Iran's history of elaborate election interference efforts, before the Trump campaign hack
Iran’s influence efforts using hacked material from the Trump campaign follow what the U.S. says was a series of influence operations in 2020.
On Friday, U.S. authorities accused three Iranian men of stealing and leaking files from former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, the largest “hack and leak” election influence operation since Russia’s breach of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Democratic organizations in 2016.
Iran’s influence efforts using hacked material from the Trump campaign follow what the U.S. says was a series of brazen influence operations in 2020, all authorized by Tehran’s senior leadership. Iran has consistently denied such allegations.
Iran, like China and Russia, constantly creates fake accounts on U.S. social media platforms in attempts to shift Americans’ opinion, U.S. intelligence officials say. It’s unclear that such operations have had much effect.
But Iran’s 2020 election interference efforts stand apart from what have become well-recognized interference patterns, according to an indictment from the Justice Department, Treasury Department sanctions, researchers and media reporting, and comments from current and former U.S. officials. Experts say that the 2020 operations were the first time Iran seriously targeted U.S. elections and that the efforts reflect Iran’s desire to find ways to worsen discord in American society around partisan politics and free elections.
“The thing that runs through both their activities in 2020 and in 2024 is the focus on trying to sow distrust within our political system,” said Brandon Wales, who was the executive director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in 2020 and now is the vice president for cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne, a cybersecurity company.
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