Trump campaign accuses ‘hostile’ foreign sources of hacking and leaking confidential documents

Former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said Saturday that it has been hacked and suggested Iranian actors were involved in stealing and distributing sensitive internal documents. It cited an instance of an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending “a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung blamed the hack on “foreign sources hostile to the United States.” A spokesperson for the National Security Council said in a statement that it takes any report of improper foreign interference “extremely seriously” and condemns any government or entity that attempts to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions, but said it deferred to the Justice Department on this matter. He pointed to the Microsoft report issued Friday and its conclusions 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.” “The Iranians know that President Trump will stop their reign of terror just like he did in his first four years in the White House,” Cheung said, adding a warning that “any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want.” Cheung did not immediately respond to questions about the campaign's interactions with Microsoft on the matter. In that report, Microsoft stated that “foreign malign influence concerning the 2024 US election started off slowly but has steadily picked up pace over the last six months due initially to Russian operations, but more recently from Iranian activity.” The analysis continued: “Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations have been a consistent feature of at least the last three U.S. election cycles.