“Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election,” Iran’s mission told Newsweek.
Iranian officials told Newsweek that U.S. intelligence claims of the Islamic Republic engaging in efforts to interfere with former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign were baseless and called on officials in Washington to provide evidence to support them.
“Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing”, the Iranian Mission to the United Nations said in a statement shared with Newsweek. “As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.
“Should the U.S. government genuinely believe in the validity of its claims, it should furnish us with the pertinent evidence—if any—to which we will respond accordingly.”
The comments followed a joint statement issued earlier Monday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in which the three agencies identified “increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns.”
“This includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign”, the statement added, “which the IC [intelligence community] attributes to Iran.”
At a time when the ODNI, FBI and CISA said “Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests”, the U.
