U.S. Accuses Iran of Targeting Voters in Meddling Operation
U.S. Accuses Iran of Targeting U.S. Voters in Meddling Operation
(Bloomberg) -- The top U.S. spy chief accused Iran of making its most direct efforts to interfere in the closing days of the presidential election, saying the Islamic Republic faked a series of intimidating messages to Democratic voters.
John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said both Iran and Russia had obtained voter registration information and that Tehran was already using it to send threatening emails. The spy chief -- a loyal ally of President Donald Trump -- didn’t provide details of what Russia may have been up to, but he said the Iranian effort was meant to undermine Trump, without explaining how he reached that conclusion.
The hastily arranged Wednesday night announcement by Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray drew bipartisan warnings against foreign interference and added to the turbulence in Americans politics less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“We cannot allow voter intimidation or interference efforts, either foreign or domestic, to silence voters’ voices and take away that right,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a joint statement with Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
But Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee cautioned that Ratcliffe “has TOO OFTEN politicized the Intelligence Community” to benefit Trump and disputed his assertion that the election interference operations would hurt Trump’s campaign.
“The threat from disinformation campaigns is real. We must be candid with Americans on the full scope of foreign disinformation campaigns, from both Russia & Iran, so Americans can be alert and resilient,” the committee’s majority said on Twitter late Wednesday. “You can’t emphasize one threat over another to suit the President’s ego.”
Ratcliffe and Wray pushed out the announcement -- while the president was speaking at a campaign rally in North Carolina -- because the interference was about to be reported by at least one news organization, according to a person familiar with the matter, adding that White House officials wanted to appear transparent. Another person said that the White House and Ratcliffe made the decision.
“We have confirmed that some voter registration information has been obtained by Iran, and separately by Russia,” Ratcliffe said alongside Wray. Reporters weren’t invited to the event and neither Ratcliffe nor Wray took questions.
Some voter information obtained by Iran may have been hacked and made publicly available on the Internet, according to a person familiar with the matter.
While U.S. officials have been warning for months about efforts by Russia, Iran and other rivals to interfere in the election, Ratcliffe’s announcement was thin on specifics. He and Wray both emphasized that the separate efforts by Russia and Iran shouldn’t affect individual votes or the election outcome.
“You should be confident that your vote counts,” Wray said.
Ratcliffe didn’t offer details in his public remarks, but he was accusing Iran of being behind threatening emails sent to Democratic voters that purported to be from the right-wing Proud Boys group, warning Democrats to vote for Trump, according to a U.S. official. Ratcliffe didn’t describe how the operation might hurt Trump.
Iranian officials quickly rejected the U.S. accusations as “clumsy and fraudulent,” emphasizing their decades-old complaint about America’s role in overthrowing their prime minister following an election in 1953.
“Unlike the U.S., Iran does not interfere in other country’s elections,” Alireza Miryousefi, a diplomat at the Iranian mission to the United Nations, said in a statement. “These accusations are nothing more than another scenario to undermine voter confidence in the security of the U.S. election, and are absurd.”
On Thursday, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Swiss ambassador, who has represented U.S. interests in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution, over the matter, according to a statement by ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh.
Iran has plenty of reasons to want to see Trump lose next month. The American president has spent the past two years ratcheting up sanctions on the Islamic Republic after quitting a 2015 nuclear deal and in January a U.S. strike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad.
If the accusations against Iran are true, they mark “a fundamental shift in our understanding of Iran’s willingness to interfere in the democratic process,” according to John Hultquist, a senior director at the cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc.
Partisan History
But Ratcliffe’s history as a partisan defender of Trump well before he became the DNI chief caused critics to question his assessment that the email operation against supporters of Joe Biden was somehow meant to hurt the president.
Before becoming intelligence chief, Ratcliffe was a Republican congressman from Texas who fervently supported the president’s claim that he was the victim of a “witch hunt” by “deep state” opponents who sought to link him to Russian interference in 2016.
“How do we know tonight’s press conference isn’t on the level?” Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, asked on Twitter after the event.
“The DNI knew for months there was a Russian agent who had penetrated Trump’s inner circle in order to spread fake anti-Biden propaganda and,” Murphy said, “no press conference. Just a footnote in a Treasury sanctions announcement.” He was referring to accusations that Trump’s lawyer and confidant Rudy Giuliani was duped by Russian intelligence.
Russian Troll Farm
Ratcliffe’s remarks came the same week that the U.S. charged six current and former members of Russia’s military intelligence unit for a series of destructive cyberattacks in recent years. Last month, Microsoft Corp. reported that Russia and Iran had attempted to hack into political targets ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov Thursday dismissed the latest allegations as “absolutely unfounded,” calling them part of “domestic-political processes connected to the coming elections.”
In September, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. found social media accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency -- the Kremlin-linked troll farm that used a coordinated operation on social media in an effort to help the Trump campaign in 2016 -- that were attempting to build an audience on the American left before the November vote.
Local media in Florida first reported on Tuesday that Democratic voters were receiving threatening messages that claimed to be from the Proud Boys. The emails read, “Vote for Trump or else!” in the subject line.
Although voter registration material is available publicly, the emails falsely asserted that they had the voters’ personal information because local election systems had been compromised by hackers.
‘Proud Boys’ Email
“You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply,” read one of the emails reviewed by the cyber research firm Proofpoint. “I would take this seriously if I were you.”
In a joint statement, Marco Rubio of Florida, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s top Democrat, said, “Our adversaries abroad seek to sow chaos and undermine voters’ belief in our democratic institutions, including the election systems and infrastructure that we rely on to record and properly report expressions of the voters’ will.”
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