A video falsely claiming election fraud in Arizona that the US intelligence community said Monday night was manufactured by Russian influence actors was first propagated by an organization linked to the notorious “troll factory” that targeted the 2016 US presidential election.
Russian influence actors “manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an interview with an individual claiming election fraud in Arizona, which involved creating fake overseas ballots and changing voter rolls to favor Vice President Kamala Harris,” the FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement hours before Election Day.
The video was created and propagated by the Foundation to Battle Injustice, known as R-FBI. The group, which casts itself as a “human rights” organization, was the focus of a CNN investigation published last week into Russian efforts to sow disinformation about the US election process.
The staged video was shared on X by the head of the R-FBI, Mira Terada, and appears to have been viewed at least 236,000 times before being removed. It shows Terada conducting a fake interview with a so-called whistleblower who is described as “a former aide” to Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. The individual — whose face is blurred and whose voice appears to be AI-generated, according to deepfake detection tool TrueMedia — claims election fraud in Arizona.
Fontes has said the claims are false.
CNN has reached out to the R-FBI and Terada for comment.
CNN’s investigation with Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub researchers found that the R-FBI has links to a Russian disinformation network known as Storm-1516, which has increasingly taken aim at the 2024 US presidential election.
Terada’s X account was shown as suspended late Monday. CNN has reached out to X for comment.
8 min ago
Harris says she will attend family dinner ahead of election night — a tradition
From CNN’s Ebony Davis
Ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris’ election night watch party at Howard University in Washington, DC, she will spend her day mobilizing swing state voters through radio interviews before she attends a family dinner — which she called a tradition.
“I will be at my alma mater, at Howard University,” Harris said during an interview on Tuesday morning with Pittsburgh-based radio show “The Big K Morning Show with Larry Richert.”
“And before that, I have a tradition of having dinner with my family and so we will do that. I have a lot of my family staying with us. And during the day, I’ll be, today all day talking with folks and reminding them to get out to vote,” Harris added.
Harris encouraged Pittsburgh voters to head to the polls, saying: “I would urge everyone to just remember that in our democracy, the people get to decide, and your vote is your power.”
8 min ago
Non-credible threats briefly disrupt voting at two Georgia polling locations, local officials say
From CNN’s Sara Murray, Linh Tran, Isabel Rosales, Denise Royal, Ryan Young, Nicki Brown, and Chris Youd
Non-credible threats briefly disrupted voting at two polling locations in Georgia Tuesday morning, according to local officials who say they will seek a court order to extend voting hours.
Five non-credible bomb threats were reported, leading to a temporary evacuation at two Fulton County locations for about 30 minutes, Nadine Williams, the county’s registration and elections director, said at a news conference.
“Thankfully these locations are now operational again and all polling sites are secure with an active security presence,” Williams said.
County officials will be seeking a court order to keep the two locations – C.H. Gullatt Elementary and Etris Community Center – open slightly later tonight, Williams said. The polling locations are in Union City, which is southwest of Atlanta.
The Fulton County School Police Department received information Tuesday morning that some schools would receive bomb threats around 8:15 a.m., according to a statement from Tori Cooper, a spokesperson for the South Fulton Police Department.
Students in the district are not in school today due to the election, the statement said. No elementary schools received any threats, but law enforcement conducted precautionary sweeps at multiple locations.
Margaret Huang, president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, praised Fulton’s swift response to the threats and efforts to extend voting hours.
“We don’t want to allow this to disrupt our votes,” she said.
