Former president Donald Trump commented for the first time on the apparent hack of his presidential campaign that the FBI is currently investigating.
Trump blamed Iran for the hack Wednesday without going into specifics on what the FBI told him about the situation.
“They are looking at it and they’re doing it very professionally, and it looks like it’s Iran,” Trump told reporters as he voted in Florida’s primary election, praising the FBI’s work.
“I don’t want to say exactly, but it was Iran,” Trump added. He touted his own hardline approach to Iran during his presidential term.
The FBI is investigating Iran’s apparent attempts to hack the Trump and Biden-Harris presidential campaigns, the bureau confirmed Monday. Suspected Iranian hackers compromised the email account of longtime Republican operative Roger Stone and used it to target senior Trump campaign officials, CNN reported, citing multiple sources familiar.
Google confirmed Wednesday the efforts by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-affiliated organization, APT42, targeted the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns, and current and former U.S. government officials. APT42 deploys phishing campaigns to lure unsuspecting users and gain access to their email accounts. Besides the U.S., APT42 aggressively targets Israeli officials to help advance Iran’s geopolitical priorities.
The hack of Trump’s campaign became public knowledge over the weekend when Politico reported on an anonymous email account sent the outlet internal Trump campaign documents. A dossier on Trump’s running mate, Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio), was among the documents emailed to Politico beginning towards the end of July.
“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. On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a Vice Presidential nominee,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung previously told NR in a statement.
Microsoft released a threat report last week detailing Iran’s schemes to influence the 2024 election by targeting swing-state voters with online content and gathering intelligence on political campaigns.
“Yet another Iranian group, this one connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor,” Microsoft observed.
Federal prosecutors unveiled last week criminal charges against a Pakistani national with ties to Iran who plotted to kill Trump and other current and former U.S. officials. His scheme was unrelated to gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks’s failed attempt on Trump’s life last month at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
“This dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in today’s complaint allegedly was orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook,” said FBI director Christopher Wray.
U.S. officials have sounded the alarm about Iran’s attempts to influence the 2024 election and its plots to harm government officials in retaliation for the Trump administration’s successful drone strike on top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.