The US Department of Justice has unsealed an indictment that charges two Iranian nationals with carrying out email blasts and more, providing new details on an audacious election interference scheme.
The indictment also accuses the defendants of carrying out other types of influence operations. Again masquerading as the Proud Boys, they allegedly sent Facebook messages and emails to Republican members of Congress, Trump campaign staffers, and journalists, claiming that the Democratic party planned to exploit security vulnerabilities in state voter registration sites, edit mail ballots, and register fake voters.
in 2016, Iran's influence operations in 2020 seemed focused around fueling narratives from the US far right and President Trump himself about supposed vote tampering and electoral distrust. In many ways, the Iranian activity seems to take up the mantle of the“Our intelligence officials have continually warned that other countries would seek to follow Russia’s 2016 playbook,” senator Mark Warner , chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement on Thursday.
Officials from the Justice Department, FBI, and US Attorney's Office emphasized that none of the activity impacted the vote count or outcomes in the 2020 election.
“This was the most aggressive attack on the 2020 election—it was as close as we got to the Russian operation in 2016,” says John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, of the Iranian influence campaigns. He notes that though Iranian state-backed hackers are prolific, they don't typically target elections.
Though the two defendants are out of US reach as long as they remain in Iran, Hultquist adds that the indictment and sanctions are still valuable. “We simply have to publicly call out attacks on our democracy," he says. “These actors have benefited from our reluctance to discuss this activity publicly for too long.”
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