Iranian hackers sent unsolicited information they stole from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to people who were affiliated with Joe Biden’s campaign over the summer, federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement that in late June and early July, Iranian malicious cyber actors “sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails.”
There is no indication that Biden’s staff ever replied, the statement says.
A spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said that “a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails.”
“We have cooperated with the appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation,” said Morgan Finkelstein, national security spokesperson for the Harris campaign.
“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt. We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.”
CNN previously reported that Iranian government-backed hackers stole internal Trump campaign documents and shared them with news organizations. The law enforcement statement Wednesday said that the hackers’ efforts to send information to US media outlets have continued.
The hack is one of several efforts by the Iranian government attempting to “stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process,” the statement said. Law enforcement officials have previously said that those efforts also included an unsuccessful attempt to hack the Biden-Harris campaign.
Beginning on July 22, Politico reported, it had received emails that contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a research dossier the campaign had put together on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
The New York Times and The Washington Post later reported that they, too, had been sent a similar cache, including a 271-page document on Vance dated February 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” that the outlets said was based on publicly available information.
The Iranian hackers did breach the email account of longtime Trump ally Roger Stone to target campaign staff in June, CNN has reported. US officials believe the hackers work for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Investigators believe the suspected Iranian hackers breached Stone’s account and then used that email account to try to break into the account of a senior Trump campaign official as part of a persistent effort to access campaign networks.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.