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Iran Hackers Target Donald Trump Campaign; North Carolina GOP Nominee For Governor Refuses To Quit Race; Shohei Ohtani Soars Into Baseball History In Epic Style. Aired 5:30-6a ET

Aired September 20, 2024 - 05:30   ET

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

[05:30:00]

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Joining us now, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. Josh, good morning to you. Always wonderful to have you on the show.

JOSH ROGIN, COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST, AUTHOR, "CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN" (via Webex by Cisco): Good morning.

HUNT: Can you kind of dig into for us into what we learned this week and how it's different from efforts we've see in the past?

ROGIN: Sure. Well, you know, for the Iranian part of it I think this is actually very similar to things that we've seen in the past going as far back as 2016. You'll remember that the Russian military intelligence hacked and dumped a ton of information about the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. And there's just been a number of those over the years, and the Iranians are just pointing it at the Trump campaign. It's a pretty well-known tactic.

The other thing the FBI announced this week was that the Chinese government has been taking over armies of zombie computers all over the world -- hundreds of thousands of them, actually -- for a different reason -- not for interference but for espionage and for attacking corporate and other organizations.

So it's not new to have foreign governments using AI and other technologies to hack and dump and cyber infiltrate. But the scale of it is unprecedented and the new technology makes it that much easier for these enemy governments to perpetrate and that much harder for the FBI to defend against.

HUNT: Josh, what are the differences among these various adversaries in how they approach things, and Iran versus China versus Russia, for example?

ROGIN: You know, that's a great question. I think there's two sets of differences. Once is targets and one is tactics.

So on targets it's pretty clear based on everything that we know that the Russians favor Donald Trump. The Russian government is work -- using its intelligence in cyber tools to help the Trump campaign against the Harris campaign. On the other hand, it's also very clear that the Iranians favor President -- Vice President Harris and are using their cyber tools against the Trump campaign. And the Chinese are kind of split. They don't seem to really have a strong preference. So that's in terms of targets.

In terms of tactics what we're seeing is that the Iranians have a very sort of low-level, short-term goal, which is just to mess with us and perhaps mess with the Trump campaign. And the Chinese have a much more long-term goal, which is to embed themselves in every router, and DVR machine, and webcam that they can find not just in America but all over the world. They're playing a much longer game and that's because their goals are corporate espionage, intelligence gathering, and then a possible attack later if and when they attack Taiwan, for example, that they can prevent us from retaliating.

So I think that basically rounds up the differences between these -- all of these bad actors.

HUNT: That's fascinating.

Josh, is our government prepared? I mean, do we stack up in terms of our capability to this threat?

ROGIN: You know, the U.S. government is actually the most prepared out of any organization in the world. They have the most resources, the most people, the smartest people. The problem is that defense is a lot more difficult than offense, and the attackers only have to be right once, and the defenders have to be right 100 percent of the time.

It's a cat and mouse game. The technology doesn't stop advancing and the enemies won't stop coming. But if I wanted any organization to defend my business or organization, or political campaign, the FBI is the cream of the crop. They're the best that there is. But no, it's never enough and it's never going to stop.

HUNT: I want to show you something that Congressman Mike Turner had to say -- obviously, important in the context of this conversation about what we learned around the Iranians and the attempted hack for the -- of the Trump campaign for Biden. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MIKE TURNER (R-OH): We don't have all the evidence and information yet. Remember, we went through the Russian hoax where they said that Trump was colluding with Russia. These are actual questions that need to be asked.

I think what's really important here also is to look at the issue that Iran has shown its clear preference for the Harris candidacy. You've got both their clear indication that they wish to assassinate President Trump and his cabinet members, in addition to them hacking his campaign and taking what should be considered confidential information from his campaign and giving it to his opponent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: So, of course, the intelligence chairman there also referencing what we did learn about a little bit earlier this year as well, which is this apparent attempted plot to assassinate Donald Trump.

You were talking about tactics and them being different -- interested in different things. How do you explain or understand the difference in terms like what Iran wants to see from the presidential election versus, say, what Putin wants?

ROGIN: Right. Well, although it seems that the Russian government and the Iranian government prefer different candidates they're overall goal is the same, is to mess with American democracy, to undermine the integrity of our elections and our politics, and to make the argument that their autocratic repressive system is somehow better than our free and open and democratic system, flawed as it is. So in that, they're perfectly aligned.

[05:35:00]

And as for the tactics they work together as well because the -- you know, whether it comes to military cooperation, intelligence cooperation, technological cooperation, the Russians and the Iranians are as close as lips and teeth. And so we can't separate those two threats despite the fact that in this particular election they seem to prefer different candidates.

