Major News Outlets Protecting the Trump Campaign
Three major news outlets were given Trump Campaign documents, including the vetting materials for JD Vance, but unlike with Hillary Clinton in 2016, they are now choosing to protect Donald Trump.
Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post are at least three of the major news outlets that have received confidential materials from the Trump Campaign, but instead of writing about what they obtained, they have chosen to discuss the hack that led to the distribution of the documents. The trove of files, which included a detailed Trump Campaign report on the viability of JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate, were sent to Politico on July 22 from a person who alleges he is a campaign insider named “Robert.”
The leaked vetting report prepared for the Trump Campaign was 271 pages long, and included details about Senator Marco Rubio’s vice presidential aptitude. The Washington Post has confirmed from two independent sources that the documents in question are authentic. Unfortunately, The Post opted not to explain what they were sent exactly, other than to say “the [materials] contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.”
Considering that Vance has made several public statements in the past about his distaste for Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016, the information that is being protected by these outlets would almost certainly have to include new, or previously unpublished documentation of disparaging comments made by Vance. If the documents contained information that was previously made public by Vance or through another source, any of these outlets would just be reiterating what the public already knows.
Despite their rocky past relationship, Donald Trump named JD Vance as his running mate on July 15, and a week later, Politico, and possibly others, were in possession of authentic Trump Campaign materials that we can assume had not been previously publicly exposed. Politico waited until August 10, to publish the story, and they chose to highlight the Trump Campaign’s version of a “hostile foreign hacking” rather than discuss the possibility of an insider leaking the emails.
In the article published in August, Politico wrote that: “The [Trump] campaign blamed ‘foreign sources hostile to the United States,’ citing a Microsoft report earlier in the week that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.” Politico denied knowing the identity of who sent the material saying, “POLITICO has not independently verified the identity of the hacker or their motivation,” and instead opted to elaborate about the suspected identity of the hacker by publishing a lengthy statement from the Trump Campaign.
“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 campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung said. Despite claiming that “Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the [Trump] presidential campaign in June 2024,” Cheung did not give any further details or evidence to substantiate that the Trump Campaign was targeted or hacked by Iran, but the Politico article does nothing to dispel that notion, and if anything, the outlet went on to bolster Trump Campaign claims.
The Washington Post, which was sent a similar cache of documents, continued to report on the matter with the focus staying on the possibly of an Iranian hack. While The Post did not elaborate with any real specificity on the content of the documents, they did publish an account of their own interaction with the alleged hacker saying:
The sender would not speak on the telephone with a Post reporter but indicated they had access to additional information, including internal campaign emails and documents related to Trump’s court cases.
“Consider me as an anonymous resource who has access to djtfp24 campaign. There are [sic] other stuff too, that I can send you, if this content is in your field of interest,” the sender wrote in an email to the reporter.
“I hope you understand my limitations and my vulnerable position in the campaign,” the sender added.
The article then mentions the possibility of the Iranian hack as confirmed by Microsoft, but concludes: “A spokesman for the company said it would not reveal whether the attack had succeeded and declined to comment Saturday.” The Washington Post article then pivots to the concept of a foreign hack and uses the remainder of the article to discuss the implications with federal law enforcement for such an event. Clearly, all of these media outlets determined that the real story should be the possibility of a foreign hacker, with no real questioning of the Trump Campaign’s statements or intention, as they bypassed the actual content within the materials that were sent.
Let’s now take a moment to compare and contrast this latest “hacker” coverage with that of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. During the 2016 presidential campaign, a Russian hack exposed emails to and from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. The massive amount of emails — which were embarrassing but far from incriminating — were published by the Wikileaks website, and mainstream news outlets were relentless with their never-ending coverage.
The ongoing speculation about the Clinton Campaign was also fueled by Donald Trump telling the media that he “loved Wikileaks” for their hacking and the release of all of the documents, and begging Putin to help assist with hacking the reminder of the material. Let me say that one more time for the cheap seats in the back: not only did the press cover Hillary Clinton’s hacked campaign emails ad nauseam, a then-candidate for President of the United States openly asked a hostile foreign dictator to co-conspire with him to steal the rest of the documents.
I’d love to be able to conclude that the reason we are seeing this shift in coverage is that the main stream media has learned their lesson in how they move forward from an ethical perspective when the American electorate can be greatly influenced, but we all know this is not true. The ongoing disproportionate coverage that the Trump Campaign continues to get from major outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have hit all new levels of egregiousness.
The only rational conclusion that can be drawn from this latest group bungling of important journalistic detail, is that Donald Trump sells newspapers and gets clicks. If outlets are willing to compromise whatever is left of their journalistic integrity in order to keep Trump viable in 2024, then that means they are willing to do whatever it takes to help him succeed in this next election, which will also benefit their bottom line. Considering that the press imposed one set of rules on covering the female candidate in 2016, we should all be concerned about where the media coverage is headed with regard to the Kamala Harris Campaign in 2024.
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter, is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and an analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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I don’t believe there was any hack by Iran. We should know from experience that every word out of the Trump campaign is a lie.
The American press has become a joke. It makes those moronic "I Don't Believe The Liberal Media" stickers even more hilarious. The FAUX news crowd thinks anything that doesn't stroke their ego and confirm their worldview is "liberal." They wouldn't know liberal if it bit them in the ass. The so-called mainstream media is nothing more than corporate entities, run and/or owned by the billionaire donor class pursuing their own agenda of no regulations and no taxes for the wealthy. Not surprising the Trump campaign leak has gotten scant attention while every utterance and meandering thought out of his cocaine-rattled brain is front page news. Just like in 2016 and 2020 they will do all they can to help him get elected while maintaining just enough of a veil of "news" as not to appear blatant about it. On that one topic, Fat Don is right, the press is indeed the enemy of the people.