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Ever have one of those days where you realize you're running on three cups of coffee and zero water? Yep, me too. And while I'm working on fixing that habit, I swear by liquid, I've got to keep me properly hydrated without having to panic. Chug bottles of water. One serving of liquid provides the same hydration as drinking two to three bottles of water. It contains the optimal ratio of glucose, sodium and potassium, which means water and nutrients are delivered to the bloodstream quicker and more effectively.

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And now they've added three new flavors to their lineup sweet and juicy guava, crisp watermelon and comforting apple pie as a sucker for all things seasonal. I'm very excited to try apple pie. Liquid Ivy is available nationwide at Wal-Mart in the beverage section or you can get twenty five percent off when you go to liquid ivy dotcom and use code trans at checkout. That's twenty five percent off. Anything you order when you use promo code trims at liquid ivy dotcom get better hydration today at liquid ivy dotcom promo code trims The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at nine PM Eastern on MSNBC.

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Voting is happening all night tonight in Harris County, Texas. Texas as a state is set to surpass already the total number of votes that were cast in Texas in the whole election in twenty sixteen. And just so I'm clear here, I don't mean like there's more early votes being cast in Texas this year compared to the early votes cast in Texas in twenty sixteen. I mean, the early vote right now in Texas is about to pass all the votes that were cast in Texas in twenty sixteen this far before Election Day.

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Early voting isn't over until seven p.m. tomorrow night, 7:00 p.m. Friday. That makes tonight the last night of early voting in Texas. And that's why Harris County, Texas, has some voting locations open overnight. Twenty four hours tonight, they're open. Twenty four hours so they can stay open every minute until early voting is done tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. in Texas. So we're keeping an eye on those overnights tonight in Texas. This evening up in Minnesota, a new court ruling tonight says the state will not be allowed to count any ballots that arrive in the mail after Election Day, even if they are postmarked before Election Day.

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Now, that is a last minute, really consequential rule change. Minnesotans had previously been told that their votes would count if they were received up to a week after Election Day. But now at the very last minute, this appeals court ruling tonight has changed that. And you can limit what that means in terms of this court decision. But bottom line, what it means for you, if you are in Minnesota and you have your ballot at home, what this means for real is that you really, truly should not trust your ballot to the mail.

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You have to bring it in in person, drop it off yourself. Seriously. Again, Minnesota, as of a court ruling tonight, changing the rules and no longer planning to accept any ballots that arrive after the polls close on Election Day. Control of the United States Senate, of course, is very much on the table right now. The endangered incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue in Georgia may very well lose his seat to his Democratic challenger, John Asaph, especially after a debate performance last night in which Asaph just wiped the floor with Perdue and then left him laying there wet.

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I know you might have seen the one clip where USCIRF tells David Perdue to his face. It's not just that you're a crook, Senator. That moment will live forever in Senate debate history. But it wasn't just that. It was more than that. This is so beneath the office of a US senator, you've continued to demean yourself throughout this campaign with your conduct. First, you were lengthening my nose in attack ads to remind everybody that I'm Jewish.

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Then when that didn't work, you started calling me some kind of Islamic terrorist. And then when that didn't work, you started calling me a Chinese communist. It's ridiculous. And you shouldn't do everything that your handlers in Washington tell you to because you'll lose your soul along the way. Senator, what the people of Georgia deserve is a serious discussion of economic relief for Georgia families and how we're going to protect coverage for pre-existing conditions. Well, perhaps Senator Perdue would have been able to respond properly to the covid-19 pandemic if you hadn't been fending off multiple federal investigations for insider trading.

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It's not just that you're a crook, Senator, it's that you're attacking the health of the people that you represent. You did say covid-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio and you did vote four times to end protections for pre-existing conditions four times.

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That was the Georgia Senate debate last night. Now tonight, incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue, the man who you can see here, carved out of soft soap on the left side of your screen. Senator David Perdue has announced tonight that he would please not to like to debate Democrat John USCIRF anymore. The candidates had a third and final debate scheduled for this weekend, but Republican Senator David Perdue is now bailing on that for all the obvious reasons. Now, what does this mean in terms of Senate control?

