This Hack Is Whack

A claimed foreign hack from Iran of the Trump campaign raises many questions and threatens chaos ahead.

Photo Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Trump campaign was hacked by Iranian intelligence, and internal campaign and other documents have wound up in the hands of our foreign adversaries. 

Or so the Trump campaign claims.

This being Trump, we should take anything he says with a healthy dose of skepticism. And indeed, there are some parts of this story that don’t yet add up, including why the right wing-owned media outlet Politico was the first to receive the allegedly hacked emails and why it sat on them for weeks.

Today, I want to walk you through the timeline of when the first alleged hack occurred and how the media failed to report on it. Then I’ll step through three questions and concerns I have over how this has played out. 

The timeline of the alleged hack and reporting on it

On July 22, Politico began receiving emails from a person calling himself “Robert.” The emails provided by this anonymous person, who was using an AOL account to communicate with Politico, reportedly contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. Those included a preliminary dossier on Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance. “Robert” also sent part of a research document compiled for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who was another finalist in the running for VP.

The sender claimed he had a “variety of documents” from “legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.” Asked how the person obtained the documents, “Robert” responded, “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.”

Politico was able to confirm the authenticity of the documents through two unnamed sources who were familiar with them. But it mysteriously waited until this past Saturday, almost three weeks after it had received the first communication from “Robert,” to actually report that any of this was happening. I’ll get to why that raises some big questions below.

Last Thursday, the Washington Post also received communications from “Robert” including the preliminary Vance dossier. The Post also sat on the apparent hack or leak and did not report about it until three days later.

On Friday, Microsoft reported that Iranian intelligence had hacked the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. Specifically, per the Post’s reporting, it stated that 

it had discovered evidence that Iranian hackers had tried to break into the email account of a “high-ranking official” on a U.S. presidential campaign in June, which was around the same time Vance was selected as Donald Trump’s running mate.

On Saturday, Trump announced that Microsoft had informed his campaign that a Trump site had been hacked, but that it only contained publicly available information, and this was of course all Biden’s fault:

“We were just informed by Microsoft Corporation that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do! They were only able to get publicly available information but, nevertheless, they shouldn’t be doing anything of this nature. Iran and others will stop at nothing, because our Government is Weak and Ineffective, but it won’t be for long.”

A spokesperson for the National Security Council said the Biden administration “strongly condemns any foreign government or entity who attempts to interfere in our electoral process or seeks to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” The Harris-Walz campaign has yet to issue a comment.

Sitting on the goods

When I first understood the timeline, and realized that for weeks Politico not only had knowledge of an alleged hack as well as authenticated, internal communications from the Trump campaign but had declined to report on it, I frankly couldn’t help but fume.

After all, we all remember the 2016 campaign, when political reporters gleefully tweeted out John Podesta’s and the DNC’s hacked internal emails in real time, even though they knew Russia likely had a major hand in the hack. That drip-drip dominated the headlines and broke the Democratic Party’s unity at a critical time in the campaign.

And I remember as recently as 2020, when the contents of Hunter’s Biden’s “laptop” (if they really ever came from there) were hacked and leaked, with Rudy Giuliani’s hands all over them—someone we knew was carrying water for the Russians in Ukraine. Many news outlets including the New York Post and Fox reported giddily about them while Trump cheered them on.

Today, however, “serious” news folk are suddenly wringing their hands and rediscovering journalistic integrity when it comes to the Trump hack. The editor-in-chief of Semafor and former New York Times columnist Ben Smith is a prime example. He tweeted, with a straight face,

Hopefully (seriously) Trump will benefit from what the media learned in 2016, when it got played by state-sponsored hackers into publishing a drip-drip of Clinton information on the hackers’ schedule. 

Which is to say — journalists can/should report seriously on real documents that shed light on real stories, but should also foreground the hackers’ motives and not publish personal information gratuitously. And, in general, not treat a drip-drip of random documents as hot scoops.

