Frustration and Finger-Pointing as GOP Pulls Out of Deal Talks on Hacked Materials

House Republicans withdrew from negotiations with Democrats over a pact that would have effectively barred both parties from using hacked or stolen material on the campaign trail in the fall of 2018. Leaders of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, and their counterparts at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had labored for much of the summer over rules that would have governed the way the congressionally run committees and their candidates treated material like the thousands of pages of damaging Democratic documents stolen and leaked by Russian hackers in 2016. Instead, the two parties were left exchanging shots just two months before Election Day; Republicans claimed that Democrats had negotiated in bad faith and violated an agreement not to speak about the negotiations publicly, and Democrats said that Republicans were merely searching for an excuse to pull out. It only fed the complaint by Democrats that Republican lawmakers have resisted bridging partisan divisions in the two years since Russia began its brazen attack on the American political system.