Foreign influence attempts are the new normal for American elections

The season of foreign election interference is well underway.

The Department of Justice this week announced it had seized websites linked to a Russian disinformation campaign. Federal authorities separately accused two employees of the Moscow-controlled media organization RT of being a part of a scheme to spread Russian propaganda, bolstered by millions of dollars.

And it’s not just Russia. On Friday, a hawkish think tank revealed that a network of pro-Iranian sites have been circulating disinformation around the election. That comes on the heels of the intelligence community linking Iran to a hacking of the Trump campaign. U.S. officials said in a briefing with reporters on Friday that Russia, Iran and China were all trying to influence the upcoming elections.

Just a few years ago, the political world was roiled by the news that Russia had sought to interfere with the 2016 election. Two presidential cycles later, attempted meddling from foreign governments has become an inescapable part of the U.S. election system, and presidential elections in particular have become major targets, with eye-popping stories of malign social media campaigns or illicit foreign agents. And 2024 is “lining up to be a busy election interference season,” said Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The United States’ response continues to evolve.

National security experts said the Biden administration has been far more aggressive than in previous recent cycles. But officials continue to grapple with questions of how to hold bad actors accountable, deter future efforts and preserve trust in a system in which both foreign and domestic operatives are actively attempting to sow distrust.

Even the question of how much to publicize attempted interference remains unsettled: It’s important to have transparency on attempted threats, but too much attention and officials run the risk of furthering the kind of chaos and uncertainty that the malign actors hope to create.

“That is the core of the debate: whether you are in fact carrying water for the adversaries by highlighting this activity,” said Emily Harding, former deputy staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The very threats themselves have also become political fodder for all sides. After the Trump campaign hack, the former president quickly claimed he was targeted for being “strong on Iran.” A Democratic PAC is weaponizing the recent crackdown on Russian influence efforts to attack Republican candidates. And the son of a former Trump campaign adviser who was charged with violating Russian sanctions immediately politicized the proceedings against his father.

Ongoing foreign threats to American elections

Fears around foreign threats to U.S. election integrity have crescendoed for years, after reports of Russian efforts to curry support for former President Donald Trump in 2016.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the Justice Department would aggressively fight attempts from foreign adversaries to interfere in this year’s elections.

“We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by Russia and Iran — as well as China or any other foreign malign actor — to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy,” he said at a meeting of the Election Threats Task Force, a Justice Department initiative.

And a slew of alleged attempts have emerged this year.

After federal authorities suggested that Iran had been behind the hack of the Trump campaign and an attempted hack on the Biden-Harris campaign, Meta announced that the Iranian hacking group had gone after the WhatsApp accounts of President Joe Biden and Trump staffers.

Russia has also sought to further meddle in U.S. politics, the federal government said, by using state media and websites that appeared to be independent to spread pro-Russia propaganda to influence the upcoming election. To combat those efforts, the federal government announced plans this week that include a visa restriction policy targeting Russian state-controlled media organizations and financial incentives for those who report information on the foreign election interference to federal authorities. The Treasury Department also sanctioned a number of people deemed close to Russia’s alleged election interference scheme.

The analytics company Graphika also recently released a report detailing an influence scheme tied to China, an effort called Spamouflage, that aims to shape U.S. political discourse using social media accounts.

Questions of how the United States should respond

As the threat of foreign interference becomes woven into American elections, experts and officials continue to debate the appropriate response.

Criminal charges related to election interference originating overseas are typically viewed as “name and shame” indictments — meaning that the accused are unlikely to ever be arrested or stand trial, usually because they are out of reach of the U.S. government.

Indeed, when prosecutors think they have a strong chance of arresting suspects, they typically don’t announce the cases until that happens.

Despite the low likelihood of a trial or guilty plea, U.S. prosecutors have said they believe such cases can have a deterrent effect. For one, they can rein in the lifestyle of those charged by severely limiting their travel, since the defendants could be subject to arrest if they travel to any country with an extradition treaty with the United States.

They also put the government alleged to be involved on notice publicly about the gravity of U.S. concerns and serve as a reminder to the U.S. public to be wary of potential propaganda, potentially innoculating voters to its impact.

However, “name and shame” cases remain somewhat controversial within the government because they have the potential to expose intelligence sources for a case that will likely never be pursued. Some critics also question the ethics of using the criminal justice system to level accusations that will almost certainly never be hashed out in court.

And because the very nature of the interference is often to inflame the passions of the American electorate — in part by exploiting existing cultural divisions — the allegations of foreign interference themselves have often been met with derision.

For example, though intelligence agencies deemed Russia’s interference in recent presidential elections as ostensibly an effort to amplify pro-Trump messages, Trump and his allies downplayed the Russian government’s involvement. Instead, they accused the U.S. agencies themselves of political motivations — a theme the former president and his squad revived this week after the latest round of charges.

Even when foreign threats don’t directly change an election, they shape politics and the public

Some national security experts warn that there is a cost to publicizing those threats — even if the steps taken by the federal government do successfully slow foreign propaganda. The attention, those experts say, can deepen public distrust in the political system and unintentionally amplify the divisive narratives that foreign states are pushing.

Foreign disinformation campaigns don’t have to convince voters to back a specific candidate or issue, for example. The very idea that disinfo is everywhere has become normalized, with voters and campaigns constantly invoking it: “Fake news!”

Gavin Wilde, former National Security Council director for Russia, Baltic and Caucasus affairs, said it was not clear whether foreign propaganda had a specific effect on how people voted. But he worries about the erosion of confidence in elections.

“That’s been problematic, because our reaction to it can cause as much stress and a sense of precarity among the public as whatever you know the Russians or Chinese are doing,” said Wilde, who contributed to assessments of Russian efforts to target the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Still, analysts praised the Biden administration’s efforts as sending a clear message. John E. Herbst, former ambassador to Ukraine during George W. Bush’s administration, lauded the “comprehensive use of American power” that put “the Russians off kilter by putting this out publicly.”

“It’s the old notion that transparency is the best disinfectant and the best defense — a very good defense in any case,” Herbst said.

But he pointed to the reaction of the Russian state-controlled media organization RT, which flouted the U.S. government’s actions by joking that “Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the US elections” and “Somewhere Secretary Clinton is sad that it’s not because of her.”

“They do that because sadly, Russian propaganda themes have made it into part of our political discourse, especially on the right,” Herbst said.

Part of the allegations against the RT employees also concerned an unnamed company funded by the Russian state-controlled media organization. That company is reportedly Tenet Media, which is connected to a number of high-profile far-right influencers.

Foreign interference allegations have also become weaponized by campaigns.

Trump was quick to say he was targeted by Iran because “I was protecting people in the Middle East that maybe they aren’t so happy about that,” an attempt to use the Iranian effort to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

But Republicans were dismissive of the news of Russia’s alleged scheme and sought to neutralize it. Stephen Miller, for example, argued in a post on X that the Department of Justice was, in fact, the real threat to election integrity. Trump also turned the allegations on Kamala Harris, writing in a post on X that the vice president and the Justice Department were “trying to interfere in and suppress the Election in favor of the Democrats by resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”

And shortly after news broke of the indictment accusing a former Trump adviser of working for a sanctioned Russian television station, the man’s son, Dimitri Simes Jr., was quick to lash out at Democrats, writing on X that “Joe Biden and his stooges are impotent cowards.”

John Sakellariadis, Maggie Miller and Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.