CLEVELAND — A super PAC backing Hillary Clinton on Thursday night mysteriously obtained and leaked drafts of Donald Trump’s nomination speech — and those of several other convention speakers — hours before the night’s proceedings were set to kick off, sending the Trump campaign scrambling on the final night of what has been a chaotic convention.

The super PAC, Correct the Record, obtained a document containing the drafts from “a Republican source who had access to it and they sent it to us,” said Correct the Record founder David Brock, a close Clinton ally.


Correct the Record sent the text of Trump’s draft speech to its press list a little after 6 p.m., gloating “as if this convention hasn't been enough of a failure for Trump, somehow he let US get a hold of his full remarks before the speech.”

About 15 minutes later, the Trump campaign sent out a press release containing excerpts of Trump’s speech that closely matched the draft released by Correct the Record.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about how the draft might have leaked.

But a senior Republican operative working behind the scenes at the convention called the leak " a disaster” that proved that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his team “just aren't ready for prime time.”

The drafts obtained by Correct the Record were in a single document formatted for a teleprompter, and were time-stamped from the early afternoon.

The document began circulating in political and journalism circles and POLITICO obtained a draft of it soon after 5 p.m. but refrained from publishing it until verifying its authenticity.

Brock said Correct the Record staff “took a little time to verify that it was real. We had a way of making sure that it wasn’t some James O’Keefe operation.”

He wouldn’t identify his group’s source, but described the person it was from as a “legitimate Republican” who was “in the right place at the right time. In the course of the work we do, we develop relationships with Republicans and this one paid off.”

While Brock founded other non-profit groups that work to place moles in conservative organizations, he said the source of the Trump leak was “not someone we planted to go in there and infiltrate.”

But he said the groups in his non-profit network would continue working to sleuth out confidential information from the Trump campaign.

“We’re going to maintain the sources we have and see what we can get. If I were them, I would be a little freaked,” he said, saying the speech leak shows the campaign is “loose and disorganized.”

