WASHINGTON (AP) — Groups in Russia created and helped spread viral disinformation targeting Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Tuesday.
The content, which includes baseless accusations about the Minnesota governor's time as a teacher, contains several indications that it was manipulated, said the official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Analysts identified clues that linked the content to Russian disinformation operations, said the official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director.
Digital researchers had already linked the video to Russia, but Tuesday’s announcement is the first time federal authorities have confirmed the connection.
The disinformation targeting Walz is consistent with Russian disinformation seeking to undermine the Democratic campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz, her running mate. Russia also has spread disinformation aimed at stoking discord and division ahead of voting, officials said, and may seek to encourage violent protests after Election Day.
Last month, analysts at Microsoft revealed that a viral video that baselessly claimed Harris left a woman paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident 13 years ago was Russian disinformation. More recently, a video surfaced featuring a man claiming to be a former student of Walz's who accused the candidate of sexual misconduct years ago. Private researchers at firms that track disinformation, including NewsGuard, already have concluded the video was fake and that the man in the footage isn't who he claimed to be.
The Associated Press contacted a former employer of the man whose identity was used in the video. The employer, Viktor Yeliohin, confirmed the man shown in the video was an impostor.
Some researchers have also suggested the video may contain evidence that it was created using artificial intelligence, but federal officials stopped short of the same conclusion, saying only that the video contained multiple indications of manipulation.
China and Iran also have sought to influence the U.S. election using online disinformation. While Russia has targeted the Democratic campaign, Iran has gone after Republican Donald Trump with disinformation as well as hacking into the former president's campaign. China, meanwhile, has focused its influence efforts on down-ballot races, and on general efforts to sow distrust and democratic dissatisfaction.
There is no indication that Russia, China or Iran are plotting significant attacks on election infrastructure as a way to disrupt the outcome, officials said Tuesday.
Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has said improvements to election security mean there is no way any other foreign adversary will be able to alter the results.
Russia, China and Iran have all rejected claims that they are seeking to meddle with the U.S. election. Messages left with the Russian Embassy seeking comment on the Walz video were not immediately returned Tuesday.
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Associated Press writer Melissa Goldin contributed to this report from New York.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a campaign event, Friday, Oct. 11, 2024, in Warren, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will head to reliably Republican Texas just 10 days before Election Day in an effort to refocus her campaign against former President Donald Trump on reproductive care, which Democrats see as a make-or-break issue this year.
Her campaign says Harris will visit Houston for an event Friday with women who have been affected by the state's restrictive abortion laws, which took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. She'll be going there after spending time in Georgia, another state with a restrictive law.
Since that 2022 high court decision, most Republican-controlled states have new abortion restrictions in effect, including 14 that ban the procedure at every stage of pregnancy. Harris has argued that Trump — who nominated three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — is responsible for worsening medical care for women and that he would seek further restrictions.
Campaign officials cast Harris' plan to visit Texas as a nontraditional way to capture the attention of voters in battleground states who are inundated with campaign ads and run-of-the-mill campaign events. The most recent non-battleground visit Harris made was to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in early September to tout her small business tax plan. Since then, she’s traveled to the seven battleground states.
“Texas is the stage for this event,” said senior campaign adviser David Plouffe. “But for us, the most important audience are folks in the battlegrounds.”
Plouffe said the vice president is making the trip “to really tell a story about Donald Trump’s role in eliminating Roe v. Wade, what that’s meant for people in a state like Texas, and the stakes — if you live in a state currently without an abortion ban — that could be coming your way if Donald Trump wins.”
In 2016, Democrats, feeling sure of their chances against Trump in his first run for the White House, sent their nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Texas, Iowa and Ohio in hopes of running up the Electoral College score, while missing signs of trouble in Democratic-leaning states that flipped and sent Trump to the Oval Office.
“We’re not doing that,” Plouffe said, dismissing the notion that the campaign was trying to compete in Texas. “We’re diverting out of the battlegrounds because we think it’ll help us in battlegrounds.”
He said it “makes a lot of strategic sense” to go somewhere like Texas, “where you have the most horrific and tragic stories about what’s happening, and then directly link that to the threat that voters in these states without current bans should feel about Donald Trump’s potential next term.”
Women affected by abortion bans have been out campaigning for Harris, including Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who went into premature labor, developed sepsis, and nearly died after doctors said they could not intervene to provide an abortion because Zurawski wasn’t in enough medical danger to allow the procedure. Harris has also highlighted the story of Amber Thurman, a Georgia mother who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill.
Harris will be joined Friday by Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, who is making a longshot bid to unseat Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. She is also scheduled to tape a podcast interview with Texan author and Brené Brown.
Trump, too, has tried events outside of battlegrounds to energize his supporters. He has a rally planned this weekend at Madison Square Garden in New York and last week had one at the site of the Coachella music festival in California.
Texas encapsulates the post-Roe landscape. Its strict abortion ban prohibits physicians from performing abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks or before. As a result, women, including those who didn’t intend to end a pregnancy, are increasingly suffering worse medical care in part because doctors cannot intervene unless she is facing a life-threatening condition, or to prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function.” The state also has become a battleground for litigation; the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the side of the state’s ban just two weeks ago, leaving a lower court's ruling in place.
Complaints of pregnant women in medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and elsewhere have spiked as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate strict state laws against abortion. Several Texas women have lodged complaints against hospitals for not terminating their failing and dangerous pregnancies because of the state’s ban. In some cases, women lost reproductive organs.
Harris was asked during an interview with NBC News whether she would be willing to make concessions to get congressional action on restoring abortion rights if she were elected and needed to work with a Republican-controlled Congress.
“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” she said.
Trump has constantly shifted his stances and offered vague and contradictory answers to questions on an issue that has become a major vulnerability for Republicans in this year’s election. He recently said he would vote against a constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot that is aimed at overturning the state’s six-week abortion ban.
About 6 in 10 Americans think their state should generally allow a person to obtain a legal abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant for any reason, according to a July poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Voters in seven states, including some conservative ones, have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to restrict them in statewide votes over the past two years.
In his first year as president, Trump said he was “pro-life with exceptions,” but also said “there has to be some form of punishment” for women seeking abortions — a position he quickly reversed.
At the 2018 annual March for Life, Trump voiced support for a federal ban on abortion on or after 20 weeks of pregnancy. In March, Trump suggested he might support a national ban on abortions around 15 weeks, before announcing that he instead would leave the matter to the states.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Concord, N.C., Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Nell Redmond)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a town hall at The People's Light in Malvern, Pa., Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
