Over the weekend, Politico announced that someone had leaked internal Trump campaign documents to them, including what appears to be the campaign’s internal opposition research about J.D. Vance. Initially, the campaign blamed foreign hackers, possibly Iran–which, of course, led to a lot of jokes along the lines of “Iran, if you’re listening…” Now, it appears the Trump campaign is backing away from the foreign hackers, and think it might be an internal source (not surprising, since groyper-pilled assholes aren’t exactly known for their loyalty).

Regardless of who leaked the information, the question becomes what should Politico do with it? These are not private communications (“But her emails!”), but a synthesis of publicly available information that could be used to harm the candidate. To the extent these weakenesses could be made from publicly available data, I think there’s an obligation to publish them, as long as the ‘weakenesses’ aren’t selective quote mining and so forth. If there’s a speech of him saying really awful stuff, or if they believe certain votes are harmful to his candidacy, then that is important for readers to know. It also would suggest political press reporters suck at their jobs because they should have found it–that’s their job.

If there are private issues (e.g., martial infidelity or FUCKING A COUCH lol), that’s much harder to justify, though something like paying for an abortion, given his stances on abortion and not having children, would obviously be germane.

Anyway, it’s unclear what Politico will do.