What Idiot Let the Trump Campaign Get Hacked? This One.

Roger Stone’s email account was broken into by suspected hackers to try to gain access to the accounts of senior Trump campaign officials.

Microsoft reported Friday that a “former senior adviser” of a presidential campaign had been successfully spear-phished. The next day, the Trump campaign announced that it had fallen victim to a hack in June. The campaign did not initially alert the FBI because the team distrusts the agency, people close to the campaign said.

Multiple sources confirmed to CNN Tuesday that the adviser who’d been hacked was none other than Stone, a longtime GOP operative and self-proclaimed “agent provocateur.”

A group of hackers were able to break into Stone’s email account in June, with the hopes of accessing his vast network, and using phishing emails as a means of entry into the Trump campaign’s inner workings—and it seems they were successful.

The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Politico have all reported receiving stolen files from the Trump campaign, but as of yet have not reported on the contents of their bounty.

“Mr. Stone was contacted about this matter by Microsoft and the FBI and continues to cooperate with both,” said Grant Smith, Stone’s lawyer, per CNN. “Mr. Stone will have no further comment at this time.”

In a brief statement, Stone told the Post that he’d been informed by authorities that “a couple” of his personal email accounts had been accessed by the hackers. “I really don’t know more about it. And I’m cooperating. It’s all very strange.”

Donald Trump, for his part, has blamed the hack on Iran, citing Microsoft’s report as its evidence. Microsoft declined to comment to NBC, citing its policy of not sharing client details without permission.

While Iran has denied allegations that it was connected to the incident, the techniques associated with the hack are consistent with those used by Iranian hackers, according to CNN.

Ultimately, it seems like Stone should’ve known better, given his prior brush with massive, campaign-damaging email hacks.

It has been theorized that Stone allegedly knew about the 2016 hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, before they were ever published by WikiLeaks, thanks to his “backchannel communications” with Julian Assange.

This story has been updated.

The day after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s choice for vice president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd of lawmakers in Louisville, Kentucky, that a Harris administration would spell certain doom for the Republican Party.

“Let’s assume our worst nightmare—the Democrats went to the White House, the House, the Senate,” McConnell said during his keynote speech at the National Conference of State Legislators Legislative Summit last week, according to Spectrum News. “The first thing they’ll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster. Second, you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity.”

Puerto Rico will vote on a nonbinding ballot measure in November to determine the territory’s future political status, with voters being given three options, all of which would change its official status: statehood, independence, or independence with free association. It will be the seventh time that the island’s 3.2 million people vote to define their political relationship with the United States. Harris has not yet taken an official stance on the vote.

McConnell insisted that next on the historically moderate Democrat’s agenda would be to place as many liberal justices on the Supreme Court as possible, noting that doing so would be “unconstitutional”—while apparently ignoring the fact that that’s exactly what Donald Trump did to achieve SCOTUS’s current conservative supermajority.

“If they get those two new states and pack the Supreme Court, they’ll get what they want,” McConnell said.

Ultimately, McConnell believes that the Harris-Walz ticket “represents the far left of the Democratic Party.

“And by the way, that’s most Democrats today,” he added.

Following the address, Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers broke down the Republican perspective on why Harris turned to Walz as her right hand.

“They’re trying to appeal to a rural voter that they have not appealed to in years,” Stivers said, reported Spectrum. “Now, whether they can or they can’t, that becomes a good question, and I think that will be based on the policies that they put forward. And hopefully, that’s what we get into.”

Donald Trump told Elon Musk during their livestreamed conversation on X Monday night that if the election goes poorly, “we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela because it will be a far safer place to meet than our country.”

Trump made the statement after mentioning that “crime rates all over the world are going way down,” an odd statement to make before bringing up Venezuela, where postelection protests have left 23 dead and more than 2,000 people arrested, according to the United Nations.

It seems that Trump is claiming that crime rates would be so high if he isn’t elected president that authoritarian Venezuela would seem safer by comparison. As president, Trump did not have positive ties with the country or its leader, Nicolás Maduro, casting doubt that Trump is actually serious about planning to flee to Venezuela. Either the convicted felon and former president perhaps was being facetious, or it’s another sign of his cognitive decline.

