• On Monday, The FBI confirmed it’s investigating claims that Iran hacked the Trump campaign. The agency did not publicly release additional information. However, according to The Washington Post, the agency has been investigating suspected Iranian phishing attempts that targeted both U.S. presidential campaigns since June. Sam Sabin, cybersecurity reporter at Axios, explains the growing risks of foreign interference in the upcoming election.
• And in headlines: The U.S. defense secretary ordered more military vessels to deploy to the Middle East amid fears that Iran will soon launch a retaliatory attack on Israel, Ukraine’s top military commander said his forces had taken control of more than 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory, and MTV moved the annual VMAs back a day to avoid a conflict with ABC’s September presidential debate.

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TRANSCRIPT

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s Tuesday, August 13th. I’m Josie Duffy Rice.

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Andersen and this is What a Day, the show where we’re giving our flowers to the Biden administration for unveiling an initiative to make paid subscription services easier to cancel. 

Josie Duffy Rice: First, the war on junk fees. Now the war on chat bots. We love to see that. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Gym memberships and streaming services, consider yourselves on notice. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Take Planet Fitness down, I beg someone. [laughter] [music break] On today’s show, the US sends a missile submarine to the Middle East to defend Israel as the threat of an attack by Iran looms. Plus, MTV wants its viewers to be civically engaged. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But first, on Monday, after years of relative bliss for all of us, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump returned to X, the site formerly known as Twitter. And even though none of us asked for any of this, Trump also participated in a talk on X with the company CEO, Elon Musk. It got off to a late start as many users struggled to access the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a cyber attack, although the website hasn’t exactly functioned properly since he laid off 80% of the staff last year. Once things did get going, the two discuss the alleged hack and the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. 

[clip of Elon Musk] What was it like for you? 

[clip of Donald Trump] Not pleasant, [laughter] I have to be honest.

[clip of Elon Musk] Not pleasant. 

[clip of Donald Trump] I said there was blood. I had–

[clip of Elon Musk] Being shot is not much fun. 

[clip of Donald Trump] –people [?] blood, I didn’t know I had, I didn’t know I had that much blood. The doctors later told me that the ear is a place that is uh, a very bloody place if you’re going to get hit. But uh, in this case, it was probably the best alternative you could even think about because it went at the right angle. And uh, you know, it was uh, it was a hard hit. It was very, I guess you would say surreal, but it wasn’t surreal. You know, I was telling somebody–

Josie Duffy Rice: Musk’s claims of a cyber attack aimed at his conversation with Trump came the same day that the FBI confirmed that they are looking into a recent phishing attempt against the Trump campaign. On Friday, Microsoft released a report detailing a phishing attempt by an Iranian intelligence unit towards a, quote, “high ranking official of a presidential campaign,” that on Saturday, Politico reported that in late July, an anonymous source reached out to them and shared confidential documents from the Trump campaign, including a dossier on vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance that contained information on his potential electoral vulnerabilities. The New York Times has also said that a source reached out to them offering similar documents. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And so Politico has been communicating with the anonymous source for weeks now, and they reported on this interaction. What’s been happening since they published their article. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So the Trump campaign confirmed to Politico that it had been hacked and they blamed Iran for the attack, though they provided no evidence of that beyond the Microsoft report. But then The Washington Post reported on Monday that the FBI is looking into Iranian phishing attempts that date back to June and have targeted the presidential campaigns for both parties. The post also reported that Trump adviser Roger Stone said his email account was hacked as part of the phishing attempt. For more on the risks of foreign interference in the upcoming election, I spoke with Sam Sabin, cybersecurity reporter at Axios, and she began by giving some context into Iran’s recent attempts to interfere in U.S. elections. 

Sam Sabin: So they have been pretty heavily involved in, U.S. elections uh, the last couple of cycles. I would say that what we’re seeing this election cycle so far is an escalation from maybe what we saw in 2020, in 2020 to set the scene, it was like a last ditch effort. A lot of influence campaigns, things like that, just kind of meant to cause a little bit of chaos. Maybe in the fall right before the vote. Uh. What we’re seeing now is the intelligence community gave a briefing, I want to say, a couple of weeks ago now to reporters saying that they are now seeing active efforts from the Iranian government to undermine the Trump campaign, mostly through disinformation so far, that’s what the intelligence community said. Uh. So that can look like fake news stories that try to point out perceived flaws in former President Trump. Or maybe they’re celebrating something that VP Harris has done or something like that. And Microsoft also as part of that report, I mean, that whole report on Friday was just about the ways that Iran has stepped up their game. Right? They’re now using AI to mimic news articles. So they’re kind of training models on existing news stories and then tweaking that to create more legitimate looking fake news stories or things like that. They also were uh, seen targeting a local campaign as well. So it’s not just this high ranking presidential campaign that they identified, it’s others as well. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So what is the goal? What does Iran want? Do they just want chaos? Do they want a certain candidate to win? Do they want like what is the hope here? 

