In mid-July, a source identifying himself only as “Robert” began contacting news organizations with what sounded like a tantalizing offer: internal documents from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
In email exchanges, Robert was cagey about how “he” had gotten the goods. “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from,” Robert advised when a Politico reporter pressed for more information. “Any answer to this question will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.”
Robert’s spy-movie statements aside, the material he was peddling was the result of a hack, one that Microsoft and federal authorities said began in June and emanated from Iran. The penetration of the Trump campaign’s files was reminiscent of Russian hackers’ breach of the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016, which led to Wikileaks’ slow-drip release of emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton’s campaign and helped Trump in the final months before the election.
This time would be different, however. None of the information stolen from the Trump campaign has been published to date. Politico declined Robert’s offer, as did The Washington Post and The New York Times, which Robert also approached. The decision by editors to sit on the hacked materials invited accusations of a double standard, with Popular Information’s Judd Legum calling out news organizations earlier this month for apparently changing their standards without any detailed explanation.
Legum revealed Tuesday that Robert approached him on September 18 with hundreds of pages of vetting documents on Trump vice-presidential contenders JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum—materials believed to have been sent to the aforementioned news organizations—as well as purported emails among Trump campaign officials, spanning October 2023 to August 2024, and notably, a four-page letter a Trump attorney sent Times reporters on September 15. Semafor’s Ben Smith confirmed the authenticity of the letter, indicating that the Trump campaign breach went on longer than previously known—and could be ongoing. Popular Information and Semafor have also opted not to publish the hacked materials.
The new revelations are sure to bring fresh scrutiny on the editorial calls made in newsrooms surrounding this late-in-the-election breach. In recently exploring the decision-making at Politico, the Times, and the Post, I’ve found that editors’ reluctance to play ball with Robert reflected neither regret over widespread coverage of the 2016 hack nor ethical concerns about publishing illicitly obtained information from a hostile foreign power. The reason for the non-response is more mundane: The hacked documents are a dud. There’s little news value in them, according to several people who’ve seen them.
The materials on potential Trump running mates consist of publicly available records, such as news articles, speech transcripts, tweets, and media interviews. The work itself is incomplete; the 271-page rundown on Vance is inexplicably missing Vance’s now infamous “childless cat ladies” comment from a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox, said one reporter. The file does include Vance’s comments from 2016 in which he called Trump “an idiot” and privately compared him to Hitler.
The files are “basically an [opposition] dump, and not a very good oppo dump at that,” said a journalist who has seen the material. “There’s not a single allegation that you couldn’t find with one click [on the internet]. It’s not good work. Honestly, it’s just not very interesting.”
In a Times podcast in August, David Sanger, the newspaper’s veteran national-security reporter, said “There was nothing there that couldn’t have been assembled by a bright college intern” using Google “to put together a dossier of nasty public things Vance had already said.”
Robert’s approach to the three news organizations suggests the hacker or hackers hoped to piggyback on a mainstream news outlet’s reach and credibility. It also suggests that the hackers believed that the reporting of the material would show the Trump campaign’s wariness and reservations about Vance, undermining Trump in the campaign’s final months (Iran has several reasons for targeting Trump, including his imposition of sanctions while president and his approval of the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in early 2020). If so, that’s naïve; presidential campaigns routinely produce this kind of material to assess a would-be running mate’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, dangling the material in front of three publications looks like an amateurish move designed to stir up a race to publish, despite the weakness of the information.
Even if the material wasn’t revealing, Robert’s actions may have been. His emails—oddly via an AOL account—were written in clear, colloquial English, suggesting to one reporter that he was “a useful idiot,” an intermediary recruited by Iranian overseers. It’s also telling that Robert approached political reporters, not those covering national security, whose suspicions about a foreign-influence campaign would have likely been immediately aroused.
A lingering question: Would the news organizations Robert approached have bit on the hack if it had contained more newsworthy information? Despite Robert’s comment about publishing illegally obtained material, that’s rarely stopped publications before. The Times and Post famously published the Pentagon Papers, based on Daniel Ellsberg’s pilfering, in 1971. The Post and Guardian won Pulitzer Prizes in 2014 for reporting on Edward Snowden’s leak of classified National Security Agency surveillance operations. In 2016, just before the Russians hacked the DNC, a hack-and-leak operation targeting a law firm in Panama led to bombshell news stories about government officials, celebrities, and wealthy individuals who’ve used offshore accounts to launder money and evade taxes.
In an interview last week, Times executive editor Joseph Kahn said the newspaper declined to report on the “Robert” dossier because of its lack of perceived newsworthiness, given that it consisted of known and previously reported information. The fact that a leaker has selfish or even nefarious motives isn’t entirely disqualifying, said Kahn. The more important considerations are whether the information is “newsworthy and true,” he said, noting the Iran-Trump documents failed the newsworthy test.
Kahn’s comments implicitly reject the double standard critique, suggesting a false equivalence between the 2024 hack and leak and the one in 2016. That is, the Clinton campaign emails—stolen by Russian trolls and published by Wikileaks—were eagerly reported by the Times and other news organizations because they had some news value. They included inside information about Clinton’s private paid speeches, details about the Clinton Foundation, her media strategy, and views about healthcare and trade. They were a previously unseen glimpse into Clinton World. In short, they were news.
Journalists at the Post and Politico saw it the same way.
John Harris, Politico’s global editor in chief, said in an interview on Tuesday that the “Robert” dossier simply fell short. “The collective judgment of the editors here was a shoulder shrug,” he said.
“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,” Post executive editor Matt Murray told his publication, adding, “In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough.”
Legum, in his Tuesday post, noted that “the materials are stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.” He acknowledged that publishing leaked materials may be justified, as in the case of the Pentagon Papers, if the information is in the public interest.
“The internal Trump campaign documents obtained by Popular Information may be embarrassing or problematic to members of the Trump campaign. Some of the documents have news value,” he wrote. “But the stolen materials do not provide the public with any fundamental new insight about Trump or his campaign. So, on balance, the relevant factors argue against publication.”
The Iranian hack may be a bust so far, but it does suggest that foreign actors remain committed to influencing and disrupting America’s presidential election. However, the full extent of what the hackers collected during their foray into the Trump campaign’s computers isn’t known. There are still several weeks left in the campaign. And Robert, apparently, is still out there.
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