What the alleged Trump campaign dossier on JD Vance may actually be telling us

27 September 2024

The alleged Trump campaign dossier on JD Vance, reportedly obtained by Iranian hackers and sent to several media outlets that refused to publish it, has now been published.

Assuming the document is genuine, it sheds light on JD Vance, Donald Trump, and their campaign, offering important insights—not so much about Vance’s positions or liabilities, but about the thoroughness of the vetting process for a vice-presidential candidate running alongside a 78-year-old Donald Trump, whose health and fitness for office have long been strongly questioned.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein, a reporter formerly at The Intercept, obtained a copy of the dossier and decided to publish it in its entirety on Thursday. He says he decided to publish the dossier because “it’s of keen public interest in an election season.”

“If the document had been hacked by some ‘anonymous’ like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combatting foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know,” Klippenstein argued.

After he published it, Klippenstein’s Twitter account was “temporarily suspended,” according to The Verge, though the reason for the suspension is not entirely clear. He remains suspended, as of publication time. Around the same time on Thursday, coincidentally, a federal grand jury indicted several Iranian nationals for hacking-related charges involving Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to Politico.

Several journalists have explained why they would not publish the dossier, and others, like the Columbia Journalism Review, have examined the issue. Judd Legum, founder of Popular information, wrote on Tuesday that “Popular Information will not publish or excerpt the Trump campaign materials…The materials are stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.”

He adds that the documents “may be embarrassing or problematic to members of the Trump campaign. Some of the documents have news value. But the stolen materials do not provide the public with any fundamental new insight about Trump or his campaign. So, on balance, the relevant factors argue against publication.”

Others disagree.

Boing Boing, founded in 1988, reported: “You can finally read the Trump campaign’s dossier on J.D. Vance. Boy does J.D. Vance hate Trump.”

Which begs the question, why did Donald Trump decide to invite him to be his vice-presidential running mate, and why did Senator Vance accept?

“The dossier serves as a massive compilation of all the times Vance has shat on Trump—a truly staggering collection lies therein and it would take a savant to figure out if any of the remarks are previously unreported. He calls Trump a liar, a fraud, a failure, too ambivalent about Nazis. He does not believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. He believes in evolution,” Boing Boing reported. It adds, Vance holds “a near-total contempt for Trump himself that extended to countless insults and accusations of rape, racism and all the rest of it.”

Vanity Fair on Tuesday reported, “The work itself is incomplete; the 271-page rundown on Vance is inexplicably missing Vance’s now infamous ‘childless cat ladies’ comment from a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox, said one reporter. The file does include Vance’s comments from 2016 in which he called Trump ‘an idiot’ and privately compared him to Hitler.”

The Bulwark on Friday agreed: “what stands out is not what’s in the 271-page file, but what was left out.”

Assuming the document is real and the final version, the Trump campaign’s vetting appears to have been inaccurate, insufficient, and sloppy. It was either unable or uninterested in executing one of the most basic requirements of a campaign: vetting.

In addition to his “childless cat ladies” claim, Vance has been chastised for suggesting America should “punish” people for not having children. His belief that children should be given the “right” to vote – but those rights should go to their parents, so parents have more votes than non-parents, and that politicians should have to have children, have been denounced. Vance’s own Congressman, a Democrat, has said the Senator’s “views and beliefs” do not represent the people or values of his district, and called the campaign he’s running “one of the cruelest, most chaotic, and downright weirdest.”

Overall, Vance has become “one of the least popular vice-presidential picks this century,” according to ABC News, which reports he is “more unpopular than Sarah Palin.”

In the section titled “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES” is this summary:

“JD Vance’s political journey has been marked by notable shifts and contradictions, making his stance on Donald Trump a subject of intrigue and critique.
“During the 2016 election, Vance openly opposed Trump, announcing his intention to vote third party and expressing doubt about Trump’s effectiveness. His critical views extended to likening Trump to heroin and dismissing the ‘MAGA’ movement as a ‘quick high.’ Described as a ‘never Trumper,’ Vance declared his opposition on public platforms, asserting that Trump was not the ideal candidate for white-working class voters. In 2016, Vance aligned himself with Trump’s accusers, tweeting about allegations of sexual assault and implying a skepticism of Trump’s honesty. He connected racism and xenophobia to Trump’s base of support, emphasizing racial resentment among Trump’s followers.
“Vance’s association with the American Enterprise Institute, an organization critical of Trump, adds another layer to his political affiliations. As a former writer for FrumForum, run by known ‘never Trumper’ David Frum, Vance’s connections to Trump-antagonists become more apparent. Despite initial moderate Republican and Democratic tendencies, Vance shifted his stance, actively supporting Trump’s policies and encouraging votes for him in the 2020 election.
“Vance’s political evolution raises questions about the consistency of his views and the influences shaping his positions.”

Whether the dossier reflects the full scope of Vance’s vetting by the Trump campaign is unknown. Some political analysts, like Dana Houle, suggest that the dossier may have been repurposed for the 2024 campaign.

The dossier is “old,” writes Houle a former Democratic congressional campaign manager and chief of staff, in a lengthy social media thread.

“It wasn’t prepared fresh for Trump in 2024. There are several cites that say the source website was accessed in April or May 2021. Other than a few pages it doesn’t include anything from his Senate campaign. I think this was prepared for some entity making decisions about the 2022 Senate race. Maybe it was originally done by Vance’s campaign or the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or some superPAC deciding on endorsements and where to commit resources for independent expenditure campaigns in fall 2022. It’s really heavy on loyalty to Trump, so maybe it was done by &/or for the RNC, or for the Make America Great Again PAC, to inform Trump’s endorsements.”

“My guess–definitely a guess–is this document was prepared before the 2022 election,” Houle continues, “most likely prior to Vance announcing his candidacy. Then, in February, it was pulled off the shelf and hastily updated with a few important policy areas, in particular litmus test issues like whether he’s suitably pro-Russian RE Ukraine, & whether he’s sufficiently anti-abortion to mollify from Christian Right. But, in general, this is lazy cookie-cutter basic research, but lacking any but a small amount of analysis of his Senate record or his campaign.”

“It’s certainly not the kind of research that would be used by a pre-Trump presidential campaign vetting a running mate.”

“Another possibility,” Houle offers. “When Trump started to look at running mates they were probably asked for information about their finances, legal record, etc., and Vance may have just turned over his 2021 self-oppo research, either updated by him or by the Trump people.”

Attorney, author, and writer Craig Calcaterra remarked the dossier serves “as a 271-page reminder of just how thoroughly Vance has traded in his principles for power. Just page after page documenting how utterly phony that guy is.”

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