Hacked Trump Campaign Material On JD Vance Leaked to Three Major News Outlets, All of Which Chose Not To Print It

Three major news outlets, The Washington Post, Politico, and The New York Times, all received hacked material from former President Donald Trump’s campaign and so far have not published any of the material or offered specifics about exactly what they received.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that the outlets have only “written about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in broad terms.” Politico published a story on the material on Saturday, noting that someone who self-identified as “Robert” started sending emails leaking campaign documents on July 22nd and has since sent a 271-page vetting document about Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and a shorter vetting report on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

The Times and the Post received similar emails and all three outlets have since confirmed the materials to be authentic. “Like many such vetting documents, they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump,” wrote the Times of the report they received.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung released a statement over the weekend calling on the media not to publish materials from the hack, which he blamed on Iran, and declared that “any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies.”

MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemire spoke to Washington Post reporter Tyler Pager on Tuesday morning about the hack and what the Post has said so far about the materials sent to them.

“The FBI says it’s investigating efforts to hack both the Trump and Biden campaigns. A source familiar with the matter tells NBC News the investigation includes attempted hacks targeting three Biden campaign staffers, as well as Roger Stone, a former adviser to Donald Trump. This comes after the Trump campaign said on Saturday that it had been hacked, and suggested that Iran was involved in stealing and distributing internal vetting documents on Senator JD vance, Trump’s now running mate,” began Lemire, introducing the segment.

“The Washington Post was first to report the FBI’s probe. According to the paper, the FBI began the investigation in June and suspected Iran was behind the attempts to steal data from the two campaigns. A Harris campaign official tells NBC that it did not appear to be any victim of any security breaches,” he continued, before asking Pager:

So tell us more about what we know about these hack attempts. You know, the Post and Politico each were sent some of this JD Vance information. Though most of it, to be clear, is publicly available things. We’re not aware of any real sensitive material just yet. But tell us more about the probe and how the campaigns are responding.

“Yeah, I think we’re still learning about this, obviously, in real-time. This just is unfolding over the last few days. But obviously, the FBI has been aware of this, and the campaigns have been aware of about this for some time and just shows the fact that foreign actors continue to try to be involved and interfere with American elections. Obviously, they were successful with the Trump campaign,’ Pager replied, adding:

We’re still learning exactly what information they have gotten access to, as you said, right now, the scope of our knowledge is that it’s related to vetting documents for J.D. Vance. Now Trump’s running mate. The Biden campaign was made aware of this effort as well. It does not appear that that was successful. But I think, you know, in conversations I’ve had over the last few days, at least on the Democratic side, after 2016, there have been massive efforts to try to bolster security across the Democratic ecosystem after they were successful in hacking into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

This is a subject of huge concerns for campaigns, and so they’ve taken extra security precautions. Clearly, the Democrats have been, to this point, successful in trying to rebut any of these efforts, but it shows just the continuing threat of foreign actors in American elections.

Lemire replied, “You know, no question a major security story and also a media story, as many were very critical of how the press handled those leaks back in 2016 with the Clinton campaign.”

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.