Iranian operatives charged in the US with hacking Donald Trump's presidential campaign

WASHINGTON (AP) — Three Iranian operatives have been charged with hacking Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as part of what the Justice Department says was a sweeping effort to undermine the former president and erode confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

The action, coupled with sanctions and rewards for information leading to the accused hackers' capture, is the latest U.S. government effort to call out what’s seen as Iran’s attempts to interfere in the election by damaging Trump and sowing general chaos. It comes as Iran has also been accused of threatening the lives of Trump and former officials and as US-Iran relations remain especially tense, with Israel fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The three accused hackers were employed by Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which the U.S. government has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Since 2020, their operation has sought to compromise email accounts of a broad swath of targets, which in addition to the Trump campaign also includes a former ambassador to Israel, a former CIA deputy director, officials at the State and Defense departments, a former U.S. homeland security adviser and journalists, according to the indictment.

In May, prosecutors say, the defendants began trying to penetrate the Trump campaign, successfully breaking into the email accounts of campaign officials and other Trump allies. They then sought to “weaponize” the stolen campaign material by spreading it to media organizations and people associated with President Joe Biden's campaign in what's familiarly known as a “hack-and-leak” operation.

“The defendants’ own words make clear that they were attempting to undermine former President Trump’s campaign in advance of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We know that Iran is continuing with its brazen efforts to stoke discord, erode confidence in the U.S. electoral process and advance its malign activities,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference Friday announcing the charges.

U.S. intelligence officials have said Iran opposes Trump’s reelection, seeing him as more likely to increase tension between Washington and Tehran. Trump’s administration ended a nuclear deal with Iran, reimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, an act that prompted Iran’s leaders to vow revenge.

Trump’s campaign said earlier this week that it had been briefed by U.S. officials on “real and specific” Iranian assassination threats, though one official told The Associated Press that the briefing had been requested by the campaign and did not include any suggestion of a new threat against Trump.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations last month denied the hacking allegations as “unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing,” saying that Iran had neither the motive nor intention to interfere with the election. It challenged the U.S. to provide evidence and said if the U.S. does so, “we will respond accordingly.”

The U.S. government has sought this year across multiple agencies to aggressively call out election interference and foreign influence operations — a stark turnabout from the government’s response in 2016, when Obama administration officials were criticized for not being forthcoming about the Russian interference they were seeing on Trump’s behalf as he ran against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The Treasury Department issued sanctions Friday related to the hacking and the State Department offered rewards of up to $10 million for information leading to the arrests of the defendants, who remain in Iran.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a video statement that the FBI has been working to publicly condemn Iran's “aggressive behavior,” including a plot to murder a journalist in New York City and a ransomware attack targeting a children's hospital.

Even with the recent focus on Iran, U.S. officials have said Russia remains the primary threat to the elections.

The Justice Department earlier this month charged two employees of RT, the Russian-state media organization, with covertly funding a Tennessee-based content creation company with nearly $10 million to publish English-language videos on social media platforms favorable to Russia's interests and agenda, and also seized dozens of internet domains that officials said were used to spread propaganda.

The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been breached and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents.

Multiple major news organizations that said they were leaked confidential information from inside the Trump campaign, including Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post, declined to publish it.

U.S. intelligence officials subsequently publicly blamed Iran for that hack and for an attempted breach of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign.

They have said the hack-and-dump operation was meant to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and potentially influence the outcome of elections that Iran perceives to be “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests."

Among the tactics the accused hackers used, the indictment said, is impersonating U.S. officials and creating fake email personas to try to dupe their victims.

Politico has reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — passed along what appeared to be a research dossier that the campaign had apparently done on the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated Feb. 23, almost five months before Trump selected Vance as his running mate.

Last week, officials also revealed that the Iranians in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails containing excerpts of the hacked information to people associated with the Biden campaign. None of the recipients replied. The Harris campaign said the emails resembled spam or a phishing attempt and condemned the outreach by the Iranians as “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.”

One of the emails was sent June 27, the date of the Biden-Trump debate, when a halting performance by the president laid the groundwork for his announcement weeks later that he would not seek reelection. An email offering the stolen information, according to the indictment, stated that the debate was likely to be Biden's “last chance” in the race.

The author stated negative feelings for Trump and wrote, “So I'm going to pass some materials along to you that would be useful to defeat him.”

