On February 23, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign compiled a research dossier on J.D. Vance, the senator from Ohio—an apparent early effort to vet Vance as a potential running mate. The dossier ran to 271 pages and was based on publicly available information about Vance; one section detailed his “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES,” including his past criticism of Trump. Evidently, Trump was not deterred: on July 15, he confirmed Vance as his pick.
On July 22, “Robert” emailed reporters at Politico. There was no indication as to who Robert really was, but they were offering communications from inside Trump’s campaign, including the early Vance dossier. Politico asked Robert how they obtained the documents. “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from,” Robert replied. “Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.” (All sic.)
On Thursday, Robert sent the dossier to the Washington Post. They declined to talk by phone with a reporter, but suggested they could access other sensitive documents related to Trump’s campaign and legal cases. “Consider me as an anonymous resource who has access to djtfp24 campaign,” Robert said. “There are other stuff too, that I can send you, if this content is in your field of interest. I hope you understand my limitations and my vulnerable position in the campaign.”
On Friday, Microsoft shared intelligence it had gathered about Iranian interference in the 2024 election. This partly concerned broader influence operations—targeting American voters with partisan junk news, for instance—but also included this more specific claim: in June, Microsoft said, Mint Sandstorm, a group affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, tried to hack a senior official with a US presidential campaign via the compromised email account of a former campaign adviser.
On Saturday, a spokesperson for Trump pointed to the Microsoft report and said that his was the campaign in question; a hostile foreign actor, the spokesperson said, had hacked the campaign and illegally obtained internal documents. “We were just informed by Microsoft Corporation that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government,” Trump himself said later, on Truth Social. “Never a nice thing to do!”
The Trump campaign told reporters that details in Microsoft’s report lined up with the timing of his process for choosing a running mate; Microsoft declined to comment on the record, but a source familiar with its work told the Post that its report of an Iranian hacking attempt was indeed a reference to the Trump campaign. Still, the campaign declined to say whether it had any further evidence of Iran’s involvement in stealing the Vance dossier and other documents, let alone sharing any; Politico, for its part, said that it could not independently confirm who Robert was and what their motives may have been. We’ve since learned a bit more about the apparent Iranian hacking activity: the Post and CNN reported yesterday that the country seems to have compromised accounts belonging to Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime friend, and that Stone has been told as much by Microsoft and the FBI; the Post also reported that the FBI is probing Iranian targeting not only of the Trump campaign but of staffers on the Democratic side. Still, per the Post, investigators remain unclear whether “Robert” has anything to do with Iran. The New York Times—which also heard from Robert—perhaps put it best in a headline: “The Hacking of Presidential Campaigns Begins, With the Usual Fog of Motives.”
The workaday nature of this headline reflects the fact that foreign hacking of American political campaigns is now, if not a common occurrence, then at least a known quantity: Russia famously breached Hillary Clinton’s inner circle in 2016, and passed a trove of internal emails to WikiLeaks. As the Times suggests, the details of such efforts are typically murky; in covering them, the press should be careful to specify what is known and what is merely suspected—what is hard evidence and what is circumstantial—knowing that campaigns won’t be shy about using claims of interference to bolster a geopolitical narrative.
In my view, coverage of the apparent Iranian hacking attempt has mostly been careful so far. But this isn’t the only challenge such operations can pose for the press: there’s also the fraught question of whether news outlets should publish documents they suspect may have been hacked. The Robert episode has sparked a lively debate on this front—one that is, to some extent, unresolvable. So far, the outlets that received Robert’s emails have not published any of the contents—but here, caution comes with its own complications. In the end, the press may be damned if it does publish and damned if it doesn’t.
Over the weekend, the Trump campaign warned the news media that reporting on the Vance dossier or other documents would be tantamount to “doing the bidding of America’s enemies.” As various outlets noted, this was a screeching departure from the 2016 Trump campaign’s conduct around Russia’s hacking of Democrats: in July of that year, Trump infamously called on Russia to “find” Clinton’s emails, adding, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”; a few months later, after WikiLeaks started publishing communications from inside Clinton’s inner circle, he said, “I love WikiLeaks.” Robert Mueller’s subsequent probe into Russian interference in 2016 did not find that Trump allies engaged in any prosecutable conspiracy, but did find that they encouraged the WikiLeaks disclosures—indeed, Stone allegedly tried to glean details about them ahead of their release, and was convicted of lying about it. (Trump later pardoned him.) “Literally nobody in history has ever had less credibility on any topic than Donald Trump objecting on this,” the commentator Matthew Yglesias wrote after the Trump campaign warned the press not to publish the Vance dossier. “If you are in possession of this info and declining to publish it for this reason you are the biggest chump in the galaxy.”
