Iran Hacked Trump Campaign, U.S. Concludes
Here's how serious it is
The Biden administration on Monday announced that the intelligence community attributes “recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign” to Iran. Not Iran-backed or linked. Iran. Meaning the government of. And “attributes” — intel-speak for that the clues point to this, we think.
The statement, jointly released by three of the growing list of federal agencies that possess a countering foreign influence mission, is light on details but is sure to stoke anxiety about shadowy foreign actors.
The Trump campaign’s announcement early this month that Iran hacked their communications drew swift media comparisons to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, resulting in similarly frantic coverage. Nearly absent from the reporting is a sense of the magnitude of the interference, or how likely it is to actually affect public opinion or the vote. Post-2016, with Washington primed to worry about foreign election interference, no one wants to say it, but Iran’s influence efforts have been a laughingstock. You wouldn’t know that from the reporting, though.
When the Trump campaign on August 10 announced that internal documents being pitched to the media were illegally obtained by “foreign sources hostile to the United States” in an effort to “interfere with the 2024 election,” the media responded as though democracy was in peril. The Washington Post warned that “wider efforts may be underway by foreign powers to disrupt the U.S. presidential election,” citing “intelligence experts.” Axios declared in a headline that “Iran is now the biggest foreign threat to the 2024 elections.” (It’s actually Russia, according to the intelligence community.) I don’t doubt that Iran is trying to influence the election, but what is the impact?
The intelligence community has itself suggested that at least some election interference isn’t significant enough to impact the outcome. These agencies have made a big deal of how closely they’re tracking foreign attempts to influence the election, by working with its new Foreign Malign Influence Center and by releasing periodic reports about general foreign threats to election security. The intelligence community has also vowed to release public warnings about specific incidents, but under one condition: that the attempted election interference was serious enough that it “could affect the election outcome.”
There are other signs the intelligence community questions the impact of foreign influence activities. In June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sought contractors that could help it understand how to measure “impact” and “effect” of what it calls “foreign malign influence,” which includes election interference.
In other words, much election interference is routine and not significant enough to affect the outcome. There’s no evidence so far that the hack of Trump’s campaign is any different.
Former President Trump himself, never one to miss a chance to say how unfairly he’s being treated, was uncharacteristically sanguine about the incident. Here’s what he said:
“We were just informed by Microsoft Corporation that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do! They were only able to get publicly available information but, nevertheless, they shouldn’t be doing anything of this nature. Iran and others will stop at nothing, because our Government is Weak and Ineffective, but it won’t be for long.”
Publicly available information! Of course, Trump might be lying, and we still don’t know whether sensitive documents were indeed stolen, but if it is all PAI, as the intelligence people call it, that’s stuff an intelligent 12-year-old could probably find. This is what sends the media scrambling to declare that our democracy is under assault?
What all of this says to me is that the media’s urgency dial is stuck on the max setting when what is needed is an effort to match the news to the severity of the incident. There is news of hacks every day (just this week it was reported that every social security number in America has been compromised!). It seems more that this is a fact of modern life. Trying to gain influence is routine. Foreign governments are trying to influence our elections, even overtly by commenting on U.S. politics and development. But let’s be real: there’s absolutely no evidence that any entity or effort has or can succeed in swinging a presidential election. That hasn’t even been demonstrated for the 2016 election, the most striking example we have.
A detailed 2022 study by the Pentagon-backed Rand Corporation concluded Russia’s disinformation efforts on social media were “neither well organized nor especially well resourced (contrary to some implications in popular media),” and that the impact on the West has been “uncertain.” This despite the study’s assessment that Russia’s efforts were “wide reaching” — something that cannot be said of Iran’s efforts, at least as far as we know. The hack of the Trump campaign is said to have turned up the campaign’s open-source research on potential vulnerabilities of Trump’s now-running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, and Sen. Marco Rubio, who was a contender for Vice Presidential nominee. Not exactly the family jewels.
“They’re kind of incompetent; if they really wanted to make a good hack-and-leak operation, they could have done much better,” Simin Kargar, a senior nonresident fellow studying Middle Eastern influence operations at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said of the hack. “This is very much in line with Iranian actors.”
In March of 2021, the Biden administration took the unusual step of declassifying an intelligence community assessment on foreign threats to the 2020 elections. Such assessments draw on classified intelligence possessed by every intelligence agency in the federal government. In other words, they dig through everything from intercepts of phone calls to human informant reporting. From that firehose of intelligence, here are the two Iranian influence operations the public assessment mentioned:
“In a highly targeted operation, Iranian cyber actors sent threatening, spoofed emails purporting to be from the Proud Boys group to Democratic voters in multiple US states, demanding that the individuals change their party affiliation and vote to reelect former President Trump. The same actors also produced and disseminated a video intending to demonstrate alleged voter fraud.”
“Since early 2020, Iranian actors created social media accounts that targeted the United States and published over 1,000 pieces of online content on the United States, though US social media companies subsequently removed many. Tehran expanded the number of its inauthentic social media accounts to at least several thousand and boosted the activity of existing accounts, some of which dated back to 2012.”
I think Trump put it best — Never a nice thing to do! But are Iranians pretending to be Proud Boys (which sounds like an old Crank Yankers skit) really a serious threat to the election? If it is, the Biden administration’s joint statement certainly didn’t say so. And if the Iranian attempts at influence aren’t an actual threat, the media needs to approach this more soberly because the real threat to election integrity is half of the country not believing the results.
The great paradox of election security is that the more the news media and the government draws attention to the threats, the more likely some are to question the legitimacy of the outcome. The intelligence community assessment I just mentioned made this clear in language that could easily describe the hack of the Trump campaign (emphasis added):
“Key Judgment 3: We assess that Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects — though without directly promoting his rivals — undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US. We assess that Supreme Leader Khamenei authorized the campaign and Iran’s military and intelligence services implemented it using overt and covert messaging and cyber operations.”
In other words, in 2021, Iran’s goal wasn’t just to undermine Trump, but to undermine Americans’ confidence in elections. That threat is internal. If we aren’t careful about accurately characterizing the effectiveness of Iran’s current influence campaign, “Stop the Steal” could happen again.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
I’ve never quite managed to understand why other countries’ attempting to get involved in US elections is terrible, but US meddling, interfering, overturning, or flat out rejecting elections in other countries is totally fine.
And if it’s Israel buying politicians, or seeking to unseat politicians whose policies are insufficiently pro-Israel, then apparently our elections are fair game. How do these contradictory positions not cause people to demand answers of their elected officials? Just asking.
... and 52 current and former CIA intelligence executives signed a letter claiming the same... ;-))