By Maria Ortiz
Aug 10, 2024, 5:31 PM EDT
Former President and Republican candidate Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign said Friday that some of its internal communications were recently hacked by foreign sources.
The leak was first reported by Politico after the outlet received emails from an anonymous account containing documents from Trump’s election campaign.
The campaign said the leak came from “foreign sources hostile to the United States” and pointed to a report released Friday by Microsoft that said Iran is targeting the 2024 election.
“These documents were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States, with the intent to interfere in the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to The Hill.
Cheung said the Microsoft report found that Iranian hackers “broke into the account of a ‘senior official’” in the June 2024 presidential campaign.
Following the attempted assassination of Trump last month at a rally in Pennsylvania, the Biden administration claimed Iran threatened to kill the former president. Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied the reports, calling them “malicious.”
Cheung noted the timing of the campaign hack and the “Iranian plot to assassinate President Trump around the same time as the tragedy in Butler, Pennsylvania.”
“Iranians know that President Trump will stop his reign of terror just as he did in his first four years in the White House,” Cheung said. “Any media outlet or news agency that reprints internal documents or communications is following the orders of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want.”
Politico said it began receiving emails from an AOL email account from someone identified as “Robert” on July 22.
Included in the documents shared with the outlet was a February investigative dossier on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance. A similar document was sent on Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also on Trump’s shortlist of vice presidential candidates.
Robert told Politico that they had a “variety of documents” from Trump’s legal battles and internal campaign discussions.
It’s not known how much information the hacker was able to obtain, but it shows that the Trump campaign experienced a major security breach, the outlet reported.
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