The US Justice Department is preparing criminal charges in connection with an Iranian hack that targeted former President Donald Trump's presidential campaign, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday, according to The Associated Press.
It was not immediately clear when the charges might be announced or whom precisely they will target, but they would be the result of an FBI investigation into an intrusion that investigators across multiple agencies quickly linked to an Iranian effort to influence this year's US presidential election.
The US government recently concluded that the Iranian government is behind a hack and leak operation targeting Trump’s presidential campaign and also attempted to target the Biden-Harris campaign.
Investigators believe the suspected Iranian hackers in June breached the personal email account of longtime Trump ally and political operative Roger Stone, and then used that email account to try to break into the account of a senior Trump campaign official.
The Trump campaign disclosed on August 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign.
The FBI, which announced it was probing the hacking in August, studied email records provided by Microsoft, Google and AOL and has spoken to Trump campaign personnel to determine who was responsible for the hack and who was responsible for the leak, sources said.
Attribution to the hack was fairly straightforward: The hackers’ techniques matched those of a notorious group affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).