The Justice Department unsealed criminal charges Friday against three Iranian operatives suspected of hacking Donald Trump's presidential campaign and disseminating stolen information to media organizations.
The three accused hackers were employed by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and their operation also targeted a broad swath of targets, including government officials, members of the media and non-governmental organizations, the Justice Department said.
The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. Multiple major news organizations that said they were leaked confidential information from inside the Trump campaign, including Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post, declined to publish it.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the United States is taking an all-of-government approach to ensure November's election is free from foreign interference.
"The intelligence community and particularly the Office of Director of National Intelligence, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have been providing updates," Garland said.
Those updates have been issued at shorter intervals as the election approaches.
"We are working around the clock to ensure that we get the quickest information about such an attempt and that we are able to alert the American public in as close to real time as possible," he said. "We will continue, between all the agencies and the government, to discover, disrupt and deter this kind of activity."
U.S. intelligence officials have linked Iran to a hack of the Trump campaign and to an attempted breach of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign. They said the hack-and-dump operation was meant to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and potentially influence the outcome of elections that Iran perceives to be “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests.”
Last week, officials also revealed that the Iranians in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails containing excerpts of the hacked information to people associated with the Biden campaign. None of the recipients replied. The Harris campaign said the emails resembled spam or a phishing attempt and condemned the outreach to the Iranians as “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.”
The indictment comes at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran as Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel escalate attacks against each other, raising concerns about the prospect of an all-out war, and as U.S. officials say they continue to track physical threats by Iran against a number of officials including Trump.