US Sanctions Russian, Iranian Groups Over Election Interference

The Treasury Department building in Washington on Jan. 19, 2023. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The United States has imposed new sanctions on entities in Iran and Russia, accusing them of trying to interfere in the 2024 elections.

The sanctions, announced on Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Treasury, target a subsidiary of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as an affiliate of Russia’s military intelligence agency over their attempts to “stoke sociopolitical tensions and influence the U.S. electorate during the 2024 election.”

“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 Smith, the department’s acting under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.

The Russian entity, the Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE), was founded by Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent Russian ideologue whom the Treasury Department had sanctioned in 2015 in the wake of the Russia-backed separatist war in eastern Ukraine.

In Tuesday’s announcement, the department said the intelligence service both directed and funded the center to influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Using these resources, CGE allegedly operated a network of “at least 100 websites” to spread false information.

“CGE and its personnel used generative AI tools to quickly create disinformation that would be distributed across a massive network of websites designed to imitate legitimate news outlets to create false corroboration between the stories, as well as to obfuscate their Russian origin,” the department said.

The Russian center also “manipulated a video” to “produce baseless accusations concerning a 2024 vice-presidential candidate,” according to the department. It did not specify which candidate was targeted.

A deepfake video posted online in October shows a man alleging that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz sexually assaulted him while the vice-presidential candidate was a high school teacher and coach. The video, which bears hallmarks of deepfake such as distorted facial features and out-of-sync audio, remains on X, where it was flagged by the platform as “manipulated media.”

The sanctions also target Iran’s Cognitive Design Production Center, which the Treasury Department said planned “influence operations” to “incite socio-political tensions among the U.S. electorate in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. elections” on behalf of the IRGC.

This is not the first time the federal government has penalized the IRGC, a designated foreign terrorist organization, for election interference.

In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice charged three IRGC operatives with an alleged “hack-and-leak” attack against the campaign of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who upon returning to the White House is expected to reinstate the “maximum pressure” policies his previous administration imposed against Tehran.

According to federal prosecutors, the three hackers tried to break into the email accounts of Trump campaign officials and the former president’s allies. They then sought to “weaponize” the stolen information by sharing it with media outlets and individuals associated with President Joe Biden’s campaign.

“The defendants’ own words make clear that they were attempting to undermine former President Trump’s campaign in advance of the 2024 U.S. presidential election,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said when he announced the charges.

In a separate announcement on Tuesday, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Russian Judge Olesya Mendeleeva for ordering the detention of Alexei Gorinov, a Moscow city councilor and Kremlin critic. Under Mendeleeva’s orders, Gorinov, already serving a sentence for speaking out against Russia’s war in Ukraine, received an additional three-year prison term in November.