--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, April 29th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some of Donald Trump's supporters say the 2020 election was stolen from them. This is not true, as courts and audits and even several hand recounts have found. But some Trump supporters in search of non-existent voter fraud are compromising voting systems along the way.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A new investigation from Reuters uncovers eight known attempts to gain unauthorized access to voting systems in five states since the 2020 election. The attempts all involved Republican officials or activists who have pushed stolen election lies or conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines.
--:-- Nathan Lane: Reuters reporter Nathan Lane says they're driven by claims there could be data to prove voting fraud. That's an unfounded belief, but they still believe that if they can get access to these machines, that they can find evidence to show that, yes, indeed, there was some orchestrated plot to use the machines to tilt the election in Joe Biden's favor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lane told us about one of these incidents in Colorado involving Dallas Schroeder, the county clerk in Elbert. He is the top election official in the county. My colleague found some previous unreported surveillance video, which captured him essentially kind of fiddling with cables and rifling through this equipment to try to essentially secure voting information.
--:-- Dallas Schroeder: Schroeder testified that he copied everything on the election server. The Colorado Secretary of State is investigating him for possibly violating election laws and is now suing to get the data back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Schroeder said in a legal filing that he believed he had a statutory duty to preserve voting records. He declined to comment to Reuters. Some local officials have defended him. He's now campaigning for higher office as a county commissioner.
--:-- Nathan Lane: There was another incident in North Carolina. In order to access a vote tabulator, which under law can only be handled by election officials, Lane says a local Republican leader threatened an elections director. Basically saying, if you don't give me access to the equipment, I'm going to make sure you lose your job. I'm going to make sure your pay is cut.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It got to the point where the elections director and her staff are being escorted to their cars at night by the police. The Republican official did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.
--:-- Nathan Lane: Even though allegations of widespread voter fraud have been debunked over and over, Lane told us that the claims and campaigns are hurting the voting process. For sure all of this rhetoric all this talk about fraud is certainly weakening confidence generally in the election system that we have.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But it also causing great pain discomfort and other things for the elections officials that are trying to carry out their lawful duty. As the Reuters investigation found, this right-wing movement suggesting our voting machines were rigged is in part drawing financial support from Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO.
--:-- Nathan Lane: Lindell says he hasn't been personally involved in any data breaches, but he says he has spent about $30 million and hired dozens of people to try to prove fraud in the 2020 election.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lane points to Trump's ongoing false claims of fraud as a key driver of these attempts to break into voting systems. Countless audits, his own administration says there's no evidence of that, and he continues to say that every chance he gets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So Trump's influence in all of this is incredibly powerful. A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In April of 2020, as COVID-19 was upending the world, reporter David McSwain was getting on a private jet. The plane had been chartered by a man who'd made a big promise to the U.S. government. Robert Stewart Jr. said he was going to deliver 6 million N95 masks to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the VA.
--:-- David McSwain: This was at a time when masks were extremely scarce in the U.S. And I asked him, well, why the hell are we going to Chicago to deliver these masks? He says, well, it's kind of a faith thing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They eventually land in Chicago. Still no masks, no clear deal. Stewart's making tons of phone calls. Basically, it turns from this faith and this energy that he had to sort of finger pointing.
--:-- David McSwain: And I began to realize with each call that maybe this was a performance and he never had masks. And by the end of the night, I began to wonder if the whole thing was made up.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The masks never materialized. A year later, Stewart would plead guilty to three counts of making false statements, wire fraud and theft of government funds. He was sentenced to one year and nine months in prison.
--:-- David McSwain: Now, that story sent me down a rabbit hole to find other examples of people trying to pull off near impossible tasks without the necessary skills or resources, all to profit off of a public health crisis.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The federal government was caught flat-footed, totally unprepared in those early months of the pandemic. And this set off a chaotic and desperate search for PPE.
--:-- David McSwain: We so ill that the national response really becomes to throw money at anyone and everyone who claims they can get things Just like chum in the sea If you claimed you had a line on masks you could get a contract for tens of millions of dollars.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that was our national response. And as the government followed all these bad leads, it wasted money and resources. A lot of people have asked me, can you put a dollar figure, a number on the contractors who got away or price gouge or whatever.
