Why Newsrooms Haven’t Published Leaked Trump Campaign Documents

The Washington Post / Will Sommer, Elahe Izadi

17:05 JST, August 14, 2024

An alleged Iranian hacking operation that the Donald Trump campaign says leaked internal documents to reporters has run into a surprising problem: So far, newsrooms have been reluctant to run with the material.

Over the past few weeks, reporters at Politico, The Washington Post and the New York Times all received emails from a mysterious figure who called himself “Robert,” offering internal Trump campaign documents, most notably a 271-page internal Trump campaign document listing JD Vance’s potential vulnerabilities as a running mate, apparently compiled well before Trump picked the Republican senator from Ohio.

The FBI is now investigating alleged Iranian hacking attempts, which also targeted the Biden-Harris campaign. Longtime Trump friend Roger Stone confirmed to The Post on Monday that his own email account had been compromised.

All of it – an alleged hacker hiding behind a pseudonym offering internal documents of questionable news value – has echoes of the Russian hacks of Democratic campaign emails in 2016, which were then published by WikiLeaks and eagerly picked over by the press.

Now, eight years later, media organizations are being tested again with how best to cover news from an alleged hack, without playing into the hands of foreign actors looking to interfere in American elections. For now, the decision among the outlets that received the documents has been not to publish them, focusing instead on the possible hack itself.

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

Politico reported first receiving an email from someone named “Robert” on July 22, who then days later sent the Vance dossier that seems to have been created on Feb. 23. The Post received the dossier on Aug. 8.

Reporters confirmed the document’s authenticity, then attempted to learn the individual’s identity; the emailer refused to get on the phone but said there was additional information to share. When Politico pressed how they got the documents, the person wrote back: “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.”

Then Microsoft revealed early Friday that Iranian hackers had tried to get into the email account of a “high-ranking official” in a presidential campaign by using a former senior adviser’s email address that had already been compromised; The Post reported that that was a reference to the Trump campaign, citing a person familiar with Microsoft’s work.

In response to reporters’ questions, the Trump campaign put out a statement Saturday revealing, for the time publicly, that it believed it was the victim of a foreign hack, without offering evidence but pointing to Microsoft’s report.

Politico published a story about the possible hack on Saturday. Editors there decided that, based on what their journalists knew at the time, “the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents,” said a Politico spokesperson. He declined to go into more details on sourcing and reporting methods.

The Post likewise focused on the possible hack and published its story later Saturday. The New York Times on Monday reported that it had received “a similar if not identical trove of data” from what was sent to Politico; a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the thinking on whether to publish the document.

In 2016, Trump relished Russian hacks of Democratic campaign emails, once asking the country to find more of Hillary Clinton’s emails with the phrase, “Russia, if you’re listening.”

But in the aftermath of its own possible hack, the Trump campaign told reporters that to publish the material would be assisting a foreign state actor in undermining democracy. “Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement.

The decision for newsrooms to not publish the Vance materials – a compilation of publicly available records and statements, including Vance’s past criticisms of Trump – appeared to be more straightforward because they also didn’t reach a high level of public interest.

“In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough,” Murray said.

Journalists’ primary loyalty is to their audience and to giving them the information they want and need, said Kelly McBride, NPR’s public editor and chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute. And before 2016, the general thinking was that, even with hacked materials, “if there’s something interesting in there, then of course you’re going to report it.”

But with foreign state actors increasingly getting involved, “it just feels dicier for news organizations to make the decision, because you don’t want to be helping another country undermine our democracy,” McBride said.

“The motivations don’t have to be pure, but it can’t be to undermine the stability of the entire country,” she added. “That just seems like a bridge too far.”

Murray said “the provenance of hacked material does matter and does play into the decision. We were suspicious and our reporting seemed to confirm that this material was from a foreign actor explicitly looking to cause mischief.”

News organizations have been tested since 2016. Wary of hacked materials since then, many proved reluctant to report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that they were the result of a hack. As the conservative press latched on to allegedly incriminating emails found on the computer in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, more mainstream outlets did not join in a 2016-style frenzy over the material, and Facebook and Twitter limited distribution of a New York Post story about the laptop.

An analysis by The Post nearly two years later confirmed the authenticity of many of the emails on the laptop, and found no evidence of a hack.

Now Trump, whose 2016 campaign was boosted by the Russian hack of Democratic emails and the ensuing press fervor over them, could be shielded by the media’s evolving reluctance to use hacked documents.

“It would certainly be ironic if Trump, of all people, benefited from the media learning lessons from a situation he exploited,” said Ben Smith, Semafor editor in chief. (He was the top editor of BuzzFeed News when it published the Steele dossier, a collection of memos alleging collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign that contained unverified allegations.)

Murray said The Post “has no blanket ‘no hacked materials’ policy. You have to evaluate the material as it comes in. I certainly don’t want to encourage hacked material, but it’s going to happen in this world that we’re in.”

News organizations shouldn’t entirely rule out reporting on hacked materials, said Richard Tofel, former president of ProPublica. But they should be wary of just running whatever hackers send to them. “That, in effect, turns the Iranians into the editor, and the editor’s supposed to stay the editor,” he said.

Despite the reluctance of news outlets to publish material, if the hackers want the documents to be available online, they will be.

“They will eventually move down the food chain to find someone who will publish them,” Tofel said. “And if they fail at that, the internet being what it is, they can just publish it themselves.”