Over the weekend, Donald Trump had posted that Iran had hacked his campaign.
On Monday, reports surfaced that the FBI was now taking over the investigation.
Talking Points…
- Trump claims campaign was hacked by Iran
- FBI investigating
- Analysis
Saturday night, Donald Trump just about blew up the internet with his claims that the campaign had been hacked by the Iranians. If I am being honest, the first thought that came to mind was that I was hoping he was not just making this up to get some headlines. It turns out that Trump made the claim because Microsoft had alerted this campaign that a former adviser's account had been hacked.
From that account, the hackers, who were reportedly associated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp, were sending fake email messages to "a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign." This was done to gain access to the campaign's official email accounts.
According to Trump, the hackers were not successful in getting anything but "publicly available information." Then Trump attacked the Biden administration, calling it "Weak and Ineffective." This came after a Politico report that included leaked documents from the Trump campaign. However, it was unclear if those documents were related to the hacking or if they came from a source inside Trump's campaign.
After the hacking was reported, it was not long before the FBI jumped in to investigate the claim. This being a presidential campaign and the recent attack on Trump's life, it was not a surprise to see the FBI take an interest in the hacking. The FBI released a statement to Fox News:
"FBI is investigating the recent cyber intrusion into the Trump campaign. We can now confirm that the FBI is investigating."
This announcement came shortly after the report from Microsoft (mentioned above) was sent to the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign also made a statement to address the report that was made on Politico. Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung stated:
"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."
Politico stated that it started to receive the emails on July 22 from an anonymous account that was using the name "Robert" in communications. Iran denied that it had been involved in any hacking, but that is to be expected. Iran is about as truthful as our mainstream media, so I would not give that denial very much credence. On the hackings, Microsoft stated that the pace of hacking has picked up considerably. It added:
"Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations have been a consistent feature of at least the last three U.S. election cycles. Iran's operations have been notable and distinguishable from Russian campaigns for appearing later in the election season and employing cyberattacks more geared toward election conduct than swaying voters.
"Recent activity suggests the Iranian regime — along with the Kremlin — may be equally engaged in election 2024."
Harris' campaign has not been hacked, so I would expect the Trump campaign to start pushing the narrative that there is foreign election interference to help Kamala Harris win the election, much like the Democrats did during the 2016 and 2020 elections when they claimed Russians were trying to help Donald Trump. And this would make sense since the Democrats have an unexplainable obsession with Iran in terms of being Iran's friend. The Iranian government knows that Donald Trump will not be friendly, so it benefits Iran to have Harris win this election.
