By NICHOLAS RICCARDI, Associated Press
Donald Trump was once a proponent of releasing hacked materials. “Russia, if you're listening,” Trump said during a press conference during his 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton's deleted personal emails were a hot topic, “I hope you can find the 30,000 missing emails.”
“I think you will probably be richly rewarded by our press,” he said on the time.
That modified when Trump’s latest presidential campaign announced this weekend that it was hacked by Iran“Any media outlet or news organization that reprints documents or internal communications is acting on behalf of America's enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Steven Cheung, the campaign's communications director, said Saturday in a press release announcing the hacking of the campaign.
The campaign has not responded to questions on why its stance on the hacking has modified, including a request from The Associated Press on Monday. But its latest stance is a notable difference from 2016, when Trump enthusiastically welcomed the Russian hacking of his opponent Clinton's advisers and the Democratic National Committee.
The current hack remains to be unclear.
On Friday, Microsoft released a report The report said Iranian hackers attempted to interrupt into the account of an official from one in all the presidential campaigns, but no further details were provided. On Saturday, the Trump campaign announced it had been hacked, but again didn’t name the person whose account had been hacked. This got here after Politico said it had been contacted by an unknown source who allegedly leaked internal campaign documents.
Iran has denied involvement in a hack. The US government has not confirmed that a hacking attack occurred. On Monday, the FBI said in a press release that it was investigating the case.
In 2016, intelligence officials said Russian hackers had stolen hundreds of emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the non-public account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The first batches were released in the summertime when Clinton won the Democratic nomination.
At the time, Trump asked Russia to see his rival's private emails. He later claimed it was a joke.
The hacked material was released through third parties, including the web site Wikileaks, which began releasing day by day releases of Democratic documents in October, shortly after a video surfaced during which Trump boasted about sexually harassing women.
Trump usually drew attention to the Democrats' Wikileaks leaks at his campaign rallies. At one in all these events, for instance, he declared: “I love Wikileaks.”
The leaked documents received a number of media attention. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications on the University of Pennsylvania and writer of the book “Cyberwar” in regards to the 2016 hacker attacks, believes that the reporting helped Trump win the election.
“2016 was not a year that journalists should be proud of,” Jamieson said in an interview on Monday, adding that the most important query is how news organizations apply their standards to material that’s in the general public domain.
“It's no surprise that Trump says what suits him for the election,” Jamieson said. “He's not a person for whom inconsistency is a problem.”
Nick Merrill was a spokesman for Clinton's 2016 campaign and opposed the discharge of the hacked documents on the time. On Monday, he noted that the Trump campaign team is playing the same role this time.
“In addition to the characteristic hypocrisy, they just spent three weeks explaining that they are not weird,” Merrill said via text message. “And I would imagine that releasing their internal correspondence will help dispel that impression.”
Asked if that meant he now believed hacked material ought to be made public, Merrill replied: “A precedent has been set here. I'm not passing judgment on that.”
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