Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is warning his Republican colleagues about highlighting the information revealed in the illegally obtained Wikileaks emails.
“I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of Wikileaks,” Rubio said in a statement. “As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process and I will not indulge it.”
He added: “Further, I want to warn my fellow Republicans who may want to capitalize politically on these leaks: Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us.”
Rubio has commented on emails and information released by the FBI that have been damaging to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, but he has avoided discussing WikiLeaks info.
I’ve personally been writing about the WikiLeaks revelations, but I think Rubio has a point, at least as far as officeholders are concerned. If it had been the RNC and Republican staffers email accounts hacked, then they would be the ones saying, “Move along, nothing to see here.”
Journalists will surely keep writing about the leaks, but even we should wonder — what if our accounts were hacked? Would casual things I’ve said in emails sound hackish to the rest of the world?
Take what happened with Glenn Thrush. As the Hill’s Joe Concha pointed out, Thrush could have been simply doing his due diligence in checking a story. There might have been some way of doing so that didn’t make it look like he was sucking up to the Clinton campaign, but there’s no reason to read the worst into it.
And that’s one problem with these emails. Reporters may sometimes act overly friendly to sources in order to get them to talk, even if the piece they’re writing is negative. I know I’ve reached out to the Clinton campaign on numerous occasions for comments and information, and I’ve always tried to be friendly (or so I think).
To someone looking at those emails on WikiLeaks, they might get taken out of context. So Rubio’s warning is smart — and politically smart for him, too — because if the shoe is on the other foot, some of the same people touting the WikiLeaks revelations might find themselves on the wrong end of a scandal.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
