Charges expected in Iranian hack of Trump campaign: Sources
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(WASHINGTON) — Federal prosecutors are expected to file criminal charges in connection with the alleged hack of emails from members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News.
The charges in connection with the hack, which the U.S. government has attributed to Iran, could be filed as soon as next week, the sources said.
The Iranians allegedly gained access to data and files taken from the email accounts of Trump advisers, which included internal documents used to vet Trump’s perspective running mate, the sources said.
The Trump campaign, as victims, would be notified of any criminal charges that happen, as is standard Department of Justice practice.
The Washington Post first reported charges were expected.
The Trump campaign did not immediately comment.
Last month, the Trump campaign cited a report published by Microsoft in claiming they were hacked. Though it did not specifically name Trump’s campaign, Microsoft’s statement said, “In June 2024, Mint Sandstorm — a group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit — 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 phishing email contained a fake forward with a hyperlink that directs traffic through an actor-controlled domain before redirecting to the listed domain.”
The IRGC is a branch of the Iranian armed forces.
Federal officials have been dealing with increased hacking activity around the 2024 election. A week after Microsoft’s statement, Google said a hacking group associated with Iran targeted the personal email accounts of “roughly a dozen” people associated with the Trump and Joe Biden campaigns, including current and former U.S. government officials.
“In May and June, APT42 targets included the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen individuals affiliated with President Biden and with former President Trump, including current and former officials in the U.S. government and individuals associated with the respective campaigns. We blocked numerous APT42 attempts to log in to the personal email accounts of targeted individuals,” the report said.
The group, APT42, is also associated with the IRGC, according to Google.
Meta has also issued warnings about hacking and disinformation during the campaign, releasing a report last month that identified Russia and Iran has the top two threats.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — In the tumultuous weeks following the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump and his allies scrambled to challenge his election loss with a flurry of lawsuits.
Their efforts failed, with judges across the country condemning their scattershot claims. But as Election Day 2024 approaches, Trump and the Republican National Committee have adopted what they say is a more aggressive pre-election legal strategy.
“Trump learned his lesson from 2020, and he has a really good legal team at the campaign and the RNC,” said Mike Davis, a lawyer and Trump ally who has been floated for a potential appointment in a Trump administration. “We are so much better prepared.”
Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign announced what they described as an “historic” “election integrity” program with the mission of deploying 100,000 volunteers and attorneys in battleground states, and implementing what they called a “proactive litigation effort.”
According to a Republican National Committee official, in recent months the program has engaged in over 130 election lawsuits across 26 states, and recruited approximately 5,000 volunteer attorneys who are ready to be activated on Election Day.
Democrats, too, have taken on an offensive posture. They have aggressively pushed back in the courts, intervening in “dozens of baseless Republican lawsuits to debunk their lies and defeat them in court,” according to an internal memo prepared by Vice President Kamala Harris’ chief attorney, Dana Remus.
“We know how to defeat Trump’s tactics,” said the memo, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News.
Some election experts have also expressed concern about the GOP-led legal strategy, accusing some Republicans of peddling lies and seeking to create confusion about voting laws in order to sow chaos should Trump lose the election.
Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News that the 2024 election has become “both the disinformation and the litigation election.”
“We’re seeing a record number of lawsuits filed before the election — nearly every day — in a seemingly coordinated push to use the legitimacy of the courts to lay the groundwork for discrediting an unfavorable result,” Weiser said. “The lawsuits are not about getting legal relief, but about spreading conspiracy theories.”
Following the 2020 election, Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits challenging the election’s outcome based on allegations of fraud, despite no evidence of widespread fraud that could have impacted the result. Nearly every single lawsuit was rejected, thrown out, or withdrawn— including two denials from the Supreme Court. In some cases, judges dismissed the lawsuits while expressing frustration over the lack of evidence, and some attorneys who publicly represented the president have since been disbarred, faced defamation claims, or been criminally charged.
Allies of the former president say that this time, they’re determined to be more aggressive in the lead-up to Election Day.
“If you wait till after the election to take legal action, you’re not going to get a judge to side with you,” Davis said. “You need to get injunctions ahead of time on signature verification and other issues, because if you wait till after the election, good luck.”
Some issues have already begun bubbling up in one of the most hotly contested states: Arizona. The Arizona Republican Party recently announced that it had brought in attorney and Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon to take over its election integrity operation.
Dhillon’s name was announced following the resignation of Kory Langhofer, who had served as chief legal counsel for the Arizona operation until the first week of October.
Sources familiar with the situation tell ABC News that Langhofer had long planned to hand over the reins. The move, however, reflects what sources said is a broader concern among some Republican lawyers in Arizona who have grown weary about the party’s legal strategies in the state, with some involved already having to halt others from bringing frivolous legal complaints.
Republicans in Arizona have set up a team tasked with receiving and sorting through reported election issues from around the state, which one source familiar with the operation described as a “daily turn of frivolous problems.”
On election night, the RNC is planning to have volunteer attorneys help staff a hotline where poll watchers and others on the ground can report issues, the RNC official said. In some states, there will be lawyers on the ground as well. Already, staff is on the ground in 18 states to handle the “election integrity” effort, the RNC official said.
Responding to critics, the RNC’s Election Integrity communications director Claire Zunk said their “unprecedented election integrity operation is committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote” and that they will “continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans.”
Republicans’ efforts this year come after the RNC in 2018 was released from its decadeslong consent decree that had blocked it engaging in “ballot security” measures since the early 1980s.
The Harris campaign, meantime, has marshaled a centralized legal team of over half a dozen lawyers to handle election claims.
“The 2024 presidential election is already the most litigated in American history,” according to the internal Harris campaign memo, “but we are also the most prepared campaign in history for what we face.”
