Trump And His Allies Once Cheered Hacked Materials. No Longer, Now That They Say He's A Target

Donald Trump was once a cheerleader of publicizing hacked materials. “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 are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

“I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” he said back then.

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

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

The current hack, so far, is murky.

On Friday, Microsoft issued a report stating that Iranian hackers tried to penetrate the account of an official with one of the presidential campaigns, but did not disclose additional details. On Saturday, the Trump campaign announced it had been hacked, though it also did not identify the individual whose account was breached. It did so after Politico said it had been contacted by an unknown source peddling what was represented to be internal documents from the campaign.

Iran has denied being involved in any hack. The U.S. government has not confirmed that any breach has occurred. On Monday, the FBI said in a statement it