Rubio warns of foreign interference around Election Day

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Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that foreign adversaries were working to undermine the U.S.election next week through disinformation campaigns. 

“WARNING. The bulk of disinformation attacks prepared by our adversaries were designed for the days before & just after Election Day,” the Florida Republican wrote on Twitter. “They may come faster than they can be spotted & called out,so word to the wise,the more outlandish the claim,the likelier it’s foreign influence.” 

One week ago, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe warned that Russia and Iran were attempting to influence the 2020 elections and had obtained some voter registration information. 

Ratcliffe noted that both nations had taken specific actions to influence voters' opinions. He noted that the registration information they obtained could be used to confuse voters through false communication. 

The Iranian interference that's been discovered, Ratcliffe said, has been designed to incite social unrest and damage the president.

"This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos, and undermine your confidence in American democracy," he said. "To that end, we have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump."

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He added that Iran was distributing a video with false information about fraudulent ballots.

The news conference was held as Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have received threatening emails, falsely purporting to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for Trump.

The voter-intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and home addresses and can include email addresses and phone numbers. Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the Nov. 3 election, for which early voting is ongoing.

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Last week, Rubio and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, also warned that adversaries seek to “sow chaos and undermine voters’ belief in our democratic institutions.”

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They said that targets may include elections systems and infrastructure.

“They may seek to target those systems, or simply leave the impression that they have altered or manipulated those systems, in order to undermine their credibility and our confidence in them," the lawmakers said.

Foreign election interference has been a public concern since 2016, and was the subject of a yearslong, five-volume report from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Microsoft in September said it had seen evidence that hackers based in Russia, Iran and China were targeting political groups, including Trump's and Joe Biden's campaigns. 

Fox News' Sam Dorman contributed to this report.