The Biden administration has accused Russia of carrying out a sustained disinformation campaign targeted at American voters and meant to influence the outcome of November’s presidential elections.
In its most direct accusation of election meddling to date, the US government accused the state-financed RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and other Russian state-backed media of spearheading a covert campaign of disinformation promoting pro-Kremlin views laundered through their online and television networks.
The treasury department also sanctioned the RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees of the network over the campaign of disinformation around the elections. Simonyan is a “central figure in Russian government malign influence efforts” the department said.
It also accused RT of spending millions of dollars to “recruit unwitting American influencers” in order to spread a message meant to undermine confidence in the US elections system and US foreign policy goals, including support for Ukraine.
The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, condemned the alleged disinformation campaign during a meeting of the justice department’s election threats task force, which included the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, and other senior law enforcement leaders.
In a statement, Garland said that the US would charge two employees of Russia’s RT network with money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. RT was officially declared a foreign agent in the US in 2017.
The state department also announced on Wednesday that it would limit visa issuance for some employees of Russian state-backed media and also declare the Russian state media organisation Rossiya Segodnya as a foreign mission effectively acting on behalf of the Kremlin, requiring further disclosures about its employees and property in the US.
“We now know that RT, formerly known as Russia Today, has moved beyond being simply a media organisation,” the US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “We know that RT has contracted with a private company to pay unwitting Americans millions of dollars to carry the Kremlin’s message to influence the US elections and undermine democracy.”
The US government also announced a Rewards for Justice (RFJ) offer of up to $10m (£7.6m) relating to information pertaining to foreign interference in a US election.
The disinformation crackdown was first reported by CNN before coordinated statements issued by the White House, which publicly condemned the actions, and the US Department of Justice, which announced a series of law enforcement actions including the charges against the RT employees.
According to Garland, the Kremlin directed Russian agencies to obtain website domains and spoof popular US news outlets like Fox News and the Washington Post, fooling American voters into reading Kremlin-produced news content that they thought was produced in the US.
“An internal planning document created by the Kremlin states that it is a goal of the campaign to secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election,” Garland said in a statement on Wednesday.
Garland accused a Russian public affairs company called the Social Design Agency of driving readers to the websites to “reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies and interests and influence voters in the United States”.
The group “deployed influencers and paid social media advertisements” to drive traffic to the sites, he said. “They also created fake social media profiles, posing as US citizens, to post comments on social media platforms with links to the sites.”
The accusations came just one month after the White House accused Iran of leading a foreign interference programme. Senior intelligence and law enforcement agencies in August said that Iran was behind a hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which led to campaign records including a dossier on the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance being leaked to a series of US news outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico. CNN reported that the hackers managed to breach the Trump campaign through the email account of Trump ally Roger Stone.
Garland also condemned “increasingly aggressive Iranian activity” in order to influence the outcome of the US presidential election.
“We will be relentlessly aggressive, encountering 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,” Garland said.
Garland added that the group was also dedicated to combating domestic threats against US public servants who administer elections in the US, saying they had been targeted with “heinous acts and threats of violence”.
“The US has long known that Moscow utilises a vast collection of tools, including malign influence campaigns and cyber activities, to undermine the interests of the United States, our democratic institutions and those of our allies,” said Miller.