Iranian hackers sent stolen Trump campaign information to Biden camp

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - WASHINGTON — Iranian hackers sent unsolicited information they stole from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to people who were affiliated with Joe Biden’s campaign over the summer, federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement that in late June and early July, Iranian malicious cyber actors “sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails.”

There is no indication that Biden’s staff ever replied, the statement says.

A spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said that “a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails.”

“We have 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 operation,” said Morgan Finkelstein, national security spokesperson for the Harris campaign.

“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt. We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.”

A campaign official told CNN that “the material was not used.”

The Trump campaign said in a statement that Harris and Biden “must come clean on whether they used the hacked material,” claiming it’s “further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election” to help the Democratic ticket.

During a rally Wednesday night in New York, Trump claimed without evidence that Biden was involved in the hack despite the law enforcement statement.

“Iran hacked into my campaign. I don’t know what the hell they found. I’d like to find out, couldn’t have been too exciting, but they gave it to the Biden campaign. I can’t believe it – oh yes I can,” he said.

Iranian government-linked hackers have also previously unsuccessfully tried to hack the Biden-Harris campaign, according to US officials and private experts, but the activity disclosed Wednesday appears to be another Iranian attempt to disseminate information stolen from the Trump campaign.

Along with Russia, Iran has emerged as one of the most aggressive foreign powers trying to influence the 2024 US presidential election, according to US intelligence officials. And in doing so, Iran is using a hack-and-leak playbook that Russia used to try to sway the 2016 US election.

During the 2016 election, Trump famously called for Russia to “find” tens of thousands of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential candidate. Russian military intelligence hackers did steal emails from Clinton campaign officials and the Democratic National Committee and sent them to WikiLeaks in a bid to undermine Clinton’s candidacy, according to US intelligence and Justice Department reports.

CNN previously reported that Iranian government-backed hackers this summer stole internal Trump campaign documents and shared them with news organizations. The law enforcement statement Wednesday said that the hackers’ efforts to send information to US media outlets have continued.

The hack is one of several efforts by the Iranian government attempting to “stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process,” the statement said.

Beginning on July 22, Politico reported, it had received emails that contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a research dossier the campaign had put together on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.

The New York Times and The Washington Post later reported that they, too, had been sent a similar cache, including a 271-page document on Vance dated February 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” that the outlets said was based on publicly available information.

The Iranian hackers did breach the email account of longtime Trump ally Roger Stone to target campaign staff in June, CNN has reported. US officials believe the hackers work for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Investigators believe the suspected Iranian hackers breached Stone’s account and then used that email account to try to break into the account of a senior Trump campaign official as part of a persistent effort to access campaign networks.

The Iranian government has denied US allegations that it is trying to meddle in the November election.

“Already devoid of any credibility and legitimacy, such allegations are fundamentally unfounded, and wholly inadmissible. The Islamic Republic of Iran does not engage in the internal uproars or electoral controversies of the United States,” the Iranian Permanent Mission to the United Nations said in a statement to CNN.

Russia, meanwhile, has conducted its own covert influence operations aimed at denigrating Harris’ campaign, according to US officials.

Russian operatives have in recent weeks intensified their online attacks on Harris’ campaign by producing and disseminating videos promoting “outlandish conspiracy theories” aimed at stoking US racial and political divisions, Microsoft researchers said this week.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday on foreign meddling in US elections, tech executives from Microsoft, Meta and Google touted their work to shut down fake accounts set up by Russian, Iranian and Chinese operatives on their platforms.

But multiple lawmakers on the committee worried that not enough was being done by the tech platforms on the issue. The panel invited social media platform X to testify, but the company did not send a representative, according to Senate Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner.

An X spokesperson told CNN in an email that its invited witness to the hearing was its former head of global affairs, Nick Pickles, who resigned on September 6.

US tech companies have made “uneven” progress in curbing foreign disinformation on their platforms since the 2016 election, Warner said at the hearing.

“Too many of the companies have dramatically cut back on their own efforts to prohibit false information [from foreign sources],” the Virginia Democrat said.

Microsoft President Brad Smith told the lawmakers that “every day we know that there is a presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.”

“But this has also become an election of Iran versus Trump, and Russia versus Harris,” he added. — CNN