Iranian hackers stole sensitive information from the Trump campaign and shopped it around to the Biden campaign and several media outlets. According to federal investigators, the hackers sent unsolicited emails to Biden’s campaign staff over the summer, but no one replied.
The FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a joint statement on Wednesday explaining the plot. It said the hackers sent the emails in late June and early July “that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails. There is currently no information indicating those recipients replied.”
Trump, of course, was pissed.
“WOW, JUST OUT! THE FBI CAUGHT IRAN SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GIVING ALL OF THE INFORMATION TO THE KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN. THEREFORE SHE AND HER CAMPAIGN WERE ILLEGALLY SPYING ON ME. TO BE KNOWN AS THE IRAN, IRAN, IRAN CASE! WILL KAMALA RESIGN IN DISGRACE FROM POLITICS? WILL THE COMMUNIST LEFT PICK A NEW CANDIDATE TO REPLACE HER?” he said on Truth Social Wednesday.
Harris was not running for president when Iran sent the emails to the Biden campaign.
Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, said that the Iranians want Harris to win because they know Trump will restore sanctions against them.
“Kamala and Biden must come clean on whether they used the hacked material given to them by the Iranians to hurt President Trump,” Leavitt said in a post on X. “What did they know and when did they know it?”
Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finklestein has said that no one at the campaign was aware they’d been sent hacked materials.
“A few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” she said in a statement to the press. “We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.”
Last month, both Google and Microsoft released reports about a wave of phishing attacks they’d seen targeting both the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns. Both teams of cyber security analysts put the blame on Iranian groups connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Microsoft detailed the attack, saying that the hackers had sent a spear phishing attack to campaign officials via the “compromised email account of a former senior advisor. The email contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the website of the provided link. Within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate.”
According to CNN, the former senior advisor was Roger Stone. At the time, Politico reported that it had received anonymous emails for an AOL account shopping around internal communications from the Trump campaign. On offer was a 271-page research dossier on JD Vance. When Politico asked the AOL account how it came by the documents, it gave a cryptic answer.
“I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them,” it said.
The FBI and other federal agencies said that it’s continuing to investigate the hackers.
“Foreign actors are increasing their election influence activities as we approach November. In particular, Russia, Iran, and China are trying by some measure to exacerbate divisions in U.S. society for their own benefit, and see election periods as moments of vulnerability,” the agencies said in the joint statement.
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