Although Iran has denied hacking any campaign, the US FBI said on Monday that it is investigating allegations of alleged espionage by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which on Saturday accused the ayatollahs’ regime of hacking his campaign communications without providing evidence; specifically, information about the selection of JD Vance as vice presidential candidate, which was published by the weekly Political. The FBI, under scrutiny for security failures at the rally where Trump was targeted, is also investigating an alleged hack addressed to campaign advisers of President Joe Biden —who resigned from the race on July 21— and of the vice president and current Democratic candidate for the White House, Kamala Harris, the newspaper reported on Monday The Washington Post.
The former president and Republican candidate said on Saturday that Microsoft had informed his campaign the day before that Iran had hacked one of its websites. Trump then claimed that Iran was only “able to obtain publicly available information,” but, as Reuters noted at the time, he was unable to provide any evidence to support the accusation, and some analysts interpreted this as his primary intention to divert attention from Kamala Harris’s media presence and return to the spotlight.
The FBI launched the investigation in June, when Biden was still a candidate for president, suspecting that Iran was behind attempts to steal data from two US presidential campaigns, the newspaper reported, citing sources close to the case. Before the existence of an investigation was confirmed on Monday, major US media speculated about possible acts of cyber hacking by China and Iran, which would replicate the disinformation maneuvers attributed in previous campaigns to Russia and in the 2020 campaign, also to Tehran.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said a U.S. intelligence report released last month concluded that Iran is working to influence the election. “So we are certainly aware that they have that intention,” he said.
Harris’ campaign, who succeeded Biden and already has the number of delegates necessary to be officially designated as the candidate for the White House at the Democratic convention that begins in Chicago next week, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Through its spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House on Monday “strongly condemned any foreign government or entity that attempts to interfere” in the electoral process or “that attempts in any way to undermine confidence” in democratic institutions. Washington, the spokeswoman added, takes “extremely seriously” any information about hacks, although she declined “to comment on the veracity of these claims that Iran was involved.”
The Trump campaign has referred to a report released on Friday by Microsoft researchers indicating that hackers linked to the Tehran authorities tried to access the data of a senior official of his campaign in June (Reuters agency cited the information from Political that it was about Vance and his weak points, a complete dossier of 271 pages that would also have received the Washington Post). The Microsoft report, which was not made public, added that the hackers took over an account belonging to a former Republican political aide and used it to attack the target, whose identity was not disclosed. The purported dossier on Vance was sent from an account on a popular US email server along with a document on Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who was once a rumoured candidate for Trump.
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For two weeks, Iran has been considering attacking Israel to avenge the assassinations of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut and the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniya, in Tehran. The accusations of cyber espionage are therefore of relative importance compared to the escalation of tension in the region – the possibility of open war – that would be the Israeli response to a hypothetical Iranian attack.
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