Other observers assailed news outlets’ decision not to publish the Vance dossier as evidence of a double standard: the press, they suggested, was only too happy to splash information from the 2016 Clinton hack, only to balk at doing so once a possible hack involved Trump. Ben Smith, of Semafor, disagreed that this was a bad thing. “Hopefully (seriously) Trump will benefit from what the media learned in 2016, when it got played by state-sponsored hackers into publishing a drip-drip of Clinton information on the hackers’ schedule,” he argued, adding that while journalists should “report seriously on real documents that shed light on real stories,” they should also “foreground the hackers’ motives and not publish personal information gratuitously,” and “not treat a drip-drip of random documents as hot scoops.” Jesse Eisinger, of the investigative site ProPublica, disagreed that this was sound journalistic practice, arguing that the calculation when receiving any information should be to determine whether it is true and newsworthy, and if so, to what extent. “Source motivation is largely irrelevant,” Eisinger wrote, “though it can be a secondary story.” The debate went on, round and round.
There’s an awful lot to unpack here. It’s worth pointing out, first and foremost, that there’s no evidence that major outlets withheld the documents “Robert” sent them out of some sense of obeisance to the Trump campaign; indeed, a spokesperson for Politico told the Associated Press that it had concluded that “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.” I have not seen the Vance dossier, but if it was a months-old compilation of publicly available information, as has been described, then its news value would indeed seem negligible. (We don’t need a foreign power to tell us that Vance has done a one-eighty on Trump.) One expert told the Post that intel-watchers have long been on the lookout for a hack-and-leak that is “potentially highly impactful, deceptive, perhaps with forgeries slipped into genuine leaked material, with real news value, hard to counter”—but that this didn’t seem to be it.
Still, it’s fair to observe that newsworthiness does not appear to have been news organizations’ only consideration when publishing hacked information in the past. There was some newsworthy information in the documents that Russia stole from the Clinton campaign, but much of it was tittle-tattle or totally irrelevant (John Podesta’s risotto recipe, anyone?), and the press as a whole too often did a poor job of distinguishing the difference. (Overall, The Atlantic’s Russell Berman wrote at the time, the emails “capture a candidate, and a campaign, that seems in private exactly as cautious, calculating, and politically flexible as they appeared to be in public.”) While it might, understandably, be frustrating to watch the same outlets withhold Trump-adjacent tittle-tattle now, learning from past mistakes is okay—to be encouraged, even. And it’s fair to point out that these situations are not completely alike. In 2016, it was WikiLeaks, not the traditional news media, that first put the Clinton emails into the public domain; if Robert had dumped the Vance dossier on, say, Discord, it’s not hard to imagine that various outlets would have covered it. Nor is it hard to imagine some people calling this fair game and others calling it “useful idiocy.”
And, if newsworthiness has not always appeared to be the only consideration here, it’s not clear that this is a bad thing, in a general sense—as I see it, not wanting to do a source’s dirty work is an honorable instinct for a journalist to have. This doesn’t mean that the press shouldn’t publish important information obtained by dubious means—good journalism does this all the time—but nor do I see thinking about a source’s motives as purely “a secondary consideration”; doing so can shape how we tell a story or itself be a key part of the story, as is clearly the case with foreign hacking operations. And yet here, too, there are complications. A source’s identity and motives are not always so easily established—particularly not by deadline—as the case of Robert would appear to show. Publishing without establishing these details might, again, open an outlet up to claims of useful idiocy. But exercising caution can also invite attack. In 2020, mainstream outlets were cautious in their handling of a New York Post story about a laptop that supposedly belonged to Hunter Biden, amid insinuations that it could be part of a Russian operation. But some claims about the laptop have since been corroborated—and the right won’t let the press forget it.
If it seems hard for the media to win here, then that might be the point. As I see it, foreign hacking operations are best understood as part of a broader campaign of informational terrorism, the impact of which is tied less to the newsworthiness of any particular hacked document than its wider ability to sow chaos and uncertainty. Turning Americans against each other—making them argue about who is a useful idiot and who isn’t—can be just as valuable an end as proving anything specific about Clinton, or Podesta, or Vance, or Trump. In one sense, it doesn’t really matter if “Robert” is an Iranian agent. The fact that they might plausibly be, and that we’re all talking about them, is a victory for the hacking activities that Iran does seem to have perpetrated.
