Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on August 8, 2024.
Joe Reddell | Getty Images
The Trump campaign said on Saturday that a foreign hacker broke into its systems and gained access to internal communications.
According to Politico, on July 22, Politico began receiving campaign documents leaked by anonymous individuals. News media reports Saturday. Politico first reported the campaign’s admission of the hack.
“These documents were illegally obtained from a foreign source hostile to the United States and were intended to interfere with the 2024 election and create disruption in our democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. confusion.
CNBC has not independently verified the origin of the hack.
A statement from the Trump campaign suggested that Iranian hackers were behind the leak, but did not provide any direct evidence to support the claim.
Instead, Zhang cited Microsoft A report on Friday warned that Iranian hackers launched a number of different attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election, including sending a phishing email to a senior campaign official in June from a senior adviser’s compromised account.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the Trump campaign was the target of an Iranian hacking plot.
Earlier this summer, U.S. officials became aware of an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump. Officials learned of the plot weeks before an assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally in July, although no link between the gunman and Iran has been established.
Politico reported that it began receiving Trump campaign documents from an anonymous email account identified only as “Robert.” The documents include a 271-page dossier on Trump’s current running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and one on Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is the short list of vice presidential candidates.
When Politico asked the anonymous source how he obtained the documents, the source reportedly said: “I advise you not to wonder where I got these documents from. Any answer to that question would be detrimental to my interests and also to the You are legally restricted from publishing these files.
Politico did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it was working with the Trump campaign and law enforcement to investigate the hack.
The reported hacking of the campaign comes as the FBI warns about cybersecurity threats around the world, particularly targeting the U.S. election results.
“We should absolutely expect foreign actors to try to exert influence and interfere,” Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said at a congressional hearing in January, referring to the 2024 elections. “What’s very clear is that “Americans should have confidence in the integrity of our election infrastructure because a tremendous amount of work has been done.”
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