August 13, 2024

Day 1302: "You’re all gone."

5 minutes

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

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1/ The FBI is investigating the suspected hacking attempts by Iran that targeted both the Trump and the Biden-Harris campaigns. The investigation includes attempted hacks targeting three Biden-Harris campaign staffers, as well as Roger Stone, who said he’d been contacted by authorities about unauthorized use of his email account. The hackers reportedly used access to Stone’s email account to try to gain access to the account of a senior Trump campaign official. The FBI has not released any information about the hacking attempts other than to say it was investigating “a campaign cyberintrusion,” but Microsoft issued a public report last week warning that Iranian hackers had tried to break into the email account of a “high-ranking official” on a U.S. presidential campaign in June. The report prompted Trump to accuse Iran of hacking his 2024 campaign, but he never alerted the FBI due to his distrust of the agency. (Washington Post / Politico / NBC News / CNN / New York Times / NPR / Axios / The Guardian / CBS News)

News outlets were leaked insider material from the Trump campaign. They chose not to print it. “Their decisions stand in marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them avidly.” (Associated Press)

Trump and his allies once cheered hacked materials. No longer, now that they say he’s a target. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said during a press conference in his 2016 presidential run, when Hillary Clinton’s deleted personal emails were a hot topic, “I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” That changed when Trump’s latest presidential campaign declared this weekend it had been hacked by Iran. “Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Steven Cheung, the campaign’s communications director, said. (ABC News)

2/ Voters in Arizona and Missouri will decide in November whether to enshrine the right to an abortion in their state constitutions. The Arizona secretary of state’s office certified 577,971 signatures that abortion rights groups had collected – 50% more than were required to put the constitutional amendment on the ballot and the highest number of certified signatures for any ballot measure in state history. In Missouri, the secretary of state’s office certified more than 380,000 signatures – more than double the minimum 171,000 needed to qualify for the ballot. The Missouri ballot measure would create a right to abortion up until fetal viability, around the 24th week of pregnancy, except to protect the life or health of the mother. Abortion-rights measures will also go before voters ...

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