Iran hacked Trump's campaign information, tried to send to Democrats: US intelligence

In a case of election interference attempt, Iran hacked electronic data from Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign and sent it to people associated with President Joe Biden, US intelligence agencies said.

Reacting to the report, Trump said on Wednesday, 18 September, "This is election interference" by a foreign country. Speaking at a rally in this New York suburb, he asserted that Iran had carried out the hack to help the Kamala Harris campaign.

Officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement.

They said that since June excerpts of "stolen, non-public material" material from Trump's campaign were sent to people associated with the campaign of Biden before he withdrew from the race, and to news media.

They said that the "malicious cyber activity" was part of Iran's attempt to "stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process".

According to them, the Biden campaign did not respond to the overtures and a Harris spokesperson said that some individuals were targetted on their emails but they were seen as "spam or phishing attempts".

"We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in US elections including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity," the spokesperson said.

The Washington Post reported in August that they had received such material and that the FBI was investigating it.

The Trump campaign acknowledged at that time that it had been hacked and the Republican candidate immediately blamed Iran.

According to reports, Iranian hackers gained access to the email account of a Trump adviser, Roger Stone, and through it infiltrated other accounts. Trump said that during his last election run, Democrats had screamed interference by Russia and claimed the laptop belonging to Biden’s son Hunter with incriminating information was a Moscow plant.

But after inquiries costing millions of dollars, they could not prove that there was any Russian collusion and the laptop was proved to be genuine, he said.

Iran has a special animus towards Trump because he withdrew the US from an international agreement with Iran to curtail its nuclear arms activity in return for loosening sanctions.