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Hackers And Election Officials Test Voting Machines; Source: Iran Wants Compensation If U.S. Exits Deal; Explosions Rock Russian Ammunition Depot In Crimea; Ship Carrying Food Aid Departs Ukraine For Ethiopia; Drought Forces Massive Cuts In Water Use For U.S. Southwest; NBA Won't Play Any Games On U.S. Election Day; Emma Raducanu Defeats Serena Williams Ahead Of U.S. Open. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired August 17, 2022 - 04:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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CHRISTINA MACFARLANE, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to CNN Newsroom. I'm Christina Macfarlane. If you're just joining us, let me bring you up to date with our top stories this hour. Two former White House lawyers were questioned by the FBI over the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. This as a judge is set to decide whether the DOJ should release the affidavit into the search.

And Liz Cheney has conceded in Wyoming's primary election race. Voters chose Trump-backed Harriet Hageman to take the state's loan congressional House seat. In a scathing speech on Tuesday night, Cheney vowed to continue her fight against Donald Trump's election lies. Liz Cheney was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Now she is the eighth who will not be returning to Congress next year. Cheney said she will do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of the White House.

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LIZ CHENEY, U.S. HOUSE REPUBLICAN: This is a fight for all of us together. I'm a conservative Republican. I believe deeply in the principles and the ideals on which my party was founded. I love its history. And I love what our party has stood for. But I love my country more.

HARRIET HAGEMAN, WYOMING REPUBLICAN NOMINEE FOR U.S. HOUSE: Wyoming has drawn a line in the sand that if we put you in power, you will be accountable to us, you will answer to us and you will do what is in our best interests. And if you don't, we will fire you.

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MACFARLANE: Well Liz Cheney's loss on Tuesday means that another election denier is one step closer to Congress. Meanwhile, hackers and election security officials gathered in Las Vegas over the weekend to put voting machine vulnerabilities to the test without stoking any election conspiracy theories. CNN Donie O'Sullivan reports.

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HARRI HURSTI, ELECTION SYSTEM EXPERT: So the conspiracy claims all the time evolved, once one head of the hydra is cut down, the second head pops up.

DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on-camera): We've had two years of nonstop conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which center around these voting machines that they were in some way hacked and used to steal votes and to steal the election. We are here at DEF CON in Las Vegas, which some people called hacker summer camp. And hackers are doing their very best this weekend to break into these voting machines.

Isn't what you're doing here by tearing these machines apart and showing that they can be vulnerable? Is that not just going to play into more of the fears, more of the conspiracy theories about the election?

CAT TERRANOVA, DEF CON VOTING VILLAGE ORGANIZER: I think a lot of these fears and these conspiracies really thrive in darkness. Here, we have like a clear box model where we open things up if you're able to look inside, and you're actually able to get your hands on these voting machines yourself. It's not that there are not vulnerabilities within these machines that needs to be addressed. Just because there are vulnerabilities, doesn't mean that they were manipulated or exploited in the way that certain parties are saying that they are.

O'SULLIVAN (on-camera): How are you've spent the weekend tearing apart voting machines? You've talked a lot about vulnerabilities. But have you ever found evidence that vulnerabilities have been used to change the results of an American election?

HURSTI: Never. Same comes with all the auto experts. We have always said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We have never seen that kind of evidence.

CHRIS KREBS, FORMER DIRECTOR, DHS CYBERSECURITY & INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AGENCY: Vulnerabilities exist in in almost all software regardless of where you find it. Even in, you know, nuclear power plants, you'll find that. There are a system of defenses and protections to ensure that a bad guy can't get to them. And those exists in voting systems as well.

O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): Chris Krebs oversaw election security at DHS for the 2020 election before being fired by Trump for speaking out against conspiracy theories.

KREBS: The biggest vulnerability and democracy is the people. It's the brain. It's the perception hack.

O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): Cyber experts here say the big challenge to the 2022 midterms is not the machines, it's misinformation.

HURSTI: I'm afraid even what I know the vulnerabilities of the systems are more of right about misinformation claiming an attack which actually didn't happen, and which will then get the holding in people's mind.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We want to focus on pushing security forward and instead we're responding to death threats.

O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): Nate Young and Michael Moore know all about conspiracy theories. They're part of the election security team for Maricopa County in Arizona, a ground zero of election lies. They're here to work with hackers to make elections more secure by exposing vulnerabilities and getting them fixed.

[04:35:04]

NATE YOUNG, DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, MARICOPA COUNTY RECORDER: We have not seen a single accusation or conspiracy theory that has produced any actual tangible results.

