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Donald Trump’s campaign said on Saturday that some of its internal communications had been hacked after Politico began receiving emails from an anonymous account that included internal campaign documents.
Citing a Microsoft report published on Friday that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign”, the campaign blamed “foreign sources hostile to the United States.”
In the report, Microsoft did not identify the campaign targeted by the email and declined to comment when approached by Politico.
There has been no independent verification of the identity of the hacker by the outlet, nor of their motivation.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung would not say if they were privy to any further information about the culprit being Iran.
“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,” Cheung said.
“On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the US presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential nominee.”
Cheung declined to state if the campaign had been in contact with Microsoft or law enforcement about the hack.
Late on Saturday, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “We were just informed by Microsoft Corporation that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government - Never a nice thing to do! They were only able to get publicly available information but, nevertheless, they shouldn’t be doing anything of this nature.”
He continued: “Iran and others will stop at nothing, because our Government is Weak and Ineffective, but it won’t be for long. What Iran doesn’t realize is that I will make the World a better and safer place, and that’s good for them, also!”
Politico began receiving emails from an anonymous AOL account from a person identifying themself as “Robert” on July 22.
The emails included what appeared to be internal communications from a senior campaign official as well as a research dossier prepared for the campaign on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, dated from February 23.
Two people familiar with the documents verified their authenticity after being granted anonymity and one described the 271-page dossier of Vance’s publicly available record and statements as a preliminary version of his vetting file. It included “potential vulnerabilities” such as his past criticism of Trump.
Another document was a partial research dossier on Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose name was also floated as a possible running mate for Trump.
“Robert” told Politico that they had a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.”
When asked how they were able to obtain the documents, “Robert” responded: “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.”
If it is a genuine hack of the Trump campaign rather than the work of a disgruntled staffer it represents a serious security breach.
The report from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center claims that groups connected to the Iranian government are ramping up their efforts to interfere with voters’ decision-making in the 2024 presidential election by targeting far-left and far-right individuals with fake news websites.
A separate effort, connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, sent a presidential campaign official a phishing email from the compromised email of a former senior adviser. That group also attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate.
Microsoft says these hacking attempts may be part of a larger goal to gain intelligence on political campaigns to influence future elections.
As November draws closer, groups such as the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center are monitoring influence operations from specific groups around the world and are keeping a closer eye on the tactics they implore to attempt to influence the outcome of the election.
“Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations have been a consistent feature of at least the last three US election cycles,” the report says.
