At least three media outlets have received confidential information from Donald Trump’s campaign, including a report on J.D. Vance’s vice presidential bid. So far, none of them have been willing to reveal the details of what they received.
Instead, Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post wrote about a potential campaign hack and described what they had in general terms.
Their decisions stand in stark contrast to those during the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. WikiLeaks published a trove of those embarrassing messages, and mainstream media outlets covered them extensively.
Politico wrote over the weekend that it had received emails starting July 22 from a person identified as “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document on Vance and a partial fact-finding report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered a potential vice presidential contender. Politico and the Post both said two people had independently confirmed that the documents were authentic.
“Like many such fact-finding documents,” the Times wrote of the Vance report, “they contained past statements that could be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks discrediting Mr. Trump.”
Detective novel?
What is unclear is who provided the information. Politico said it did not know who “Robert” was and that when it spoke to the alleged leaker, he told it, “I suggest you don’t look into where this information came from.”
Trump’s campaign claimed that his account was hacked and that Iranians were behind the hack. While it 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 involved.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said over the weekend that “any media or news organization that reproduces internal documents or communications is doing the work of America’s enemies.”
The FBI released a brief statement Monday that said: “We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this matter.”
The Times said it would not comment on why it decided not to publish details of the internal communications. A Post spokesman 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.”
Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring said the site’s editors believed “the questions surrounding the origin of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the content of the documents.”
Indeed, it didn’t take long after Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate for various news organizations to dig up unflattering statements the Ohio senator had made about him.
A lesson from 2016?
It’s also easy to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team pushed coverage of the Clinton campaign documents that WikiLeaks had acquired from hackers. This was widespread: a BBC article promised “18 revelations from WikiLeaks’ hacked Clinton emails,” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s tips for making a great risotto.
Brian Fallon, then a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about the Russian hack had quickly given way to fascination with what had been revealed. “Exactly as Russia wanted,” he said.
Unlike this year, the WikiLeaks documents were made public, increasing pressure on the media to publish them. That led to bad decisions: In some cases, the media distorted some documents as more damaging to Clinton than they actually were, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Cyberwar,” a book about the 2016 hack.
This year, Jamieson said she believed news organizations made the right decision not to publish details of Trump’s campaign material because they couldn’t be sure of the source.
“How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” Jamieson asked. 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 said it appeared that a foreign agent’s efforts to influence the 2024 presidential campaign were more newsworthy than the leaked information itself.
But a prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, a 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 were most relevant to the campaign, or revealed things that reporters didn’t know.
Once it is established that the material is accurate, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than the source, he said.
“I don’t think they handled it properly,” Eisinger said. “I think they learned too much from 2016.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.
