OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
11:37 AM – Thursday, September 19, 2024
The FBI and other federal agencies announced on Wednesday that Iranian hackers attempted to influence President Joe Biden’s campaign by handing over data that was stolen from the rival campaign of former President Donald Trump.
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They did so by sending unsolicited emails to individuals associated with the Democrat president in an attempt to sway the results of the 2024 election.
Officials went on to claim that there is currently no proof that any of the recipients replied, which would have kept the compromised data from becoming public during the last few months of the election.
Before Biden dropped out from the campaign, the hackers distributed emails to those connected to it in late June and early July. A statement from the U.S. government stated that the emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails.”
In July, representatives from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence also stated that Tehran had launched their own discreet campaign aimed at weakening Trump’s candidacy, CBS News reported on Thursday.
“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign,” said Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, in a statement to the press on Wednesday night in response to the findings. “A few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” Finkelstein added.
The campaign has “cooperated with the appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation,” she continued.
Meanwhile, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CBS that “this is further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror.”
Examples of the activities of Iranian hackers attempting to influence the 2024 election were provided in a Microsoft threat intelligence assessment that was released last month.
“Not surprisingly, the latest revelations confirm that Iran’s efforts are multi-pronged and intended to damage the Trump campaign,” stated Chris Krebs, former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director, told the press on Wednesday. “This comes on the same day as a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on foreign threats to elections. In that hearing, Microsoft President Brad Smith characterized the state of foreign interference as Russia vs Harris and Iran vs Trump.”
On August 10th, the Trump campaign said that it had been possibly hacked by Iranian actors which stole and shared private documents. Leaked sensitive materials from inside the Trump campaign were obtained by Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other news agencies.
Politico also revealed that on July 22nd, the outlet began receiving strange emails from an unidentified account. The source—an AOL email address only known as “Robert”—sent over what looked to be a dossier of research the campaign had allegedly completed on Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president. The date on the document was February 23rd, which was over five months before Trump announced Vance as his running mate.
Nevertheless, Iran continues to deny the announced allegations by U.S. federal agencies.
The FBI’s “allegations” are “fundamentally unfounded and wholly inadmissible,” according to a spokesperson for Iran’s mission to the U.N.
“Having already unequivocally and repeatedly announced, Iran neither has any motive nor intent to interfere in the U.S. election, and it therefore categorically repudiates such accusations,” Iran’s statement says. “Should the U.S. government genuinely seek the truth, it is incumbent upon them to formally and transparently provide their substantiated evidence, so as to receive a corresponding and precise response.”
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