Washington — The Biden administration is set to accuse Russia of engaging in an interference campaign leading up to the 2024 presidential election, multiple sources familiar with the planning confirmed to CBS News.
The actions against Russia are expected to include multiple announcements across executive agencies on Wednesday, including charges filed by the Justice Department, the sources said. The news was first reported by CNN Wednesday.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is convening a meeting of the Election Threats Task Force Wednesday that will include FBI Director Chris Wray and top Justice Department officials.
Wray and other Biden administration officials have warned that the Russian government and other foreign adversaries have continued trying to interfere with the electoral process.
“They’re still at it,” the FBI leader told the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing in July. “We’ve seen that in election cycle after election cycle.”
Already, the FBI has disrupted a Russian AI-enhanced social media bot farm that spread disinformation in the U.S., which was designed to be an influence operation. Some of the fictitious profiles from bots purported to be Americans.
Wray said such efforts to influence U.S. elections were not limited to Russia, but also Iran — in 2020 and 2024 — and China.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, also warned about threats related to the 2024 election.
“We can absolutely expect that our foreign adversaries will remain a persistent threat, attempting to undermine American confidence in our democracy and our institutions, and to sow partisan discord,” she told reporters Tuesday. “And that’s why it is up to all of us not to let our foreign adversaries be successful.”
The FBI, CISA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a rare joint statement last month that the agencies have seen “increasingly aggressive Iranian activity” during the 2024 election cycle that specifically involves influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations aimed at presidential campaigns.
Those efforts by Iran include recent activities to compromise former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, the agencies said. The intelligence community is “confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties,” the intelligence agencies warned.
The Russian government has for the last two presidential election cycles mounted influence operations. Their attempts in 2016 were sprawling and sophisticated, analyses of the efforts found, and involved extensive efforts to sow division among Americans and erode trust in democratic institutions through social media.
Thirteen Russian nationals and entities were charged in February 2018 as a result of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election, 12 of whom worked at the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that led the efforts to spread discord in the U.S.
The U.S. intelligence community said in an unclassified assessment nearly one year ago that Russia waged campaigns in at least 11 elections across nine democracies, including the U.S., between 2020 and 2022.