O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): Conspiracy theories like those being pushed by the likes of The My Pillow Guy who basically claims countries like China have hacked American elections and changed votes.

MIKE LINDELL, CEO, MYPILLOW: No, just forget about the evidence. If I'm right, the China took our country right now. Do you care? Would that bother you?

O'SULLIVAN (on-camera): How does it feel as a voting systems experts listening to people like Michael Lindell?

HURSTI: It makes me sad. It makes me sad from the fact that all of the resources, all of the energy which could have been used for something beneficial, improving is now misused.

O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): Misused to perpetuate misinformation that undermines American democracy.

KREBS: The further the narrative goes on, the firmer and gets set in stone. You repeat the lie long enough, and then many times it becomes kind of that reality, their reality. Ultimately, this comes down to the voters. What do people want? Do we want to be a democracy? And if the answer is yes, better start damn acting like it.

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O'SULLIVAN: And while many of the machines you saw there in that piece are used in the U.S. are also used in countries all around the world. And we saw hackers putting them to their tests there. One thing that is just very important to underline is that as the experts said in that piece, you know, they're hackers, they want to be able to break into systems to poke holes in them to find flaws.

They said they have not seen in the U.S. any kind of vulnerabilities at the scale, where votes would be changed in a way that would overturn an election, despise the Pillow Guy and despise the former U.S. president is saying. Back to you.

MACFARLANE: Donie O'Sullivan there. Very interesting.

OK, Iran may be close to reviving its nuclear deal, but it's demanding a few things from the U.S. first. What Tehran wants and how Washington is responding, just ahead. Plus, parts of the southwestern U.S. are facing a potentially catastrophic collapse of their water supply unless they take drastic measures to cut back.

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PEDRAM JAVAHERI, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Weather across the United States, Meteorologist Pedram Javaheri. Here's what's happening. Notice the Southwest, the monsoon still in full effect across that region. I've had plenty of thunderstorms and cloud cover across areas of the southern United States, the first relief and seemingly weeks across this region at temperatures have been below average and expected to remain there with additional possibilities of wet weather.

Houston will take any rainfall here to keep us a little bit cooler. The Southwest, we've seen so much rain and additional moisture is expected to surge into this region. So flood alerts have been prompted here and rainfall amounts could exceed in some cases more than 50 millimeters. So Arizona, northern Mexico, parts of New Mexico, all getting in on some quite a bit of rainfall here in the coming days.

We know the Drought Monitor gradually dropping these numbers that were frankly sitting right around 100 percent just a few weeks ago. So chipping away at this and notice the incoming rainfall here going to be very beneficial for this region.

And speaking of rainfall, nearly most of the United States has an increased probability here to see rainfall over the next week and a half or so. So that is positive news here. The additional areas of concern though, are right here in southwest with flooding.

Notice this, with the rains, the color contours of light green, light yellow, that's indicative of cooler air also building in for at least a few days. So temps in Dallas down to about 30, in Oklahoma City in the 20s after most of the summer was close to 40 degrees.

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MACFARLANE: Welcome back, South Korean defense officials are monitoring developments from Pyongyang after North Korea apparently fired two cruise missiles towards the sea off its western coast. Now this will be the first time since January North Korea has fired a cruise missile which is not banned under U.N. sanctions. And it comes as the U.S. is scheduled to hold joint military drills with South Korea next week.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force has tested an unarmed nuclear capable long-range missile. The Minuteman III was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It flew 4,200 miles or 6,700 kilometers to a test range near the Marshall Islands. The Airforce says the launch is meant to demonstrate that the U.S. nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, and reliable. U.S. regularly tests intercontinental weapons to verify their accuracy. Now Iran is apparently worried about getting trumped again, if it resumes its nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers. A diplomatic source tells CNN Tehran wants compensation if the U.S. pulls out of the agreement, like Donald Trump did in 2018. The revived deal like the 2015 original would limit Iran's ability to produce a nuclear weapon in exchange for sanctions relief.

Well CNN's Fred Pleitgen has covered Iran extensively and joins us now live from Moscow. And Fred, what response has there been from the United States to these demands?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, so far the U.S. of that it's studying the demands that have been put forward by the Iranians. The European Union says it's studying them as well. But so far, the vibe that we're getting from the Iranians after some statements that were made by U.S. officials have not been very negative. They still believe that there are positive vibes out there, they believe that a deal can be done very quickly.

I want to listen in really quickly to what the State Department had to say about what they've received from the Iranians and how things could move forward. Let's listen in.

