Trump campaign reckons with alleged Iranian hack

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 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.

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.

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