Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign said its communications had been hacked and suggested Iran was to blame, casting it as an effort to interfere in November’s presidential election where he faces Vice President Kamala Harris.
The hack was first reported by Politico, which said it had begun receiving emails in July containing internal Trump campaign documents from an anonymous account. Those documents, released over the course of a few weeks, included a dossier on Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s vice presidential pick, according to the report.
“These documents 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,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
The campaign cited a report this week from Microsoft Corp. that detailed increasing efforts by Iran to target the U.S. election, including fake news sites to influence voter opinion and hacks to obtain intelligence on political campaigns.
Among the actions in the report was a so-called spear phishing email in June to “a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor.” Microsoft, which didn’t identify the campaign, said that attempt was from an Iranian group connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Microsoft said it had “notified those targeted.”
Cheung said the hack “coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a Vice Presidential nominee.” Trump announced his vice presidential selection in mid-July. Cheung also cited recent reports of an Iranian plot to assassinate the former president separate from the attempt on his life by a gunman at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13.
That Iranian threat appeared to be linked to a broader pattern of threats against former Trump administration officials stemming from the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, in January 2020 — an attack ordered by then-President Trump.
“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 said in his statement.
___
©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