And that's why we have to sort of work with our allies and the other free and open societies to pool resources and tactics and technologies to push back. Because in the end our system and our capabilities are much stronger, but we have this idea that we should have free and open elections, and they have an idea that they should attack those elections. And on that goal, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese, and the North Koreans, by the way --

HUNT: Yeah.

ROGIN: -- are all working together. That's for sure.

HUNT: Very cheerful.

Josh Rogin, thank you very much for being up with us this morning.

ROGIN: Thank you for having me.

HUNT: I really appreciate your insight. Happy Friday.

All right, let's turn now back to this story. North Carolina's Republican nominee for governor is refusing to drop out of the race after a bombshell report exposed dozens of inflammatory comments he made on a foreign site message board more than a decade ago. Mark Robinson is denying any responsibility for the posts in which he called himself a "Black Nazi." He praised slavery, and he made derogatory comments about Martin Luther King Jr.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) LT. GOV. MARK ROBINSON, (R) NORTH CAROLINA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: This is not us, these are not our words, and this is not anything that is characteristic of me nor has it ever -- has it ever been. This is not things that we would ever say or even think.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How can you deny with all these matching details that this is you?

ROBINSON: Look, I'm not going to get into the minutia of how some might manufacture this -- these salacious tabloid lies, but I can tell you this. There's been over $1 million spent on me through AI by a billionaire's son who is bound and determined to destroy me. The things that people can do with the internet now is incredible.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Robinson is facing calls to step down or prove the reports are false, but the deadline to exit the race was midnight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JEFF JACKSON (D-NC): Read what he wrote. You know he said that. And now he's lying by denying it. You know he said it. It fits with his character. This person clearly is failing the character test.

REP. RICHARD HUDSON (R-NC): Well, like I said, he said they're not true. Let's see if he can assure the people of the state that the details that can help them feel confident they aren't true.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: All right, joining us now to talk about all of it, Andrew Desiderio, senior congressional reporter for Punchbowl News. Andrew, good morning to you.

ANDREW DESIDERIO, SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER, PUNCHBOWL NEWS: Good morning.

HUNT: Another day and here we have a candidate with quite a salacious list of comments on websites -- porn websites straight up. There do seem to be these escalating calls for him to step aside but it doesn't seem like he's going to do it.

DESIDERIO: Right, and let's remember that this race, even before all of this came out, was likely to go towards the Democrats, right. And there was a concern -- again, already before this story came out -- that this could have an affect up and down the ballot -- a negative affect for Republicans up and down the ballot.

You see the Harris campaign trying to pounce on this as well, trying to connect Mark Robinson to Donald Trump. Obviously, Mark -- Donald Trump has long praised Mark Robinson. He's probably the reason why he is -- why Mark Robinson is the Republican nominee for governor in that state in the first place. So you see the Harris campaign really trying to take advantage of that. And what you hear Republicans saying is that this has -- him being on

the ballot and this whole controversy has the potential to flip North Carolina to the Democrats, which if Kamala Harris wins North Carolina it's pretty much all over. Donald Trump loses the election.

HUNT: It's very hard for him to get to 270 if he doesn't have North Carolina.

And it's interesting you mention that Trump endorsed Robinson and is a big part of why he's there because Thom Tillis -- of course, the Republican senator from North Carolina who won that Senate seat from a Democrat, right -- because it's not as though North Carolina hasn't recently sent Democrats to the -- to the statewide office at the federal level. He was -- he endorsed Robinson's opponent.

DESIDERIO: Right, he endorsed Robinson's opponent in the primary. He had said at the time that there were all of these things that could potentially come out about this guy because a lot of this was widely known in the state, at least among Republican circles, that there was some stuff out there about this guy that could potentially come out. Senator Tillis had said that at the time.

He actually tweeted late last night that -- I believe he used the words "it's been a tough day for North Carolina Republicans." I think that's an understatement. But he immediately shifted his focus to the presidential race and saying that Republicans should do everything in their power to make sure that the controversies with Mark Robinson do not reverberate to the presidential race.

HUNT: Yeah, and he said there we must stay focused on the races we can win --

DESIDERIO: Um-hum.

HUNT: -- which, of course, would indicate that he does not believe that Mark Robinson is going to be the next governor of North Carolina.

DESIDERIO: He hasn't endorsed him in the general election either. Again, before this story came out because there was so much already out there about this guy.

[05:40:00]

HUNT: Right. I mean, this is the latest --

DESIDERIO: Right.

HUNT: -- in a long list of things.

Andrew, while I have you, is the government going to shut down before the election?

DESIDERIO: (Laughing) Man, you're really putting me on the spot here.

