The Trump campaign said Saturday that some of its internal communications had been hacked and suggested Iran was responsible and seeking to undermine the former president’s prospects in the November election.
Documents belonging to the campaign “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,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement.
He cited recent statements from the U.S. government that accused Iran of seeking ways to prevent Trump from returning to the White House, including an alleged assassination plot. Cyber-threat research published Friday by Microsoft has also detailed Iran’s election hacking operations.
It wasn’t clear how far-reaching the purported theft of private campaign material was or how potentially damaging any of it could be to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. But the specter of a campaign hack by Iran could jolt the already tumultuous presidential campaign.
Its public disclosure comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East and fears that Tehran and its allies are seeking retribution against Israel for a pair of recent killings against two militant leaders in the region.
The Trump campaign didn’t provide direct evidence that Iran was responsible for the hack. Instead, it tied the hack to the new Microsoft cyber-threat research that laid out a range of election interference operations it said were linked to several different Iranian cyber groups, noting an observed increase in Iranian activity in recent months.
Among its findings, Microsoft said that a group tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully compromised an email account belonging to a former adviser to a U.S. presidential campaign.
Microsoft didn’t identify the former adviser or the presidential campaign, but said Iran used the compromised email account in June to send messages to a senior official still working for the campaign. Those sent messages contained a malicious link that could have been used to compromise the current campaign official, Microsoft said. Separately, the technology giant said another Iranian cyber group compromised an account owned by a “county-level government employee” in an unidentified swing state.
Microsoft declined to comment about the apparent Trump campaign hack. A spokesman for the Iranian mission to the United Nations didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in a statement said it was “aware of the media reporting. We decline to comment further.”
The Trump campaign’s apparent confirmation of a campaign breach followed a report published Saturday afternoon by Politico that said the news outlet had been “receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation” since late July. The AOL email account went by “Robert” and declined to explain how it had acquired the campaign documents, according to Politico, which said it had confirmed the documents were authentic. Among the files were a research dossier on Trump running mate JD Vance that were based largely on public information and highlighted potential vulnerabilities, Politico reported.
Presidential campaigns are high-value hacking targets for foreign governments eager to glean any insights into a potential future administration. In 2008, Chinese hackers breached both the Obama and McCain campaigns and stole internal documents, U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged.
“Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said Saturday.
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