A group of Iranian operatives hacked into GOP candidate Donald Trump's campaign and attempted to give the pilfered confidential information to the Democrat campaign, according to multiple U.S. intelligence agencies.
In what the FBI labeled last month an attempt to influence the 2024 presidential election, the bureau along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said the hackers also tried to send private information from the Trump campaign to the U.S. media, but did not indicate whether any of the information was ever published.
"Iranian malicious cyber actors in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with" what was then the Biden-Harris campaign "that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails," the intel agencies said in a joint statement. “There is currently no information indicating those recipients replied."
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said: “This is 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. Kamala and Biden must come clean on whether they used the hacked material given to them by the Iranians to hurt President Trump. What did they know and when did they know it?"
Park MacDougald noted in a Sept. 19 Substack.com analysis: "Indeed, there is a stark difference in the amount of media attention paid to the 'Russia, Russia, Russia' hoax, on the one hand, and what Trump called in a Thursday Truth Social post the 'Iran, Iran, Iran' scandal. The former is fake and the latter is real, but the first serves the party while the latter embarrasses it. Again, you don’t need to be a genius to figure it out."
Urgent: Support Free Press Foundation
"No doubt Iran is interested in sowing discord, but it is also quite obviously interested in preventing Trump from returning to the White House. The Biden-Harris administration has funneled billions of dollars to the Iranian regime via both official sanctions relief and sanctions nonenforcement, boosted U.S. trade with Iran, and sought to protect Iran and its proxies from Israeli retaliation following the Iran-backed Oct. 7 attack. Trump, on the other hand, nearly bankrupted Iran and assassinated its top warlord in a drone strike. You don’t need to be a genius to understand what’s going on here."
Trump wrote in a Truth Social post:
WOW, JUST OUT! THE FBI CAUGHT IRAN SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GIVING ALL OF THE INFORMATION TO THE KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN. THEREFORE SHE AND HER CAMPAIGN WERE ILLEGALLY SPYING ON ME. TO BE KNOWN AS THE IRAN, IRAN, IRAN CASE! WILL KAMALA RESIGN IN DISGRACE FROM POLITICS? WILL THE COMMUNIST LEFT PICK A NEW CANDIDATE TO REPLACE HER?MacDougald noted: "Indeed, the Biden-Harris administration elevated to the highest levels of foreign policymaking an individual who might well have been an Iranian asset. Robert Malley, the lead negotiator on the Iran deal under Obama, served as the Biden administration’s special envoy to Iran from 2021 until Spring 2023, when he first had his security clearance revoked and then was placed on unpaid leave from the State Department—and under investigation by the FBI—in circumstances that still have not been adequately explained."
Three Iran experts "who worked closely with Malley—including one he hired into the U.S. government, Ariane Tabatabai, and one he attempted to hire but who was denied a security clearance—were later revealed to be participants in an Iranian influence operation called the Iran Experts Initiative, run out of the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Malley’s personal emails have mysteriously appeared in the Iranian press. And Kamala Harris’ top foreign-policy adviser, Phil Gordon, is a close associate of both Malley and Tabatabai, co-authoring pro-Iran op-eds with both of them," MacDougald noted.