Sam Sabin: Yeah it’s a little bit of both, right? I mean, any time a nation state is targeting us, whether it’s Russia or Iran especially, it’s usually chaos. They want to drive divides in the United States. They see that our country is deeply divided right now. And I mean, any adversary likes to see when their opponent is weak and then you see places that you can exploit it. And so it’s pretty easy to just go on social media, feed into it and do that. And of course, nation states are always conducting espionage. That’s always a goal. The weird thing about the current reporting around the alleged Trump campaign hack is that the documents that were stolen were mostly vetting documents for potential vice presidential candidates. Right. So JD Vance, who, of course, was chosen for that post, or Marco Rubio as well. And so you could argue maybe it’s espionage, but that seems more so like chaos, right? Like you want to leak this to someone and then have you’re already kind of seeing on social media where people are questioning even what’s in these so-called dossiers. And what is the smoking gun that, that maybe this hacker is trying to get at? 

Josie Duffy Rice: You mentioned Russia. Like, how does this all compare to Russia’s attempts to interfere in 2016? Obviously that was its own kind of partisan issue. Right. And so how does it compare? 

Sam Sabin: It looks pretty similar, to be frank with you. It in 2016 for maybe those who uh, forgot because we’ve lived like ten lives since then. [laugh] Uh. Essentially in 2016, uh the Russian government was found to be uh hacking the DNC and basically the, the Clinton campaign and then just sharing whatever it stole with Wikileaks and others in the hopes that this information was published, maybe skewed in a different way, things like that. Back then, uh reporters were kind of new to the experience of like, what a hack and leak was. So you saw a lot of outlets going through Wikileaks reporting on what we’re seeing, and it really did exactly what Russia was hoping for, which was to skew the outcome of the 2016 election. This is kind of similar, right. You’re seeing Iran targeting a campaign. And the hope clearly is to kind of pour through these dossiers, see what was there, and hope that the smoking gun is unearthed and the election is swayed. Right. So it’s actually quite similar. I think the difference is the response, which is you’re not seeing those documents fully published anywhere as of right now. 

Josie Duffy Rice: And so is there a difference in cyber security on our end? Like how much have presidential campaigns and the intelligence community improved their cyber security practices? Is it harder for these countries to use these tactics, take these angles? 

Sam Sabin: I would say on the campaigns, it deeply varies, right. On the national level, there is, of course, more money. There are more people who can look into cybersecurity. So the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign, they have way more staffers dedicated to this than, say, your local mayoral race or your senators race or something like that. So you’ve seen a lot more focus on cybersecurity on the national level. Now, I will say if this did happen through like uh your run of the mill phishing attack, it kind of highlights that even though we are investing more on the campaign level, like very basic human error can still lead to an incident, right? And that’s always going to be a factor. I think it’s a matter of like how you store information in your networks, things like that, that maybe we’re still figuring out. Uh. In the intelligence community, it really feels like there are more efforts to kind of get ahead of this stuff. Right? So even before the attack, uh there was a briefing with the intelligence community, which was kind of rare, right? It’s very rare for the intelligence community to weigh in on foreign election interference this early before election day and to warn us that hey, this is coming. Hey, be on guard. Uh. And maybe question what you see online a little bit more. And don’t be so quick to repost something if it looks kind of even like 10% weird, right? [laugh] So, uh we’ve kind of learned in those regards, just like there’s awareness. But obviously I wouldn’t say we’re 100% there yet. I don’t know if anyone is really 100% there on cybersecurity, though. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Right. You spoke to an official who have voiced concerns about how the Trump campaign could use the real threat of election interference to its advantage. So tell us a little bit more about what he said. 

