By Raul Castillo
Aug 11, 2024, 5:49 PM EDT
Iran has denied any intention to interfere in the US presidential campaign, after a Microsoft report on Friday revealed cyber operations by the Iranian government to interfere in the November election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
A spokesman for the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations said: “We do not give credence to these reports. The Iranian government has no intention or motive to interfere in the US presidential election.”
In the report, titled “Iran Pushes Forward on 2024 Elections with Cyber-Facilitated Influence Operations,” the firm says it has seen such activity from Tehran in the past three U.S. election cycles and “in recent months.”
Specifically, Iran has “laid the groundwork” for influence campaigns on hot-button election issues and has activated them to generate controversy among voters, “especially in key swing states” that can lean toward one party or another, Microsoft said in the report.
Trump campaign complaint
Following the publication of the Microsoft report, former President Donald Trump’s campaign claimed that its internal communications were hacked by an Iranian group in June.
The hack of the Republican campaign would have coincided “with the moment when President Trump chose a candidate for vice president,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, told NBC News.
The specialized media outlet Politico reported this Saturday that it received emails from an anonymous account at the end of July with documents apparently from the Trump campaign.
The documents, dated February 23, contained what appeared to be “internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official,” the outlet reported.
They also received an investigation that the campaign had apparently conducted on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
“These documents were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States, with the intention of interfering in the 2024 elections and sowing chaos in our entire democratic process,” Cheung said in a statement carried by various media outlets.
How they obtained the documents
Asked by Politico how he had obtained the documents they were leaking, the anonymous sender replied: “I suggest you not be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question will compromise me and will also legally restrict you from publishing them.”
“Iranians know that President Trump will end their reign of terror, just as he did during his first four years in the White House. Any media outlet or news publication that reproduces internal documents or communications is following the orders of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Cheung added.
The Trump campaign’s complaint comes the same week that the Justice Department revealed that a Pakistani national with ties to Iran orchestrated a plot to assassinate an American politician using hitmen. The FBI believes the target may have been Donald Trump.
With information from EFE.
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