Iran’s leaders know whom they prefer to see behind the Resolute desk next year, as they carry out a comprehensive sabotage campaign targeting Donald Trump.
That effort, the details of which are trickling out through reports in the media and intelligence-community disclosures, includes hacks of the Trump campaign and a plot to assassinate the former president.
This week, federal officials revealed that Iranian cyber actors sent confidential information stolen from the Trump campaign to Biden campaign aides throughout the summer, before the president ended his campaign. It’s not clear whether the campaign staff did anything with the information, and the Harris campaign reportedly said that the emails, received only by a few people, were regarded internally as phishing attempts. The Harris camp’s condemnation of the hack is a good start, but it should specifically speak to whether campaign staffers viewed any of the material sent by Iran and whether they used it at all.
Heading into November, Tehran is likely to continue this effort to boost Kamala Harris at Trump’s expense.
The Trump administration’s maximum-pressure campaign, its staunch support of Israel, and, most significantly, the strike that killed General Qasem Soleimani have all led to the perception that Trump’s return to the White House would be bad news for the regime. That assessment, of course, is absolutely correct.
Iran has received a three-and-a-half-year reprieve. First, the Biden administration tried to revive a form of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Then, when that fell through, it continued to oversee the lax enforcement of sanctions on purchases of Iranian oil and granted waivers that unfroze the country’s assets abroad. Not to mention the friend that Tehran had in Biden’s Iran envoy, Rob Malley, who has been suspended amid an investigation into his security clearance.
Taken with Iran’s reported efforts to kill Trump and other former officials involved in the Soleimani killing, it’s also noteworthy that the administration has spent considerably less time countering Iran than it has on social-media disinformation networks operated by the Russian state. A recent disclosure from the State Department about RT’s direct, operational role in the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine and global-influence schemes is a welcome development, for example, but it seems that, across government, the ongoing plots against Trump have received considerably less time from press-briefing podiums across the administration.
Tehran’s theft of campaign information has also been the subject of virtually no outrage from the crowd that crowed about Russian “collusion” during the Trump administration, a manifestation of the double standard on foreign interference that benefits Democratic leaders.
That double standard, as well as a genuine lack of awareness about Iranian-influence operations, has persisted for many years, and, unfortunately, the latest news probably isn’t enough to trigger a reckoning with what Iran is doing to our elections and within U.S. government.