Donald Trump behind the American flag. NBC News/AP.
The US intel community has confirmed that Iran was responsible for the hack that targeted the Trump campaign and also targeted the Biden and Harris campaigns. NBC News. Iran was said to have targeted both campaigns with social engineering to breech their security in an effort to influence the election. They were successful in doing so with the Trump campaign but no damaging information was found and media companies did not publish the materials, which mostly related to vetting material to VP candidate JD Vance. It is unclear if they were able to breach the Biden and Harris campaigns though both campaigns denied Iran had. Iran says they had nothing to do with the hacks and say that they have no intent to interfere with the 2024 election. However, Iran has been blamed for election interference before, most notably in 2020 when they launched a false flag operation threatening Democrats while blaming the Proud Boys.
I originally wrote about the Trump campaign blaming Iran for the hack here.
My Comment:
This is a fairly disturbing development from the intel community but I would be remiss to not point out that the IC has falsely accused countries of interfering with elections before. They said that Russia colluded with Donald Trump to win in 2016 and that was false, all Russia did was make a few spam profiles on social media. To say that I don't trust them is an understatement.
But I am leaning on this being real. Certainly, both campaigns are acting like it is and so is the media, so it's not like it's just the intel community. And Iran has the motive, means and opportunity to do so. It's possible that it was not a state actor but it sure seems like it is.
What is surprising that the Harris campaign was targeted as well. It's very clear that Iran prefers her to Donald Trump, but I think it makes sense that they would want any advantage they can over any of the candidates. And they want to cause chaos in the United States. Hacking damaging information from either campaign and releasing it would do so.
I was surprised that Iran was responsible for a false-flag attack against the Proud Boys and Donald Trump. They threatened Democrats and then tried to blame it on the Proud Boys and link it to Trump. It didn't work because I don't even remember hearing about it in 2020, but it was clear that they were trying to get Biden into office.
This operation appears to have failed as well. They were able to breach the Trump campaign with a spearfishing campaign (supposedly it was Rodger Stone, but that isn't confirmed) so this wasn't very complex stuff. But they found nothing even remotely intresting. It was just public info about JD Vance that was already out there.
I think that's why the US Media skipped out on publishing this hacked material. It wasn't about doing the "right thing" it was about looking like they were doing so. I have no doubt that if there had been damaging things in these e-mails they would have been released but since those e-mails were a nothingburger and, if anything, shows that there isn't much dirt in the Trump campaign, they didn't bother.
So will Iran affect the election? It depends. I wouldn't doubt that Iran has links to the antifa/pro-Hamas types currently rioting at the DNC convention, they want to cause chaos and the best thing that could happen for Iran is a civil conflict in the United States. Iran probably wants to deal with Israel without the United States interfering and if the US falls into chaos that would be a win.
But the big problem is that they probably can't do much to actually affect the election. Indeed, the one thing they could do, a major strike on Israel, might not be on the table anymore. But these two bit hacking attempts? It's only going to affect things if they actually get something damaging and so far they have failed.
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