The Trump campaign accused Iran of a hack-and-leak operation Saturday, after a 271-page dossier of JD Vance’s “vulnerabilities” was sent to at least two news organizations.
The internal campaign vetting report on Vance was sent to Politico and The Washington Post from an AOL.com email address, along with a document on Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who was not chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate.
Hours after Politico revealed it received the materials, the Trump campaign said it had been hacked, accusing Iran of the breach.
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“The Iranians know that President Trump will stop their reign of terror just like he did in his first four years in the White House. Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told NBC News.
He went on: “On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential nominee.”
The Biden administration has not commented on the alleged hack.
The Microsoft report cited by Cheung accused “another Iranian group, this one connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” of sending “a phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”
“The email contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the website of the provided link… within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate,” the report added.
Politico reported that on July 22 it began receiving emails from an AOL account only identified by the moniker “Robert.” The emails contained proprietary information and internal documents from the Trump campaign.
One email contained a 271-page report on Vance entitled “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” Robert told Politico they had a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions,” and when pressed for how they obtained them, Robert responded, “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.”
This is by no means a first for Trump. In 2020, a hacker hacked his X account by guessing his password, “maga2020!”
Trump has also allegedly been the target of an Iranian assassination plot which resulted in a Pakistani man named Asif Merchant, with ties to the Islamic Republic, being charged by the DOJ on Wednesday.