Sam Sabin: Yeah, yeah. So I spoke with Jake Braun. He is a former Obama campaign official who uh he was there when even their campaign was facing attacks from China. And typically back then, China was just interested in espionage. But he was really concerned about the potential, especially from the Trump campaign, to maybe use even suspected Iranian hacking to their advantage. Right? Uh. We know that President Trump is already kind of in disarray in the last few weeks since Biden dropped out, VP Harris stepped in, and uh he’s kind of been looking for a way forward. And he has been going on this message of saying, you know, the election could be rigged if I don’t win. We all know what happened. You could see a world where if we get closer to November, if it’s not going uh the former president’s way in his mind, then he could easily go, hey, it was the Iranians. Oh, hey, you saw a glitch in a voting machine? Probably the hackers. They got me. They can get you, right? And so there’s a deep fear that this can be weaponized in the next few weeks. And we have an electorate that already has so much distrust in our electoral system for various reasons, legitimate or not. So it doesn’t really take much to even like pour a little bit of gasoline and and burn those further. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That was my conversation with Sam Sabin, cybersecurity reporter at Axios. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Thanks for that, Josie. That’s the latest for now. We’ll get to some headlines in a moment. But if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. We’ll be back after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK] 

Josie Duffy Rice: Let’s get to some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Josie Duffy Rice: World leaders are bracing themselves for escalating tensions in the Middle East as they wait for Iran’s expected retaliatory attack on Israel. This comes after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, vowed revenge on Israel after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was killed in Tehran late last month after attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Officials from Jordan and Saudi Arabia have met with Iranian leaders in recent days to discuss the need to de-escalate tensions. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday that the Pentagon sent a missile submarine to bolster Israel’s defenses, along with other military reinforcements. 

Tre’vell Anderson: A new report from the Associated Press found that more than 100 pregnant patients who needed an abortion have been denied emergency health care since the fall of Roe. The report cites several federal complaints from patients who were turned away from hospitals despite having an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies occur when a fetus grows outside of the uterus and cannot be carried to term. One woman in Texas said doctors handed her a pamphlet about miscarriage and told her to, quote, “let nature take its course,” when she went to the hospital. Doctors eventually terminated her pregnancy days later, but by then one of her fallopian tubes had ruptured. Even though several states have passed strict abortion bans since 2022. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, dictates that hospitals must provide abortion care when the patient’s life is at risk. But medical providers are hesitant to do so in states like Texas, where they face up to 99 years in prison for violating the state’s abortion ban. State officials have challenged EMTALA in court and even taken it up to the Supreme Court, but the justices sent the case back to a lower court. 

Josie Duffy Rice: On Monday, Ukraine’s top military commander said his forces had taken control of more than 1000 square kilometers of Russian territory, or about 400 miles. This marked the first time Ukraine’s military publicly acknowledged its week long campaign in Russia’s Kursk region, which borders northeastern Ukraine. Russia has scrambled to respond to Ukraine’s attack, which is the largest on Russian soil since World War Two. During a televised meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top officials Monday, the acting governor of the Kursk region said more than two dozen towns and villages were under Ukrainian control, and that more than 120,000 people had fled. During the meeting, Putin ordered Russian troops to kick the enemy out and insisted Moscow would still meet all of its goals for its war in Ukraine. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And apparently MTV still plays music videos and awards folks for them. On Monday, the network said it would postpone its annual video music awards ceremony to avoid conflicting with the presidential debate. The VMAs were originally scheduled for Tuesday, September 10th. That’s the same day Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are set to square off on ABC for their first, and so far, only debate. The VMAs will now be held Wednesday, September 11th in Long Island, what a choice. MTV also announced some of the performers at this year’s ceremony. They include Sabrina Carpenter, Camila Cabello and Chappell Roan. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So quaint. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Quaint. 

Josie Duffy Rice: [?]. 

Tre’vell Anderson: A VMAs on the September 11th in Long Island? I mean, come on. 

Josie Duffy Rice: No, not the September 11th–

Tre’vell Anderson: Oh. 

Josie Duffy Rice: –part. [?] part. [laughter] Just the general VMAs. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Just the fact that they’re still in existence, you mean? 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. It feels so nostalgic. You know?

Tre’vell Anderson: Mm hmm. Throwback Thursday or–

Josie Duffy Rice: I bet that’s what they’re going for. 

Tre’vell Anderson: –Tuesday, whatever today is. [laugh]

Josie Duffy Rice: And those are the headlines. 

[AD BREAK] 

Josie Duffy Rice: That’s all for today. If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review, prepare yourself for the weird September 11th VMAs and tell your friends to listen. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And if you are into reading and not just about the Biden administration’s war on junk fees like me, Wha a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Tre’vell Anderson. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

[spoken together] And see you in hell chat bots. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, now hold on, I won’t be there so.

Josie Duffy Rice: No, I’m not gonna be there either. I’m definitely not going to be in that hell. 

Tre’vell Anderson: About to say. [laugh] I’m not claiming that. 

Josie Duffy Rice: [?] a whole other hell because that’s too much. [music break]

Tre’vell Anderson: What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Ethan Oberman, Jon Millstein, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.