Look, we've got about 10 days until the deadline. Right now, House and Senate appropriators are creating what is going to be a three-month package to fund the government -- a stopgap bill that will include probably some disaster relief; a Secret Service funding patch, of course, that we've been talking about in the wake of this second assassination attempt against former President Trump; and there's potentially other things that could be looped in that the administration is asking Congress for.

What I'm hearing is that it'll be released over the next few days and then you'll see the House take action and you'll see the Senate follow suit, and we'll bump right up to that September 30 deadline as we seem to do every single year. And then we'll do this all again in December -- and Merry Christmas to all.

HUNT: Merry Christmas, indeed.

All right, Andrew Desiderio. Thank you very much for being here on this Friday. I appreciate it.

DESIDERIO: Thank you.

HUNT: All right. Still ahead here on CNN THIS MORNING civil rights is the family business for our next guest. We're going to talk to -- with Maya Wiley about her new book and her family's legacy.

Plus, Dodgers slugger Shohei Ohtani may have just had one of the greatest games in baseball history. We'll have that coming up in our Bleacher Report.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:45:45]

HUNT: About 50 years ago, a man named George Wiley was on the front ranks of the civil rights movement right here in Washington. And our next guest is carrying on her family's activist legacy. Attorney Maya Wiley is now a civil rights leader in her own right, working to advance social justice as the president of a national coalition that was born out of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That legacy has been attacked by the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBINSON: Take a look at the so-called civil rights movements of the 1960s.

CHRIS LEVEL, HOST, POLITICS AND PROPHECY WITH CHRIS LEVELS PODCAST: Um-hum.

ROBINSON: How the socialists, how the communists use that to manipulate people in this country. So many things were lost during the civil rights movement. So many freedoms were lost during the civil rights movement that shouldn't have been lost.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Joining us now is Maya Wiley, the author of the new memoir "Remember, You Are a Wiley." Maya, congratulations on the new book.

I think your face said it all in reaction to the comments that we just played from the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson. He, of course, in the news overnight. I want to ask you about that briefly and then we'll talk about the book because he was -- he said derogatory things about Martin Luther King on porn websites.

What was your reaction?

MAYA WILEY, AUTHOR, "REMEMBER, YOU ARE A WILEY", PRESIDENT AND CEO, THE LEADERSHI CONFERENCE ON CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS, CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY: Horror, frankly, sadness -- deep sadness -- and a lot of anger. I mean, the anger is that any of this language from anybody, no matter who they are, should be denounced.

It's factually inaccurate for sure, but it's really devastating and dangerous to a country that's already seeing so many divisions being manipulated and created on race when we actually have made important progress that we should not lose. And we have more progress we need to make.

But to be a Black man who reportedly has referred to himself as a "Black Nazi" -- I mean, to be a person who comes from a history of subjugation who takes the mantle of antisemitism, who takes the mantle of white supremacy is a different kind of danger. It's a rarity. We should make that very clear. But it's really devastating because it allows the white supremacist extremist right to have a wingman that gives them cover for their racism and a way to point to it and deny that it's racism.

HUNT: You, of course -- we introduced here -- and this book is really about your family's story and the fighting that you did to change some of the things that you were just talking about -- some of the realities that Americans -- Black Americans lived with for so many years in this country.

You called your parents' marriage an integration story. Tell us a little bit about that and what brought you to write this book.

WILEY: Well, I'll start with what brought me to write the book to answer that question about my parents because I wasn't going to write a memoir. I was on the faculty of The New School, and I was going to write this book about social movements because it seemed like such an important topic for people to understand that the hashtags of Black Lives Matter or Time's up, or the fight for a $15.00 minimum wage were not hashtags. They come from a long tradition of struggle and a culmination of a lot of struggle over many years.

And my parents' story was very much that, including that integration story that my father being an organic chemistry professor at the University of Syracuse -- and don't ask me about my chemistry grade --

HUNT: (Laughing).

WYLIE: -- and my mother being a student in the English department -- different department -- but a graduate student. And she being an activist in her own right but coming out of a racist west Texas community -- Southern Baptist community but having found her way out of racism on her own, meeting my father and then deciding very quickly because they were in love. And because it was more than a decade before Loving versus Virginia, the Supreme Court case that finally said it was not -- that it was unconstitutional to bar interracial marriage.

[05:50:00]

They got married but they had to make that decision very quickly because it wasn't a society that would be success -- would actually accept a Black man and a white woman dating. So they just hopped right into marriage, and I'm thankful they did.

HUNT: Indeed.

What do you hope that people take from this book in terms of what they bring to whatever struggle it is that is in front of them today?

WILEY: I think as we think about what we're seeing in the news cycle, of what we're seeing in our politics, of what we're seeing in people's struggle is about -- I really learned from my parents the importance of understanding what people's lived experience is, where injustice happens and why, but also how it affects all of us. How it so deeply affects this country but that we have to personal connection and compassion to transcend this.