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NED PRICE, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON: We started this process in the spring of 2021. It is now nearly late summer of 2022. If all sides, if the Iranians had show -- had demonstrated a seriousness of purpose from the earliest days of this, we would have been able to achieve a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA in relatively short order.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PLEITGEN: Now, of course, the Iranians, Christina, have a very different take on that. They believe that the Biden administration when it came into office could have immediately gone back into the JCPOA and dropped all the sanctions. But, of course, the negotiations have been quite difficult over the past couple of months.

And the reason for that is actually exactly what you said. And the lead in to all this, the Iranians don't want to get trumped again, as they put it. They say they had bad terms with the JCPOA. And they said the big problem for them was they destroyed large parts of their nuclear program. And then Donald Trump went and left the JCPOA. And they had a destroyed nuclear program.

And at the same time, we're getting hit with massive sanctions. And the Iranians say, they don't want that to happen again. That's where this whole term of compensation seems to be coming from. It seems to be less monetary compensation. When you speak to people who are close to these negotiations, they call it more a price to pay.

They essentially are saying that, look, if this happens again, they understand that they can't stop the U.S. from leaving the nuclear agreement again, if there's a new administration or something else comes up. But they want to make sure that there's a price to pay, which means they probably want to destroy their nuclear program, or permanently disable their nuclear program to a lesser extent, and they also want compensation, for instance, for companies that do business with Iran, Christina.

MACFARLANE: Yes, it'll be very interesting to see how the United States responded to this. Fred Pleitgen there from Moscow. Thanks very much, Fred.

Well, for the second time in a week, explosions have rocked a Russian military site in Crimea. The Russian Defense Ministry says sabotage is behind Tuesday's blast at an ammunition depot. But Ukraine has stopped short of claiming responsibility.

And to the east, Ukraine is acknowledging some Russian gains in the Donbas with one Ukrainian commander calling the situation intense, but fully controlled. Meanwhile, the first shipment of humanitarian food aid bound for Africa since the war began left Ukraine on Tuesday. U.N. Charter ship is headed to Ethiopia.

Well for more, let's go live to CNN's David McKenzie who joins us from Kyiv. And David, we've seen numerous ships leaving Ukraine carrying I think agricultural shipments up to now but this particular shipment is the first of its kind because it's helping countries facing famine, particularly in Africa.

DAVID MCKENZIE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's right, Christina. It is a bit of light in this otherwise very dark story. This ship is commandeered or, sorry, I should say, it is you used by the World Food Programme to get a grain into at this point, Ethiopia where they've been struggling with famine-like conditions.

[04:45:09]

Now it's still just early days for this agreement, 23,000 tons of grain on that particular vessel, they've managed to get out around half a million tons. But I remember just around a month ago, we were in Tunisia reporting, and at that point, 20 million tons of grain, according to the Ukrainians was held hostage by the Russian.

So the hope will be that they can accelerate these grain shipments to make some kind of a dent in the very precarious situation in parts of East Africa. But it is still a positive moment. And here's the World Food Programme.

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MARIANNE WARD, DEP. COUNTRY DIRECTOR, WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME IN UKRAINE: We're very excited that this is the first ship to be leaving this port and that a humanitarian ship is really leading the way. We also hope that this will be the beginning of normal operations and that Ukrainian food can start to go out and support the world and end hunger and bring down global food prices.

(END VIDEO CLIP) MCKENZIE: Overnight, there's been several significant strikes by Russian forces, according to Ukrainians, both west of the capital to where I am standing, as well as several strikes in Odesa that Black Sea port close to where those grain shipments are leaving from. But I think in terms of intensity over the last few days and weeks, in fact, the Eastern conflict has been extremely intense with Ukrainian commanders saying that Russians are strike them in at least 800 times a day. And that really is where this conflict should be watched very closely, indeed. Christine?

MACFARLANE: Yes. And I know you will continue to do that. David McKenzie there from Kyiv. Thanks very much, David.

All right, still ahead this hour, the climate crisis is taking an unprecedented toll on some of America's most crucial reservoirs and rivers, forcing states and farmers to make drastic changes.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's a big one.

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MACFARLANE: You're looking at video of a massive tornado like waterspout forming off the coast of Northwestern Florida. It happens during a Tuesday morning, during some thunderstorms. One witness told CNN, quote, it scared the heck out of me. Yes, it certainly would me too.

The drought in southwestern U.S. has reached a new tier of crisis for the first time specifically, a federally designed tier -- two-tier water shortage condition. This means Arizona, Nevada, as well as Mexico will have to further cut back on water used from the Colorado River starting January.

As CNN's Bill Weir has more on this now.

