Donald Trump once cheered the promotion of hacked material. When the deletion of Hillary Clinton’s private emails became a hot topic during his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said at a press conference, “Russia, if you’re listening,” he said, “I hope you find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
“I think our press will reward you greatly,” he said at the time.
That changed when Trump’s recent presidential campaign announced this weekend that it had been hacked by Iran. “Any media or news outlet that reprints documents or internal communications is doing exactly what the enemies of America want,” the campaign’s communications director, Stephen Cheng, said in a statement announcing the hack on Saturday.
The campaign did not respond to questions from The Associated Press on Monday about why its views on the hacking had changed. But the new stance is a marked change from 2016, when Trump was openly accepting that Russia hacked Clinton’s aides and the Democratic National Committee.
The hacking method is unclear so far.
On Friday, Microsoft released a report saying Iranian hackers had attempted to infiltrate the accounts of government officials working on one of the presidential campaigns, but did not provide any additional details. On Saturday, the Trump campaign announced it had been hacked, but did not identify the individuals whose accounts were compromised. It did so after Politico said it had been contacted by an unknown source who was selling what appeared to be internal campaign documents.
Iran has denied any involvement in the hack. The U.S. government has not confirmed that a breach occurred. On Monday, the FBI said in a statement that it was investigating the matter.
In 2016, intelligence officials said Russian hackers had obtained thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the personal accounts of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. The initial batch came in the summer, after Clinton had clinched the Democratic nomination.
At the time, Trump urged Russia to find his rival’s private emails, something he later claimed was a joke.
The hacked materials were made public by third parties, including the online site WikiLeaks, which began releasing Democratic documents daily in October, shortly after the release of a videotape in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women.
Trump frequently referenced Democratic leaks on the campaign trail, at one point declaring, “I love WikiLeaks.”
The leaked documents received widespread news coverage, and Kathleen Hall Jamison, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote the 2016 book about hacking, “Cyberwar,” said the report helped Trump win the election.
“2016 was not a year for journalists to be proud of,” Jamison said in an interview Monday, adding that the biggest question is how news organizations apply the standards to all material in the public domain.
“It’s not surprising that Trump says things that are electorally expedient,” Jamison said. “This is a guy whose problem is inconsistency.”
Nick Merrill was a spokesman for Clinton’s 2016 campaign and opposed the release of the hacked documents at the time. On Monday, he noted that the Trump campaign played a similar role this time.
“In addition to the inherent hypocrisy, they spent three weeks trying to explain to me that they were not weird,” Merrill said in a text. “And I think sharing their internal correspondence will help dispel that notion.”
When asked whether he thought the hacked material should be made public, Merrill said, “There’s precedent for this. I’m not going to pass judgment on it.”
