Trump says Microsoft told him Iran was behind campaign hack

Republican nominee Donald Trump said on Saturday that he was informed by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) that one of his campaign websites was hacked by the Iranian government, but added that the hackers were only able to gain “publicly available information.”

“Nevertheless, they shouldn’t be doing anything of this nature,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Never a nice thing to do!”

Politico had earlier reported that it had begun receiving emails in July from an anonymous source with documents from inside Trump’s operation, including a report about vice president pick JD Vance’s “potential vulnerabilities.”

“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,” said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung in a statement to Bloomberg.

In response to a Seeking Alpha request for comment, Microsoft (MSFT) pointed to its blog post and report detailing Iran’s efforts to target U.S. elections.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) report stated that in June 2024, a group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps 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 report did not name the campaign.

The United States had killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, in January 2020 – under the orders of then President Donald Trump.