House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan has given the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, a hard deadline to answer a series of questions related to the hacking of the Trump campaign by Iranian operatives and their attempt to send the information to Democratic officials and news outlets.
Jordan said in a letter that despite the FBI's own announcements and subsequent media reports, there are still "few" details about the hacking. That's why he gave Wray until September 26 to answer a series of questions, including the nature of the material that Iran got from the Trump campaign, who were the Democratic officials who the information was sent to and the concrete actions the Democratic campaign took after that.
According to the FBI and different reports, there is no evidence that the recipients responded to the messages, which were initially sent in June and July, when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic presidential candidate.
The government detailed that the emails had an "excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump's campaign as text in the emails." "We're not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign," Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein told CBS News.
He added that "a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt" and that the campaign has "cooperated with the appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operations.
Officials added in late July that Tehran was actively seeking to weaken Trump's candidacy, while Moscow intended to bolster it. According to Jordan's letter to the FBI, the former sent to the media outlets "research compiled by the Trump campaign on (Senator) JD Vance...and internal polls from the campaign."
Politico, one of the outlets that received the information, said it began receiving emails from an anonymous AOL account identified as "Robert." None of the outlets published the information received.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that the revelations are "further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror."
Meta Platforms has also said that Iranian hackers posing as tech support agents attempted to infiltrate the WhatsApp accounts of staffers in both the Trump and Biden administrations.
The social media giant identified the hackers, who posed as representatives from companies like AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, after receiving reports from users who encountered suspicious messages on WhatsApp.
Meta's investigation traced the activity back to APT42, an Iranian-linked hacking group notorious for its persistent phishing campaigns targeting political, diplomatic, and public figures. This network is the same one that has been blamed for hacking former President Donald Trump's campaign.
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