The FBI said on Monday (12) that it is investigating alleged Iranian cyber attacks on the election campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden – the current US president was still in the race and had not left his candidacy.
Three staffers from the time when the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign was still led by Biden, not Vice President Kamala Harris, said they received emails designed to look legitimate but that, if their files were opened, would have given access to those people’s communications.
According to the same anonymous sources, there is no evidence that these attempts were successful.
The newspaper The Washington Post reported that the FBI began the investigation in June, suspecting that Iran was behind the attempt to steal data from the two election campaigns. Among other companies, they contacted Google.
The attempted invasion occurred before Biden announced in July that he would not run for re-election, and Democrats chose Kamala as their new presidential candidate.
While the FBI suspects Iran was behind the attempted email hacks, the newspaper said investigators are not certain that the country was responsible for leaking internal campaign information to the press, something for which Trump’s Republican Party has suspected Tehran.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung confirmed to the American press last Saturday (10) that some of his internal communications had been hacked.
Politico reported the same day that it received emails in late July from an anonymous account with documents apparently from the Republican campaign and containing what appeared to be “internal communications from a senior staffer” on that team.
Cheung said in a statement over the weekend that the documents “were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States, with the intent to interfere in the 2024 election and sow chaos” in the country’s democratic process.
The spokesman referred to a Microsoft report released Friday (9) on the Iranian government’s cyber operations to influence the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election.
In the report, the company said it had seen such activity by Tehran in the past three US election cycles and “in recent months.”
On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized foreign interference in the election in general and said she took the allegations “very seriously,” but declined to comment on the Republican campaign’s accusation.
“We have said many times that this administration strongly condemns any foreign government or entity that attempts to interfere in our electoral process or that seeks to undermine confidence in our democratic institution. That is why we take reports of such activities very seriously,” he said.
The spokeswoman stressed that they do not and will not tolerate such influence and made clear that the government’s efforts to protect US elections have “grown significantly over the years.”
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