donald trump was once a cheerleader in the dissemination of hacked materials. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said during a news conference during his 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton’s deleted personal emails were a hot topic, “I hope you can find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
“I think you will probably be heavily rewarded by our press,” he said at the time.
That changed when Trump’s latest presidential campaign declared this weekend that was hacked by Iran. “Any news outlet or media outlet that reprints documents or internal communications is doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Steven Cheung, the campaign’s communications director, said in a statement Saturday announcing that the campaign had been hacked.
The campaign did not respond to questions about why its views on hackers have changed, including a question posed Monday by the Associated Press. But his new position is a marked change from 2016, when Trump warmly embraced Russian hacking to his opponent Clinton’s aides and the Democratic National Committee.
The current hack, so far, is obscure.
On Friday, Microsoft issued a report stating that Iranian hackers attempted to penetrate the account of an official in one of the presidential campaigns, but did not disclose additional details. On Saturday, the Trump campaign announced that it had been hacked, although it also did not identify the individual whose account was breached. It did so after Politico said it had been contacted by an unknown source selling what appeared to be internal campaign documents.
Iran has denied being involved in any hack. The US government has not confirmed that any breach occurred.
In 2016, intelligence officials said Russian hackers obtained thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The initial batches were released in the summer, when Clinton won the Democratic nomination.
It was then that Trump encouraged Russia to find his rival’s personal emails. He later argued that he was joking.
The hacked material was released through third parties, including the website Wikileaks, which began publishing daily excerpts from Democratic documents in October, shortly after the release of a video of Trump bragging about how he had sexually assaulted women.
Trump routinely praised Democratic leaks at his campaign rallies, even declaring at one, “I love Wikileaks.”
The leaked documents received widespread news coverage, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote the book “Cyber Warfare” about the 2016 hacking, said she discovered that it was the coverage that won Trump the election.
“2016 was not an example that journalists should be proud of,” Jamieson said in an interview on Monday, adding that the bigger question is how news organizations apply their standards to any material that is in the public domain.
“The fact that Trump is saying what is electorally expedient is not a surprise,” Jamieson said. “This is not a person for whom inconsistency is a concern.”
Nick Merrill was a spokesman for the Clinton campaign in 2016 and opposed the publication of the hacked documents at the time. On Monday, he noted that the Trump campaign played a similar role this time.
“In addition to the characteristic hypocrisy, they spent three weeks trying to explain that they are not strangers,” Merrill said via text message. “And I imagine sharing your internal correspondence will help dispel that notion.”
Asked whether this meant he now thought the hacked materials should be published, Merrill responded: “A precedent has been set here. I’m not judging that.”