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BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting. That's supposed Mark Twain quote has been a Western slogan since the first settlers. But now the worst drought in 1,200 years, as water managers in seven states 30 tribal nations and Mexico fighting over every precious drop.

CAMILE TOUTON, BUREAU OF RECLAMATION COMMISSIONER: But to date, the states collectively have not identified and adopted specific actions of sufficient magnitude that would stabilize the system.

WEIR (voice-over): That was the commissioner in charge of dams and reservoirs, admitting that upper and lower basin states have failed to agree on ways to cut their water use by up to 25 percent. PAT MULROY, FORMER COMMISSIONER, SOUTHERN NEVADA WATER AUTHORITY: I think ultimately the states are going to realize they're playing Russian roulette, and they're going to have to come to their senses.

WEIR (voice-over): For almost 30 years, Pat Mulroy was in charge of Southern Nevada's water and led an aggressive conservation campaign to tear up lawns, reuse wastewater and scold water wasters.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Can't water in the middle of the day, ma'am. You'll be fine if you don't change your watering clock.

WEIR (voice-over): All measures she'd like to see happen downstream.

MULROY: I think they're kind of kicking the can down the road past the election, if you want me to be very frank about it. I don't think anybody wants to make great public announcements about measures they may have to take --

WEIR (on-camera): Right.

MULROY: -- prior to the election.

WEIR (voice-over): Rather than the force new action, the feds will let the states keep talking while the next round of automatic cuts will lower water delivery by 7 percent to Mexico, 8 percent In Nevada, and 21 percent to Arizona.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can hear this crunching, it's just starting to dry up.

WEIR (voice-over): Here, alfalfa farmers are already being paid to let their fields go fallow. While some are switching to crops like Wioli (ph), a rubber plant that grows in the desert.

KEVIN MORAN, ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND: Crop switching. Looking at lower water use crops like Wioli (ph) is one of the solutions we need to be looking at in a drier future to allow communities to sustain themselves.

WEIR (voice-over): Thanks to some creative water accounting, California will not face mandatory cuts next year. But their governor is already warming of a future with a lot more people and a lot less water.

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): Science and the data leads us to now understand that we will lose 10 percent of our water supply by 2040. If all things are equal, we will lose an additional 10 percent of our supply by 2040.

MULROY: We have the very real possibility this coming year. If we have another lousy winter, all things being equal, that we will drive this lake down to elevation 1,000. That is 100 feet above Deadpool, and you're at the bottom of the martini glass. So it doesn't take much to tip that over and get to the point where nothing can go downstream.

And if you don't take it seriously now, if you think that you're going to avoid this, do a rain dance, go pray, do whatever that we have a great winner, you're insane.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WEIR: On the same day of this new report, President Biden also signed new legislation, the most ambitious climate legislation in American history, which includes, thanks to Western senators, $4 billion for drought relief and likely go to farmers paying them not to grow cotton or alfalfa in the desert for the coming years. Maybe homeowners paying them to tear up their lawns or shrink the footprint of their swimming pools.

[04:55:08]

The big ideas, desalination plants or reviving the Salton Sea or even piping water from the Eastern U.S. These have been bandied about for decades, but these take time and money. And in the meantime, all anybody can do is conserve every precious drop.

Bill Weir, CNN, Lake Mead, Nevada.

MACFARLANE: Now opening statements are set to begin later today. In R. Kelly's federal trial in Chicago, the R&B singer is facing child pornography and obstruction of justice charges. He has pleaded not guilty. Kelly has already been sentenced to 30 years in prison on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges.

The NBA says it won't play any games on November 8th, the day of the U.S. midterm elections and is encouraging fans to vote that day. Teams will use their platforms before the election to distribute information on voting processes and voter registration deadlines. Meanwhile, the league is expected to reveal its full schedule for the upcoming regular season later today.

And in tennis, Serena Williams lost the opening round of the western and southern open in Ohio on Tuesday. This was Williams second match since announcing she plans to evolve away from tennis. The 23-time Grand Slam winner is still set to play the U.S. Open that later this month. Her opponent Emma Raducanu, the reigning U.S. Open champion said it was a true honor to share the court with Williams.

And some quick thinking from football players from a high school in Georgia are getting a lot of attention for their heroism. They rushed to help an injured woman from her car after an accident near school. They said they had to use all their muscles to force open the door of the badly damaged vehicle. Players hope the woman they rescued is doing OK.

What a team of champions.

That does it this hour on CNN Newsroom. I'm Christina Macfarlane in London. Early Start with Christine Romans is up next. Stay tuned.

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