The Case for Publishing the Hacked Trump Documents

It’s an easy call—it’s news.

What did they vet and when did they vet it? (Photo by Tom Brenner / Washington Post via Getty Images)

JOURNALISM CAN BE COMPLICATED. But it has a simple north star: Run stories that are true and newsworthy.

There’s a reason “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is the New York Times’s motto. Yet the publication risks not living up to this principle if it continues to sit on what appears to be a collection of hacked internal documents from Donald Trump’s campaign. The Washington Post and Politico have also reportedly received the same documents—and like the Times, they, too, have so far not published them.

It is possible that each of these outlets will eventually publish the hacked material, which reportedly includes a 271-page file, assembled as Trump was considering a running mate, assessing both the strengths and “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES” of Ohio Sen. JD Vance. It may be that the Times, the Post, and Politico are all working to ensure that no erroneous material was deliberately inserted. But that is not the explanation they have offered so far for why they are holding off.

And if they ultimately decide not to publish the material, it would be a mistake on its face. It would defy longstanding journalist principles and feed conspiracy theories about pro-Trump media bias. And it glaringly conflicts with past practice.

In 2016, all three publications were among the media organizations that published information hacked by Russian agents about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The circumstances were not exactly the same—in that case, a third party, WikiLeaks, published the stolen documents, timing the Clinton-damaging drops to come out during news cycles that were bad for Trump. Back then, Trump cheered on the publication of those internal emails.

This time, Trump’s campaign says it was the one hacked by a foreign entity—Iran is the alleged culprit—and that those who release the information are “doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want.”

But that isn’t the primary consideration that the outlets should weigh when it comes to deciding whether to publish the materials. Their considerations should be much more narrow: Can the information be verified and is it news?

And the material that was hacked appears to be both.

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HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW about the origins and the contents of the new hack: According to Politico, which first reported the incident, on July 22, a person with an AOL account who called himself “Robert” emailed a reporter what looked like internal Trump campaign communications. “Robert” sent the Vance dossier, dated February 23, that consisted of publicly available information about Vance’s record and past statements. And “Robert” emailed a partial document concerning Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who also had been under consideration to be Trump’s running mate.

The hacker also told Politico he had a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.” But when asked how he came into possession of the documents, “Robert” said: “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.” (That last part is not true: There is no legal prohibition on a publication releasing material obtained via illegal hacking, so long as the publication was in no way responsible for the hacking.)

In a written statement this past Saturday, August 10, the Trump campaign declared it had been hacked and blamed Iran, citing an August 8 Microsoft alert about that country’s efforts to hack a presidential campaign. The FBI is investigating.

The statement also waved the press away from the documents on grounds that publishing them would “sow chaos throughout our Democratic [sic] process.” The Trump campaign did not dispute the authenticity of the documents. In fact, Politico reported that “two people familiar with” the documents confirmed they “are authentic.”

Despite that, both Politico and the Washington Post have issued statements indicating the information wasn’t “newsworthy” enough to print—as of yet. Each statement left open the possibility that the publication might still write more in depth about the substance of the hacked information they received. The New York Times is not commenting.

That’s baffling. What a campaign thought about its own vice presidential candidate is inherently newsworthy.

Consider this: Did the dossier list as a vulnerability Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment that led to saturation media coverage after he was picked? Whether the answer is yes or no, it’s a revealing window into how the campaign team thinks and works.

More broadly, the file would give us clear insights into what the Trump campaign believes are political liabilities and ideological third rails in this modern campaign climate. With the benefit of recent reporting on old Vance positions and statements, we could also see the stuff that Trump’s vetting team may have missed—itself an illustration of the operation’s mindset.

