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WASHINGTON — US officials believe Chinese government-linked hackers targeted Eric Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s call and text data as the scale of a sweeping cyber-espionage campaign targeting senior figures in both the Republican and Democratic parties comes into focus just days before the US election, with dozens of people believed to be impacted, three people familiar with the matter told CNN.
Former President Donald Trump’s son and son-in-law join a growing list of top political figures whose phone communications US officials believe were targeted by the elite Chinese hacking team. Other targets include Trump himself, his running mate JD Vance and people affiliated with the Harris-Walz campaign, CNN previously reported. The hackers also targeted prominent Democrats including the staff of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, another source briefed on the matter told CNN.
The scope of the hack is “way worse than the public knows” and officials are still sifting through the intrusions to determine the impact, another source familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
In some cases, the hackers may have had access to the call and text data of their targets for many months, the two sources said. The FBI has been notifying those whose phone data was targeted.
The New York Times was first to report that Eric Trump and Kushner had been targeted.
US officials investigating the hacking campaign, which came via intrusions at US telecom firms AT&T, Lumen and Verizon, consider it to be among the most concerning national security-related hacks in recent memory and more serious than initial press reports suggested.
And the timing of the revelations means the FBI is carrying out a high-stakes and delicate investigation into hacking aimed at both the Trump and Harris campaigns days from a hugely consequential election.
The hackers do not appear to be trying to influence the election itself, as the Iranians who breached the Trump campaign earlier this year attempted to do, according to US officials. But they are trying to collect intelligence on the private communications of senior officials from both parties that would be of keen interest to Beijing.
Investigators believe the hackers are also likely searching for other sensitive national security information, including, in some cases, information on wiretap warrant requests made by the Justice Department, CNN previously reported.
“It’s real-time wiretapping,” one of the sources told CNN, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive and ongoing investigation. “They flat-out hacked the system that the Department of Justice requires (telecom firms) to maintain for lawful access.”
“We might as well let Huawei come into the network,” the source added, referring to the Chinese telecommunication giant that the US has imposed restrictions on banned from federal networks over spying concerns.
Eric Trump regularly appears with his father on the campaign trail and has served as one of the most prominent surrogates for his father, holding campaign events across the country. Eric’s wife Lara was tapped as co-chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year.
Kushner has been barely visible this campaign cycle. Two years ago, his wife Ivanka Trump announced she and Kushner would be taking a step back from politics to focus on their family.
“Does this surprise anyone? Under Kamala and Biden, China has walked all over our country,” Eric Trump said in a statement to CNN.
There are no indications anyone was able to access data related to Jared Kushner or his devices, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
CNN has asked the Trump campaign for comment. The Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, has denied that Beijing-backed hackers have breached US telecom firms, calling that information “a distortion of the fact.”
The FBI declined to comment. In a statement last week, the FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed they were investigating “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China,” but did not specify who was targeted.
The Trump campaign is operating under the assumption that the hackers could still have access to the phone communications they targeted that belong to Trump and Vance, two of the sources said. The campaign has changed some security protocols, including by rotating the use of phones, to try to evade the surveillance, one of the sources said.
Evicting the hackers from the telecom networks has proved difficult. The hackers are blending in with benign internet traffic in routers and switches, making them difficult to find, multiple other sources familiar with their techniques told CNN.
The FBI was watching the Chinese hackers operate in the telecom networks after US officials first learned of the intrusions, one of the sources familiar with the matter said. After the Wall Street Journal first reported on the seriousness of the hack this month, the hackers took additional steps to try to elude US investigators, according to the source, who likened it to a game of cat and mouse.
The White House has convened an interagency team to oversee the response to the hack, a move typically reserved for major cybersecurity incidents, three US officials familiar with the matter told CNN. The Washington Post first reported on that process being activated.
Meanwhile, a Department of Homeland Security-led group of cybersecurity experts that probes major hacking incidents plans to investigate the root causes of the Chinese hacking campaign, a DHS official told CNN.
On Capitol Hill, the alleged Chinese hack is such a sensitive matter that normally garrulous lawmakers clam up at the mention of it.
“This is a very serious breach that the committee is monitoring on a daily basis,” Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee, told CNN earlier this month. He repeated the same sentence when asked for more details and said he couldn’t share anything more.
Given how pervasive the Chinese hacking campaign has been in US telecom networks, some US allies are checking their own computer networks for signs of compromise. Officials in the United Kingdom, for example, have been on high alert for evidence of any impact in the UK from the hacks but so far have found none, a UK official familiar with the matter told CNN.
The ongoing Chinese hacking campaign means that the next administration — whether Trump or Harris wins — will likely inherit another major cybersecurity incident with big implications for national security. When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the US government was still dealing with the fallout of a sophisticated hack by Russian intelligence that infiltrated software made by the tech firm SolarWinds to breach multiple US government agencies. — CNN
