After Trump Campaign Hack, Experts Warn Of 2016 Redux
INSIDE: Donald Trump ... Tanya Chutkan ... JD Vance
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
‘Buckle Up’
We’ve entered the mean season for the dark arts: foreign influence, computer hacks, and disinformation.
The question is whether we’re any better prepared to withstand them than we were in 2016. The outlook isn’t promising.
Let me pull together and try to bring into focus what’s happened in recent weeks, and especially over the past few days, that harkens back to the Russian influence scheme of 2016 but with the focus this time on Iran:
June 2024: “Mint Sandstorm—a group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit—sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor,” Microsoft would later reveal in a report on Iran’s malign activities.
July 9: In a briefing with reporters, U.S. intel officials declare Russia the “preeminent threat” to U.S. election security in 2024 and characterize Iran as a “chaos agent” without a specific preference in this election.
July 22: Politico begins receiving emails from an anonymous AOL account that a user, identified only as “Robert,” uses over the following weeks to provide “internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official.”
July 29: In second briefing with reporters, U.S. intel officials change their tune and declare that Iran now prefers that Trump lose and is engaged in covert online influence operations toward that end.
Aug. 8: The WaPo also receives material from an anonymous AOL user going by the name “Robert,” but the newspaper doesn’t immediately report on it.
Aug. 9: Microsoft issues a new warning that Iran has ramped up its cyber-enabled influence campaign to include fakes news sites and hacking attempts. For the first time, Microsoft publicly reveals the June phishing incident targeting a high-ranking official in a U.S. presidential campaign.
Aug 10: Politico reports on internal Trump campaign documents, revealing for the first time the communications with “Robert” that began July 22. Among the hacked materials was a 271-page research dossier used in the vetting of vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The Trump campaign confirms that some of its internal communications were hacked and blames Iran, pointing to the Microsoft report.
Aug. 11: While neither the U.S. government nor Microsoft have confirmed that the documents sent to news outlets were the product of an Iranian hack or identified which U.S. presidential campaign was the target of the Iranian phishing incident, the WaPo reports that “a person familiar with Microsoft’s work confirmed that the report’s reference was to the Trump campaign.” For the first time, the WaPo reveals that it, too, received the 271-page dossier marked as “privileged & confidential.”
Aug 12: The NYT reveals that it received “what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico,” but the newspaper doesn’t pinpoint when it received the trove.
It’s only August. There’s a long way until November.
“Buckle up,” warned Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired by Trump after the 2020 election for debunking Trump’s Big Lie.
Trump Confuses His Black Politicians
Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city council member and state senator, came forward Friday to say it was he and not former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown who was aboard a helicopter with Trump that ran into problems mid-flight and had to make an emergency landing:
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Trump had insisted Brown was aboard and threatened to the sue the NYT over the issue.
Trump Calls Harris A ‘Bitch’ In Private
NYT:
Indeed, Mr. Trump has often been in a foul mood the past few weeks. He has ranted about Ms. Harris. He has called her “nasty,” on “Fox & Friends,” and a “bitch,” repeatedly, in private, according to two people who heard the remark on different occasions. (“That is not language President Trump has used to describe Kamala, and it’s not how the campaign would characterize her,” Mr. Cheung said.)
‘The Nice Men Of The Left’
Rebecca Traister on the stark differences currently on display between how the men of the right and the left define masculinity:
On the one hand is the Republican Party’s view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership. …
This is not to suggest that these Democratic guys represent some perfect specimen of evolved masculinity. But taken as a whole, as male Democrats fall over one another in an effort to elect a woman to the presidency, they are presenting a different definition of masculine strength tied to women’s liberation and full civic participation and all but declaring it a new norm.
2024 Ephemera
NYT battleground state polls show Harris shoring up the Blue Wall that had been threatening to crumble on Biden: She now leads Trump among likely voters by the identical 50%-46% margin in each of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Crazytown: The weekend insanity on the right, embraced by Donald Trump himself, was that the images of big crowds at Kamala Harris’ rallies are AI-generated fakes.
NBC News: “False or misleading claims about the U.S. election that Elon Musk has posted to X this year have generated nearly 1.2 billion views, according to an analysis published Thursday by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.”
What In The World?
Every time I’m ready to move on from the tedium of NYT headline scrutiny, stuff like this happens:
The revised version currently still live is “Biden Promised Peace, but Will Leave His Successor a Nation Entangled in War.”
Judge Chutkan Agrees To Delay Jan. 6 Case
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s unopposed motion to delay the Jan. 6 case while the Justice Department sorts out the implications of the Supreme Court’s staggeringly ahistorical ruling on presidential immunity.
Chutkan set new deadlines of Aug. 30 for a joint status report from the parties and Sept. 5 for a status conference.
No Degradation Is Too Great For Vance
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The Trump campaign and the media are still treating the hack of the Trump campaign as an attack by Iran (because the Trump campaign says so). That might be true, but the facts are ambiguous. Microsoft reported to the Trump campaign that an Iranian group attempted to hack the Trump campaign in June. Per the WaPo, the only entity that has confirmed the hack was by Iran is the Trump campaign—which lies about everything. If the Iranians are using an AOL email account to cover their hack, they have a keen sense of American culture, history, and humor.
WaPo has possessed the leaked materials for three days. It has not published or described their contents—unlike its treatment of the hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the contents of Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop.
The editor-in-chief of Semafor and former New York Times columnist Ben Smith is a prime example. He tweeted, with a straight face,
“Hopefully (seriously) Trump will benefit from what the media learned in 2016, when it got played by state-sponsored hackers into publishing a drip-drip of Clinton information on the hackers’ schedule.
“Which is to say — journalists can/should report seriously on real documents that shed light on real stories, but should also foreground the hackers’ motives and not publish personal information gratuitously. And, in general, not treat a drip-drip of random documents as hot scoops.”
In other words, in order to benefit Trump in this year’s election, the media should apply all the “lessons” it learned when it trashed the Democrats in 2016 and again in 2020. Forgive me if I say the mainstream media has zero integrity remaining, and its bias toward Trump is a continuing threat to our democracy.
Why did the “hacker” send the material to Politico, which is now part of the Axel Springer media empire owned by pro-Trump billionaire Mathias Döpfner?? Döpfner himself is Rupert Murdoch-lite in Europe; his media is like Fox News. To give a sense of how much of a Trumper he is, right before the 2020 election, Döpfner urged executives from his media empire to put Donald Trump in their prayers. Döpfner said of Trump,“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more.”
So, a company owned by this guy is the one “Iranian intelligence” sends negative material on Trump to??? And after three weeks of no action by Politico, the hacker goes to the Washington Post which… also sat on the story? And the NYT - which also sat on the story? According to Politico, they talked to the Trump campaign to authenticate the hacked documents - and Trump didn’t immediately inform the FBI?
What’s disturbing is that the press will take a pass on a story like this if Trump could be harmed, while they exhibit no restraint or journalistic integrity when it’s the Democratic nominee who will suffer.
And Trump himself pointed out that the campaign suffers from "low self-esteem leakers." What's the over-under that the "hack" was an inside job, especially since the documents came from the law firm that has defended Trump and his fellow felons in the Florida documents case, among others.
Pfft
Wanting Trump to lose doesn’t make Iran special sorry.