Stories like this used to be the bread and butter of politically obsessed outlets. In January 2012, Buzzfeed published the opposition research file that John McCain’s 2008 campaign had compiled on then-primary opponent Mitt Romney. Buzzfeed hadn’t received the material through a hack. But strictly as a matter of news, many commentators saw value in their decision. Buzzfeed also, more controversially, printed the subsequently discredited Steele dossier. It did so under the argument that, again, it was indisputably a matter of public interest to know what material was being shopped around on Trump prior to his election.¹

The Vance files, authenticated, certainly clear the bar set by these past stories. The idea that there’s nothing “newsworthy” in 271 pages of internal campaign documents at all defies credulity.

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THE OUTLETS CURRENTLY IN POSSESSION of the Vance dossier have been in this situation before.

In 2016, Politico obtained hacked internal opposition research about Florida Democratic congressional candidates that was assembled by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Politico decided to print the story to give readers an inside look at what the party thought of its own candidates.

I’m intimately familiar with this story because I was one of the coauthors. Printing the story had not been an easy call. Nor are the editorial debates around what to do with the Vance dossier. Media organizations don’t want to incentivize hacking political campaigns by providing publicity, or aid a hostile foreign government’s efforts to upend U.S. elections. There’s a partisan dimension, too. Whichever campaign is hacked will accuse the reporter and media organization of being a tool of foreign agents as well as their political opponents.

But reporters are not in this to worry about partisan critics or holier-than-thou media professors. This isn’t a job to make friends, be extensions of campaigns, or agents of any government. We report news. In 2020, when 60 Minutes put together a story that attacked Politico’s decision to run the Florida DCCC story four years earlier because of its reliance on hacked materials, I told them that the standard was simple: “It has to be true. And it has to be newsworthy.”

60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker asked if it was fair to use the DCCC hacked documents. “Life is unfair,” I replied. “And politics is unfair. My job is not to sit there and decide, ‘this is fair, and this is not.’ My job is to cover the news. And wherever the news leads, we follow.”

I would say the same thing today. The job is to cover the news. And the Vance dossier sure as hell sounds like news.

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SINCE THE 2016 CAMPAIGN, there have been other cases where news outlets have had to make difficult decisions about whether to publish material obtained through controversial means—most notably the stories in the runup to the 2020 election around the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he had left in a computer-repair shop. I was still at Politico then. And the edict from editors was to treat the story with such caution that we wrote almost nothing, except that the laptop was a hallmark of “Russian disinformation.”

The laptop was real. And, in retrospect, that episode showed that journalists had overlearned their lessons from four years prior.

For some observers wondering why the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico haven’t published the hacked Trump documents, a lot of frustration comes from the outlets’ glaring inconsistency over the years. The New York Times in particular has been singled out, owing to its saturation coverage of Clinton’s emails.

“Outlets like the New York Times owe their readers frenzied coverage of his campaign’s emails, or a mea culpa for their history-altering emails fixation in 2016,” Brian Beutler wrote Tuesday in his Off Message Substack.

Beutler makes a fair point. Maybe the editors at the three outlets have a good reason for not running stories on the Vance documents. I’m not privy to their newsroom conversations and I think highly of the reporters at all of these outlets. Maybe there are questions about the authenticity of parts of the documents. Maybe, in the wake of 2016, these outlets formulated a more stringent policy concerning the use of hacked materials.

Or maybe they’re working on significant stories about the documents right now. Maybe they are gathering material they can publish alongside the documents to put them in the fullest possible context.

But whatever the case, they ought to be transparent about their thinking. If the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post have decided that some considerations prevent them from publishing this authenticated and newsworthy information, then the least they could do is explain to the public what those considerations are.

It’s important to start adopting clearer standards—because it’s easy to see this occurring over and over.

Back in 2020, when Whitaker asked me about it happening again, perhaps during that election, I didn’t hesitate.

“Oh, yes,” I responded. “It certainly could happen again.”

Well, here we are.

1. Former Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith, looking back on the decision six years later, said “if I had to do it again, I would publish the [Steele] dossier” again, although only in excerpts and with more factual context, making clear “that we weren’t sure it was true, and in fact we had noticed errors in it.”