An American journalist who runs an independent newsletter published a document Thursday that appears to have been stolen from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — the first public posting of a file that is believed to be part of a dossier that federal officials say is part of an Iranian effort to manipulate the U.S. election.

The PDF document is a 271-page opposition research file on former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio.

For more than two months, hackers who the U.S. says are tied to Iran have tried to persuade the American media to cover files they stole. No outlets took the bait.

But on Thursday, reporter Ken Klippenstein, who self-publishes on Substack after he left The Intercept this year, published one of the files.

“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 combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know,” he wrote.

Publication of the document reflects how a shifting media ecosystem featuring more high-profile independent journalists on platforms like Substack can influence the ability of state-sponsored hackers to carry out election influence operations.

In an interview, Klippenstein said: “It’s been a vibes election. They are so vague on policy. There’s so few specifics, and something like this can give you some sense of what the campaign thinks.”

At least three major news outlets and two independent journalists previously received a document described as a JD Vance dossier but did not publish it, citing what they have described as a lack of newsworthy information in it.

The dissemination of the Vance file appears to be a hack-and-leak operation akin to how Russian intelligence leaked files from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Those emails got significant media attention at the time, a decision that prompted much media criticism.

Politico, which says it began receiving unpublished Trump documents on July 22, was the first news outlet to report that it had received them. The Trump campaign acknowledged last month that it had been hacked and accused Iran, but it has not shared details, and it did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Research published by Google and Microsoft indicates the hack occurred in June.

Three U.S. agencies have publicly attributed the hack and the subsequent distribution of the files to Iran.

Iranian officials have denied involvement with the hack. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s vice president for strategic affairs, told NBC News on Tuesday that the country has “no interest in changing the results or affecting the results of this election” and that “the government and official agencies of Iran have not hacked anybody. People working for us haven’t, either.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has repeatedly said since July that Iran seeks to damage Trump’s candidacy. As president, Trump authorized the assassination of military leader Qassem Soleimani. Intelligence officials have also briefed Trump on what they say are ongoing Iranian attempts to assassinate him. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Reporters who have received the documents describe the same pattern: An AOL account emails them files, signed by a person using the name “Robert,” who is reluctant to speak to their identity or reasons for wanting the documents to receive coverage.

NBC News was not part of the Robert persona’s direct outreach, but it has viewed its correspondence with a reporter at another publication.

One of the emails from the Robert persona previously viewed by NBC News included three large PDF files, each corresponding to Trump’s three reported finalists for vice president. The Vance file appears to be the one Klippenstein hosts on his site.

X, formerly known as Twitter, appears to have taken the strongest initial stance against Klippenstein following his Substack post, blocking accounts that share links to his post and suspending his account. Elon Musk, who owns the site, was a staunch critic of how Twitter’s previous leadership limited access to an “October surprise” story in the New York Post about scandalous material found on a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Former intelligence officials at the time cautioned that the laptop was consistent with the work of Russian intelligence, though no direct connection has been publicly substantiated.

An X spokesperson told NBC News that Klippenstein “was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information” pertaining to Vance.

Klippenstein wrote an additional post on Substack on Thursday defending his decision to post the file while acknowledging that it did appear to violate X’s rules.

“Did I make a mistake in not redacting the ‘private’ information on J.D. Vance? If I wanted a Twitter account, apparently so. But on principle? I stand by it absolutely,” he said.

Representatives for Substack did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kevin Collier

Kevin Collier is a reporter covering cybersecurity, privacy and technology policy for NBC News.

It was a mistake to visit Los Alamos in the middle of a presidential campaign that Donald Trump might win. I get that now, after wandering around the New Mexico town that is synonymous with clichés like “cautionary tale” and “Pandora’s box” and “be careful what you wish for.”

The shadow over the Manhattan Project — the undeniable feat of scientific brainpower that gave us the nuclear bomb — is apparent nine miles from this haunting town, in a roadside protest sign that quotes Pope Francis speaking five years ago in Hiroshima: “The possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral.” It is apparent in a video at the local history museum, as scientists reflect on their work with ambivalence and pride — regretful that Japanese leaders were not offered the chance to see a demonstration of a nuclear bomb and perhaps surrender before two cities were destroyed; thankful that after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death, President Truman followed through with the plan to use the bombs that ended World War II.