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Mint Hill, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Nell Redmond)

This image provided by the FBI shows three accused hackers, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri, Yasar Balaghi and Masoud Jalili, who were employed by Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, as the Justice Department unsealed criminal charges Friday, Sept. 27, 2024, against the three Iranian operatives suspected of hacking former President Donald Trump's campaign and disseminating stolen information to media organizations. (FBI via AP)

Attorney General Merrick Garland arrives for a news conference as the Justice Department announced criminal charges against Iranian operatives suspected of hacking Donald Trump's presidential campaign and disseminating stolen information to media organizations, at the Justice Department in Washington, Friday, Sept. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Attorney General Merrick Garland, flanked by Matt Graves, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, left, and Ronald Davis, director of the United States Marshals Service, holds a news conference as the Justice Department announced criminal charges against Iranian operatives suspected of hacking Donald Trump's presidential campaign and disseminating stolen information to media organizations, at the Justice Department in Washington, Friday, Sept. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. announced an agreement with the Iraqi government Friday to wrap up the military mission in Iraq of an American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group by next year, with U.S. troops departing some bases that they have long occupied during a two-decade-long military presence in the country.

But the Biden administration refused to provide details on how many of the approximately 2,500 U.S. troops still serving in Iraq will remain there or acknowledge it will mark a full withdrawal from the country.

“I think it’s fair to say that, you know, our footprint is going to be changing within the country,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Friday without providing specifics.

The announcement comes at a particularly contentious time for the Middle East, with escalating conflict between Israel and two Iranian-backed militant groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — threatening a broader regional war. Bases housing U.S. forces and contractors have been regularly targeted by Iran-backed militias over the last several years, and those attacks intensified late last year and early this spring after the Israel-Hamas war broke out nearly a year ago.

For years, Iraqi officials have periodically called for a withdrawal of coalition forces, and formal talks to wind down the U.S. presence in the country have been going on for months.

U.S. officials who briefed reporters Friday said the agreement will bring about a two-phase transition in the troops assigned to Iraq that began this month. In the first phase, which runs through September 2025, the coalition mission against ISIS will end and forces will leave some longstanding bases.

Following the November election, American forces will start departing from Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq and from Baghdad International Airport, according to Iraqi government officials who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Those forces will be moved to Hareer base in Erbil, in northern Iraq's Kurdistan region.

In the second phase, the U.S. will continue to operate in some fashion from Iraq through 2026 to support counter-ISIS operations in Syria, a senior Biden administration official and a senior defense official said on the condition of anonymity on a call with reporters to provide details ahead of the announcement.

Ultimately, the U.S. military mission would transition to a bilateral security relationship, the U.S. officials said, but they did not indicate what that might mean for the number of American troops who remain in Iraq in the future.

The Iraqi officials said some American troops may stay at Hareer base after 2026 because the Kurdistan regional government would like them to stay.

“We have taken an important step in resolving the issue of the international coalition to fight ISIS,” Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani said in a speech this month. He noted “the government’s belief in the capabilities of our security forces that defeated the remnants of ISIS.”

The continued presence of U.S. troops has been a political vulnerability for Sudani, whose government is under increased influence from Iran. Iraq has long struggled to balance its ties with the U.S. and Iran, both allies of the Iraqi government but regional archenemies.

“We thank the government for its position to expel the international coalition forces,” Qais Khazali, founder of Asaib Ahl al-Haq — an Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militia that has conducted attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq — said last week.

But critics caution that this year’s surge of ISIS attacks in Syria across the desert border from Iraq suggest the drawdown in Iraq is a “really significant cause for concern,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute research center in Washington.

The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq isn’t because ISIS has disappeared, Lister said. “The withdrawal is because there’s a significant proportion of the policy-making community in Baghdad that doesn’t want American troops on Iraqi soil.”

The agreement marks the third time in the last two decades that the U.S. has announced a formal transition of the military's role there.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003 in what it called a massive “shock and awe” bombing campaign that lit up the skies, laid waste to large sections of the country and paved the way for American ground troops to converge on Baghdad. The invasion was based on what turned out to be faulty claims that Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons never materialized.

The U.S. presence grew to more than 170,000 troops at the peak of counterinsurgency operations in 2007. The Obama administration negotiated the drawdown of forces, and in December 2011, the final combat troops departed, leaving only a small number of military personnel behind to staff an office of security assistance and a detachment of Marines to guard the embassy compound.

In 2014, the rise of the Islamic State group and its rapid capture of a wide swath across Iraq and Syria brought U.S. and partner nation forces back at the invitation of the Iraqi government to help rebuild and retrain police and military units that had fallen apart and fled.

After ISIS lost its hold on the territory it once claimed, coalition military operations ended in 2021. An enduring U.S. presence of about 2,500 troops stayed in Iraq to maintain training and conduct partnered counter-ISIS operations with Iraq's military.

In the years since, the U.S. has maintained that presence to pressure Iranian-backed militias active in Iraq and Syria. The presence of American forces in Iraq also makes it more difficult for Iran to move weapons across Iraq and Syria into Lebanon, for use by its proxies, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, against Israel.

—-

AP writer Ellen Knickmeyer contributed from Washington.

FILE - Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani poses for a photo at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Feb. 17, 2024. (Sven Hoppe/DPA via AP, Pool, File)