It's believed that a group of Chinese hackers have collected audio from phone calls of U.S. political figures including former president Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance.
According to a report from the Washington Post, a group of expert hackers known as Salt Typhoon is believed to have breached some of the major telecommunication companies in order to snag audio from phone calls made by American leaders. It’s unclear what audio has been collected. The hacking has reportedly been going on for months and now a federal investigation is underway.
Reports are that the hackers targeted the phones of Donald Trump and JD Vance. In a statement from the Trump campaign, they say, "This is the continuation of election interference by Kamala Harris and Democrats who will stop at nothing, including emboldening China and Iran attacking critical American infrastructure, to prevent President Trump from returning to the White House.”
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said China has been trying to hack into the phones of U.S. public officials for quite some time. He also said the Chinese are exclusively going after Trump and hope to see Harris defeat him.
"They're targeting the Trump campaign and not the Harris campaign," Rep. McCaul said. "They clearly would prefer Harris to prevail in this election."
Rep. McCaul said he knows that China was able to look into sensitive data but doesn't know exactly what data.
Vice presidential candidate JD Vance told Joe Rogan on his podcast this week that he believes the Chinese were able to go after he and former president Trump's phones through a piece of legislation passed less than a week after the September 11 attacks.
"The way that they hacked our phones is that they used the backdoor telecom infrastructure that had been developed in the wake of the Patriot Act," Vance told Rogan.
The Patriot Act, signed into law by then President George W. Bush, allows internet service providers to disclose phone and email communications to the government voluntarily. It also removed barriers between law enforcement and intelligence agencies when sharing information between them.
The reports of Chinese hackers going after the phones of top American officials comes after a report that Minnesota Governor and the Democrat's vice presidential nominee Tim Walz had a relationship with the daughter of a top official in the Chinese Communist Party.
"I think the American people really need to know what's going on here with respect to China," McCaul added.
McCaul believes Walz has been compromised to the point that he could potentially be blackmailed.