Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort on August 8, 2024, in Palm Beach, Florida.
Joe Rydell | Getty Images
The Trump campaign said Saturday that foreign hackers had breached its systems and gained access to internal communications.
Politico began receiving leaked campaign documents from an anonymous source on July 22, the news agency reported Saturday. Politico was the first to report the campaign’s admission of the hack.
“These documents were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States, with the intent of interfering in the 2024 election and sowing chaos throughout our democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung said in a statement.
CNBC was unable to independently verify the source of the hack.
The Trump campaign statement suggested that Iranian hackers were behind the breach, but provided no direct evidence to support that claim.
Instead, Cheung cited a Microsoft report dated Friday warning that Iranian hackers had launched several different attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election, including sending a phishing email in June to a senior campaign official from a compromised account of a senior adviser.
Microsoft declined to comment further on whether the Trump campaign was a target of the Iranian hacking plot.
Earlier this summer, U.S. officials became aware of an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump. Officials learned of the plot in the weeks before the attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July, though no connection between the shooter and Iran has yet been established.
Politico reported that it began receiving Trump campaign documents from an anonymous email account identified only as “Robert.” Among the documents was a 271-page dossier on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, as well as another on Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was on the shortlist for vice presidential running mate.
When Politico asked the anonymous source how they obtained the documents, the person reportedly said: “I suggest you don’t be curious about where you got them. Any answer to that question would put me at risk and legally prevent you from publishing them.”
Politico declined to provide additional comment on whether it is working with the Trump campaign and law enforcement agencies to investigate the hack.
The campaign hack comes as the FBI has issued warnings about cybersecurity threats around the world, particularly those targeting the results of the US election.
“We should certainly expect that foreign actors will try to influence and interfere,” Jane Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said at a congressional hearing in January, referring to the 2024 election. “To be very clear, Americans should have confidence in the integrity of our election infrastructure because of the tremendous amount of work that has been done.”
