Should the media report on hacked campaign documents?

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.”
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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.

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