The News
Donald Trump’s campaign says it has been hacked, with some internal communications stolen and leaked to Politico over the last month.
The Trump campaign blamed Iran for the hack, and referred to a Microsoft report published Friday that hackers tied to the Iranian government had tried to break into the account of a “high-level” presidential campaign official.
“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to Semafor, noting recent reports of an Iranian plot to assassinate the former president. “The Iranians know that President Trump will stop their reign of terror, just like he did in his first four years in the White House. Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want.”
The extent of the hacked material remains unclear, and the person responsible for sending out the information used an anonymous AOL account. Politico characterized one document as a “research dossier” the campaign apparently conducted on JD Vance, Trump’s-now running mate. Others were described as internal communications from a top campaign official.
Iran’s deep enmity to Trump is rooted in two of his administration’s actions: Withdrawing in 2018 from a deal aimed at containing its nuclear program in exchange for looser sanctions; and assassinating Qasem Soleimani, a central figure in Iran’s security apparatus, in Iraq in 2020.
The Harris campaign declined to respond on the record to an inquiry about how they believed the hacked material should be handled.
But US officials have been bracing for foreign interference. An intelligence committee assessment listed a range of countries, including Iran, as likely attackers.
“Past is prologue, and our foreign adversaries are more motivated than ever to try and interfere in our elections,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival and the most famous victim of such an attack, told Semafor this March.
Know More
The apparent state-sponsored hack is a repeat of 2016, when Russian operatives obtained nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee and released them to the public through WikiLeaks, according to Robert Mueller’s investigation of the incident. Then, Trump welcomed the revelations — which ranged from claims of bias against Bernie Sanders’ campaign to fundraising details — and called publicly for more.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” he said after the first wave of hacks. “I love WikiLeaks,” he said on October 10, after a larger wave of leaks.
Some in Trump’s party also warned at the time that this set a dangerous precedent.
“Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow, it could be us,” Senator Marco Rubio said at the time. The latest hack reportedly included information related to Rubio’s vetting as a potential running mate for Trump.
The View From the Trump Campaign
The campaign’s exposure could be more limited than they might have been in the past: The Trump campaign has long preached to staffers to be careful of what is put into email, with the knowledge that bad actors could target the campaign, a person familiar with its internal workings said. Many political professionals have used encrypted messaging apps for much of their communications since 2016. The Trump campaign also has an in-house cybersecurity team, the person said.
The View From Democrats
While Harris’s campaign wouldn’t comment on the leak, many Democrats believe that Trump has sacrificed whatever special consideration other candidates might get over a hack.
“What I struggle w/ is how much the Trump team goaded reporters into writing on Hillary team’s emails,” wrote Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist and former Biden administration official. “Trump literally asked Russia to leak more and refused to agree to not use leaked materials in subsequent elections. It’s a tough call, but what goes around comes around.”
“There SHOULD be a lot of lessons learned from 2016, but I just don’t think these people have earned the right to benefit from them,” she wrote.
One of the hack’s worst victims, former Clinton aide Neera Tanden who is director of the Domestic Policy Council, merely tweeted “Oh. My. God.” in response to this editor’s reservations about the new hack.
Ben’s view
Norms in politics and traditional media have shifted after the last eight years, and hacked information is treated more gingerly, less breathlessly, than it was when the hack helped derail Clinton’s campaign.
And the biggest immediate story here is the apparent, intensifying Iranian effort to defeat Trump, a bigger story than the latest inflammatory JD Vance blog items.
But the hacked material won’t, and shouldn’t be, off limits to journalists. Organizations regularly publish information leaked by sources with questionable motives, including hackers. Last year, in fact, Semafor published detailed revelations about an Iranian government effort to influence American politics, based on apparently hacked documents.
We’ll approach the Trump documents, if they’re publicly available, in a similar way: Not as hot scoops — Politico, notoriously, live-blogged the WikiLeaks revelations — but as information that, if verified, can shed light on important subjects of public interest, but without ignoring their source.
And, of course, news organizations exercise even less control over the public sphere than they did in 2016.
The platform now known as X, controlled by Trump ally Elon Musk, ended its attempts to filter hacked or leaked political material after being widely criticized for attempting to limit access to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which included both questions of public interest and sex tapes.
Whatever institutional players do, however, consumers may be more accustomed to hacks and leaks, and more sophisticated about what they mean, than they were in 2016.
— with reporting by Benjy Sarlin
Notable
- The Mueller Report describes the Russian hacking and Wikleaks distribution on pages 36 to 62.
- CNN warned journalists not to download hacked material for fear of malware, but news organizations have otherwise been silent, Max Tani reported.
- In 2017, Russian hackers targeted French President Emmanuel Macron, with little effect; the French resistance to that incident is now treated as a case study.
- Small world: The company that first attributed the DNC hack to Russia is the same one, CrowdStrike, that was to blame for a massive computer outage last month.