Donald Trump Once upon a time there was a cheerleader for promoting hacked content. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said during a press conference in his 2016 presidential run, when Hillary Clinton’s deleted personal emails were a hot topic, “I hope you’re listening to those 30,000 emails. will be able to find those who are missing.”

“I think you’ll probably get a great reward from our press,” he said again.

That changed when Trump’s latest presidential campaign announced it this weekend. It was hacked by Iran. Steven Cheung, the campaign’s communications director, announced in a statement Saturday that the campaign had been hacked, saying, “Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications is doing the bidding of America’s enemies and It’s doing exactly what they want.”

The campaign has not responded to questions about why its view on hacking changed, including one on Monday from The Associated Press. But his new position is a striking shift from 2016, when Trump warmly embraced Russian hacking of his opponent Clinton’s aides and the Democratic National Committee.

The current hack, so far, is complicated.

On Friday, Microsoft released a Report It said Iranian hackers tried to break into the account of an official in the presidential campaign, but did not disclose further details. On Saturday, the Trump campaign announced that it had been hacked, though it did not identify the individual whose account had been compromised. He did so after Politico said he was contacted by an anonymous source in what was presented as internal campaign documents.

Iran has denied any involvement in the hack. The US government has not confirmed that a breach has occurred.

In 2016, intelligence officials said Russian hackers obtained thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The first shipments came out in the summer, when Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination.

That’s when Trump encouraged Russia to search his rival’s personal emails. He later argued that he was joking.

The hacked material was released by third parties, including the online site WikiLeaks, which began publishing daily installments of Democratic documents in October after a videotape surfaced of Trump with women. They were sexually abused.

Trump routinely mentioned Democratic leaks at his campaign rallies, including declaring at one: “I love WikiLeaks.”

The leaked documents received a lot of news coverage, and Kathleen Hall Jamison, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote the 2016 hacking book “Cyberwar,” said the coverage won the election for Trump.

“2016 was not an example that journalists should be proud of,” Jamison said in an interview Monday, adding that the bigger question is whether news organizations are enforcing their standards for whatever material they find in the public domain. How to apply it.

“It’s Trump saying that’s electorally easy, no surprise,” Jamieson said. “This is not someone for whom inconsistency is a concern.”

Nick Merrill was a spokesman for Clinton’s 2016 campaign and pushed back against the release of the hacked documents at the time. On Monday, he noted that the Trump campaign was in a similar role this time around.

“Extraordinary hypocrisy aside, they just spent three weeks trying to explain that they’re not weird,” Merrill said via text. “And I would imagine that sharing their internal correspondence would help dispel that idea.”

Asked if that meant he now thought the hacked content should be published, Merrill replied: “There’s a precedent set. I’m not passing judgment on that.” ‘