Of course, in another sense, whether Robert is an Iranian agent matters enormously, for the reasons I outlined at the top of this newsletter. Keeping in mind these two, seemingly competing conclusions is a devilish balancing act for the press, and is only one of several. We have to balance the knowledge that the specifics of a hacking mission don’t necessarily matter—but could very much matter. We have to acknowledge uncertainty—while accepting that it is our job to clarify it. We have to try and shut out disingenuous partisan noise—while knowing that the noise is, in many ways, a key part of the story. If the debate here feels unsettled, or news outlets’ approaches feel inconsistent, it’s because it is, and they are. Ultimately, I don’t see blanket rules as viable here. The best way forward is to tread carefully, case by case, hack by hack.
If this is unsatisfying, we should, perhaps, consider that we aren’t in this bind alone; while the stakes of this type of reporting are very high, the media is not a lone gatekeeper in this arena, our public watching and waiting with bated breath for us to put a thumb up or down. After Smith warned the press to be judicious in covering salacious material of dubious origin, he was widely accused of hypocrisy—after all, it was Smith who, as editor of BuzzFeed, published the infamous Steele dossier of unvetted claims about Trump in 2017. But his stances, perhaps, are more consistent than they appear. Back in 2017, Smith said that he trusted BuzzFeed’s readers to “reckon with a messy, sometimes uncertain reality.” Over the weekend, he echoed something like this idea: “Whatever institutional players do,” he wrote, “consumers may be more accustomed to hacks and leaks, and more sophisticated about what they mean, than they were in 2016.”
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday morning, the @realDonaldTrump account began posting again on X for the first time since it was banned following the insurrection in January 2021 (bar a one-off return to post a mug shot from his criminal case in Georgia last year); then, yesterday evening, Trump appeared on the platform for a live conversation with Elon Musk, its owner, who has endorsed Trump’s campaign. The event started more than forty minutes later than planned due to technical errors; Musk blamed a targeted attack, but various observers suggested that the stream more likely crashed under the weight of huge interest. Once it got underway, the exchange was “rambling and tedious,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel argues; if it was also revealing, it was only of the fact that Trump and Musk are “more likely to regurgitate Fox News talking points than offer genuine insight.”
- Also yesterday, a magnitude-4.4 earthquake hit Los Angeles—and it’s safe to say that journalists in the area felt it. Noah Goldberg, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, noted that the quake caused TV sets to shake and lights to flicker in the paper’s newsroom. Meanwhile, on ESPN, Malika Andrews was interviewing Rebecca Lobo, a basketball analyst, when tremors jolted the picture—but Andrews kept her cool, winning praise on social media. “Andrews’ body language was of someone smoothing over a minor ruckus, her voice soothing as she asked co-workers if they were OK,” Steve Henson wrote for the LA Times. “The shaking lasted only a few seconds, and she deftly returned to the video call with Lobo, who understandably wore an incredulous expression.”
- Kathleen Kingsbury, the opinion editor of the New York Times, revealed that the paper’s editorial board will no longer make endorsements in New York elections, including legislative races and those for governor and New York City mayor; Kingsbury did not offer a reason for the change, but insisted that the Times would remain “rooted in New York City.” Various New York journalists were sharply critical of the decision, including Semafor’s Smith, who accused the Times editorial board of “abdicating the only thing anyone actually, really listened to them on,” and of leaving New York City politics to “continue to drift along, more or less controlled by tiny interest groups.”
- Also for the Times, Matt Flegenheimer profiled Bari Weiss, a former columnist at the paper who is now “the founder, public face and heat-seeking curator of The Free Press, a new media company with ambitions to overtake the old media.” Weiss “has identified a mélange of reliable foils,” Flegenheimer writes, including “the illiberal left; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; opponents of Israel”—and the Times itself. She has positioned herself “as a teller of dangerous truths while becoming a kind of brand ambassador for the views and passions of her audience, which often seem to track neatly with her own.”
- And The Guardian’s Jim Waterson profiled Psychic News, the “house journal of British spiritualism”—or “the belief that there is life after death and the ‘so-called dead’ can make contact via a medium”—which has fallen on tough times after a sponsor decided to pull funding. The editor of Psychic News “has to admit that, no, he did not see his magazine’s financial crisis coming,” Waterson writes. The publication promotes spiritualism, but the editor insists that it is more journalistically “professional” than its competitors.
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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.