In the pledge’s final version, signed by DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Luján, the Democrats said they would “never use known stolen hacked information, or promote or disseminate stolen hacked materials to the press, regardless of the source.” In other words, Democratic House candidates won’t use stolen documents even if reporters choose to cover them in the run-up to the midterms. The NRCC wasn’t happy with that, the NRCC official said, and wanted instead to make a “broader point about the press covering hacked materials responsibly.” The press has had to grapple with whether it was an unwitting agent of Russian propaganda in 2016 in its decision to publish stories based on documents stolen by Russian hackers and published by WikiLeaks. But it is not clear how making that point in the pledge, at the expense of a broader commitment to not engage with the press reports, would impact the campaign committees’ own handling of stolen material.

The NRCC was also vexed, I’m told, by the pressure the Democrats were putting on the committee to make a commitment by the end of this week. Republicans claimed to never have received a draft version of the pledge, and considered the deadlines “arbitrary.” They were irked, moreover, by what they saw as the Democrats’ “consistent threat of going to the press” with the Republicans’ waffling. “It breached our trust and made it clear to us they were using this as a PR stunt and trying to jam us,” the NRCC official said. But with the election less than 60 days away—and flurries of hacking attempts having already been publicized—the DCCC felt a sense of urgency, a DCCC spokesman said. “Luján was patient and gave the NRCC three months to get on board with the DCCC’s standing position to not use stolen hacked materials in political campaigns. If by ‘threats’ they are referring to Luján pushing [NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers] directly on several occasions to finalize and release a joint agreement for the good of the country, then their excuses are just getting weaker by the moment,” the DCCC spokesman said. The Democrats also disputed the claim that they had never offered the Republicans a draft to work with, citing at least four separate occasions in which Luján and Stivers negotiated the pledge’s language between July 17 and September 5. (The NRCC acknowledged receiving a “redline draft” from the DCCC on September 4 with proposed revisions, but noted that the draft arrived after Luján had indicated to The Wall Street Journal that they were nearing a deal.)

Republicans are “not seeking hacked materials. We don’t want hacked materials. We have no intention of using hacked materials,” the NRCC official said. “We don’t need a pledge to do what we planned to do already.” But it is still not clear how the committee would react if a Republican House candidate were given a damning email or text hacked from an opponent, or whether the committee is formulating its own guidelines surrounding the use of hacked materials in campaigns. The issue is not without precedent: The NRCC used a hacked document in an ad attacking the Florida Democratic candidate Randy Perkins in 2016, after Russian hackers infiltrated Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee servers and compromised candidates in nearly a dozen states. And it’s not just Democrats who are vulnerable: Russian hackers gained “limited” access to Republican National Convention computer systems in 2016, former FBI Director James Comey testified last year.