Harris campaign says FBI warned of foreign hacking, but systems were not breached
Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.
“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.
Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:
Key events
Democrats in Arizona received some good news yesterday, when the secretary of state approved a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports. The party hopes the initiative will bring out voters who will also cast ballots for Kamala Harris in a state that could prove decisive to her hopes to winning the White House:
Arizona voters will decide this November whether to add abortion rights into their state constitution, a prospect that could turbocharge voter turnout in a critical battleground state in the 2024 election.
Late Monday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office announced that it had validated an estimated 577,971 signatures in support of a ballot measure, the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, to establish a constitutional right to abortion in the state.
On X, the office called the measure “the largest petition effort in Arizona history”. The measure will be listed on the ballot as Proposition 139.
Arizona is not the only state to face the prospect of an abortion-related ballot measure this November. So far, states including Colorado, Florida and Nevada – another key battleground state – are also set to hold similar ballot measures. Tuesday also marks the deadline for the state of Missouri to determine whether to add its own abortion-related measure to its ballots.
Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ballot measures that protect or preserve abortion rights have successfully passed even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. However, they have never been tested during a presidential election. Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base, especially since the vice-president, Kamala Harris, one of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on abortion rights, became the party’s nominee.
Arizona’s Republican former governor Doug Ducey has endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election bid, after he was censured by the state GOP near the end of his term for not being sufficiently loyal to the former president.
Ducey cited his support for tougher immigration policies and a continuation of Trump-era tax cuts in his endorsement:
Much is on the line this election year & I’m encouraging all eligible Arizonans to vote & prioritize the issues that most affect our state & nation.
I will be voting for Republicans up & down the ballot in November — and both Donald Trump and Kari Lake have my endorsement.
1/— Doug Ducey (@DougDucey) August 13, 2024
Three years ago, the state Republican party reprimanded Ducey after it was taken over by rightwing officials who retaliated against politicians from the state that had clashed with Trump:
Donald Trump’s campaign is out with a new statement claiming that the former president’s interview with Elon Musk last night “breaks the internet”.
It says 25 million users on X have listened to the entire two-hour-plus interview as of noon today, and that the conversation generated 9.6m posts, among other statistics. It also hit out at Kamala Harris for not having done any interviews since launching her campaign.
“While weak, failed, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has avoided answering questions for 23 days, President Trump delivered his message directly to the people in a historic, two-hour interview that generated millions of posts and impressions related to President Trump and Elon Musk’s unfiltered conversation,” the statement reads.
Here’s more, from the Trump campaign communications director, Steven Cheung:
President Trump will do everything he can to bring his unscripted message directly to the people, something the fake news media refuses to do. While Kamala Harris enjoys the luxury of hiding from the press, President Trump accepted Elon’s invitation to have an unfiltered conversation about his America First policies with voters and people around the world. The media can lie, but the numbers don’t: Americans are eager to hear from President Trump and his momentum is only growing as we get closer to November 5.
Sanders warns Trump is ‘laying the groundwork’ to dispute election loss
The prominent progressive senator Bernie Sanders has warned that Donald Trump is preparing to once again dispute the results of the 2024 election, should he lose.
Trump has never publicly conceded his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, and engaged in a months-long effort to prevent the Democrat from taking office that culminated in the violent January 6 insurrection.
In a just-released statement, Sanders cites the former president’s recent language to argue that he is preparing to do the same this year:
Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that “nobody” showed up at a 10,000-person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness. Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses. If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent”.
This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about.
Joanna Walters
The former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges last night.
Peters, a one-time hero to those denying that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with the My Pillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, access to the Mesa county election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity, the Associated Press reports.
Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to “steal” the election from Trump. His online broadcasting site has been showing a livestream of Peters’ trial.
Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The breach Peters was charged of orchestrating heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.
Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state. She was found not guilty of identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and one count of criminal impersonation.
She will be sentenced on 3 October.
Trump and Musk talk on climate labeled ‘dumb’ by top expert
Oliver Milman
Sea level rise will help create “more oceanfront property”, carbon pollution is only a problem once it starts causing “headaches and nausea” and we should be more worried about “nuclear warming” than global warming.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s conversation on X, which Musk owns, last night featured several incoherent and baseless statements on the climate crisis, prompting both confusion and derision among environmental advocates.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate group 350.org, labeled it the “dumbest climate conversation of all time.”
