The Department of Justice brought charges against three Iranian citizens over allegations they hacked into email accounts belonging to former President Donald Trump‘s campaign and unlawfully distributed the material, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday.
Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Aghamiri, and Yasar Balaghi were charged with hacking violations and charges of supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
The trio “prepared for and engaged in a wide-ranging hacking campaign” from January 2020 to at least this month, prosecutors wrote in the indictment.
The three defendants are alleged to have obtained the Trump campaign material this year. They allegedly sent it to numerous media outlets and to the campaign of Trump’s former opponent, President Joe Biden, before Biden dropped his bid for reelection.
The indictment comes after the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in August that they could confirm Iran was responsible for the Trump campaign hack and that Iran had also targeted Biden’s campaign.
In a second statement, the same intelligence agencies revealed that in late June and early July, the suspects sent some of the material they hacked from the Trump campaign to people who worked for Biden’s former campaign.
The campaign for the current Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, said in a statement that “a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt.” An anonymous Harris campaign official told CNN, “The material was not used.”
The agencies said that the material the hackers sent to the Biden associates was unsolicited and that “there is currently no information indicating those recipients replied.”
The matter came to light on Aug. 10, when multiple media outlets, including Politico and the New York Times, reported that they had recently received private Trump campaign materials from an anonymous source.
The outlets declined to publish the documents but said they included a dossier the Trump campaign compiled as part of its research on vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and a senior campaign official’s communications, the outlets said.
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The FBI, ODNI, and CISA also said that the behavior from Iran, a major U.S. adversary, was not new but that the country’s efforts to affect this year’s U.S. elections had become “increasingly aggressive.”
“Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the agencies said.
