Iranian hackers tried to interest President Biden’s campaign in stolen information from former President Donald Trump’s rival campaign, sending unsolicited emails to people associated with the Democratic president in an attempt to influence the 2024 election, the FBI and other federal agencies said Wednesday.
Authorities said there was no evidence that any of the recipients responded, preventing the hacked information from leaking in the final months of the tense election.
The hackers sent emails to people associated with Biden’s campaign in late June and early July. before he dropped outAccording to a statement from the US government, the emails “include an excerpt of stolen, non-public materials from former President Trump’s campaign within the text of the emails.”
In late July, officials from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security said that Tehran a campaign had begun to weaken Trump’s candidacy, while Russia was trying to do the exact opposite.
Last month, sources told CBS News that the FBI was investigating whether Iranian hackers targeted people with ties to the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns.
In response to the revelation, Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein told CBS News in a statement Wednesday night that “we are not aware of any material that was sent directly to the campaign,” adding that “a few individuals were contacted via their personal emails with what appeared to be spam or a phishing attempt.”
Finkelstein said the campaign “has been cooperating with appropriate law enforcement agencies since we learned that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CBS News in a statement that “this is further evidence that the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, knowing that President Trump will reinstate his tough sanctions and oppose their reign of terror.”
A Microsoft Threat Intelligence Report last month gave examples of the actions of Iranian groups attempting to influence the 2024 elections.
“It’s no surprise that the latest revelations confirm that Iran’s efforts are multi-pronged and aimed at harming the Trump campaign,” Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told CBS News on Wednesday. “This comes on the same day as a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on foreign threats to elections. At that hearing, Microsoft President Brad Smith characterized the state of foreign interference as Russia versus Harris and Iran versus Trump.”
The Trump campaign announced on August 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news organizations — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — leaked confidential material from the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal details about what they received.
Politico reported that it began receiving emails from an anonymous account on July 22. The source—an AOL email account identified only as “Robert”—was passing along what appeared to be an investigative dossier the campaign had apparently compiled on Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. The document was dated Feb. 23, nearly five months before Trump picked Vance as his running mate.
A spokesperson for Iran’s permanent mission to the UN told CBS News in a statement Wednesday that the FBI’s “allegations” were “fundamentally unfounded and completely inadmissible.”
“Now that Iran has unequivocally and repeatedly announced that it has no motive or intention to interfere in the US elections; and therefore categorically rejects such allegations,” the statement said. “Should the US government be sincere in its search for the truth, it is their duty to formally and transparently provide their substantiated evidence, in order to receive a corresponding and accurate response.”
