US agencies conclude Iran was behind hack targeting Trump campaign

Three federal agencies said on Monday that the Iranian government is attempting to interfere in the 2024 presidential election and is responsible for a recent hack that targeted the campaign of former President Donald Trump. 

In a joint statement, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said they “have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns.”

The agencies added that “this includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign, which the [intelligence community] attributes to Iran.”

The Trump campaign confirmed earlier this month that the personal email account of a top campaign official — later identified as longtime Republican operative Roger Stone — had been hacked. The disclosure came after an individual reached out to several news outlets offering to provide reporters with internal campaign documents. 

Trump and his advisors initially attributed the breach to Tehran, pointing to a Microsoft report released on Aug. 8 that found, in part, that Iranian hackers “sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”

Tuesday’s statement is the government’s first public acknowledgment that Iran was behind the intrusion.

The FBI, ODNI and CISA also warned that Iranian-linked hackers targeted the accounts of advisors on the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, with the bipartisan efforts “intended to influence the U.S. election process.”

The FBI previously said last week that it was investigating the hack of the Trump campaign, as well as spear-phishing emails that had been sent to staffers on the Harris campaign. 

The high-profile hack targeting the Trump campaign comes after Russian hackers breached email accounts affiliated with the Democratic National Committee and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election cycle. Documents pilfered during the breach were later published on the WikiLeaks platform.

The three agencies drew a parallel between the actions of the Iranian and Russian hackers, noting that Tehran and Moscow “have employed these tactics not only in the United States during this and prior federal election cycles but also in other countries around the world.”