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee in this election, said that rising seas will help create “more oceanfront property” and complained that “people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” in reference to potential nuclear war.
During the often disjointed exchange, Trump also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration hadn’t opened up the Arctic to oil drilling and baselessly claimed that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle” because of climate edicts.
Musk, meanwhile, said that he is “helping the environment” by making electric cars via Tesla but said that he didn’t want people to “vilify” the oil and gas industry that is driving the climate crisis and that the real dangers were, he felt, an increase in CO2 that will cause “headaches and nausea” and the world potentially running out of oil.
“We don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that,” Musk said about the urgency of climate change. “Like leave the farmers alone.”
Scientists are clear that the world needs to rapidly move away from fossil fuels to avoid worsening and disastrous climate impacts such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts.
The exchange did little to assuage concerns that a second Trump term will only help accelerate dangerous global heating.
Joanna Walters
Kamala Harris’s campaign team has posted a clip of the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, praising her support for workers’ right to strike, in contrast to Donald Trump’s lack of such support.
“In 2019, GM [General Motors] was on strike for 40 days, Donald Trump was nowhere to be found, didn’t say nothing, didn’t do nothing. Now, let’s look at Kamala Harris … you want to know where she was? On the picket line … she stood with workers on strike,” Fain said.
He praised job retention and creation in the auto and auto parts industry by Joe Biden and his vice-president, Harris, and criticized Trump for promising to save workers’ jobs but then “leaving them behind” as jobs transferred away from factories “left for dead”.
The UAW reposted the post on X, formerly Twitter.
Joanna Walters
The United States was not engaged in any aspect of planning or preparation for Ukraine’s incursion in Russia, the state department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters a little earlier today.
Ukraine blindsided Moscow by pouring thousands of troops into the western Russian region of Kursk last week in a surprise operation that Kyiv says has seen its forces take 1,000 sq km of land, its largest gains since 2022, Reuters reports.
You can read our global coverage here.
Joanna Walters
The fraud trial against the former congressman George Santos, slated to start in a matter of weeks, is coming into focus after a federal judge ruled today that jurors will have their identities kept secret from the public.
They won’t, however, be required to fill out a written questionnaire gauging their opinions of Santos when they arrive for jury selection on 9 September, as his lawyers had requested, the Associated Press reports.
Judge Joanna Seybert said during a brief hearing in federal court on Long Island that she agreed with the government’s assessment that a questionnaire would only bog the proceedings down.
She said questioning each potential juror in person would allow her and both sides to ask more varied and probing questions to elicit more truthful responses.
Prosecutors told the judge the trial could last three weeks. Santos has pleaded not guilty to a range of financial crimes, including lying to Congress about his wealth, collecting unemployment benefits while actually working, and using campaign contributions to pay for personal expenses.
Santos declined to speak with reporters outside court after the hearing, the last expected before the trial.
For all intents and purposes, Santos has already been found guilty in the court of public opinion,” read a memo from Santos’s defense team, filed last week.
After Santos, a Republican, was ousted from Congress, Democrat Tom Suozzi won the House seat.
Joanna Walters
Wilma Liebman, chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the former US president Barack Obama, said that the fact that Elon Musk chuckled but did not respond to Donald Trump’s comments about firing strike workers, during their online conversation last night, makes it harder for the NLRB to find the electric vehicle entrepreneur liable for making illegal threats to workers at his companies, Reuters reports.
Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike, and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, the UAW auto workers union said in a statement. Trump called Musk “the greatest cutter” for his swathing job losses.
The NLRB has limited power to punish unlawful labor practices. In cases involving illegal threats, the board can order employers to cease and desist from such conduct and to post notices in the workplace informing workers of their rights. Unions can also use favorable rulings from the NLRB to engage workers they are trying to organize.
It’s trying to expose more than anything politically what Donald Trump is about in terms of workers, and Musk as well. Everyone knows the NLRB remedies are toothless to start with, but it’s not so much for the remedy as for sending both a political message and an organizing message,” Liebman said.
The UAW has filed separate complaints against Musk and Trump with the NLRB.
‘Trump is a scab’ – union
Joanna Walters
The United Auto Workers union (UAW) leadership is going all in against Donald Trump for this presidential election.
In addition to the statement from the union president, Shawn Fain, the association has posted on X: “He’s for the billionaires. Not for you. Donald Trump is a scab.”
