Iranian hackers tried but failed to interest Biden’s campaign in stolen Trump info, FBI says

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By ERIC TUCKER and DAVID KLEPPER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iranian hackers sought to interest President Joe Biden’s campaign in information stolen from rival Donald Trump’s campaign, sending unsolicited emails to people connected to the Democratic president in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other federal agencies said Wednesday.

There’s no evidence that any of the recipients responded, officials said, preventing the hacked information from surfacing in the final months of the closely contested election.

The hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a U.S. government statement.

The announcement is the latest effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen, ongoing work to interfere in the 2024 election, including a hack-and-leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies linked last month to Tehran. The Justice Department has been preparing charges in that breach, The Associated Press has reported.

The FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have said the Trump campaign hack and an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign are part of an effort to undermine voters’ faith in the election and to stoke discord.

The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.

Politico reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — passed along what appeared to be a research dossier that the campaign had apparently done on the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated Feb. 23, almost five months before Trump selected Vance as his running mate.

In a statement, Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for Kamala Harris’s campaign, said the campaign has cooperated with law enforcement since learning that people associated with Biden’s team were among the recipients of the emails.

“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” Finkelstein said.

Trump and Harris are taking a brief break from campaigning in battleground states

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By MEG KINNARD Associated Press

Presidential candidates typically focus much of their travel on battleground states, but Donald Trump on Wednesday is taking his message to a somewhat unlikely place: suburban New York.

The Republican presidential nominee and former president is heading to Uniondale, on Long Island, an area that could be key to his party maintaining control of the House. His party is trying to protect 18 Republicans in Democratic-heavy congressional districts that Joe Biden carried in 2020, particularly in coastal New York and California, and going on offense to challenge Democrats elsewhere.

Long Island in particular features one of the most closely watched races, between first-term Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito and Democrat Laura Gillen. D’Esposito is a former New York Police detective who won in 2022 in a district that Biden won by about 15 percentage points in 2020.

Trump posted Tuesday on his Truth Social platform that the GOP has “a real chance of winning” New York “for the first time in many decades.” In that same post, Trump also pledged that he would “get SALT back,” suggesting he would eliminate a cap on state and local tax deductions that were part of tax cut legislation he signed into law in 2017.

The so-called SALT cap has led to bigger tax bills for many residents of New York, New Jersey, California and other high-cost, high-tax states, and is an important campaign issue in those states, particularly among those New York Republicans serving in districts Biden won.

On the Democratic side of the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to speak at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 47th Annual Leadership Conference in Washington on Wednesday, and has trips planned later in the week to Michigan and Wisconsin.

Latino voters form a critical bloc in swing states such as Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Speaking on the Nueva Network this week with the personality known as “Chiquibaby,” Harris promoted her proposed tax deductions for new small businesses, her experience prosecuting border cases as California attorney general and her support for offering a “pathway to citizenship for those who have earned it.”

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On Tuesday, the vice president sat for an interview in Philadelphia with members of the National Association of Black Journalists. She decried Trump’s rhetoric and said voters should make sure he “can’t have that microphone again.”

Trump is attempting to return to his campaign cadence after Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt as he golfed in Florida. On Tuesday, he traveled to Flint, Michigan, and has not appeared to alter plans for upcoming trips to the nation’s capital and North Carolina later in the week.

His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is scheduled to hold an event in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Wednesday.

Boeing CEO says the company will begin furloughs soon to save cash during labor strike

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By The Associated Press

Boeing’s CEO said Wednesday that the company will begin furloughing “a large number” of employees to conserve cash during the strike by union machinists that began last week.

Chief Executive Kelly Ortberg said the layoffs would be temporary and affect executives, managers and other employees.

About 33,000 Boeing factory workers in the Pacific Northwest began a strike Friday after rejecting a proposal to raise pay by 25% over four years. They want raises of at least 40% and other improvements in the deal that they voted down.

The furloughs are expected to affect tens of thousands of Boeing employees. Ortberg said employees will be furloughed for one week every four weeks, and he and other senior executives will take pay cuts during the duration of the strike.

Now a Roe advocate, woman raped by stepfather as a child tells her story in Harris campaign ad

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By COLLEEN LONG Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A 22-year-old woman who became an abortion rights advocate after she was raped by her stepfather as a child tells her story in a new campaign ad for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Hadley Duvall says in voiceover that she’s never slept a full night in her life — her stepfather first started abusing her when she was five years old, and impregnated her when she was 12. As she speaks, images of Duvall as a child flash on the screen. The soundtrack of the ad is a song by Billie Eilish, who endorsed the vice president on Tuesday.

“I just remember thinking I have to get out of my skin. I can’t be me right now. Like, this can’t be it,” Duvall says. “I didn’t know what to do. I was a child. I didn’t know what it meant to be pregnant, at all. But I had options.”

The ad is part of a continued push by the Harris campaign to highlight the growing consequences of the fall of Roe, including that some states have abortion restrictions with no exceptions for rape or incest. Women in some states are suffering increasingly perilous medical care and the first reported instance of a woman dying from delayed reproductive care surfaced this week. Harris lays the blame squarely on Republican nominee Donald Trump, who appointed three of the conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court who helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

Duvall blames Trump, too.

“Because Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, girls and women all over the country have lost the right to choose, even for rape or incest,” she says in the ad. “Donald Trump did this. He took away our freedom.”

Hadley Duvall, a sexual assault survivor and reproductive rights advocate who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, joins a rally for Vice President Harris at the Independence Visitor Center in Philadelphia, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. Gov. Josh Shapiro headlined the reproductive rights rally before the campaign’s national “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus departed on a tour across Pennsylvania. (Tom Gralish/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP)

During the presidential debate on Sept. 10, Trump repeatedly took credit for appointing the three Supreme Court justices and leaned heavily on his catchall response to questions on abortion rights, saying the issue should be left up to the states. He said he would not sign a national abortion ban.

“I’m not signing a ban,” he said, adding that “there is no reason to sign the ban.”

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But he also repeatedly declined to say whether he would veto such a ban if he were elected again — a question that has lingered as the Republican nominee has shifted his stances on the crucial election issue.

Duvall of Owensboro, Kentucky, first told her story publicly last fall in a campaign ad for the governor’s race in her home state supporting Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. Duvall’s stepfather was convicted of rape and is in prison; she miscarried.

Beshear won reelection, and Democrats have said Duvall’s ad was a strong motivator, particularly for rural, male voters who had previously voted for Trump.

Duvall is also touring the country to campaign for Harris along with other women who have been telling their personal stories since the fall of Roe, joining Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro last week.