FBI Focused On ‘Elevated’ Risk Of Outside Influence In 2024 Polls

WASHINGTON, DC (IANS) – The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the national security community, is “keenly focused” on the threat of possible election interference in the 2024 elections from outside forces, especially from adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran after the 2016 Russian interference experience.

According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, “It is not seriously disputed that our foreign adversaries have tried and are continuing to try to interfere in our elections,” Wray, the FBI honcho since 2017, told Senate lawmakers last week.

“We’re keenly focused on the risk that foreign adversaries, whether it’s Russia, whether it’s China, whether it’s Iran or others, would seek to interfere in our elections, ” he told the Senate committee.

The FBI boss acknowledged that the threats of external influence on the 2024 presidential election are “elevated”.

“I think it’s fair to say that they are elevated from where they were before,” Wray said.

“And to elaborate just slightly on that point, obviously we saw, and it’s not disputed, that the Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election and then continued. But what we’ve seen since then is other adversaries attempting to take a page out of the Russians’ playbook,” he said.

There is a threat from outside countries that could influence views and public opinion prior to the election in addition to the threat from election machinery. Last month, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced that it shut down roughly 4,800 fake accounts created by someone in China designed to appear to be from Americans with the intent to spread polarizing political content, the Washington Examiner reported.

The left-leaning group Free Speech for People, a non-profit advocacy group focused on election and campaign finance reforms, wrote a letter to Wray earlier this month expressing concern about previous efforts to access voting system software as also to Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly.

The group comprising two dozen computer scientists, election security experts, and voter advocacy organizations, who signed the letter, requested a federal investigation into what it alleged was a “multi-state conspiracy to obtain voting machine software, carried out through cooperation of a network of Trump allies”.

Former President Donald Trump, who is also the 2024 GOP front-runner, repeatedly and vociferously doubted the integrity of the 2020 election that he lost to President Joe Biden. His claims, which were repeated by a majority within the Republican Party, de-legitimize the validity of his election loss amongst his hundreds and thousands of supporters, many of whom still believe in baseless claims that the election was stolen from the former president, the Examiner said.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in April: “Our approach to election integrity is — we fight in the courtroom, but we play by the rules we’re given in the field.”