The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced earlier this week that it was conducting an investigation into the sensitive documents that were stolen from the campaign of GOP nominee Donald Trump.
This comes after Trump’s campaign claimed that Iran had hacked them.
In just a brief statement, the FBI said:
“We can confirm the FBI is investigating this matter.”
No one from Trump’s campaign provided additional details about how they knew that Iran was involved in the cyber intrusion of their campaigns. The claims came not long after Microsoft released a report that detailed attempts by foreign agents to interfere in the presidential campaign of U.S. candidates this year.
In the report, there was one instance that happened in June, in which a unit for Iran’s military intelligence sent “a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”
This news all broke after Politico reported over the weekend that it started receiving emails in late July from an anonymous AOL email account. The media outlet said the person only identified himself as Robert, and sent them what looked like a research dossier Trump’s campaign did on Ohio Senator JD Vance, who was eventually named as Trump’s running mate.
As Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said recently:
“These documents were obtained illegally … [and] intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our democratic process.”
Not surprisingly, Iran’s mission to the United Nations, denied that they were involved in the security breach when they were asked about the claim the Trump campaign had put forth.
That being said, it’s long been suspected that Iran has been involved in hacking political campaigns so they could target their enemies throughout the Middle East and outside of it.
Iran has issued threats that they would retaliate against Trump because of the drone strike he ordered in 2020 that killed Qassem Soleimani, a prominent general in the Revolutionary Guard.
That drone strike killed Soleimani as he and a group of other people were traveling from the international airport in Baghdad, Iraq.
In their security report, Microsoft said “foreign malign influence concerning the 2024 U.S. election started off slowly but has steadily picked up pace over the last six months due initially to Russian operations, but more recently from Iranian activity.
“Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations have been a consistent feature of at least the last three U.S. election cycles. Iran’s operations have been notable and distinguishable from Russian campaigns for appearing later in the election season and employing cyberattacks more geared toward election conduct than swaying voters.”
CNN reported this week that the person whose email account was hacked is Roger Stone, an operative for the Trump campaign.
According to the media outlet, hackers were able to access Stone’s email, and then tried to use that to break into an email account of another senior official in the Trump campaign.