Truman could have stopped it. He didn’t, but right afterward he ordered that presidential permission was required for such action, and his administration made it official policy in a 1948 memo: U.S. presidents had the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. If a president gives the word, the military must obey. That’s even if America has not been attacked, and even if a president is demonstrably unfit. A president, for instance, such as Trump, whose reckless, divisive term ended with his loyalists — at his urging — staging a deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election.

“President Trump’s last terrifying weeks in office have been a wake-up call. Never again should we allow a dangerous president to have unilateral control over nuclear launch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry wrote in USA Today shortly after the mob rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump wasn’t the first president to raise such concerns, they said, nor would he be the last. They called for ending “this godlike power” for all presidents to come.

But presidents still have it. And Trump is now trying for a second term in a race most analysts consider too close to call — a prospect so disturbing that this week more than 700 current and former national security officials signed a bipartisan letter endorsing his opponent, asking Americans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because Trump is “impulsive and ill-informed.” Just days earlier, more than 100 former Republican national security officials warned in a similar Harris endorsement that Trump’s erratic nature “threatens reckless and dangerous global consequences.”

A volatile temperament is one of the many reasons Trump is a national security menace. As Hillary Clinton memorably noted in her 2016 convention speech accepting the Democratic nomination: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

Trump has already made America less safe. In his one term, he destroyed three nuclear agreements by unilaterally pulling the U.S. out, and he refused to extend the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (a position President Biden reversed). Historian Lawrence S. Wittner, author of “Confronting the Bomb,” warned in July that “Trump was far less interested in arms control and disarmament than in entering ― and winning ― a new nuclear arms race.”

This was full circle from President Carter’s single term 40 years earlier, in the midst of the Cold War. He signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union in 1979 and told Congress that “every president” since the end of World War II “has sought to reduce the most dangerous elements of the Soviet-American competition.” Three of those presidents were Democrats and three were Republicans. This was a bipartisan project for decades, both before and after Carter.

But President George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, and 15 years later came Trump. We need to get back to reducing the risk of nuclear war. However, says author Steve Olson, who wrote about the Manhattan Project’s plutonium reactors in “The Apocalypse Factory,” “that is not going to happen with any Republican administration if Republicans continue on their current path.”

How about sending them on a field trip to Los Alamos? The Bradbury Science Museum there features a short film called “Racing Toward Dawn,” an allusion to the dawn of the atomic era. It recounts the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, respectively.

“The Manhattan Project had unleashed a force never before seen,” the narrator says. “Each strike claimed tens of thousands of lives and left the cities in ruins. The devastation of these attacks, along with the Soviet entry into the war on Aug. 8, compelled the Japanese to surrender.” The war ended on Aug. 14. More than 50 million people had died because of the conflict. And the lab at Los Alamos moved on to improving atomic weapons, described in the film as “refining the nation’s nuclear deterrent.”

What happened at Los Alamos was both a triumph and a tragedy. What’s inarguable is that “nuclear deterrent” is a nerve-racking concept, especially if voters once again hand the “godlike power” to launch a nuclear strike to Donald Trump.

Jill Lawrence is a writer and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.” @JillDLawrence

The challenge the United States faces in confronting China on the global stage is “almost overwhelming” and exceeds some of the worst historical crises the country has ever encountered, former Trump administration national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said during an appearance Thursday in Washington.

“I’m not sure America has faced a threat like Communist China in our history,” O’Brien said in a conversation hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

“Maybe the Revolutionary War, when we fought the British who were the leading superpower in the world at the time?” he said. “I think that the threat that we face from China is far more serious than we faced against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.”

O’Brien said he believes China’s ultimate plan is to force the country’s “Marxist-Leninist” ideology on the rest of the world.

“They have an ideology that they believe they can use to organize, to govern the world,” he said. “So it’s a danger to all of us, to our kids and grandkids. It’s a danger to everyone around the world, because they see themselves as being able to govern the entire world based on their ideology.”

Future US-China policy

O’Brien’s remarks come at a time when experts are trying to parse what U.S. relations with China will look like in the next presidential administration, whether it is a second Trump term or a first term for current vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

In a report issued Thursday morning, Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggested that future U.S. policies toward China will likely trend in the same direction regardless of who wins the election.

“U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan is likely to maintain its broad contours under a Harris or a Trump administration,” Lin wrote.”The Harris and Trump teams share the view that China challenges and threatens the established international order, peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States. ‘Managing’ China or ‘winning’ against China will be a top priority for the next U.S. administration, as intense U.S. competition with China will likely continue.”

However, Lin pointed out several areas where a Trump administration might differ, including by implementing harsher trade policies and imposing more far-reaching crackdowns on Chinese influence operations in the U.S.

