When the news first broke that Donald Trump’s campaign said it had been hacked, I started drafting a post on applying the lessons of past ratfucks.

The alleged hack was earlier. Politico reported.which says some people using AOL accounts accessed and shared documents, including test materials related to JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the past few weeks, the man — who used an AOL email account and identified himself only as “Robert” — has had what appears to be internal communications with a senior Trump campaign official. A research document the campaign apparently conducted on a Trump associate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as an early version of the Venus investigation file.

The investigative document was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past records and statements, including some — such as her past criticisms of Trump — described in the document as “potential threats.” was identified as The man also sent part of a research document about Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Trump’s bouncer spokesman Steven Cheung claimed the hack was done by Iran, citing Microsoft’s report continues Friday, explaining Iran’s compromise of a “former senior adviser’s” email account, which the IRGC then tried to compromise with a current high-level official.

Another Iranian group, linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, in June used a compromised email account of a former senior adviser to send an expletive-laden email to a high-ranking presidential campaign official. The email contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the provided link’s website. Within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into the account of a former presidential candidate. We have since notified those who have been targeted.

Unfortunately for the Trump campaign, Cheung is a habitual liar, so we can’t trust anything he says, and Politico’s endorsement relies exclusively on word of mouth from people who Passes are documents, not digital authentication.

Still, it’s clearly possible. The FBI for sure Believing The IRGC is trying to kill Trump.

The lessons I was going to suggest in my draft post were as follows:

• Vice President Harris should avoid assigning his most senior staff to exploit these emails, as Trump did in 2016.
• But only after Trump, Don Jr., and Mike Pompeo apologized for their enthusiastic use of hacked emails in 2016.
• The same 51 former spokespeople who warned that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained signs of foreign influence operations should write a similar letter here, in which (as they did in their Hunter Biden letter (was) emphasized the importance of resisting foreign attempts to influence the presidential election. Maybe Peter Strzok and Andy McCabe will be involved. Chris Krebs, Joe Already have weight Confirming the seriousness of the threat, but who was fired for telling the truth about the 2020 election, could also be involved. They should send it to Politico, which first reported the story, but CC Jim Jordan, who says even writing such a letter is an abuse of First Amendment protections of freedom.
• Donald Trump Must Turn Over All Infected Servers To FBI, Stat.

That last one was going to be my punchline. Partly because of the misleading (allegedly false) testimony of Jim Comey, and partly because a large number of people were motivated to do Russia’s bidding, for eight years people, including in Congress, Many people are suggesting that all servers should be given to the hacking victim. That law enforcement agencies were hacked — the actual servers, not the forensic images — would otherwise cast doubt on the FBI’s investigation.

They were wrong on several counts. But he was loud and insistent.

Well based on this precedent, Trump should turn over his campaign servers to the same FBI that has criminally investigated him, including his campaign finance practices.

This is what I was going to write when Politico’s Alex Snestadt, who is not a journalist to report a hack and leak story, was the only one who wrote it.

But then WaPo wrote itwith Trump whistleblower Josh Dawsey and horse racing journalist Isaac Arnsdorff, but also Alan Nakashima and Shane Harris, the latter two of whom are extraordinary reporters for a story about hacking.

There were two additional details in this story that made me reconsider its possible implications. First, he revealed Trump did not tell the FBI about the hack.

The campaign separately ended earlier this summer after its email system was breached but did not disclose it publicly or to law enforcement, people familiar with the matter said. Some officials were told to take more security measures on their email accounts, the people said. At the time, campaign officials told others they weren’t sure who hacked the emails.

It’s also unclear whether Trump got an outside contractor — and if so, if it was more capable than Rudy Giuliani, whom Trump once positioned as a cybersecurity expert — to clean up the mess. To help do It took more than a month for CrowdStrike and the DNC to attribute the Russian hack, but they didn’t completely clear it. And there were continuous attacks through the election. That is, even with a respected outside contractor, Democrats were wasting energy on defense efforts for the rest of the election.

Against this background, WaPo details what The combined personality becomes more dangerous.

On Thursday, The Washington Post was also sent a 271-page document about Vance by a sender who identified himself as Robert and used an AOL email account. Dated Feb. 23 and labeled “privileged and confidential,” the document highlighted potential political vulnerabilities for the first-term senator. Two people familiar with the document confirmed that it was authentic and The brand was launched by Woodward’s campaign.a law firm that represents several prominent Trump advisers in investigations by state and federal authorities.

