Donald Trump campaign blames Iran for hacking

The Trump campaign says some of its internal communications had been hacked, suggesting Iran was responsible and seeking to undermine the former president’s prospects in the election.

Republican presidential nominee, former US President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse at Montana State University. Picture: AFP

The Trump campaign said Saturday that some of its internal communications had been hacked and suggested Iran was responsible and seeking to undermine the former president’s prospects in the November election.

Documents belonging to the campaign “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,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement.

He cited recent statements from the US government that accused Iran of seeking ways to prevent Trump from returning to the White House, including an alleged assassination plot. Cyber-threat research published Friday by Microsoft has also detailed Iran’s election hacking operations.

It wasn’t clear how far-reaching the purported theft of private campaign material was or how potentially damaging any of it could be to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. But the spectre of a campaign hack by Iran could jolt the already tumultuous presidential campaign. Its public disclosure comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East and fears that Tehran and its allies are seeking retribution against Israel for a pair of recent killings against two militant leaders in the region.

The Trump campaign didn’t provide direct evidence that Iran was responsible for the hack. Instead, it tied the hack to the new Microsoft cyberthreat research that laid out a range of election interference operations it said were linked to several different Iranian cyber groups, noting an observed increase in Iranian activity in recent months.

Among its findings, Microsoft said that a group tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully compromised an email account belonging to a former adviser to a U.S. presidential campaign.

Microsoft didn’t identify the former adviser or the presidential campaign, but said Iran used the compromised email account in June to send messages to a senior official still working for the campaign. Those sent messages contained a malicious link that could have been used to compromise the current campaign official, Microsoft said. Separately, the technology giant said another Iranian cyber group compromised an account owned by a “county-level government employee” in an unidentified swing state.

Microsoft declined to comment about the apparent Trump campaign hack. A spokesman for the Iranian mission to the United Nations didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. spy agencies said last month that Iran was attempting to harm Trump’s presidential campaign in covert online influence operations, fearing a return to power by the Republican nominee would inflame relations with Washington. The assessment, shared during a media briefing with reporters, updated an earlier view among intelligence agencies that Iran was chiefly seeking to promote chaos around November’s election and hadn’t demonstrated a clear preference.

The Trump campaign’s apparent confirmation of a campaign breach followed a report published Saturday afternoon by Politico that said the news outlet had been “receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation” since late July. The AOL email account went by “Robert” and declined to explain how it had acquired the campaign documents, according to Politico, which said it had confirmed the documents were authentic. Among the files were a research dossier on Trump running mate JD Vance that were based largely on public information and highlighted potential vulnerabilities, Politico reported.

Presidential campaigns are high-value hacking targets for foreign governments eager to glean any insights into a potential future administration. In 2008, Chinese hackers breached both the Obama and McCain campaigns and stole internal documents, U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged.

Sometimes the hacks of campaigns aren’t limited to intelligence collection. In 2016, hackers tied to the Kremlin hacked Democratic emails and later gave them to the antisecrecy organisation WikiLeaks, which multiple U.S. government investigations concluded was part of a broad, multipronged cyber operation ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin that was intended to harm Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and boost Trump’s electoral chances.

“Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said Saturday. In 2016, Trump publicly urged Russia to find Clinton’s emails and repeatedly referenced hacked Democratic emails that were published by WikiLeaks.

“Someone is running the 2016 playbook,” Chris Krebs, a cybersecurity expert who ran the cyber wing of the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, said on X about the reported campaign hack.

Krebs, who was fired by Trump after publicly disagreeing with the former president’s unsubstantiated assertions of election tampering in the 2020 contest, said voters should expect more efforts to “stoke fires in society and go after election systems.” But he cautioned against paranoia or distrust in the election process, explaining that more than 95% of votes are cast with a paper backup and that the U.S. has strong auditing procedures.

“But the chaos is the point,” Krebs said.

On Tuesday, law-enforcement officials said a Pakistani man with ties to Iran was charged with plotting assassinations of Trump and other politicians. Asif Merchant travelled to New York in April to recruit hit men to carry out his scheme but was foiled when one of the people approached reported him to the FBI and became an informant, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said.

The indictment didn’t mention Trump by name, but it was unsealed weeks after U.S. officials said a threat against Trump from Iran prompted them to bolster security for the former president.

Security had been stepped up at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month following revelations of a possible Iranian plot. A 20-year-old gunman tried to kill Trump at that rally, but officials said the attack was unrelated to the threat from Iran.

The Wall Street Journal