The FBI said on Monday that it appears to be investigating a hacking attack on the Trump campaign and an attempt to gain access to the accounts of leading Democrats. The attack likely came from Iran, a senior law enforcement official said.
The disclosure came in a brief statement days after former President Donald J. Trump said Iran had targeted his campaign. Neither Iran nor Trump were identified by name, nor did the office address the extent of the breach or the possibility that other campaigns or political figures were affected.
But investigators are also looking into an attempt to infiltrate accounts linked to the Democratic presidential campaign, according to the law enforcement official familiar with the situation. The timing of the attempt was unclear, but the official added there was no indication the attempt was successful. Vice President Kamala Harris’ team, which carefully monitors cyber threats, is not aware of any breaches of its systems, according to a campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security precautions.
On Friday, Microsoft said a hacking group linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had infiltrated the account of a former top adviser to an unnamed presidential campaign. Trump’s longtime adviser Roger J. Stone said Microsoft contacted him several months ago and told him his Hotmail email account had been compromised and that it believed the culprit was Iran, he said in a phone interview Monday evening.
A few weeks later, he received a call from the FBI saying his Gmail account had also been hacked. The FBI believes his account had been abused by malicious actors to successfully gain access to the internal communications of others in Trump’s political operation, Stone added.
The FBI has repeatedly warned that foreign countries could interfere in the upcoming election, including by using artificial intelligence to spread misinformation. It singled out Iran, China and Russia in particular. Russia has long sought to create chaos in American elections, targeting the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
The Iranian mission to the United Nations rejected the allegations in a statement. “The Iranian government has neither the intention nor the motive to interfere in the US presidential election,” it said.
The extent of the breach into the Trump campaign is still unclear, but investigators expect the hackers will make further attempts to distribute other materials, officials said. The material sent to news organizations such as The New York Times included research and planning documents.
Phishing attacks, such as the one used in the Trump data breach, are typically broad attacks that use a large volume of emails with malicious links. All it takes is one or two recipients to click on a link to trigger a major breach.
Microsoft said the hacker group Mint Sandstorm, believed to be behind the breach, used a compromised account to send fake emails to infiltrate the campaign’s accounts and databases. The group’s goal is to disrupt and delegitimize the democratic process.
On Saturday, Trump claimed the hackers had only collected publicly available information. “We have just been informed by Microsoft Corporation that one of our many websites has been hacked by the Iranian government – that is never a nice thing!” he wrote on his social media page.
His revelation came after news outlets, including Politico, reported that they had obtained a trove of internal campaign documents from an anonymous AOL account whose only identity was the name Robert. Among the documents was a lengthy dossier assessing the candidacy of Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.
The New York Times also apparently received similar, if not the same, information.
Iran’s efforts to infiltrate Trump’s campaign come after warnings that the country was planning to kill the former president. In 2020, Trump authorized a drone strike in Iraq that killed Major General Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, a secret wing of the Revolutionary Guard responsible for external operations.
Last week, the Justice Department indicted a Pakistani man with ties to Iran on charges of hiring someone to kill political figures in the United States, including potential targets like Trump.
That Stone, a fiery provocateur who came of age in the rough Nixon era of Republican politics, was apparently inadvertently responsible for a serious breach of Trump’s cybersecurity is remarkable.
In 2016, Stone was part of a group of senior Trump advisers who used social media to try to maximize the damage done to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign by the WikiLeaks hack of Democratic National Committee officials and other members of Clinton’s team.
Mr. Stone was later convicted of lying to Congress in connection with the investigation into Russian efforts to undermine Mrs. Clinton and the role he allegedly played as an intermediary between the campaign and WikiLeaks. Mr. Stone maintained his innocence and denied any involvement. Mr. Trump pardoned him shortly before leaving office.
“I am cooperating in every way,” Mr. Stone said Monday about his current interactions with federal investigators.
Reid J. Epstein And Farnaz Fassihi contributed to the reporting.
