Why News Outlets Are Sitting on Hacked Trump Documents (original) (raw)

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.