Get ready for the Ayatollah’s revenge for the loss of his nuclear-weapons program! No, I’m not referring to the alleged Iranian sleeper cells that the Joe Biden Regency allowed into the US, and which Tom Homan is presently rounding up. The Iranians have an even bigger bombshell to drop on Donald Trump … Stormy Daniels.
No, really. Hackers working for Ali Khamenei’s regime have decided to release private e-mails and other data they gleaned from their 2024 intrusion into the Trump campaign. They claim to have a 100-gigabyte trove and plan to use it to embarrass Trump and undermine his administration:
An Iran-linked cyberattack group that hacked President Trump’s 2024 campaign is threatening to release another trove of emails it has stolen from his associates, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Roger Stone.
The big picture: Reuters first reported the threat on Monday that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on X called a “calculated smear campaign” — which came the same day as the Trump administration released a report warning that “Iranian Cyber Actors” may target U.S. firms and “operators of critical infrastructure.” …
Hackers who gave themselves the pseudonym “Robert” told Reuters in online conversations on Sunday and Monday they had around 100 gigabytes of emails involving Wiles, Stone, Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan and adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and others.
Er … can anyone see the glaring errors in this strategy? First off, Stormy Daniels is played out as a scandal. The 2024 election proved it; Trump won despite a cooked-up felony conviction over payments for an NDA, and perhaps even because of it. The only people who care about Stormy Daniels besides the porn star herself are Michael Avenatti, Alvin Bragg, and a sweaty ayatollah hiding in a bunker in Tehran. As bombshells go, Daniels is a dud, at least politically speaking.
Second, the Iranians are late to the party. Democrats spent the last three years trying to embarrass and humiliate Trump into retreating. How well did that work out? For that matter, the Iranians spent most of 2024 trying these same tactics to no avail, including this same hacker group. As Axios notes, they tried to leak material to kneecap Trump’s campaign, only to discover that they would have saved a lot of time and effort by just advising Democrats to dump both Biden and Kamala Harris.
And third, what purpose does this serve now? Trump already won the election. He’ll be president until 2029 no matter what. (No one’s going to impeach Trump over hacked emails sourced by the IRGC. Well … no one but Al Green and Jasmine Crockett, anyway.) Trump is not eligible for another term in office.
Finally, the entire strategy is predicated on the idea that Trump will get intimidated by scandal. Has Iranian intelligence even heard of Donald Trump? The man thrives on scandal and gossip, courts controversy, and generally embodies the theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Trump is running a much tighter ship in this term than in his first, but don’t let anyone think that Trump will get deflected over a second round of cheap IRGC smear tactics.
Heck, Trump might repackage it, sell it as NFTs in the digital-media market, and make a small fortune.
The IRGC should be embarrassed by this idea. Consider just how lame this response is. Trump destroyed their supposedly inviolable nuclear-development redoubt, helped destroy the rest of that program’s infrastructure, and made clear that he’d strike again if the Iranian regime resumed enrichment activities. Is making a bid for some headlines at the National Enquirer or the equally august and relevant New York Times even close to an equivalent? This is a demonstration of impotence, not even a threat so much as a cry for help. The Protection Racket Media will likely eat it up, because they’re as desperate and sweaty as Khamenei. They spent most of the last year hiding behind Daniels’ skirt too, so they’re used to that position.
Ask Trump if he’d trade Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan for another round of silly scandal-making. The author of The Art of the Deal will take that trade every day … and the Iranians will likely come to discover that the hard way if they choose to keep playing around.
