Confidential documents from the campaign of the candidate of the Republican Party for the President of the United States of America (USA) Donald Trump reached at least three American media, which decided not to publish their content, writes the Voice of America.
Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post wrote about the hacking attack that took place, and in general about the documents that reached them.
This decision of the media is the exact opposite of the decision in the 2016 campaign, when Russian hackers entered the email of John Podseta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, the WikiLeaks website published it, and the media reported it.
Politico reported over the weekend that it began receiving emails on July 27 from a person who identified himself as "Robert" and sent 271 pages of campaign documents about Trump's running mate JD Vance, and a report on Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who also mentioned as a candidate for vice president.
Politiko and the Washington Post reported that two unrelated people confirmed to them that the documents were authentic.
"Such documents contain statements that may be harmful or embarrassing, such as Mr. Vance's offensive comments about Mr. Trump," the New York Times writes.
Who Hacked Trump?
It is not known who sent the materials to the media. Politiko wrote that he did not know who "Robert" was and that he told them, when they spoke with him, "not to be curious about where he got the documents from."
The Trump campaign said it was hacked by the Iranians.
Although they did not provide evidence of this, the attack came a day after Microsoft released a report about attempts by Iran's military intelligence service to break into the email account of a former senior adviser to the presidential campaign - but did not say whose.
Stephen Cheng, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said over the weekend that "the media that publishes the leaked documents will work in favor of America's enemies."
In a brief statement, the FBI only confirmed that it was investigating the case.
The New York Times did not say why it did not want to publish details of the internal communications, while a Washington Post spokesman told the AP: "When we receive materials, we check their authenticity, the motives of the sources and make a decision whether publication is in the public interest."
Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Politika, says that the editors judged that how the documents reached the media was more worthy of attention than the content of the material.
Lessons from 2016?
Trump and his campaign in 2016, on the other hand, encouraged the release of documents about Clinton that WikiLeaks obtained from hackers.
Brian Fallon, a Clinton campaign spokesman at the time, noted that concern that Russian hackers were involved quickly faded, and a fascination with the content of the hacked emails arose.
"Just as Russia wanted," he said.
In contrast to the current moment, WikiLeaks then released the materials so that everyone could see them, which increased the pressure on the media to publish the story. And that led to some bad decisions, in some cases the media reported that the content of the emails was more damaging to Clinton than it really was, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote a book on the case.
This time, Jamieson says, the media made the right decision not to publish details from the hacked Trump campaign, because they cannot fully trust the source.
"How do you know that you are not actually being manipulated by the Trump campaign?" says Jamieson, adding that she is against publication because "we live in an age of misinformation."
Thomas Reed, director of the Alpertovich Institute for Cyber Security at Johns Hopkins University, also believes that the media made the right decision, but for different reasons. He says the bigger story is the attempt by foreign countries to influence the campaign, rather than the leaked materials.
The editor of ProPublica (a non-profit organization dedicated to investigative journalism) Jesse Eisinger, on the other hand, believes that the media should have published something more.
He notes that some of Vance's past statements about Trump are easy to find online, but that internal reports on the VP candidates may reveal more. If the material is found to be accurate, then whether the story is news is more important than who the source is.
"I don't think they did a good job, and they went too far in learning the lessons of 2016," says Ejsinger.
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