CNN  —  In the hours after President Joe Biden’s historic decision to step aside from the 2024 presidential race last month, journalists across three major US newsrooms began receiving emails from an anonymous person claiming to have tantalizing new information about the election. The individual, who identified themself only as “Robert,” sent a trove of private documents from inside Donald Trump’s campaign operation to journalists at Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Beginning on July 22, Politico reported, it began receiving emails from an AOL email address that contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a research dossier the campaign had put together on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The dossier included what the Trump campaign identified as Vance’s potential vulnerabilities. Politico was also sent portions of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who had been among the contenders to join Trump on the GOP ticket. Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump gestures after speaking at a campaign rally in Bozeman, Mont., Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) Rick Bowmer/AP Related article Suspected Iranian hackers breached Roger Stone’s personal email as part of effort to target Trump campaign, sources say The Times and The Post later reported that they, too, had been sent a similar cache, including a 271-page document on Vance dated Feb. 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” that the outlets said was based on publicly available information. But despite receiving the sensitive campaign files, the three outlets opted to not publish reporting on the trove they’d been handed, even as the the person suggested they still had a variety of additional documents “from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.” “Politico editors made a judgment, based on the circumstances as our journalists understood them at the time, that the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents,” Politico spokesperson Brad Dayspring told CNN in a statement. Instead, the first public sign of any release of private information came Saturday, when the Trump campaign went public with its announcement that it had been hacked, pointing the finger at Iranian operatives. “These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said. On Monday, CNN reported that the FBI and other investigators were probing the apparent security breach, which sources said involved compromising the personal email account of longtime Republican and Trump operative Roger Stone. Iran has denied the allegations, and the US government has declined to officially blame Tehran for the hack, a source told CNN, adding that the hackers’ techniques closely resembled those used by Iranian operatives. But while the hacking incident, which occurred in June, set off a scramble in the Trump campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, the three news organizations that had received the files held off on publishing information from the trove. The decision marked a reversal from the 2016 election, when news outlets breathlessly reported embarrassing and damaging stories about Hillary Clinton’s campaign after Russian hackers stole a cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee, publishing them on the website Wikileaks. The decision underscored the challenge news organizations face when presented with information potentially obtained by nefarious means and the shifting publishing standards of newsrooms in the wake of the 2016 election, during which Russian disinformation efforts we seen as playing a key role in Trump’s victory. In the run up to the 2020 election, newsrooms were presented with another conundrum when the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were shopped to news organizations, with most refusing to publish its contents over fears of a possible Russian disinformation effort.