US intelligence agencies blame Iran for Trump campaign security incident
U.S. intelligence agencies accused Iran of being behind attempts to infiltrate the Trump presidential campaign and said Tehran has also tried to spy on the Biden campaign, according to a statement released Monday.
The statement, which comes from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, lays bare what cybersecurity experts and national security officials have said for weeks: that Iran is conducting “influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns.”
“Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the U.S. election process,” the statement reads. “It is important to note that this approach is not new.”
The statement comes after several cybersecurity companies released reports that detailed Iran-linked operations, including fake news campaigns and attempts to phish a high-ranking presidential campaign official. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center was first to publicly report on the activity, with further reporting tying those incidents to the Trump campaign.
Last week, Google’s Threat Analysis Group said that hackers linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns.
A spokesperson for the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations called Monday’s statement from the U.S. intelligence community “unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing.”
“As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election,” the spokesperson said. “Should the U.S. government genuinely believe in the validity of its claims, it should furnish us with the pertinent evidence — if any — to which we will respond accordingly.”
The accusations that Iran breached the Trump campaign surfaced after U.S. news outlets were supplied with internal campaign documents, prompting the Republican nominee to point the finger at Iran. Little is known about the material obtained via the breach of the campaign, and so far none of it appears to have been published by the media outlets to whom it was furnished.
No evidence has been made public linking the breach to Iran, but Monday’s statement represents the most authoritative claim yet that it was an operation orchestrated by Tehran.
Last month, government officials described Iran as a “chaos agent” more interested in exploiting U.S. political and social tensions than it is in fostering a specific electoral outcome.
Monday’s statement adds a level of urgency to that description, highlighting what the intelligence community believes is Iran’s goal.
“In addition to these sustained efforts to complicate the ability of any U.S. administration to pursue a foreign policy at odds with Iran’s interests, the [Intelligence community] has previously reported that Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the statement said.
You can read the full statement here.
AJ Vicens contributed to this report.
