Influence actors expected to adjust tactics amid chaotic election cycle, intel official says

Foreign actors looking to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election are “closely monitoring” the recent tumult on the campaign trail and will likely exploit it to try new tactics to undermine confidence in the race, senior intelligence officials said on Monday.

The American political system has experienced multiple seismic events since officials provided an update on foreign influence efforts earlier this month, including the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s decision to not seek re-election and Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Yet foreign governments who would seek to denigrate the country’s electoral process have thus far not seized on the changes, though it’s unclear if they are devising new approaches or if their latest efforts have simply not been uncovered.

“The short answer is it's too early to say,” an official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said during a media briefing. “Generally speaking, it takes a little time for influence actors to devise narratives and deploy them. This is notably different than just reacting to smaller events during the campaign cycle, rather than the campaign itself changing.”

Operators “will adjust their tactics in the coming weeks,” the official said. “We view changes to influence themes are more likely than changes to larger strategies or preferences.”

While the officials didn’t explicitly say so, that would mean Moscow, which the ODNI official called a “prominent threat” to U.S. elections, would continue to favor Trump ahead of Election Day.

The latest insight, shared roughly 100 days before voters head to the polls, came the same day ODNI issued an election security update that highlights how influence actors outsource such work for commercial firms and co-opt Americans to launder their narratives and thus make them appear more authentic.

An eye on Iran 

The ODNI official said that since the last update the clandestine community has observed Iran “working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive with increased tensions” with the U.S.

Tehran’s Oval Office preference is “focused on this core interest,” according to the official.

While the official didn’t mention Biden by name, he said the approach mirrored the 2020 election cycle. An intelligence community assessment of that contest found Tehran worked covertly to undercut Trump's re-election without directly promoting his rivals.

The ODNI official said Iran “relies on a vast webs of online personas and propaganda mills to spread disinformation and have notably been active in exacerbating tensions with the Israel-Gaza conflict.”

Still, “most of the activity we're observing from Iran's influence actors remains focused on stoking chaos and divisions in the United States,” the official, who declined to comment on the scale of such efforts, told reporters.

While the intelligence community has not seen any efforts by foreign actors to prevent the U.S. from conducting elections, officials have witnessed "efforts to scan networks related to election infrastructure." 

In 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016.

The ODNI official declined to say which countries are conducting the digital reconnaissance or what systems have been targeted.