What is unclear, she said, is the degree to which Trump would continue to nurture some of the Indo-Pacific region alliances that the Biden administration has been working to strengthen, and whether he would continue U.S. support of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its own.

In his remarks Thursday, O’Brien touched on all of those subjects.

Not speaking for Trump

O’Brien served in the administration of former President Donald Trump first as a special envoy for hostage affairs, and then as national security adviser from September 2019 until January 2021.

During the 90-minute appearance on Thursday, O’Brien made clear he was not speaking for the former president.

“Anyone who says they’re speaking for Donald Trump, whether it’s on personnel or policy, is not speaking for Donald Trump,” he said. “Donald Trump is going to speak for Donald Trump.”

However, his observations about China might provide some insight into the mindset of people likely to populate a second Trump administration, should the former president win reelection in November.

O’Brien said that a future Trump administration would be focused on signaling American economic, diplomatic and military strength to China and combating what the former president sees as China’s unfair practices. Those include theft of intellectual property, flooding Western economies with Chinese goods subsidized by Beijing, and keeping the value of the Chinese yuan artificially low.

“President Trump has said what he’s going to do,” O’Brien said. “He’s going to raise tariffs on the Chinese and send a strong message that we’re not going to tolerate intellectual property theft any longer. We’re not going to tolerate the dumping, we’re not going to tolerate the currency manipulation, and we’re going to have an incentive for American manufacturers to come home.”

China’s ‘relentless’ aggression

O’Brien said that when he was in the White House, he saw that China is tireless in its effort to expand Beijing’s influence, whether by using its military to harass its neighbors in the Indo-Pacific region or by engaging in espionage and influence operations.

“Every time we fought them somewhere — espionage at a Confucianist institute that we got closed, if it was a cyber intrusion, if it was some sort of military action against our allies — every time you shut that down, they popped up somewhere else. I mean, they operate across every spectrum. They’re in space, they’re in the air, they’re in the sea, they’re on the land,” he said.

“They just operate in every sector. They’re attempting to wear down the free world, and they’ve done a pretty good job of it.”

AK-47s in Taiwan

Earlier this year, O’Brien sparked an angry reaction from Beijing when he suggested arming every military-aged male in Taiwan with an AK-47 in order to resist a potential Chinese invasion.

On Thursday, he repeated the suggestion, saying, “Every military-aged male should have an AK-47 and two [ammunition magazines]. Make sure they’re interoperable so you can get your follow-on ammunition from the patrols that you ambush and kill when they invade your country.”

The object, he said, is to “strike a little fear into the hearts” of China’s leadership. “You may invade, but every time you walk down the street, every window’s going to have an AK-47 pointed out.”

He went on to say that under the first Trump administration, “China did not harass Taiwan the way that they’re doing it now.” He said that under a Harris administration, “You’re not going to see the kind of strength that you get from President Trump that will keep Taiwan free.”

US alliances

O’Brien said that in his view, it is essential that the U.S. continues to cultivate close alliances in the Indo-Pacific region. The “good news,” he said, is that those alliances are strong.

“You take the combination of the ‘Quad’ with India, Australia, the U.S. and Japan; you take the Japan-South Korea-America trilateral alliance; you take a look at AUKUS, with the U.K. and Australia and the U.S.; and the treaty alliances with Thailand and with the Philippines,” he said.

“Those alliances scare the Chinese, because they see us operating together,” he said. “And together, we can contain, and we can push back against the Chinese. When they drive wedges between us, that’s where they get the big advantage.”

Return to nuclear competition

O’Brien said it is becoming increasingly important for the U.S. to revitalize its nuclear “triad” — the combined capacity to launch missiles from air, land and sea — because in addition to the threat the country faces from Russia, China’s nuclear capacity is surging.

“If we don’t take steps soon to both modernize our triad and expand our capabilities, we’re going to be in real trouble, because you have the Russians with 1,250 or 1,500 strategic weapons. They’ve got about another 2,500 tactical nukes that they can deploy. And the Chinese are going to have 1,500 strategic weapons pointed at us, and who knows how many tactical weapons.

“That’s going to be a 2- or 3-to-1 overmatch on us, and that’s not a recipe for deterrence,” he said.

“We’ve got to get back in the nuclear game,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, because we thought that was a day that was gone — that we were past that. But our adversaries have decided that they’re going to still play it. It would be nice to say, ‘Yeah, we don’t want to play that game.’ But we have to have an effective deterrence.”