Getty Images Fourth Estate The Clintonites Should Stop Freaking Out About WikiLeaks

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

The Clinton campaign has a three-fold plan to interrupt press coverage of the gusher of emails sent to and from campaign chair John Podesta’s account and released by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization. The first is a Fight Club-style vow of silence about the emails, which appear to have been hacked, as Podesta and the campaign have refused to confirm or deny their authenticity to reporters. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked,” Podesta tweeted.

The second has been to call attention to what appears to be the emails’ tainted provenance.


“Media needs to stop treating Wikileaks like it is same as FOIA,” tweeted Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon on Monday in one of five tweets on that theme. “Assange is colluding with Russian government to help Trump.” That WikiLeaks hasn’t released material on Trump, Fallon continued, “tells you something.”

The third has been to assign Clinton surrogates to the talk shows to dismiss the significance of the very documents that have so upset Fallon.

Of the three strategies, the second seems more imaginative. Going beyond the traditional dialectic of confirm-or-deny, Fallon hopes to totally delegitimize the emails by branding them as the dark fruits of a scurrilous foreign power. The subtext of Fallon’s protest is that no matter what reporters dig out in the voluminous Podesta emails, their stories will be polluted by the motives and methods behind their acquisition.

Fallon is floating a very large crock here. Real reporters don’t treat Freedom of Information Act requests the way he implies. That is, reporters don’t FOIA the government for a stack of documents and then, upon receiving them, blindly publish the stack or their gleanings and call it a work of journalism. No document obtained via the FOIA process is automatically a reliable source upon which a sound story can be built. Its contents must be tested, verified, cross-examined and blended with other information before it has any business being placed in a news story. The same goes for court proceedings, corporate documents, scientific papers, and audio and video recordings, only double.

Clinton’s allies warn us that because the WikiLeaks dump may contain forgeries—not a fully imaginary admonition, mind you—reporters should keep their distance for their own good. Forged documents are as old as journalism itself, and as technology grows more sophisticated, more forgeries will appear, and reporters will have to be even more vigilant lest they be hoodwinked. But if the Clinton forces had journalists’ best interests at heart, they’d agree to help confirm or deny the contents of the more salacious emails. But they don’t, so they won’t. Until they do, we should consider their warnings about WikiLeaks forgeries to be mostly about throwing reporters off the trail, not preventing the spread of disinformation.

In some corners, the WikiLeaks documents are considered radioactive because they were, purportedly at least, hacked and not merely leaked. This is a difference without a distinction. In both cases, information has been improperly obtained and improperly shared, with laws broken in the process. In most cases, both are criminal acts. Should it matter to journalists that the Podesta emails might have been liberated by, to put it in Fallon’s words, an “illegal hack by a foreign govt.”? Absolutely! That’s a great story! I’d run that story! But angels almost never leak. If reporters limited their appetites to only heavenly leaks, they’d starve. I say that if the material is strong enough, you hold your noise and publish the best and most accurate stories you can from them.

One indicator that the hacked Podesta emails are legit is that they are so boring. One of my Politico colleagues who has plowed through hundreds of them looking for news calls them “The Big Yawn.” The characters in the Podesta emails come off less like Machiavellian schemers than harried politicians responding on the fly with a mixture of bravado, strategy and improvisation to unfolding events. They’re not in control. Like most everybody else in Washington, they’re reacting.

This is not to say that the emails contain no news value. From them we gain a sense of how the Clinton team works together, what Clinton said in her Wall Street speeches and more on the political sabotaging of Bernie Sanders. We learn that Clinton aide Doug Band was feuding with Chelsea Clinton at the Clinton Foundation. That Hillary Clinton has made herself expert in taking both sides of an issue. That Donna Brazile leaked CNN Town Hall questions to the Clinton campaign. That Podesta was courting Martin O’Malley in February, hoping to win his endorsement for Clinton, of petty squabbles involving Lanny Davis and Robby Mook, and that Podesta was phone buddies with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Future emails leaks may contain stronger meat. For my sake, and for the journalists assigned to wallow in them, I hope so. But so far, there is less journalistic significance in the confidential emails Team Clinton is zipping around than in the wild, prolific and quite public tweets that Donald Trump issues nearly every hour.

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If you don’t want to see sausage made, don’t eat sausage. Or something like that. Send mangled clichés via email to [email protected]. My email alerts are forgeries, my Twitter feed is controlled by a foreign power, and my RSS feed has a head of prematurely silver hair.