The document is drawn from publicly available information, including past news reports and interviews with the senator. The campaign also released several reports on other candidates, advisers said.

The dispatcher would not speak with a Post reporter by telephone but indicated they had access to additional information. including internal campaign emails and documents related to Trump’s court cases. [my emphasis]

First, Brand Woodward tested the campaign.

Stan Woodward represents, Along with othersWalt Nota, Kash Patel, and Peter Navarro in various criminal investigations related to Trump, as well as some subversives. He’s a perfect fit for Trump because he’s good. Creating outrage over manufactured lights – Although before regular judges, those complaints are usually dismissed. Several filings in the case of documents show that Woodward There is a weak link with digital technology.

The role of Stan Brand, Woodward’s partner, has been painstakingly concealed, except that he made claims about the cases to the on-the-record press without disclosing his relationship to Woodward.

Now, WaPo has confirmed that Microsoft’s description — a former adviser’s use of the man’s email account, an attempt to hack a “senior official” in the campaign — is related to the Trump campaign. Given this description, there is no reason to believe that Woodward or Brand were affected.

But even then there is a problem with hiring Brand Woodward to vet his candidate. To be clear: the brand is perfectly qualified to do this kind of work. He has a long record of doing so in Congress. But even Trump It seems Concerns about important issues that were missed by the vetting process, to say nothing of its donors.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, J.D. Vance, as news coverage scrutinized — and then outright criticized — Mr. Vance’s past statements. Made – Remarks including a lamentable statement that America is being run by a “childless cat”. Women.”

Mr Trump rejected suggestions from hand-off donors that he would replace Mr Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women since Mr. Trump elected him.

There were better Choice candidates, but if Trump wants to let a thin team vet the surly troll he’s picked as his running mate, that’s his own business.

Brand Woodward My alarm about the news starting, however, is that the Trump campaign has messed up various operations, criminal and civil defense, with campaign finances and now candidate vetting. This creates a legal quagmire, which — if Trump loses this election — could lead to more legal trouble down the road.

Maybe that’s why Trump didn’t call the FBI.

But it also means that some people—notably, Susie Wiles and Boris Epstein, along with Woodward and Brand—are performing multiple functions. Wiles is the one who decides who pays his criminal defense bills, is also the one who decides to spend campaign cash, and was a big supporter of JD’s election.

When people play such overlapping functions, it means that a hack targeted at one function—say, candidate testing—could strike a gold mine of documents related to another function. Is — say, criminal defense.

WaPo cites “documents related to Trump’s court cases” – Politico cites the figure as having “a variety of documents [Trump’s] “Legal and Court Documents for Internal Campaign Debates” — may ultimately be related to Trump’s election court cases. If it does, it may be the biggest news out there, as Trump’s election court cases are about democracy. are a direct threat to

But what if they don’t? What if these documents relate to things that overlap with what people — people like Wiles or Epstein, and those are just the two most obvious — know about Trump’s criminal cases? What if they are related to claims about where the witnesses transferred the documents to the FBI or what they contained? What if they are related to the original documents Trump stole, starting with the US strategic plan against Iran that Trump shared with Mark Meadows’ ghostwriters?

Trump hasn’t firewalled his campaign from a criminal case involving highly sensitive US government documents, meaning a well-executed hack targeting his campaign could turn into an intelligence bonus.

If Iran intends to make things difficult for Trump, the problems could go beyond the leaked documents. As he did in 2016, this could mean Trump is wasting resources to continually defend against hacking attempts through a range of different platforms. This could mean that Iran does what Russia did, hacking key strategic models to improvise other kinds of waste in elections later. Because — unlike Russia — Iran is actively seeking to kill Trump, not just defeat him, the hacked documents could facilitate similar efforts. Charged against Asif Merchantcreating a fake protest to create a distraction to facilitate an assassination attempt.

The question of how to deal with this news, if further confirmed, goes beyond the question of whether to publish documents allegedly stolen by Iran. In the main part Because With Trump refusing to maintain boundaries between his political life and his criminal life, hacks from Iran could do real damage to the US that Trump’s campaign does.

So by all means, let’s pause for schadenfreude for a moment. Let’s review all the things Trump said and did in 2016 and 2020 (including with the Hunter Biden laptop) that invite his opponents to take full advantage of the stolen documents this time around.

But as you do, consider that this rat may be far more dangerous to America than those targeting Hillary and Hunter.