close
close

US officials say Russia is behind fake voter fraud video in Georgia

play

WASHINGTON – U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed Friday that they believe Russia is behind a fake but viral video showing a man claiming to be a recent Haitian immigrant saying he and a friend were in Georgia – twice – voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

“The IC believes that Russian influence actors recently produced a video that falsely portrayed individuals claiming to be from Haiti and voting illegally in several counties in Georgia,” the U.S. law enforcement agency said in a statement. and secret services.

In the joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said they assessed that Russian influence actors also produced a video in which they falsely accused an individual , which is linked to the Democratic presidential campaign Bribery by a US entertainer. They did not provide any further information.

Friday's revelation follows the ODNI publicly attributing three other fake videos to Russia in recent weeks. They included one who falsely accused Harris of paralyzing a young girl in a hit-and-run accident and another who falsely accused her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, of sexual abuse.

A third fake video created and distributed by Russia purports to show pro-Harris voters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania illegally tearing up Trump mail-in ballots, an ODNI official said.

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader efforts to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans,” ODNI said. It was the latest of several election updates warning Americans about what they call “foreign malicious influence operations.”

“In the lead-up to Election Day and in the weeks and months thereafter,” the statement continued, “the IC expects Russia to create and publish additional media content aimed at undermining confidence in the integrity of the election.” “To divide Americans,” the statement continued. The statement used an acronym for the U.S. intelligence community.

The Elon Musk factor

The video is the latest salvo in an intensified campaign by the Kremlin to smear Vice President Harris and give emphasis to what intelligence officials say is Vladimir Putin's preferred candidate, former President Donald Trump, in the final days of the close Nov. 5 election.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung did not comment on whether the former president would condemn the alleged Russian efforts.

The Georgia video is also the latest example of how tech billionaire Elon Musk, an aggressive Trump supporter, has failed to comply with at least some requests from the U.S. government to post verifiably fake Russian disinformation videos on his influential social media platform X to remove unfairly influencing voters.

CISA officials first informed Georgian authorities of the latest video on Thursday. This prompted Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to publicly disclose the information operation on X, formerly Twitter, and to publicly call on Musk and other social media platform owners to shut it down.

In Raffensperger's public appeal on have seen the election.” ”

Musk, the SpaceX founder, Tesla CEO and the world's richest man, bought the social media company in 2022 for $44 billion.

However, as of Friday morning, the video was still available on X, a Raffensperger spokesperson told USA TODAY. A few hours later, it had already amassed more than 900,000 views and was widely shared by Trump supporters, including some Republican officials and Trump supporters.

Musk did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Meanwhile, he too shared and posted demonstrably false anti-Harris disinformation to his 200 million followers.

In a post Friday afternoon, Musk falsely claimed that there was evidence of “Democrat election interference in Bucks County,” a key battleground in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

Musk has even gone so far in recent years as to allow claims of rampant voter fraud to grow exponentially in the current election cycle, critics have said, while US election officials say there is none.

Fighting a “fire hose of disinformation”

A CISA official said in a media briefing on Friday that the cybersecurity agency, the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community are grappling with a historically unprecedented “firewave of disinformation” as the election approaches, suggesting the videos last week and now falsely claiming voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Georgia was just two of many.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity about the U.S. disinformation efforts, declined to single out Musk as a point of criticism or say whether federal election security officials have personally appealed to him to eliminate them.

But the official said it would be “highly irresponsible” for individuals to knowingly spread inaccurate information about U.S. election processes because it amounts to “and I hope we recognize that in doing so we are “doing the work of our foreign adversaries.” for her.”

The disinformation – mostly from Russia, but also from Iran and China – is flooding America not only through X and other social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but also through other channels, including “chat applications,” he said CISA officials.

Instead of relying on social media companies to tune them out, the official said, “We're trying to focus on encouraging the American people to focus on the signal amidst all of this noise, and that signal is them.” state and local election officials in this matter.” Countries who are the experts responsible for managing the electoral process.

A viral video about double voting

In the latest video, two men sit in a car, one of whom claims to be a Haitian immigrant who came to the United States six months ago and already has American citizenship and all the documents he needs to vote. The men proudly display numerous driver's licenses, and the man speaking says the two have voted for Harris once before – and plan to do so at least once again in another Georgia county.

“Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we vote in Fulton County,” the man said, adding that they were voting for Harris.

“We invite all Haitians to come to America and bring families with them,” the man also says. A Harris-Walz baseball cap can be seen next to him.

On Thursday evening, Amy Kremer, a member of the Republican National Committee who helped organize the January 6, 2021 rally that preceded the pro-Trump attack on the US Capitol, shared a link to a version of the video featuring Raffensperger and senior figures Trump campaign and RNC officials.

“This is illegal and not okay,” she wrote. “Georgia citizens would like an answer to this situation. How did they get multiple passes?”

Raffensperger, who played a crucial role in blocking Trump's efforts to overturn his loss in Georgia in 2020, said his office was working with state and federal authorities to combat the spread of the video and determine its origin.

“In the meantime,” he said in his X post, “we call on Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to eliminate this.”

After the ODNI issued a statement that the latest video was actually part of the Kremlin-backed disinformation campaign, Raffensperger reached out to X again.

“The Russians,” he said, “picked the wrong Georgians to mess with.”

You may also like...