News agencies leak confidential Trump campaign materials. They decided not to print them.

At least three media outlets have released confidential materials from the Trump campaign, including a report vetting JD Vance as vice presidential candidate. Each has so far declined to reveal any details about what they received.

Instead, Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post wrote about a potential campaign hack and generally described what happened.

Their decisions stand in stark contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hacker released emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website WikiLeaks published a slew of those embarrassing messages, and major news organizations covered them fervently.

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Political I wrote on the weekend about receiving emails since July 22 from a person identified only as “Robert,” including a 271-page campaign document about Vance and a partial background check report for Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered as a potential vice president. Both Politico and Post announced that two independent people confirmed the authenticity of the documents.

“As is the case with many such verification documents” Times wrote Vance’s report, “they included prior statements that may have been compromising or damaging, such as remarks by Mr. Vance casting suspicion on Mr. Trump.”

Jail?

It is unclear who provided the material. Politico said it did not know who “Robert” was and that when it spoke to the alleged leaker, he said, “I suggest you don’t ask where I got it from.”

Trump’s campaign said that was hacked and that the Iranians were behind it. While the campaign provided no evidence to support that claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an attempt by Iranian military intelligence to hack into the email account of a former senior presidential campaign adviser. The report did not specify which campaign it was referring to.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said over the weekend that “any media or news organization that reprints documents or internal communications is carrying out the will of America’s enemies.”

FBI issued a low statement On Monday, it said: “We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this matter.”

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The Times said it would not discuss why it decided not to publish details of the internal communications. A Post spokesman said: “As with any information we receive, we consider the authenticity of the material, any motives of the source and the public interest in deciding what, if anything, to publish.”

Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Politico, said editors felt that “the questions about where the documents came from and how they came to our attention were more interesting than the material contained in the documents.”

Indeed, it wasn’t long after Vance was announced as Trump’s vice presidential candidate that various news organizations began dig up unflattering statements what the senator from Ohio said about him.

The lesson from 2016?

It’s also simple to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged the reporting of Clinton campaign documents that Wikileaks had obtained from hackers. It was widely reported: a BBC article promised “18 revelations from Clinton’s hacked emails by Wikileaks,” and Vox even reported Podesta’s advice on how to make a great risotto.

Brian Fallon, then a Clinton campaign spokesman, noted at the time how striking it was that concerns about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination with what had been revealed. “Exactly what Russia wanted,” he said.

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In contrast, the WikiLeaks materials were dumped into the public domain this year, increasing pressure on news organizations to publish them. That led to some bad decisions: In some cases, media outlets misrepresented some of the materials as more damaging to Clinton than they actually were, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyberwar,” a 2016 book about the hacking.

Jamieson said news organizations made the right decision this year not to publish details of Trump campaign materials because they could not be sure of their sources.

“How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” Jamieson said. She is conservative about making the decisions public “because we live in an age of disinformation,” she said.

Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, also thinks the news organizations made the right decision, but for different reasons. He said it appears the attempt by a foreign agent to influence the 2024 presidential campaign was more newsworthy than the leak itself.

But one prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, a senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested that the media could have said more than it did. While it’s true that Vance’s previous statements about Trump are readily available to the public, the fact-checking document could have indicated which statements were most relevant to the campaign or revealed things that the journalists didn’t know.

Once we determine that the material is exact, its informational value is more vital than the source, he added.

“I don’t think they’ve handled it properly,” Eisinger said. “I think they’ve overdone it with the science of 2016.”