The US justice department unsealed criminal charges on Friday against three Iranian operatives suspected of hacking Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and disseminating stolen information to media organizations.
The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said on Friday afternoon that hackers were trying to undermine Trump’s campaign, as the Republican nominee for president.
He said the department was seeing “increasingly aggressive” Iranian cyber activity in this presidential election cycle.
The Trump campaign disclosed on 10 August that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. Multiple major news organizations that said they were leaked confidential information from inside the Trump campaign, including Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post, declined to publish it.
US intelligence officials subsequently linked Iran to a hack of the Trump election campaign and to an attempted breach of what was previously the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign, before the US president dropped his re-election bid and his vice-president took over the top of the ticket for Democrats.
Officials said the hack-and-dump operation was meant to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and potentially influence the outcome of elections that Iran perceives to be “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests”.
Last week, officials also revealed that the Iranians in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails containing excerpts of the hacked information to people associated with the Biden campaign. None of the recipients replied. The Harris campaign said the emails resembled spam or a phishing attempt and condemned the outreach by the Iranians as “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity”.
The indictment comes at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran as Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel escalate attacks against each other, raising concerns about the prospect of an all-out war, and as US officials say they continue to track physical threats by Iran against a number of people including Trump.
Earlier this week, US intelligence officials briefed Trump about a suspected Iranian plot to kill him, his campaign has said.
The briefing, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), was believed to have focused on a scheme unrelated to two failed domestic assassination attempts against the Republican nominee for president, and came amid the reports suggesting that Iran was conducting an ongoing hack against Trump’s campaign.