But His Emails!

Trump team's emails spilled. Here's what we know

I did everything right, and they hacked me! | Getty

In a twist of irony so heavy handed you once again have to wonder if God has lost his fastball, the Trump campaign’s emails have spilled out to the press as they decry foreign election interference. This of course echoes Russia’s hacking of the Clinton campaign’s emails in 2016, though in that case Trump was cheering it on.

Just minutes ago, Politico revealed that it was in receipt of emails from an anonymous sender in possession of internal Trump campaign communications. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly blamed the release on Iran, but we don’t yet know if that’s true for reasons I’ll explain momentarily. Here’s what Cheung had to say:

“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process.”

“On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential nominee.”

While it’s certainly possible that Iran is behind the hack, a close look at Microsoft’s report shows that it did not identify which candidate it believed was being targeted. An overview of Microsoft’s report, authored by Clint Watts, a former FBI official and MSNBC contributor who my readers are already familiar with (recall that wrote comic books for the Department of Homeland Security, as I wrote about recently), said on Thursday:

“Today we’re sharing intelligence about activity we’ve been tracking that increasingly points to Iran’s intent to influence this year’s US presidential election. In recent weeks, groups connected with the Iranian government have upped two kinds of activity. First, they’ve laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and begun to activate these campaigns in an apparent effort to stir up controversy or sway voters – especially in swing states. Second, they’ve launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns and help enable them to influence the elections in the future.”

Neither the overview nor the underlying report by Microsoft identifies the Trump campaign specifically as the victim of a hack. The report does, however, mention an attempt in June to hack into a “high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” whose political affiliation is not specified. Per the Microsoft report:

“In June 2024, Mint Sandstorm—a group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit—sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor. The phishing email contained a fake forward with a hyperlink that directs traffic through an actor-controlled domain before redirecting to the listed domain.”

Late last month, the U.S. intelligence community warned that it “has observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive would increase tensions with the United States.” The warning cited Tehran’s use of fake online personas and propaganda mills to spread disinformation, but made no mention of hack-and-dump campaigns of the sort that the Trump campaign is alleging.

None of this is to say, of course, that it isn’t plausible that Iran might be behind this. Former President Trump was famously and theatrically hawkish on Iran. He at one point tweeted out a bizarre image of himself behind the words “SANCTIONS ARE COMING,” a spoof of the TV fantasy series Game of Thrones. So it makes sense that Iran would want to prevent his reelection. But in the media feeding frenzy that’s to come, I think it’s important to remember that we just don’t know what happened yet.

Nonzero chance Iran tweets, “Emails are coming”

If it was Iran, it’ll be hard not to laugh given some of the brazen praise Trump heaped on the hack of his opponent’s emails. Consider these classics:

• “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

• “I love WikiLeaks.”

In any case, I’ve followed the intelligence community’s work on election interference closely, so I’ll be discussing this in my subscriber chat throughout the day, which you can access using the button below. Join us!