Trump Campaign Leaks Unpublished, Journalist Questions Why
Written by djfrosty on August 16, 2024
Source: Adam Gray / Getty
A former writer for Politico has publicly wondered why their outlet and many others haven’t published leaked info from Donald Trump’s campaign.
According to reports, at least three major news outlets – the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico – all received leaked internal documents from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign earlier in the week. None of them have published information from them, which has former Politico senior writer Marc A. Caputo perplexed enough to question why. “It may be that the Times, the Post, and Politico are all working to ensure that no erroneous material was deliberately inserted,” he wrote in his Bulwark newsletter. “But that is not the explanation they have offered so far for why they are holding off.”
Caputo would write that the information contained in the 271 pages of leaked documents includes vetting information gathered for Ohio Senator JD Vance, which the Trump campaign team apparently used to determine whether to pick him to be the former president’s running mate. Caputo writes that it’s “baffling” that the outlets wouldn’t publish that information, as “what a campaign thought about its own vice presidential candidate is inherently newsworthy.”
Caputo would then cite the internal emails from Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign spokesman John Podesta being hacked by someone named “Guccifer” in 2016, who then sent them to Wikileaks. That led to heavy coverage of the information in those emails, with the New York Times doing most of it in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Caputo also spoke about the stories concerning Hunter Biden and the laptop he left behind in a computer-repair shop being part of the news landscape before the 2020 election. He noted the extreme caution by editors then, saying, “that episode showed that journalists had overlearned their lessons from four years prior.
“Maybe, in the wake of 2016, these outlets formulated a more stringent policy concerning the use of hacked materials,” Caputo writes. “But whatever the case, they ought to be transparent about their thinking. If the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post have decided that some considerations prevent them from publishing this authenticated and newsworthy information, then the least they could do is explain to the public what those considerations are.” He stressed that bringing the information in the leaks is important so people don’t feel there’s partisanship being practiced. “It’s important to start adopting clearer standards—because it’s easy to see this occurring over and over,” he concludes.