The Republican National Committee allegedly failed to notify the FBI that its email systems had suffered a serious breach by Chinese hackers for fear of bad press during Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency.
Citing excerpts from a forthcoming book by Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, the Wall Street Journal reports the attack allegedly committed by hackers with ties to the Chinese government, was likely carried out in an effort to assess the GOP’s internal view of tensions between China and Taiwan.
Insiders told Isenstadt that Microsoft had alerted the RNC to the breach just days before the attempt on President Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Beijing, for its part, has denied any role in the breach, with a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., telling the Journal that China “firmly opposes and combats cyberattacks and cyber theft in all forms.”
There’s apparently nothing in Isenstadt’s book to suggest quite how far hackers made it into the GOP’s internal systems, or just how many emails might have been compromised.
It’s nevertheless thought the attack came at roughly the same time as a separate hack targeting the Trump campaign carried out by cyber operatives tied to the Iranian regime, who obtained a number of documents that were later flogged to a variety of U.S. media outlets. Most of those publications declined to make use of the leak out of concerns for its origin.
Intelligence officials have long-warned that U.S. presidential campaigns serve as prime targets for espionage operations by hostile states, with internal communications in particular offering not only valuable insights into the foreign policy priorities of potentially-incoming administrations, but also opportunities to sow chaos by leaking otherwise sensitive data.
Both the RNC and the White House have been approached for comment on the allegations.