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Well, it's not a good sign for David Perdue that said, look at this. There have been, I think, 11 polls in that Senate race conducted this month in the month of October. Of those 11 polls, five of them showed David Perdue ahead. Five of them showed John USCIRF ahead and the 11th one was a tie. So, yeah, Georgia. Oh, my lord. Does your vote count this year? Georgia residents get to the polls again.

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It is too late to trust your ballot to the US mail service. If you've got a ballot at home, bring it in. Whether or not you were planning on voting early, vote early. Just in case you didn't think it was high drama enough already around this election, right? I mean, it's the it's the presidential races, the Senate races, everything. Right. With with huge numbers of early votes. And the US male no longer being a reliable way to get your ballot in at this late date.

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So everybody was still has a ballot now, has to hand deliver it. And nobody knows how many people are going to be voting on Election Day. Really, truly, nobody knows that. And the courts all over the country are still changing the rules even now about what's going to be counted and what won't. I mean, man, just get your vote now, get it done. Honestly, I personally can't take the stress, get it done.

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And meanwhile, meanwhile, here's the new crash point in today's news between two of the major sources of our national anxiety right now, the safety and security of our election and the safety and health of us.

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Tuesday at noon, this is what the sign in screen at Canton Potsdam Hospital looked like, sign service is unavailable and over a governor. Hospital systems are down. Officials say Masina Memorial was targeted to they say hackers were using a new type of ransomware unknown to antivirus software companies after it learned of the cyber attack. St Laurence health system has disconnected all of its computer systems and shut down the affected network to prevent even more problems. For a portion of Tuesday, Kent in Potsdam was asking ambulances to bring patients elsewhere.

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Governor remains on ambulance diversion health system. Investigative teams are working with the FBI and Homeland Security to provide them more information about the ransomware attack.

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It's local news and TV in upstate New York. That part about ambulance diversion, asking ambulance to take patients elsewhere. Three of St. Lawrence County's hospitals have been hit by a cyber attack. St. Lawrence County, New York, is up against the Canadian border. Three of the hospitals in that county have been hit by a cyber attack that has shut down hospital computer systems. And that has already meant in those hospitals, among other things, diverting patients to other places that are not being hit by this attack that's locking up their computers now.

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Now, St. Lawrence County in New York is not, in case you're wondering, a covid hot spot. The latest data from the state of New York says the St. Louis St. Lawrence County has less than four hundred covid cases in the whole county, which is good and particularly for New York. That's good. But imagine this happening in one of the many places where the hospitals are already stressed to the max by the coronavirus surge. Well, yesterday, the FBI put out a joint alert with the Homeland Security Department cybersecurity agency Cesa, alerting hospitals across the country to get ready for this kind of an attack, to prepare themselves and to make changes now, to try to fended off, hears from that alert, quote, sees the FBI and HHS have credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and health care providers.

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CSA, FBI and HHS assess malicious cyber actors are targeting the health care and public health sector with trick bot malware, often leading to ransomware attacks, data theft and the disruption of health care services.

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Now, outside of St. Lawrence County, that northern New York county where we just saw that local news report, other hospitals that have apparently been hit by the attack so far include the Sky Lakes Medical Center all the way across the country in Klamath Falls, Oregon, from the Washington Post report on that attack, quote, The hospital is unable to offer cancer treatments that are computer controlled and the attack has curbed some diagnostic imaging as well. Hospital spokesman in Klamath Falls says doctors and nurses have turned to paper for patient records with the electronic system offline.

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The New York Times reporting that the efforts to try to protect the hospital in Klamath Falls, Oregon, once it came under attack, were pretty blunt and simple quote. Employees of the hospital were told if it's a PC, shut it down. The Times is also reporting that another hospital that was hit is in California, Sonoma Valley Hospital in Sonoma, California. They were also they were apparently hit several days ago. As of today, they are still reportedly trying to restore their computer systems.

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Now, tonight, NBC News is reporting on yet more. The University of Vermont has also reportedly been hit, and that includes facilities both in the state of Vermont and also hospitals across the Vermont border into New York state. And these are New York state hospitals, other than the ones in St. Lawrence County that we were just talking about. So beyond this number of hospitals that have been hit with this cyberattack thus far, Nicole Proehl Roth reporting at The New York Times that the hackers behind these attacks, hackers who are believed to be based in Moscow and St.

