The U.S. government on Tuesday announced sanctions against entities in Iran and Russia over their attempts to interfere in the election. The U.S. Treasury Department said the two entities - an affiliate of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a Moscow branch of Russia's military intelligence agency GRU - attempted to interfere in the 2024 elections.
"As affiliates of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Russian intelligence services, these actors aim to stoke sociopolitical tensions and influence American voters during the 2024 U.S. election," the Treasury Department said in a press release.
"The governments of Iran and Russia have targeted our election processes and institutions and sought to divide the American people through targeted disinformation campaigns," Bradley T. Smith, acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury, said in a statement. "The United States will remain vigilant against adversaries who undermine our democracy."
A spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York said Iran had denied interfering in the U.S. election "on multiple occasions," citing past statements denying the accusations, calling them "devoid of any credibility or legitimacy," "fundamentally baseless" and "totally unacceptable."
"Our response remains unchanged," said mission spokesman Ali Karimi Magham.
The Russian Embassy in Washington denied the U.S. accusations in a statement, saying "we respect the voting will of the American people."
The sanctions announcement issued by the Treasury Department on Tuesday said that an organization called the Cognitive Design Production Center (Cognitive Design Production Center), representing Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), planned to "incite sociopolitical tensions among American voters starting at least in 2023."
The Treasury Department also alleged that the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Experts, "with the direction and financial support of the GRU," directed and funded the "production and publication of deepfakes and the spread of disinformation about U.S. candidates for the 2024 election."
This includes disinformation "designed to imitate legitimate news organizations, create false corroboration between reports, and obfuscate their Russian origins," the department's press release said.
U.S. intelligence officials said in September that Russian, Iranian and Chinese propagandists were using artificial intelligence to deceive Americans and interfere with the 2024 presidential election.
While none of the entities sanctioned by the Treasury Department on Tuesday were affiliated with China, the department said in a separate letter on Monday that its computers were hacked in a Chinese state-backed operation and that it was "a significant incident." China has denied the accusation.