Politico has been sitting on hacked communications from the Trump campaign for 3 weeks
By 
Some rain on your wedding day:
The campaign blamed “foreign sources hostile to the United States,” citing a Microsoft report on Friday that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.” Microsoft did not identify the campaign targeted by the email and declined to comment Saturday. POLITICO has not independently verified the identity of the hacker or their motivation, and a Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, declined to say if they had further information substantiating the campaigns’ suggestion that it was targeted by Iran.
“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,” Cheung said. “On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential nominee.”
I can’t believe I read the first sentence in the second graf and didn’t have a stroke.
Anyway, Politico has apparently been sitting on these since July 22:
On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.
I mean, I know it can be tiresome to keep saying this, but the double standard here when contrasted with how hacked emails apparently provided by foreign ratfuckers were handled in 2016 is absolutely outrageous:
Will be truly amazing if the only thing the media learned from 2016 turns out to be another dual standard that benefits Trump. https://t.co/NSZzHw00Hc— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) August 10, 2024
IMO they should treat Trump they way they treated Hillary and then do better in the future https://t.co/7owM80qHH1— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 10, 2024
The standard that Smith is articulating in the quoted tweet is roughly consistent with what I have always advocated: there obviously can’t be a bright line rule that illegally obtained information provided by ratfuckers can’t be covered, but there should be a rigorous bar to ensure that the communications are genuinely newsworthy and a careful evaluation of why the emails are being leaked and for what purpose. The problem here is that this was most definitely not the standard the media used in 2016 — indeed, a bunch of stories covered stuff that was considered newsworthy only because it came from hacked emails, and the stories also generally went along with how they were spun by Wikileaks even though this was typically misleading.
I think it’s worth noting here that when Amy Chozick (to her credit) was one of the few prominent political journalists to retrospectively question the wisdom of the uncritical feeding frenzy around the Assange/GRU provided emails in 2016, her colleagues angrily insisted that they had done nothing wrong. If there’s now a consensus that the coverage of the hacked emails was in fact seriously botched in 2016, it sure is “interesting” that 1)this consensus was apparently reached in private and 2)conveniently revealed only when it would favor Trump rather than his opponent!
Personally, I think the only fair thing is for journalists to learn the phrase “goes to the doubts voters have about Trump.” It’s the magic formula that makes everything newsworthy and bad news for the Trump campaign.