Leaked Trump campaign documents were sent to the media. They decided not to publish them.

CNN
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In the hours following President Joe Biden’s historic decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential campaign last month, journalists at three major U.S. newsrooms began receiving emails from an anonymous person claiming to have tantalizing new information about the election.

The person, who identified himself only as “Robert,” sent a wealth of private documents from Donald Trump’s campaign team to journalists from Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Starting on July 22, Politico reported, the company received emails from an AOL address that contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a research dossier the campaign had compiled on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance. The dossier included what the Trump campaign identified as Vance’s potential vulnerabilities. Politico was also sent portions of a research document on Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who was among the contenders to support Trump on the Republican ticket.

The Times and Post later reported that they had been sent a similar cache, including a 271-page document on Vance dated February 23 marked “privileged and confidential” that the newspapers said was based on publicly available information.

But even though the three media outlets had received the sensitive campaign files, they chose not to publish reports on the trove given to them, even though the person suggested they had a host of other documents, “from (Trump’s) legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.”

“Politico editors judged, based on the circumstances as our journalists understood them at the time, that the questions surrounding the origin of the documents and how they came to our knowledge were more newsworthy than the material contained in those documents,” Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring said in a statement to CNN.

Instead, the first public sign of the release of private information came on Saturday, when the Trump campaign publicly announced that it had been hacked and pointed the finger at Iranian agents.

“These documents were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States. Their goal was to influence the 2024 election and create chaos in our democratic process,” said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.

On Monday, CNN reported that the FBI and other investigators were looking into the alleged security breach, which sources said involved the compromise of the personal email account of longtime Republican and Trump official Roger Stone.

A source told CNN that Iran has denied the allegations and the US government has declined to officially blame Tehran for the hack, adding that the hackers’ techniques closely resembled those of Iranian agents.

But while the June hack sparked an uproar within the Trump campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, the three news organizations that obtained the files held off on releasing information from the trove. The decision was a reversal from the 2016 election, when news outlets breathlessly reported embarrassing and damaging stories about Hillary Clinton’s campaign after Russian hackers stole a cache of Democratic National Committee emails and posted them on the website Wikileaks.

The decision underscored the challenges news organizations face when confronted with information that may have been obtained through nefarious means, as well as the changing publishing standards of newsrooms in the wake of the 2016 election, where Russian disinformation efforts, we believe, played a key role in Trump’s victory. In the run-up to the 2020 election, newsrooms faced another dilemma when the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were sold to news organizations. However, most refused to publish the content, fearing a possible Russian disinformation effort.

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“As with all information we receive, we consider the authenticity of the material, any motives of the source and assess the public interest before deciding what, if anything, to publish,” a Washington Post spokesperson told CNN on Tuesday.

A New York Times spokesman declined to comment, saying the newspaper does not discuss editorial decisions related to ongoing reporting.

Trump on Tuesday downplayed the significance of the hacking attack, calling the material “boring information.”

“I was briefed, and many people believe it was Iran, it probably was,” Trump said in an interview with Univision. “I think that’s pretty boring information, and we know by and large what it is, it’s not very important information.”

During the 2016 campaign, then-presidential candidate Trump publicly supported the hacking and release of embarrassing emails about Clinton. Those emails came to light shortly after the discovery of a video showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 missing emails. I think you’ll be handsomely rewarded by our press for that,” Trump said at a press conference in July 2016.

“WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” he later told the rally participants.

The website, founded by Julian Assange in 2006 to facilitate the anonymous sharing of secrets, had previously published tens of thousands of classified documents on the Afghanistan war and military documents on the Iraq war. While Trump welcomed the release of hacked files to embarrass his opponent, some believe the press went too far in its eager coverage of WikiLeaks’ releases.

“News organizations should be cautious when dealing with hacked documents. As long as they are verified and newsworthy, they are fair game, but motive is also an important part of the story,” Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, told CNN. “In 2016, too many news outlets ran stories about the Democratic National Committee emails without questioning why WikiLeaks, which had ties to the Russian government, had hacked them in the first place.”

Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said news organizations must always review documents and “make every effort to ensure that they are what they claim to be.” This task is becoming increasingly difficult given the proliferation of sophisticated manipulation tools, including artificial intelligence.

“From an ethical perspective, journalists should ask: Who benefits from this revelation? The role of the media is to act independently in this situation,” Kirtley told CNN. “Again, journalists’ loyalty should be to the public, not to a political party or candidate.”

Still, the news outlets’ decision not to release the files was criticized by some as hypocritical after they reported on the DNC emails seized by Russian hackers in 2016, leaving it unclear whether some of the materials could even be released.

“The double standards here are truly unbelievable. With all the chatter in interviews, it would be great if the people making these decisions were held accountable to the public,” Neera Tenden, a domestic policy adviser to President Biden, wrote on X on Tuesday. “Are they now admitting they were wrong in 2016, or is the rule that hacked materials are only used when it hurts Democrats? There is no in-between.”

While it remains unclear who “Robert” is, news organizations appear to be learning from the experiences of the past decade and are taking a more cautious approach to hacking attacks and government influence operations.

“This episode probably shows that news organizations don’t publish every hacking incident that’s labeled ‘exclusive’ or ‘insider information’ just for the sake of publishing it,” Matt Murray, executive editor of The Washington Post, told the newspaper. Instead, “every news organization in this case took a deep breath and paused and thought about who likely leaked the documents, what the hacker’s motives might have been, and whether or not this was really newsworthy.”

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