The Election Interference Hypocrisy

How Trump is using Iran's "interference" in U.S. elections to justify his own

Yesterday morning, many of us awoke to news that the Trump administration had, in collaboration with Israel, launched airstrikes on Iran. The situation is incredibly complex. The attacks, for which Trump did not get Congressional approval, are likely unconstitutional. They have also targeted a brutal Iranian regime that has been murdering its own citizens — many of whom have been protesting the government — for months.

As it typically does in “fog of war” situations, the informational picture continues to evolve. Early rumors that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the attack have now been confirmed by both the U.S. and Iranian governments. There are reports of a strike hitting a girls school, killing dozens of children, and we can expect substantial efforts in the days and weeks to contest the facts around that event, including who or what caused it.

Situations like this — with high uncertainty and even higher stakes — are ripe for rumoring, propaganda, and other efforts to shape how people interpret the underlying events and their views on what to do next.

A Trump “Truth” Cuts through the Fog of War

In the midst of this, one social media post, in particular, caught my eye: a “Truth” posted by President Trump on the social media platform he owns.

The post features a link to an article by Just the News, a conservative media outlet. The article makes a provocative claim that Iran tried to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 U.S. elections, and that Democrats ignored these efforts, which went “unnoticed.”

As someone who has been studying disinformation around elections for a few cycles now — and has the reputational scars to prove it — this post attempting to justify the attack on Iran through allegations of “unnoticed” election interference in 2020 and 2024 stood out as particularly representative of the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and duplicity of the Trump administration and its allies in the right wing media. It is also a hint of even more nefarious things to come.

Impersonating Proud Boys: Iran’s 2020 Influence Operation

I am going to focus on the 2020 claim, because I know the basis of this one well. Iran did attempt to interfere in the 2020 election! (Technically, it was an influence operation, not interference, but okay.) But what this allegation leaves out — as many misleading election claims do — is that this effort had very little impact on the outcome of the 2020 election. And, perhaps most importantly, and certainly most relevant here, is that it was quickly identified, exposed, and mitigated through the collaborative work of independent researchers and government agencies.

Here’s what happened: In late October 2020, hundreds of Democratic voters in Alaska and Florida received emails, ostensibly from the Proud Boys (a right wing political organization in the U.S.), with threats ordering them to “vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” Many of the emails contained a video claiming to show voter information being exposed via a hack. The messages caused confusion and consternation — as well as suspicion, from very early on, that they were a scam.

It was soon discovered that the emails were not actually from the Proud Boys, but were part of an Iranian information operation. Researchers, including a team at the Stanford Internet Observatory, quickly noted inconsistencies in some of the metadata of the email and the video. The SIO team shared the results of their analysis directly with government agencies and through a public blog. Around that same time, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI formally attributed the emails and video to an Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) actor.

I remember this episode well, because my team at the University of Washington was collaborating at the time with Stanford’s team as part of the Election Integrity Partnership, and we watched their analysis unfold in real-time.

What is striking now, five years on, is not the fact that Iranian agents ran an influence operation to try to sow distrust in U.S. elections — but how the Trump administration is trying to cynically exploit that operation to justify their attack on Iran and their own efforts to interfere in U.S. elections.

To understand the insincerity and hypocrisy here, you need to remember (or learn for the first time) what happened next to the researchers and organizations that helped to identify, call out, and address the Iranian information operation in 2020.

How Trump Dismantled U.S. Election Security Infrastructure

In the wake of the January 6 (2021) attack on the U.S. Capitol, and especially after the Congressional hearings exposing the motives and perpetrators of that attack, a counter-movement began to take shape that attempted to rewrite the events of that day, to make the villains into heroes and the heroes into villains. As part of that effort, the people and organizations who had worked to call out lies about the 2020 election — falsehoods that had motivated the January 6 violence — were attacked for so-called “censorship.”

The academic researchers involved in the Election Integrity Partnership (that helped expose the Iranian operation) were smeared, our work profoundly mischaracterized as a massive, government-controlled, censorship operation. (None of this was true.) We were harassed, threatened, sued, and a few of us hauled into the bowels of buildings in Washington D.C. for interrogations by Jim Jordan and the Judiciary Committee’s “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”

Then we were defunded. Our team lost its long-standing National Science Foundation funding (though we continue our research with other support). Under pressure externally and internally and with reduced grant funding, the Stanford team was dismantled in spring of 2024, and the Internet Observatory closed later that year.

Similar efforts targeted people and agencies working on the government side. Chris Krebs, the Director of CISA — the DHS agency that made the formal attribution of the “Proud Boys” emails to Iranian threat actors — was notoriously fired via tweet in November of 2020 for not supporting the election denialism stance of the first Trump administration.

When the second Trump administration took power in 2025, it began to hollow out and hamstring the organizations tasked with protecting our elections. CISA has been decimated, particularly the groups who worked on the informational dimensions of election security. Election watchdogs are concerned that the U.S. will be more vulnerable to foreign election interference in future cycles due to the current administration’s policies.

Using Foreign Influence to Justify Federal Interference

So, the Iranian regime did try to “interfere” in the 2020 election. But it absolutely did not go unnoticed! It was quickly detected, called out, and its damage mitigated by independent researchers and government agencies who, at the time, had pathways for sharing information about election threats.

Instead of celebrating this work to secure elections and mitigate influence operations like the ones mentioned in his post, President Trump and his administration have intentionally destroyed the infrastructure that supported it.

But why is he now highlighting the existence of these Iranian influence operations and pretending that the infrastructure to address them was never there? One straightforward way to read this is that the operations provide additional justification for the strikes in Iran yesterday.

But there’s more backstory that could be relevant here. The Trump administration has, according to the Washington Post, been mulling a potential executive order, prepared by and circulating among his political allies, that would assert emergency powers over election infrastructure via an emergency declaration to “address election integrity issues caused by foreign interference.” Considered within that context, Trump’s “Truth” post — and the Just the News article that it cites — reflect not just an attempt to justify the strikes in Iran, but also, quite possibly, to support this potential executive order.

TL;DR (Summary)

The real story is that foreign governments try to interfere with elections in the U.S. all the time. In 2020 and 2024, the U.S. had private and public infrastructure in place to catch them, call them out, and mitigate the damage. Now, those mechanisms are gone, intentionally undermined and dismantled by the Trump administration. Instead of securing our elections, it seems that the current administration would prefer to exploit the spectre of “foreign interference” to justify its own *federal interference* in the upcoming midterm election.