Donald Trump in an interview with Newsmax/ screenshot
The FBI said it can now confirm that the government of Iran did in fact behind a recent hack of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Iran also hacked into the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns as well.
America’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a joint statement on the matter.
“Iran seeks to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions,” said the statement. “Iran has furthermore demonstrated a longstanding interest in exploiting societal tensions through various means, including through the use of cyber operations to attempt to gain access to sensitive information related to U.S. elections.”
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The agencies said they observed “increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns.”
They added that they have been tracking this activity, has been in contact with the victims, and will continue to investigate and gather information in order to pursue and disrupt the threat actors responsible.
“We will not tolerate foreign efforts to influence or interfere with our elections, including the targeting of American political campaigns,” they declared.
This news comes just a 12 days after Microsoft issued a report of its own saying it gained intelligence about activity the company was tracking that “increasingly points to Iran’s intent to influence this year’s US presidential election.”
Microsoft reported then that in recent weeks, “groups connected with the Iranian government have upped two kinds of activity. First, they’ve laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and begun to activate these campaigns in an apparent effort to stir up controversy or sway voters – especially in swing states. Second, they’ve launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns and help enable them to influence the elections in the future.”
At the time of the hack Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung released a statement saying the 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.”
Iran’s U.N. mission to the U.S. denied the allegations, releasing a statement that said, “Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing. As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election. Should the U.S. government genuinely believe in the validity of its claims, it should furnish us with the pertinent evidence—if any—to which we will respond accordingly.”