And, with a skeptical inquiring face emoji, the union re-posted a message from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign X account, @KamalaHQ: “Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions.”
The UAW has endorsed Harris for president, as the presumptive Democratic nominee against Trump, the Republican nominee. It is also trying to unionize workers at Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company.
The day so far
Elon Musk is basking in the afterglow of the interview he conducted on X with Donald Trump last night. The Tesla CEO said their conversation had attracted 1bn views and comments, a number that was impossible to verify, while adding he would be willing to hold a similar event with Kamala Harris. But a remark Trump made during the interview about firing employees who strike has spurred the United Auto Workers to file a federal labor law complaint against both the former president and Musk, while Harris’s campaign dismissed last night’s event as a chat between “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live stream in the year 2024”.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
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Harris has no public events scheduled today, but her campaign continues to face questions over why the vice-president hasn’t held a press conference or granted a sit-down interview since announcing her bid for the White House.
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Musk has a long history of opposing unions, including at Tesla, where the UAW has been trying to encourage workers to organize.
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Trump has been flying around to campaign events in a plane once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, according to a report.
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has no public events scheduled today, but continues to face questions over why she won’t talk to reporters.
The vice-president has not granted a proper interview or held a press conference since announcing her bid for the White House late last month, a decision her campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod was asked about today, in an interview with CNN.
Elrod replied:
She has said on the campaign trail that she would be doing an interview at some point. She said that, I think, last week during – a during a rope line or when she was talking to reporters. But look, what is important here … is that she is taking her message directly to the American people. She hit a number of battleground states. I think we had 15,000 people in Detroit last week, 12,000 to 13,000 in Nevada. She’s been taking her message to the voters and drawing large crowds. So, she’s actually having those direct conversations.
Among those calling for Harris to talk to the press is the Guardian’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan. Here’s what she has to say:
As the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reported earlier this year, Elon Musk is part of a group of powerful business interests that have turned to the courts to blunt efforts to organize workers nationwide. Here’s more:
A multi-pronged legal attack under way by Elon Musk, large corporations, business groups and anti-union litigators threatens to “raise havoc” with US labor law and hobble a resurgent labor movement, according to experts.
So far efforts to scale back or undermine workers’ rights through the US courts have centered on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – the US top workplace watchdog and overseer of union elections. But other laws – including trademark and property rights statutes – are also being used.
Both Musk and Starbucks are pursuing cases that would undermine the NLRB.
Musk’s company SpaceX filed a lawsuit championed by the Federalist Society and other conservative groups against the NLRB in January. The lawsuit claims the board is unconstitutional because its members can only be removed for cause, not at will, and claims the board violates due process protections. The suit was filed in Texas by Musk’s attorneys with the union avoidance law firm Morgan Lewis in response to a board complaint that SpaceX fired workers in retaliation for writing a letter over concerns about Musk’s behavior.
United Auto Workers files labor charge over Trump comments on strikes
The United Auto Workers labor union, which is trying to organize workers at Tesla, has filed a federal labor charge over comments Donald Trump made last night in his interview with Elon Musk.
The union, which has endorsed Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House, said this comment from Trump to Musk ran afoul of federal law against threatening to fire workers who go on strike: “You walk in, you say, You want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”
Here’s more, from UAW president Shawn Fain:
Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45m a month to a Super Pac to get him elected. Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal and totally predictable from these two clowns.
In addition to Elon Musk, Donald Trump was also a friend to the late convicted sex offender and New York socialite Jeffrey Epstein. The Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that the former president has been using a plane Epstein once owned to travel to campaign events:
Donald Trump used a plane that was once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, to fly to several presidential campaign events last weekend, it has been revealed.
The former president flew on a Gulfstream G-550 jet whose previous ownership was subsequently traced to Epstein after Trump’s own private plane – a Boeing 757 known colloquially as Trump Force One – encountered engine troubles.
The former Epstein jet was emblazoned with the slogan “Trump 2024” for the duration of the ex-president’s use.
According to the Miami Herald, Trump flew from Bozeman, Montana, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and then to Aspen, Colorado, before a final trip to Denver on the jet to attend fundraisers as the Republican presidential nominee for November’s election.
The Trump campaign said it was unaware of the plane’s previous ownership when it chartered it from Private Jet Services Group, a charter jet vendor it occasionally uses, after the technical problems with the former president’s own aircraft.
