Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, announced in a statement on Saturday that his campaign had been hacked. In an attempt to forestall the publication of any secret documents, Cheung warned 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.”
This is the stand that Trump representatives are taking in 2024, but when in 2016 Hillary Clinton’s campaign was hacked, Donald Trump was singing a different tune.
“Russia, if you’re listening,” Donald Trump said during his first run for the White House, “I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” Hillary Clinton’s deleted personal emails were a hot topic in that campaign, one that the former president was able to exploit to his advantage and that he amplified into allegations of criminal activity on Clinton’s part. Eventually the often-repeated allegations and insinuations on the missing emails and the criminal activity that Trump ascribed to them mushroomed into the chant of “lock her up” and propelled him into the White House.
Urging the press to scrutinize and publicize the alleged incriminating emails, he said, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”.
Intelligence officials said Russian hackers had obtained thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the personal account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. The initial batches came out in the summer, as Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination. From that point on Trump capitalized on it as a rallying cry while crowing, “Wikileaks. I love Wikileaks.”
The 2016 leaked documents received widespread news coverage, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote the book “Cyberwar” on the hacking, said she found that coverage was what won the election for Trump. “2016 was not an instance of which journalists should be proud,” Jamieson said in an interview Monday, adding that the greatest question is how news organizations apply their standards to whatever material finds itself in the public domain.
This time around, it seems that journalists learned their lesson from 2016 and acted more responsibly. Starting on July 22, on the heels of Biden’s historic decision to step aside from the 2024 presidential race, journalists across three major US newsrooms began receiving emails from an anonymous person claiming to have enticing new information about the election. The person identified only as “Robert,” sent a cache of private documents from inside Donald Trump’s campaign operation to journalists at Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post. They all decided not to publish any of the material they received.
Politico spokesperson Brad Dayspring stated to CNN, “Politico editors made a judgment, based on the circumstances as our journalists understood them at the time, that the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents.”
In an attempt to prevent disclosure of the hacked material, Cheung stated, “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.”
In 2016 the conditions that Cheung described were virtually identical, but given that it was the rival’s campaign that was hacked, Trump seized the advantage, unconcerned about the involvement of a hostile enemy source and the security of the country.
As Jamieson points out, “That Trump is saying what is electorally convenient [today] is not a surprise”, adding, “This is not a person for whom inconsistency is a concern.”
