FBI Investigates Alleged Iranian Hacking of Trump, Biden, Harris Campaigns

The FBI indicated on Monday that it is investigating alleged Iranian attempts to launch a computer attack on the election campaigns of Republican Donald Trump and Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

“We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this matter,” the FBI said in a brief statement carried by newspapers such as The Washington Post. Washington Post.

Three employees, when the Democratic campaign was still led by President Joe Biden, not Vice President Kamala Harris, said they received emails designed to appear legitimate but opening them would have given them access to those people’s communications.

So far, according to those same anonymous sources, there is no evidence that these attempts have been successful.

The newspaper explained that the FBI began its investigation in June on suspicion that Iran was behind the attempt to steal data from the two election campaigns. Among other companies, they contacted Google.

Read: Trump claims crowd at Harris rally in Michigan was 'fake' and generated by AI

The hacking attempt occurred before Biden announced in July that he would not run for re-election, and Democrats nominated Harris as their running mate.

Although the FBI suspects Iran is behind the email hacking attempts, Washington Post He noted that investigators are less clear about whether that country was responsible for sending internal campaign information to the press, something Republicans have accused Tehran of.

Former President Trump's campaign spokesman, Stephen Cheung, confirmed to US media on Saturday that some of his internal communications had been hacked.

Politico reported the same day that it had received emails from an anonymous account in late July containing documents apparently from the Conservative campaign that appeared to contain “internal communications from a senior official” from the team.

The documents were “illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States, with the aim of interfering in the 2024 elections and sowing chaos” in the country's democratic process, Cheung said in a statement over the weekend.

The spokesman pointed to a Microsoft report published Friday on cyber operations by the Iranian government to influence the November 5 presidential election in the United States.

In the report, titled “Iran Enters 2024 Elections with Cyber-Facilitated Influence Operations,” the company notes that it has seen such activity from Tehran in the last three U.S. election cycles and “in recent months.”

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre criticized foreign election interference in general on Monday, saying she takes information about it “very seriously,” but she did not want to comment on the accusation made by the Republican campaign.

“We have said many times that this administration strongly condemns any foreign government or entity that attempts to interfere with our electoral process or seeks to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions. That is why we take these types of reports of such activity very seriously.”

The spokesman stressed that they will not tolerate this influence and will not fight it, and explained that the government's efforts to protect the US elections “have grown significantly over the years.”

With information from EFE

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