The group is led by Dana Remus, who provides overall strategic direction and leads the campaign’s legal election protection programs. Lawyers including Seth Waxman of Wilmer Hale, Don Verrilli of Munger, Tolles & Olson, and John Devaney of Perkins Coie are litigating cases and working with local counsel in battleground states. Lawyers including Bob Bauer and Marc Elias are also advising the team.
It’s part of an effort that lawyers from the Harris campaign told ABC News they’ve been building up for years, since President Joe Biden took office in 2021 and they immediately began planning for the next cycle. One of the first things that was done when Biden launched his reelection effort in 2023, the lawyers said, was to call a meeting to start putting together the post-election plan.
“We’ve brainstormed the worst scenarios, and are ready to go if we see them,” said Maury Riggan, the general counsel for the campaign, in an interview with ABC News.
“The veteran lawyers who fought and won in 2020 have been preparing for dozens of scenarios, drafting thousands of pages of legal briefs, and working directly with hundreds of lawyers and experts on the ground in battleground states so we are ready for whatever the other side throws our way,” the Harris campaign’s internal memo said.
Together, the Democratic National Committee, with support from the Harris campaign, is involved in 35 lawsuits around the country, lawyers with the Harris campaign told ABC News.
Earlier this month, for example, the DNC, filed a lawsuit in Georgia after the state’s pro-Trump State Election Board passed a series of controversial voting rules over the objection of some of the highest Republican elections officials in the state.
The Democrats won the suit last week after a judge struck down a controversial “hand count” rule that would have required election workers to hand count the ballots on election night — a process they said would invite “chaos” on election night and beyond. Six other rules were struck down as well.
“From the beginning, this rule was an effort to delay election results to sow doubt in the outcome, and our democracy is stronger thanks to this decision to block it,” said a joint statement from the Harris campaign, the DNC, and Georgia Democrats. “We will continue fighting to ensure that voters can cast their ballot knowing it will count.”
The RNC has appealed the decision, with RNC Chairman Michael Whatley saying the judge “exemplified the very worst of judicial activism.”
The Democrats’ aggressive legal posture has trickled down to the individual states. In the battleground state of Nevada, the Democrat secretary of state said his office has started pre-drafting legal filings with his attorney general to try to anticipate any issues that may come up — a process he likened to a game of “Mad Libs.”
“You know the county, you fill in the county name, you fill in the date, you fill in the facts,” said Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar in an interview with ABC News’ Terry Moran. “And you file that thing as soon as you can before the Nevada Supreme Court.”
According to Marc Elias, a prominent election litigation lawyer brought on by the Harris campaign this cycle, there have been almost 180 election lawsuits filed around the country this year — a number he said is “a record for the most new cases ever filed in a single year.”
Active litigation is pending in 39 states, Elias said in a recent post on X, with prominent battleground states seeing the most activity. Georgia leads the way with 23 lawsuits, followed by Pennsylvania with 16.
(NEW YORK) — Former President Barack Obama will hit the campaign trail for Vice President Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz starting next Thursday, Oct. 10, through election day, according to a senior campaign official.
The first stop will be in Pennsylvania in the Pittsburgh area before Obama embarks on a campaign blitz across the battleground states in the final 27 days.
Obama held a Los Angeles fundraiser for Harris in September and — along with former first lady Michelle Obama — gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Meanwhile, Harris recently enlisted the help of former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Thursday at a rally in Wisconsin.
Cheney, the former co-chair of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, laid out former President Donald Trump’s actions on that day before telling the crowd, “I don’t care if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent. That is depravity, and we must never become numb to it. Any person who would do these things can never be trusted with power again.”
Cheney is among a handful of prominent Republicans, including her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have pledged to support Harris’ bid, but her endorsement, as one of former President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics within the party, is one that Harris hopes to leverage in crucial states like Wisconsin, whose margins are expected to be razor thin.
In August, Obama delivered the closing speech on night two of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told delegates. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.”
Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, speaks during an event at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre September 20, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris will define her economic views as “pragmatic” during a policy speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday as her team thinks she is making up ground against former President Donald Trump on the economy, a senior campaign official said.
In the speech, Harris plans to tell voters that “as a capitalist she understands the limitations of government” and that the government must “work in partnership with the private sector and entrepreneurs,” according to the senior official, granted anonymity to preview Harris’ speech. The official notes Harris will make clear “she is unafraid to hold bad actors accountable if she needs to.”
Harris is also expected to evoke former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal agenda brought America back from a steep economic downturn during the Great Depression, in her remarks, according to another senior campaign official.
The vice president will also argue that her economic philosophy is “rooted in her middle-class upbringing” and contrast that with Trump’s “gilded path to wealth,” as part of a larger values argument, the senior official said.
“For Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers. Not those who build them. Not those who wire them. Not those who mop the floors,” Harris is prepared to say Wednesday.
In drawing that comparison, Harris will highlight the “pressures of making ends meet” that she’ll say her mother experienced trying to balance a budget late at night at the kitchen table.
The remarks, to be delivered at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, comes as Harris and her advisers see an opening to erode Trump’s edge on the economy in voters’ eyes as many Americans get to know the vice president, a senior official said.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the ABC News presidential debate earlier this month found that the economy was the top issue for voters, with 91% saying it was an important issue for them. In that poll, voters trusted Trump to do a better job handling the economy than Harris by 7-point margin. A recent NBC News poll out Sunday showed Trump led Harris in dealing with the economy by a 9-point spread.
Harris has made the economy and the cost of living a focal point of her campaign. In recent weeks, Harris has rolled out proposals to give first time homebuyers $25,000 down payment assistance for first time homebuyers, increasing the small businesses start up tax credit tenfold to $50,000, and a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life.
