The Department of Justice brought charges against three Iranian citizens over allegations they hacked into email accounts belonging to former President Donald Trump‘s campaign and distributed the material to his political opponent and media outlets, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday.
Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Aghamiri, and Yasar Balaghi were charged with hacking violations and charges of supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
The trio “prepared for and engaged in a wide-ranging hacking campaign” from January 2020 to at least this month as part of Iran’s efforts to interfere with U.S. elections and advance the interests of the Guard, prosecutors wrote in the indictment.
Prosecutors said the defendants had numerous targets, including “U.S. Presidential Campaign 1,” a reference to Trump’s campaign based on details in the indictment. The defendants successfully gained unauthorized access to the personal email accounts of a Trump lawyer, an informal Trump political adviser, and a Trump campaign official, according to the indictment.
Jalili, Aghamiri, and Balaghi also accessed personal email accounts of a foreign policy reporter, a former CIA deputy director, and a former Department of Homeland Security adviser, among others, prosecutors said. The prosecutors did not give names of the victims, only descriptions.
The indictment comes after intelligence agencies confirmed in recent statements that Iran was responsible for a recent Trump campaign email hack and that the country also targeted the former campaign of President Joe Biden before he dropped his bid for reelection.
The agencies said Iranian suspects sent some private Trump campaign material to people who worked for Biden’s campaign and media outlets. This activity is now also featured in the indictment against Jalili, Aghamiri, and Balaghi.
In response to the intelligence agencies’ revelations, Trump accused his current opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, of “illegally spying” on him. Harris’s campaign comprises many employees from the former Biden campaign.
“THE FBI CAUGHT IRAN SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GIVING ALL OF THE INFORMATION TO THE KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN,” Trump wrote online on Sept. 18. “THEREFORE SHE AND HER CAMPAIGN WERE ILLEGALLY SPYING ON ME. TO BE KNOWN AS THE IRAN, IRAN, IRAN CASE! WILL KAMALA RESIGN IN DISGRACE FROM POLITICS?”
The Harris campaign said in a statement at the time that “a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt.” An anonymous Harris campaign official told CNN that “the material was not used.”
The intelligence agencies said that the material the hackers sent to the then-Biden associates was unsolicited and that “there is currently no information indicating those recipients replied.”
The matter first came to light on Aug. 10, when multiple media outlets, including Politico and the New York Times, reported that they had recently received private Trump campaign materials from an anonymous source.
The outlets declined to publish the documents but said they included a dossier the Trump campaign compiled as part of its research on vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and a senior campaign official’s communications, the outlets said.
The decision not to publish the information sparked fury from Democrats, who argued that the same outlets now in possession of secret Trump campaign material were quick to publish a trove of hacked emails belonging to former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 after they were anonymously shared on WikiLeaks.
Editors for the outlets who received the hacked Trump material recently told Vanity Fair that they did not publish the contents because it lacked news value.
At the same time that Jalili, Aghamiri, and Balaghi’s indictment was unsealed, the State Department announced it was offering a $10 million reward for anyone with information about them.
The behavior from Iran, a major U.S. adversary, is not new, but the country’s efforts to affect this year’s U.S. elections have become “increasingly aggressive,” the FBI and other intelligence agencies recently said in a statement.
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“Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the agencies said.
Read the indictment below:
