Former President Donald Trump’s campaign was hacked and confidential memos were sent to some news outlets over the weekend, but the hacking appears to be more complicated than first thought.
Over the weekend, the Trump campaign team confirmed that it had been hacked after Politico and the Washington Post reported receiving material from a person identified only as “Robert.” The mysterious account sent a 271-page vetting document about Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), via an AOL email account. The material was based on publicly available information about Vance.
Microsoft announced on Friday that Iran had sent a spear-phishing email to a senior presidential campaign official from a compromised email account belonging to a former senior adviser. At the time, however, Microsoft did not publicly disclose which campaign was affected. It was only in the following days that it became clear that it was Trump’s campaign that was affected, and more details followed.
Here’s what we know so far about the hacker attack on the Trump campaign.
Democrats were also targeted
Not only was Trump’s campaign team compromised by the attack, but President Joe Biden’s campaign team – which has morphed into Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team following Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidency – was also targeted.
The Washington Post reported that three Biden-Harris campaign employees had received spear phishing emails that looked like authentic emails. The report suggested that attempts to break into the Democratic campaign were unsuccessful.
Harris’ camp said Tuesday it was contacted by the FBI in July because it was “targeted by a foreign influence operation,” according to NBC News.
Trump blamed Iran for the hack
Both Trump’s campaign team and the former president himself blamed Iran for the hacking attack. On Saturday evening, Trump posted on Truth Social that Microsoft had informed his campaign team that Iran was behind the hacking attack.
“We were just informed by Microsoft Corporation that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian government – that’s never a nice thing!” Trump posted. “All they could do was obtain publicly available information, but they should not do anything like that. Iran and others will stop at nothing because our government is weak and ineffective, but that won’t last much longer. What Iran doesn’t realize is that I will make the world a better and safer place, and that’s good for them too!”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to the Washington Examiner over the weekend that “these documents were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States with the intent to influence the 2024 election and create chaos in our democratic process.”
Investigations into the hacker attack have been ongoing since June
The FBI confirmed on Monday that it is investigating attempts to penetrate the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns.
The federal agency’s investigation began in June on suspicion that Iran was trying to illegally obtain data from both campaigns, according to the Washington Post.
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During the 2016 election, the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was hacked and the information obtained was published by WikiLeaks.
In the 2024 Trump campaign hack, the media that received materials from the hack did not report on the materials, butAd reported on the apparent hack of the Trump campaign.
