At least three US media outlets have received confidential information from Donald Trump’s campaign team, including a report on the selection of JD Vance as his running mate. So far, none of them have been willing to reveal the details of what they received.
Instead, PoliticoTHE New York Times and the Washington Post wrote about a potential campaign hack and described what they had in general terms.
Their decision stands in stark contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The WikiLeaks website published a slew of those embarrassing missives, and mainstream media outlets covered them avidly.
Politico wrote over the weekend that he had received emails starting July 22 from a person identified as “Robert,” which included a 271-page campaign document on Mr. Vance and a partial screening report on Senator Marco Rubio, who was also considered a potential vice presidential candidate.
Politico and the Washington Post both said two people had independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents.
“Like many of these selection documents,” wrote the New York Times “regarding the J.D. Vance report, they contained past statements that could be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks discrediting Mr. Trump.”
Who is the culprit?
What is not clear is who provided the material. Politico said he did not know who “Robert” was and that when he asked the alleged whistleblower, he replied: “I suggest you don’t ask where I got them from.”
Donald Trump’s campaign announced that it had been hacked and that Iranians were behind it. While the campaign provided no evidence for the claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an attempt 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 was responsible.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said over the weekend that “any media outlet or media organization that republishes internal documents or communications is paying the price of America’s enemies.”
The FBI released a brief statement Monday saying: “We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this matter.”
THE new York Times declined to explain why it decided not to publish details of the internal communications. A spokesman for Washington Post said: “As with any information we receive, we consider the authenticity of the material, the motivations of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”
Brad Dayspring, spokesperson for Politicosaid the editors believed that “the questions surrounding the origin of the documents and how they came to our attention were more worthy of interest than the content of the documents.”
It didn’t take long after Mr. Vance was announced as Mr. Trump’s running mate for various news organizations to unearth unflattering statements the Ohio senator had made about him.
Lessons from 2016
It is also easy to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged coverage of the Clinton campaign documents that WikiLeaks had acquired from hackers. The story was widespread: a BBC article promised “18 revelations about WikiLeaks’ hacked Clinton emails” and Vox even wrote about Mr. Podesta’s tips for making a great risotto.
Brian Fallon, then a Clinton campaign spokesman, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination with what was revealed. “Exactly the way Russia wanted it,” he said.
Unlike this year, the WikiLeaks documents were made public, increasing pressure on the media to publish them. This led to bad decisions: in some cases, the media distorted some documents, making them appear more damaging to Mme Clinton than they actually were, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania who has written Cyberwara book about hacking from 2016.
This year, Mme Jamieson believes the media made the right decision not to publish details of the Trump campaign documents because they could not be certain of the source.
“How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” she said. She’s conservative about publishing decisions “because we live in the age of misinformation,” she said.
Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University, also believes the media made the right decision, but for different reasons. He believes the effort by a foreign agent to influence the 2024 presidential campaign is more newsworthy than the leaked material itself.
But one prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, a senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested that the media could have said more than they did. While Vance’s past statements about Trump are readily available to the public, the fact-checking document could have indicated which statements the campaign was most concerned about, or revealed things the reporters didn’t know.
Once it is established that the material is accurate, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than the source, he stressed.
“I don’t think they handled it properly,” he said. “I think they learned too much from 2016.”