WASHINGTON — Iranian hackers sought to interest President Joe Biden’s campaign in information stolen from a rival Donald Trump’s campaignsending unsolicited emails to people associated with the then-Democratic candidate to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other federal agencies said Wednesday.
There was no indication that any recipient responded, authorities said, and several media outlets contacted over the summer with leaked stolen information also said they did not respond.
Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign called the emails from Iran “unwanted and unacceptable malicious activity” that was received by only a few people who considered them spam or phishing attempts.
The emails were received before the Trump campaign hack was publicly acknowledged, and there appears to be no evidence that the recipients of the emails knew their origin.
The announcement is the latest effort by the U.S. government to expose what officials say is Iran’s brazen and ongoing work to interfere in the election, including a hacking and leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies last month linked to Tehran.
In recent months, U.S. officials have used criminal charges, sanctions and public notices to detail actions by foreign adversaries to influence the election, including an indictment targeting a covert Russian effort to disseminate pro-Russian content to the American public.
In that case, hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people associated with Biden’s campaign before he withdrew from the race under pressure from his own party. The emails “contained a snippet of stolen, nonpublic documents from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The agencies said the hack of the Trump campaign and an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign are part of an effort to undermine voter confidence in the election and stoke discord.
The FBI informed Trump advisers in the past 48 hours that information hacked by Iran had been sent to the Biden campaign, according to a senior campaign official who was granted anonymity to speak because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.
On August 10, the Trump campaign revealed that it had been hacked and claimed that Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three media outlets — Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post — received confidential information from the Trump campaign. So far, each has declined to reveal the details of what it received.
Politico reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — forwarded what appeared to be a research dossier the campaign had apparently compiled on Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. The document was dated Feb. 23, nearly five months before Trump chose Vance as his running mate.
In a statement, Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said the campaign has cooperated with law enforcement since learning that people associated with Biden’s team were among the recipients of the emails.
“We are not aware of any direct mailings to the campaign; a few individuals have been targeted in their personal emails with what appears to be spam or phishing attempts,” Finkelstein said. “We condemn in the strongest terms any attempt by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections, including this unwanted and unacceptable malicious activity.”
Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, called the efforts to pass stolen information to the Biden campaign “further evidence that the Iranians are actively interfering in the election” to help Harris.
Iranian intelligence has said Iran opposes Trump’s reelection, believing it is more likely to escalate tensions between Washington and Tehran. The Trump administration has terminated the nuclear deal with Iran, reimposed sanctions and ordered the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, an act that has prompted Iranian leaders to vow revenge.
Iran’s intrusion into the Trump campaign was cited as one of the cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns identified by tech companies and national security officials at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday. Executives from Meta, Google and Microsoft briefed lawmakers on their plans to protect the election and the attacks they’ve seen so far.
“I think the most perilous moment will come 48 hours before the election,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers at the hearing, which focused on U.S. technology companies’ efforts to protect the election from foreign disinformation and cyberattacks.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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