In other words, in order to benefit Trump in this year’s election, the media should apply all the “lessons” it learned when it trashed the Democrats in 2016 and again in 2020. Forgive me if I say the mainstream media has zero integrity remaining, and its bias toward Trump is a continuing threat to our democracy.

The Trump campaign itself has suddenly discovered what it feels to be on the receiving end of a purported hack, warning that “any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want.” As reporter Matthew Ygelsias observed,

I am sorry but literally nobody in history has ever had less credibility on any topic than Donald Trump objecting on this. If you are in possession of this info and declining to publish it for this reason you are the biggest chump in the galaxy.

Wait, the hacker went to Politico?

If I wanted to spread damaging information about Trump, as this hacker supposedly sought to do, I wouldn’t go with it to Politico. After all, that outfit is now part of the Axel Springer media empire owned by a pro-Trump billionaire Mathias Döpfner. Politico was purchased by Axel Springer in 2021 for a billion dollars. 

Döpfner himself is like Rupert Murdoch-lite in Europe, and his media is a bit like Fox News. So how in the tank is Döpfner for Trump? To give a sense of that, right before the 2020 election, Döpfner urged executives from his media empire to put Donald Trump in their prayers.

“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Döpfner wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Post. He claims he was being ironic and trolling his own editors a bit, many of whom hate Trump, but his own admiration for Trump was clear. “No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” Döpfner said of Trump.

So coming back to the alleged hack, it makes little sense to me, at least without knowing more, that Iranian intelligence would set its sights on Politico to get the word out. There are many left-leaning publications that would have happily run with the story right away and encouraged more information from the supposed hacker to be turned over. And after days, a week, three weeks of no action from Politico, the hacker only then went to the Washington Post which… also sat on the story?

This just doesn’t add up. Politico had a story, either way: Either the hack really was a foreign intelligence job (where it at least could have published that it was being fed what appeared to be hacked communications without actually publishing what they were) or it was an inside Trump campaign job, in which case there was no national security concern over publishing the information.

There is at least one other reason to believe we don’t have the full story here, and it comes from no less than Donald Trump, who really can’t help himself. In an another unhinged rant on Truth Social on Sunday evening, Trump complained about “low self-esteem leakers”—quite a specific set of people to mention all of a sudden.

This raises a key question: Is Trump aware of a leak in his campaign that he isn’t talking more about? And if Politico had discussions with the Trump campaign to help authenticate the allegedly hacked documents, why didn’t Trump go immediately to the authorities about it? 

Clues in the Vance dossier

As legal columnist Marcy Wheeler pointed out in fairly colorful terms, the leaked draft Vance dossier was assembled by the law firm Brand Woodward. And that itself should raise some loud alarms within the Trump campaign. 

Brand Woodward was deeply involved with Trump’s criminal cases. One of its founders, Stanley Woodward, represents Trump’s co-defendant Walt Nauta as well as several witnesses in the Mar-a-Lago espionage and obstruction case. The firm also represents several Trump advisors in election-related cases by state and federal authorities.

It isn’t clear how “Robert” came upon an internal Brand Woodward-generated draft dossier on Vance. But if a “hack” led to his possession of that file, it’s reasonable to suspect that other Brand Woodward documents could be in his possession. Indeed, “Robert” referred specifically to other “legal and court documents” now in his possession.

That could explain why the Trump campaign kept quiet after learning it had been compromised. If the “former senior adviser” to the Trump campaign also sent or received privileged legal memos and communications relevant to Trump’s criminal cases, this could wreak true legal havoc should they be published.

This is a developing story, and we don’t know what the next moves of the alleged hacker, the media and the Trump campaign will be. Whatever happens, it is a stark warning both that our elections are vulnerable to outside interference and that the press will take a pass on stories like these if it means Trump could be harmed, while exhibiting no restraint or journalistic integrity when it’s the Democratic nominee who will suffer.