The Trump campaign has acknowledged that at least one of its senior staff had their email hacked, and the product of the hack was sent to Politico.
The campaign blamed “foreign sources hostile to the United States,” citing a Microsoft report on Friday that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.” Microsoft did not identify the campaign targeted by the email and declined to comment Saturday. POLITICO has not independently verified the identity of the hacker or their motivation, and a Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, declined to say if they had further information substantiating the campaigns’ suggestion that it was targeted by Iran.
“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process,” Cheung said. “On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential nominee.”
Cheung declined to say whether the campaign had been in contact with Microsoft or law enforcement about the breach, saying it would not discuss such conversations.
According to Politico, on July 22, it started receiving emails from an AOL email account that called itself “Robert.” They received, that they admit, JD Vance’s vetting document and part of Marco Rubio’s vetting. The email warned, “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.”
IANAL, but it seems to me that once you tell someone that they can’t legally publish the documents, if they are told how you got them you’ve sorta admitted you got them illegally.
While Politico going public and apparently cooperating with the investigation is a good sign, we have to keep in mind that those documents will be mined for stories damaging to the Trump campaign in general and JD Vance in particular. We also don’t know who else received documents from the hack or what those might have contained. Though all fingers are pointing at Iran right now, it is far from certain who was behind it.
Although this may have been the first known hack of this campaign, we can probably rest assured that it will neither be the last nor will the Harris campaign be immune.
