Former president donald trumpThe Reuters campaign said on Saturday that some of its internal communications had been hacked.
The acknowledgment came after POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation.
The campaign blamed “foreign sources hostile to the United States,” citing a Microsoft Report on Friday that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official in a presidential campaign.” Microsoft did not identify the campaign targeted by the email and declined to comment Saturday. POLITICO did not independently verify the hacker’s identity or motivation, and a Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, declined to say whether he had more information to substantiate the campaigns’ suggestion that the hacker was targeted. of Iran.
“These documents were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States, with the intention of interfering in the 2024 elections and sowing chaos throughout our democratic process,” Cheung said. “On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘senior official’ in the June 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, which coincides with the upcoming timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential candidate.”
Cheung declined to say whether the campaign had contacted Microsoft or law enforcement about the breach, saying he would not discuss such conversations.
On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified himself only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A dossier of research the campaign apparently did on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, dated February 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them who were granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a draft version of Vance’s verification file.
The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s background and past statements, with some — such as his past criticism of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.
The person said they had a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents for internal campaign discussions.”
Asked how he obtained the documents, the person replied: “I suggest you don’t be curious to know where I got them from. Any answers to this question will bind me and also legally restrict you from publishing them.”
The scope of the information obtained by the hacker is unclear. But it represents a major security breach for the Trump campaign.
Last month, reports emerged of the US intelligence community receiving mounting evidence suggesting that Iran was working on plots to kill Trump in retaliation for his decision to order the assassination of Iranian military officer Qassem Soleimani in 2020. There is no indication that the shooter who attacked Trump in a rally last month was linked to the plot.
In his Saturday statement, Cheung pointed to those reports, saying: “Iranians know that President Trump will stop his reign of terror just as he did in his first four years in the White House.”
Iranian government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
In 2016, senior Democratic Party officials were hacked before the presidential election. The breach resulted in the leak of embarrassing emails documenting the inner workings of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s party and campaign. National security officials later blamed Russia for orchestrating the hacking effort. Many of these emails were later released to WikiLeaks, a website that publishes leaked documents, and were published before Election Day with the aim of embarrassing Clinton’s political operation.
In 2017, the Justice Department launched an investigation into Russian election interference and what role Trump associates played in the hacking effort. Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded he did not have enough evidence to bring criminal charges against Trump or his campaign for allegedly conspiring with the Russians. However, he described a Trump campaign that encouraged the hack and was eager to capitalize on the materials, and he described significant efforts by Trump and some allies that hampered investigators’ ability to obtain important communications and testimony that could have shed more light on the subject. .
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
