Three Iranian nationals have been indicted for hacking into former President Donald Trump’s campaign, stealing emails and documents and then sharing them with the media, according to U.S. officials and a federal indictment filed Friday in Washington.
The three Iranians, identified as members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, hired “malicious cyber actors” to hack into an unidentified presidential candidate’s campaign in May and stole documents from it.
U.S. officials have said privately that Trump’s campaign was the victim of the attack.
The indictment says the personal email accounts of a former CIA deputy director, a former Defense Department official and an individual who appears to be Trump’s longtime adviser, Roger Stone, were also hacked.
“The American people, not a foreign power, decide the outcome of elections in our country,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Not Iran and its malicious cyber activities, as today’s indictment shows.”
The hackers created fake email accounts in which they impersonated current and former U.S. officials, as well as other high-profile organizations and individuals. They then conducted spearphishing attacks that tricked individuals associated with the Trump campaign into opening emails containing malware.
In June, hackers emailed materials stolen from Trump’s campaign to people associated with then-President Joe Biden’s campaign. The FBI and other U.S. officials said there was “currently no information” that recipients responded to the emails.
The three members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who oversaw the operation were identified in the indictment as Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri and Yaser Balaghi. They were charged with material support for terrorism, computer fraud, wire fraud and identity theft.
Iran has denied the accusations. Its ambassador to the United Nations called them “completely baseless, devoid of any credibility and legitimacy” and “in no way acceptable,” the semi-official Fars news agency reported earlier this month.
The hacking against the Trump campaign is the latest example of an increasingly brazen approach by Iran, which includes alleged assassination plots against dissidents and defectors on American soil and a threat of assassination against former President Trump, US officials and analysts say.
Garland said Russia and China were also trying to influence the U.S. election. U.S. officials have said that, generally speaking, Russia is trying to help Trump in his efforts to get re-elected, Iran is trying to harm Trump and China is trying to influence state and local elections in a way that benefits Beijing.
Earlier this week, Matthew Olsen, head of the department’s National Security Division, said in an exclusive interview with NBC News that the level of foreign interference in the ongoing election was unprecedented. Olsen said Iran, Russia and China were all trying to influence the election.
“Let me be as clear as possible: This is not a hoax. This is actually happening,” Olsen said. “The Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese are seeking to interfere in our elections in a way that fundamentally undermines our democracy.”
Olsen said the three countries – all led by authoritarian leaders – are pursuing the same general goals: exacerbating divisions among Americans and undermining American voters’ confidence in election results and in American democracy itself.
“Foreign governments seek to undermine our country, to undermine our democracy, to undermine our national security,” Olsen said. “They seek to advance their own authoritarian goals by sowing discord within our country and undermining our confidence in our elections.”
A senior U.S. official told NBC News on Friday that no evidence has been found that Iran, Russia and China are directly coordinating their electoral influence efforts.
First publication of stolen documents
On Thursday, an American journalist who runs an independent newsletter published a document that appears to have been stolen from Trump’s presidential campaign. This is the first public release of a file suspected of being part of Iranian efforts to manipulate U.S. elections.
The PDF document is a 271-page opposition research brief on Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio.
For more than two months, the hackers who stole the documents tried to persuade members of the American media to write about or publish the files they had stolen. No outlet has done this.
On Thursday, journalist Ken Klippenstein, who self-publishes on Substack after leaving The Intercept this year, posted one of the files.
“If the document had been hacked by an ‘anonymous’ hacker group, the media would have seized on it,” Klippenstein wrote. “I just don’t believe in the media as an arm of government doing its job of countering foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.
Journalists who received the documents described the same pattern: An AOL account emailed them files signed by someone using the name “Robert,” who was reluctant to discuss his identity or why he wanted the documents. documents are published.
NBC News was not part of the direct outreach to Robert’s character, but viewed his correspondence with a reporter from another publication.
One of Robert’s character emails previously viewed by NBC News included three large PDF files, each corresponding to Trump’s three announced finalists for vice president. The Vance file appears to be one that Klippenstein hosts on his site.
Russia’s efforts to help Trump
Earlier this month, Justice Department prosecutors indicted two RT employees, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, and accused them of using a Tennessee-based company in “secret projects” aimed at influence American politics by posting videos on TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. .
RT employees sent millions of dollars to prominent right-wing commentators through a media company that appears to fit the description of Tenet Media, a leading platform for pro-Trump voices, a study finds from NBC News on charging documents, business records and social media. media profiles.
Tenet has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube since November 2023, according to the indictment.
It is unclear, however, what impact foreign influence operations have on American voters. Tenet was competing for attention in an oversaturated online space and among an electorate that, after years of consuming hyper-polarized content online, tends to seek out and receive information that reinforces pre-existing beliefs.
Justice Department officials said the threat of foreign interference remained serious and pledged to continue investigating actions by foreign governments related to the 2024 elections. Olsen urged Americans to be wary of unrelated information. verified.
“This right to vote for our free and fair elections – the decisions we make in the upcoming elections – these are the choices that we as Americans make and we make alone,” he said. “And we must be extremely vigilant about protecting this right. »
