At least three news outlets have leaked confidential material from inside Donald Trump’s campaign, including the report vetting J.D. Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal details about what they received.
Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post wrote about a possible hack of the campaign and described in general terms what they had done.
Their decisions are in striking contrast until the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hacker exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of the embarrassing messages, and mainstream news organizations eagerly reported on them.
Politics wrote on the weekend about receiving emails from July 22 from a person identified as “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document on Vance and a partial vetting report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also being considered as a potential vice president. Both Politico and the Post said that two people had independently confirmed that the documents were authentic.
“Like many such control documents,” Times wrote of the Vance report, “they contain prior statements that could have been embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s comments disparaging Mr. Trump.”
What is unclear is who provided the material. Politico said it did not know who “Robert” was and that when it spoke to the alleged leaker, he said, “I suggest you not be curious about where I got them.”
The Trump campaign said it was hacked and that Iranians were behind it. While the campaign provided no evidence to support the claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an attempt by an Iranian military intelligence service 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 Trump’s campaign, said over the weekend that “any media or news organization that reprints documents or internal communications is acting on behalf of America’s enemies.”
The FBI released a short statement On Monday it said: “We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this matter.”
The Times said it would not discuss why it had decided not to publish details of the internal communications. A spokesman for the Post said: “As with all information we receive, we consider the authenticity of the materials, any motives of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if any, we publish.”
Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Politico, said editors there determined that “the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material in those documents.”
It didn’t take long after Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate for several news organizations to unearthing unflattering statements which the senator from Ohio had made upon him.
It’s also easy to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged reporting on Clinton campaign documents obtained by WikiLeaks from hackers. It was widespread: a BBC story promised “18 revelations from WikiLeaks’ hacked Clinton emails” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s advice for making great risotto.
Brian Fallon, then a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination with what was being revealed. “Just the way Russia wanted it,” he said.
Unlike this year, the Wikileaks material was dumped into the public domain, increasing pressure on news organizations to publish. That led to some bad decisions: In some cases, media outlets misrepresented some of the material to make it seem more damaging to Clinton than it actually was, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyberwar,” a book about the 2016 hacking.
Jamieson said she believes this year that news organizations made the right decision not to publish details of Trump’s campaign materials because they couldn’t be sure of the source.
“How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” Jamieson said. She’s conservative about publishing decisions “because we live in the age of disinformation,” she said.
Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, also believes the news organizations made the right call, but for different reasons. He said it appeared that an attempt by a foreign agent to influence the 2024 presidential campaign was 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 it’s true that Vance’s past statements about Trump are easily found in the public domain, the audit document could have indicated which statements were most relevant to the campaign, or revealed things the journalists didn’t know.
Once the material is determined to be accurate, the news value is more important than the source, he said.
“I don’t think they handled it well,” Eisinger said. “I think they learned too much from the lesson of 2016.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.