WASHINGTON – Iranian hackers sought to implicate President Joe Biden’s campaign in information stolen from rival Donald Trump’s campaign by sending unsolicited emails to people connected to the Democratic president in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other federal agencies said Wednesday.
There is no evidence that any of the recipients responded, officials said, preventing the hacked information from emerging in the final months of the closely contested election.
The hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with the Biden campaign before he left. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the email,” according to a US government statement.
The announcement is the latest effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen and ongoing work to interfere in the 2024 election, including a hacking and leaking campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies have linked last month to Tehran. The Department of Justice has prepared charges in this violation, The Associated Press said.
The FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the Trump campaign hack and an attempted hack of the Biden-Harris campaign are part of a effort to undermine the faith of the voters in the elections and to tease. discord
The Trump campaign disclosed on August 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three media outlets – Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post – were leaked confidential material from within the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details of what they received.
Politico said it started receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — forwarded what appeared to be a dossier of research the campaign had apparently conducted on the Republican vice presidential candidate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated February 23, nearly five months before Trump chose Vance as his running mate.
In a statement, Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesman for the Kamala Harris campaign, said that the campaign has cooperated with law enforcement since learning that people associated with the Biden team were among the recipients of the e-mail.
“We are not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; a few individuals were targeted at their personal emails with what appeared to be a spam or phishing attempt,” Finkelstein said.
David Klepper contributed to this report.