The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday sanctioned two Iranian and Russian organizations that attempted to interfere in the 2024 election.

The move is the latest in a series of recent steps taken by U.S. officials to combat disinformation from foreign adversaries.

The first entity that the Treasury Department sanctioned this week is known as the Cognitive Design Production Center, or CDPC. It’s an Iranian organization that has planned influence operations targeting U.S. voters since at least 2023. The operations were “designed to incite socio-political tensions among the U.S. electorate in the lead up to the 2024 U.S. elections,” Treasury officials detailed this week.

The Treasury Department has also sanctioned the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise, or CGE, and its director Valery Mikhaylovich Korovin. CGE is an affiliate of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. CGE staffers work directly with a GRU unit that is responsible for sabotage, political interference operations and cyberwarfare against the West.

According to Treasury officials, CGE distributed disinformation via a large network of websites meant to imitate legitimate publications. Those fake websites were designed with two goals in mind. One was to hide the Russian origin of the disinformation they spread, while the other was to create false corroboration between their posts.

The disinformation that CGE distributed via the fake websites included content created with generative artificial intelligence tools, Treasury officials detailed. To avoid foreign web hosting providers that would have blocked it, CGE built and ran a server to host the generative AI software. The machine also stored content generated using the software.

The GRU supported the group’s influence operations. It provided CGE and a “network of U.S.-based facilitators” with financial support to build the generative AI server, maintain it and rent the apartment where it was hosted.

Treasury officials also shared details about some of the disinformation that CGE spread. According to the department, the content included a video of a 2024 vice presidential candidate that was manipulated in a bid to sow discord among U.S. voters.

“Today’s sanctions build on numerous previous U.S. government actions that have disrupted Iran’s attempts to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions and Russia’s global malign influence campaigns and illicit cyber activities,” stated State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.

About two months before the election, the Justice Department seized 32 domains that were used in a Russian disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger. Some of the domain names hosted websites that imitated legitimate publications. They spread disinformation that focused on, among other goals, influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections.

Photo of the Treasury Building: Michael Pick/Flickr