At least three media outlets leaked confidential material from within Donald Trump’s campaign, including the report examining JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received.
Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post wrote about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in general terms.
Your decisions remain marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a collection of these embarrassing letters, and major news organizations eagerly covered them.
Political I wrote at the weekend about receiving emails beginning July 22 from a person identified as “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document about Vance and a partial verification report from Senator Marco Rubio, who was also considered a potential vice presidential candidate -president. Both the politician and the the Post said two people independently confirmed that the documents were authentic.
“Like many of these verification documents,” the Times wrote of the Vance report, “they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr.
What is not clear is who provided the material. Politico said it didn’t know who “Robert” was and that when he spoke to the alleged leaker, he said, “I suggest you don’t get curious about where I got them from.”
The Trump campaign said this was hacked and that the Iranians were behind it. While the campaign did not provide evidence for the claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an effort by an Iranian military intelligence unit to compromise the email account of a former senior adviser to a presidential campaign. The report did not specify which campaign.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said over the weekend that “any media or news outlet that reprints internal documents or communications is doing the bidding of America’s enemies.”
The Times said it would not discuss why it decided not to publish details of internal communications. A Post spokesperson said: “As with any information we receive, we take into account the authenticity of the materials, any motives of the source and evaluate the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”
Brad Dayspring, a Politico spokesman, said the editors felt that “the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more interesting than the material contained in those documents.”
In fact, it wasn’t long after Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate that several news organizations unearth unflattering statements that the Ohio senator made about him.
It is also easy to remember how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged the coverage of documents about the Clinton campaign that Wikileaks had acquired from hackers. It was widespread: a BBC story promised “18 revelations of Wikileaks’ hacked Clinton emails” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s advice for making excellent risotto.
Brian Fallon, then a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, noted at the time how impressive it was that concern about Russian piracy quickly gave way to fascination with what was revealed. “Exactly as Russia wanted,” he said.
Unlike this year, Wikileaks material has been placed in the public domain, increasing pressure on news organizations to publish. That led to some bad decisions: In some cases, news outlets misrepresented some of the material as more damaging to Clinton than it really was, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyber Warfare.” ”. a book about hacking from 2016.
This year, Jamieson said he believes news organizations made the right decision in not publishing details of Trump campaign material because they can’t be sure of the source.
“How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” Jamieson said. She is conservative about publishing decisions “because we are in the age of misinformation,” she said.
Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, also believes news organizations made the right decision, but for different reasons. He said it appeared that a foreign agent’s effort to influence the 2024 presidential campaign was more interesting than the leaked material itself.
But one prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested that the media could have told more than they did. While it’s true that Vance’s past statements about Trump are easily found publicly, the fact-checking document could have indicated which statements most concerned the campaign, or revealed things journalists didn’t know.
Once it is established that material is accurate, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than source, he said.
“I don’t think they handled the issue adequately,” Eisinger said. “I think they learned a lot from 2016.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.
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