--:-- David McSwain: And the answer is we can't. I mean, this was so huge, I couldn't approach it. And you can look at various federal programs and conclude that we're talking billions of dollars.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But McSwain says the most upsetting part is the time that was wasted, time that was especially precious in those first few months. We talk about government waste all the time. You know, forget the money. That's not the true outrage here.
--:-- David McSwain: I mean, we wasted time when time meant body bags.
--:-- Shamita Basu: McSwain spent a year and a half reporting on this for ProPublica, and he ended up turning his work into a book out now called Pandemic Inc.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you want to hear my full conversation with David McSwain, check out this weekend's episode of Apple News In Conversation. There are so many more shocking details in his reporting, like the U.S. government sending masks to China as late as February of 2020 instead of growing a domestic stockpile.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And a government agency spending millions of dollars on faulty test kits. You can find the episode by searching Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app or in the podcast app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this year, security experts paying attention to North Korea's internet noticed that the country was having some serious connectivity issues. The country only has a few dozen websites, and most of them kept being knocked offline.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some assumed it must be a cyber attack launched by a foreign government. But it turned out to be the work of just one guy. A single American hacker who goes by the name Pax.
--:-- Andy Greenberg: Pax declined to use his real name because he's worried about the repercussions. And was doing all of this essentially from his home office, going back and forth between his computer in the office and his couch where he was sitting and watching the Alien series and eating spicy corn snacks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Pak says he was probably violating U.S. hacking laws, but his conscience is clear. Because as far as he's concerned, he's just getting even with what North Korea did to him in a big hacking effort last year.
--:-- Andy Greenberg: This was actually part of a larger campaign of North Korean hackers targeting Western and American security researchers to try to steal their hacking tools.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Pax says the hackers didn't steal any of his tools, but he was deeply unsettled that he had been targeted. He was even more frustrated by what he felt was a lack of response from the U.S. government.
--:-- Andy Greenberg: He says they helped him assess the damage or offer tips for protecting himself in the future. The FBI told Wired it takes threats like this seriously and works to hold those responsible accountable.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But after about a year went by with no further word from the government, Pak says he eventually decided that not retaliating would be like inviting North Korea to try again.
--:-- Andy Greenberg: North Korea is, despite its relatively small size as a country and its complete almost disconnection from the internet, it's one of the most active state-sponsored hacking countries in the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, their hackers are incredibly aggressive and dangerous and have carried out some of the worst cyber attacks we've ever seen. They go after very often cryptocurrency targets and just try to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
--:-- Andy Greenberg: They kind of uniquely in the world have a whole brigade of hackers whose job it is to steal money to try to fund the regime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Pak says he knows his stunt was sort of performative and mostly harmless, like tearing down a government banner. But still, he says he wanted to prove a point.
--:-- Andy Greenberg: If you mess with American or Western hackers, then there will be a price to pay. We will hit you back. If that is a mere annoyance, then he's OK with that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think he just wants to kind of throw some sand in the gears digitally of the North Korean regime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This last story grabbed us with a picture. It shows a guy with a 1962 VW Beetle. And the weird thing is, it's plugged into a charging station.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The L.A. Times has all these pictures of old cars that have been converted to electric. a classic Corvette, a 69 Carmen Ghia, even a back-to-the-future-worthy DeLorean.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This story explains how electric conversions are a big thing now in the classic car world. Drivers want to reduce damage to the environment, and they want to spend less on gas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So many are now trying to convert their classic gas guzzlers into EVs. That is, if you have the money to pay for it, and if you're willing to sit on a long waiting list for a mechanic who can do it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A surprising name pops up in this story, legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk. One of his favorite cars is a 64 Chevy Corvette Stingray.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When he was a kid, he thought it looked like the Batmobile. Except, unlike the Batmobile, his tended to break down after 20 miles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So now he's working on turning it into an electric vehicle. Oh, and if he ever changes his mind down the road, the person who runs the makeover shop says he purposely does a lot of these vintage jobs so that they can be reconverted back to combustion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again on Monday.