Unlike North Korea, where Trump and its leader Kim Jong Un infamously exchanged gushing letters, Trump and Venezuela were on bad terms from the start of his presidency. He refused to rule out a military intervention to confront Maduro in 2017, and two years later, Trump recognized Juan Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the interim president of Venezuela, causing Maduro to cut ties with the United States.

Musk doesn’t have any favorable ties with Venezuela either, with Maduro banning X last week and accusing Musk of promoting hatred in the country after its recent election. Musk, in turn, accused the self-proclaimed socialist of “major election fraud.”

In short, Trump probably isn’t going to flee to Venezuela if he loses in November, especially since he’s now a convicted felon and barred from leaving the country at least until he’s sentenced for his hush-money crimes. Venezuela probably wouldn’t take him unless there was some kind of revolution or coup in the country. But stranger things have happened, especially since Musk has remarked in the past that “we will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” regarding a 2020 coup d’état in nearby Bolivia. But surely Trump isn’t dumb enough to bank on something like that, right?

Donald Trump compared a photo-illustration of Vice President Kamala Harris to his wife, Melania, Monday night, seeming to call his opponent a “beautiful woman.”

During Trump’s two-hour, trainwreck conversation with Elon Musk, which took place on the technocrat’s glitchy X Spaces, the former president made several strange comments—but by far the weirdest was the creepy compliment he gave his opponent.

“She’s terrible, but she’s getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her on Time magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. I—it was a drawing,” Trump said. He was referring to Neil Jamieson’s photo-illustration of Harris, which accompanied the magazine’s latest cover story.

From there, his strange flattery only got weirder.

“Actually, she looked like our great first lady, Melania,” Trump said.

“She looked, she didn’t look, she didn’t look like Camilla [sic], that’s right. But of course, she’s a beautiful woman so, we’ll leave it at that,” Trump continued, mispronouncing Harris’s name into an entirely different name. Throughout the interview Trump struggled with a soft lisp, which his team inexplicably denied in the most hostile way possible.

While it’s unclear whether he is calling Harris or his wife “beautiful” at the end, this comment, in addition to his past comments about women’s appearances, makes clear his gross obsession with women’s looks.

Last week, Donald Trump launched a strange attack on Vice President Kamala Harris through an even weirder lie: that he had survived a helicopter crash in 2018 with Harris’s old beau, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who Trump claimed was no longer a “fan of hers” by that point.

Moments after the presser ended, the truth came to light: Trump had fabricated the entire story, with Brown denying having ever ridden in a helicopter with Trump. The copter’s actual passengers at the time—former California Governor Jerry Brown and current California Governor Gavin Newsom (both of whom are white)—called the whole thing “complete B.S.”

But Trump did survive a near-death helicopter experience sometime in 1990 alongside another Black California politician: the former California state senator from Los Angeles Nate Holden.

“If he were confused, which I’m not sure he was, then he could be giving misleading information intentionally,” Holden told CNN Monday night. 

“But if he were confused, Willie Brown is the—I shared with him four years in the legislature, he was in the assembly, I was in the state Senate. There was never any misidentification of us during that time period.

“Willie Brown was a short, intelligent, sharp guy [from the] San Francisco area, and I’m the taller guy from Los Angeles,” Holden continued. “Maybe to Donald, we all look alike.” 

Trump’s former executive vice president of construction and development Barbara Res was also on the terrifying flight, and recalled the white-knuckle encounter in her 2013 book, All Alone on the 68th Floor. She confirmed that Trump, his brother Robert, and Holden were all on board the aircraft as it lost control of some of its instruments and was forced to make an emergency landing in a New Jersey airport.  

“We may not have gotten much business done, but it sure as hell was memorable,” Res wrote.

But regardless of whomever Trump had misremembered on the flight, Holden affirmed to Politico on Sunday that no one had criticized Harris like Trump claimed.

“He either mixed it up,” Holden told Politico. “Or, he made it up. This was just too big to overlook. This is a big one.”