The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Tuesday that it imposed new sanctions on Iranian and Russian entities that tried to interfere in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Starting in at least 2023, the Tehran-based Cognitive Design Production Center, a subsidiary of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terror organization, attempted to “incite socio-political tensions among the U.S. electorate” ahead of the presidential elections, Treasury alleges.
The Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise created and spread artificial intelligence-generated images and other “deep fakes” intended to influence U.S. voters and sow discord through a network of more than 100 websites with the direction and funding of Russia’s GRU intelligence service.
“The governments of Iran and Russia have targeted our election processes and institutions and sought to divide the American people through targeted disinformation campaigns,” stated Bradley Smith, acting under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence. “The United States will remain vigilant against adversaries who would undermine our democracy.”
The allegations from the Treasury Department are the latest indication of Iranian and Russian efforts to influence the American electorate.
In September, the Department of Justice charged three Iranians with hacking email accounts from President-elect Donald Trump’s election campaign and attempting to leak the results to the media. An internal opposition research file on Vice President-elect J.D. Vance was among the materials that were stolen from the campaign and published.
Iran has also plotted to assassinate Trump and other Americans in retaliation for the 2020 killing of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani, and in November, the Justice Department charged two Americans and an Iranian in a murder-for-hire conspiracy that targeted Trump. (There are no known links to Iran in either of the two assassination attempts on Trump in 2024.)
In the build up to the election, the U.S. intelligence community repeatedly issued warnings about foreign efforts to interfere in the presidential contest and in the leadup to the inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025.
The intelligence community “assesses that this year China, Iran and Russia are better prepared to exploit opportunities to exert influence in the U.S. general election after the polls close on Election Day due to lessons drawn from the 2020 election cycle,” per an Oct. 8 memorandum of the National Intelligence Council.
“We expect these actors to at least conduct information operations denigrating U.S. democracy through Inauguration Day,” it stated.
