The United States announced Tuesday that it would impose sanctions on entities in Iran and Russia for attempted election interference.
The Treasury Department said the entities — a subordinate organization to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a Moscow-based affiliate of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU — attempted to interfere in the 2024 elections.
“As affiliates of the IRGC and GRU, these actors aimed to inflame sociopolitical tensions and influence the U.S. electorate in the 2024 U.S. elections,” the Treasury Department said in a statement. press release.
“The governments of Iran and Russia have targeted our electoral processes and institutions and sought to divide the American people through targeted disinformation campaigns,” said Acting Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Bradley T. Smith, in the press release.
“The United States will remain vigilant against adversaries who could undermine our democracy,” Smith added.
A spokesperson for Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York said Iran had denied interference in the U.S. election “repeatedly,” citing previous statements denying the allegations and calling them “devoid of any credibility and legitimacy”, “fundamentally unfounded”. and “totally unacceptable”.
“Our reaction remains the same,” said Ali Karimi Magham, spokesperson for the mission.
The Russian embassy in Washington denied the US allegations in a statement, saying “we respect the will of the American people.”
The Treasury sanctions announcement Tuesday said the Cognitive Design Production Center, acting on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was planning operations “since at least 2023…to inflame sociopolitical tensions within the American electorate.
The Treasury also said the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise, “under the direction and with financial support of the GRU,” directed and subsidized “the creation and publication of deepfakes and disseminated disinformation about candidates in the 2024 US general election. .”
This included disinformation “designed to imitate legitimate media outlets to create false corroborations between stories, as well as to mask their Russian origin,” the department’s statement said.
U.S. intelligence officials said in September that propagandists in Russia, Iran and China used artificial intelligence in efforts to deceive Americans and interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
Although none of the entities sanctioned Tuesday by the Treasury Department are affiliated with China, the department said in a separate letter Monday that his computers had been hacked in a Chinese state-sponsored operation in a “major incident.” China has denied the allegation.