We have to have organizing, and we have to have activism, and they are not separate from compassion. They are not separate from the ability to try to create a bigger tent and have a conversation with people we don't agree with. And trying to help people understand people's experiences that may be different from their own and how important that is to democracy and how important it is to all our communities and people. And that's the story I wanted to share.

HUNT: The book is "Remember, You Are a Wiley," a memoir. Maya Wiley, thank you so much for being here for this. You're going to stick around and be with our panel at the top of the show. Thank you.

All right, time now for sports.

Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani makes baseball history with one of the greatest performances of all time.

Carolyn Manno has more in this morning's Bleacher Report. Carolyn, good morning.

CAROLYN MANNO, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Kasie.

It is Shohei Ohtani's world and we're just living in it. The Japanese phenom is where no baseball player has ever been before by accomplishing the first 50 home run-50 steal season in Major League history.

He went into yesterday's game against the Marlins with 48 homes runs and 49 stolen bases. It didn't take him long to start adding to those numbers. He grabbed his 50th steal in the first inning and added number 51 in the second. That is the speed.

Now how about the power, launching his 49th home run in the sixth inning, sending a two-run bomb to the second deck to come within one of the 50-50 club. And then in the seventh, Ohtani came to bat again. It was runners and second and third with two outs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL ANNOUNCER: He swings. It's a drive to left. This ball's back! There it is! The first 50! The first player in the history of Major League Baseball to have a 50-50 season! He is incredible!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MANNO: What's incredible is he wasn't done yet. He went on to blast the Dodgers' record 51st home run in the ninth inning. Ohtani finished the game six for six at the plate with 10 runs batted in. He's now the first player ever with three home runs and multiple stolen bases in a single game.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVE ROBERTS, MANAGER, LOS ANGELES DODGERS: This game has been around for a long time and to do something that's never been done, he's one of one. And he couldn't be a more talented player. He couldn't be more humble.

SKIP SCHUMAKER, MANAGER, MIAMI MARLINS: I think out of respect for the game we were going to go after him. He hit the home run. I mean, you know, that's just part of the deal. He's hit 50 of them. He's the most talented player I've ever seen. He is doing things that I've never seen done before in the game. And if he has a couple more of these peak years, he might be the best ever to play the game.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MANNO: If all that wasn't enough, Ohtani's performance ensuring that he will play in October for the first time in the big leagues. The Dodgers crushing the Marlins 20-4 to clinch a playoff spot for the 12th consecutive season. Remarkable stuff.

The Cleveland Guardians also clinching a spot in the postseason in dramatic fashion, by the way, beating the Twins 3-2 on a walk-off single from Andres Gimenez in the bottom of the 10th inning. The come- from-behind win was the Guardians' league-leading 42nd comeback of the season. The team celebrating with champagne and beer showers in the clubhouse.

Cleveland now has a chance to possibly end baseball's longest active World Series title drought dating all the way back to 1948.

And finally, it was a long time coming but Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers has a win for the first time at MetLife Stadium, playing in his first home game since tearing his Achilles tendon in last year's season opener. The 40-year-old showed no signs of slowing down. Rodgers threw two touchdown passes. The Jets flew to a dominant 24-3 win over the Patriots.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AARON RODGERS, QUARTERBACK, NEW YORK JETS: I felt pretty good tonight. I was doing some things I did as a younger man. So I -- you know, I've said that as the games go on, I'm going to feel more comfortable moving around a little bit, and there was a couple of times where I needed to extend plays. And sometimes in games like this you need those little extra plays that I used to do a lot when I was a younger player. But it's nice to have that element back.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[05:55:00]

MANNO: So this game something of a salve for Jets fans, Kasie, who were holding their collective breath. But as you heard Aaron Rodgers say, he heard the crowd -- they were behind him -- and he felt pretty young. So we'll see what happens moving forward but a good starting effort for him, for sure.

HUNT: Yeah -- no. I appreciate the candor.

And Shohei Ohtani -- man, what a privilege it is to be able to watch that guy play baseball. He's just amazing.

Carolyn, thank you.

MANNO: I know. I know how much you love the game. Yeah -- no -- it's really great.

HUNT: I really do. It's great.

All right. Coming up next here on CNN THIS MORNING a new twist in this already tight presidential race. Scandal surrounding one Trump-backed candidate in the critical state of North Carolina. How might it impact the top of the ticket there?

Plus, Kamala Harris getting some help with undecided voters from the one and only Oprah.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OPRAH WINFREY, HARRIS SUPPORTER: Whether you are a Democrat, or a Republican, or somewhere in the middle, you will choose to vote your values because values are on the line in this election.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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