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Petersburg in Russia, these hackers, quote, have been trading a list of more than 400 US hospitals they plan to target. And if this is causing you to get a little pit in your stomach, you are not alone, cybersecurity people are kind of freaking out about this. Here's from the Associated Press, which did a really good roundup on this today. Quote, The offensive by a Russian speaking criminal gang coincides with the US presidential election, although there is no immediate indication they were motivated by anything but profit.

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Charles Karmichael, chief technical officer of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, said in a statement, quote, We are experiencing the most significant cybersecurity threat we have ever seen in the United States. Alex Holden, CEO of Household Security, which has been closely tracking the ransomware in question for more than a year, agreed that the unfolding offensive is unprecedented in magnitude for the US given its timing in the heat of a contentious presidential election and the worst global pandemic in a century.

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Just in case, having the worst and worst managed epidemic on earth wasn't enough with the national government that's pretending it's not happening, it was something on the order of forty seven states getting worse right now with two hundred and twenty nine thousand of us dead already and nine million of us infected as of tonight. And no cure and no treatment in sight and no vaccine. And a president who mocks and undermines efforts to fight it and slow its spread just in case.

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That's not enough. Now we have a Russian criminal hackers from Moscow and St. Petersburg freezing the computer systems at our hospitals.

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In the middle of it, demanding money or else it seems like it's a handful of hospitals already, this Vermont information tonight reported by NBC News plus the five or six other hospitals that were already reported by this afternoon. Four hundred hospitals potentially on deck in terms of how the hackers have been discussing this amongst themselves online.

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And the story gets worse and weirder, weirder if you are not usually into news like this, if you don't follow things like cyber security all that closely, you might still have heard this term ransomware recently in the news. And that's because it was only about two and a half weeks ago. And we covered this on the show at the time when we got this sort of odd announcement from Microsoft of all entities in which Microsoft said they were going on offense to take out a threat to our elections this year, that was the kind of threat most of us didn't even know about.

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Most of us who aren't all that tech minded wouldn't have even known to conceive of it. But what Microsoft announced a couple of weeks ago was that they were taking out servers used by something a big network called Trick Bot. They described Tretbar as a gigantic network of computers hijacked by Russian speaking criminal hackers to carry out ransomware attacks, ransomware attacks where you lock up somebody's computers or their data and you say you won't release the stuff unless they send you money.

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Ransomware, that is a crime and an increasingly common one. But it's interesting. The reason this made news beyond cybersecurity and beyond computer related news is because Microsoft said two weeks ago now that it was taking action against trick, but it was taking out their servers now, specifically because Tretbar was the kind of weapon that could be used to take out our election systems catastrophically just in time for the presidential election. It's the type of weapon that could be used to lock up voter registration systems or voter tabulation or vote tabulation systems or the means by which people access the vote count as the votes are counted on election night and beyond.

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So a couple of weeks ago, right, this was good news. Microsoft figuring out a way involving the courts of all things, figure out a way to Monkeywrench Trick bought and seize their servers. Trick bought this this Russian criminal ransomware scheme. Microsoft said they were taking them out because they were worried in part that although they've been used to commit all sorts of crimes, the new and present danger was that they could be used against our elections. The New York Times then had further good news.

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The New York Times then reported that once Microsoft started acting against trick, but they also found that US Cyber Command was already in their US Cyber Command, headed by General Paul Nakasone, they found was also taking offensive operations against Brickbat to take them out ahead of the elections. And for the same kind of reasons, New York Times reporting at the time, quote, So far, Trick Bot has not been directed at voting infrastructure, officials say, but it would be well suited to turn against the offices of the secretaries of state who certify tallies, vulnerable voter registration systems or electronic poll books.

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The records that allow people to vote trick, but would be an excellent weapon to use against systems like that. And so it's not just private industry. It's not just the US government. It's both Cyber Command and Microsoft acting a couple of weeks ago to take this trick bot network out to eliminate that threat to our elections. Good. All good, great news until now, because who is this hospital's attack, this current hospital attack being attributed to? But it turns out they haven't been taken out the same big, sophisticated Russian criminal scheme that everybody worried was the kind of weapon that would be ideally suited for the Russians to use against our elections infrastructure.

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So thank God they were being taken out. Turns out they weren't taken out. Microsoft in US Cyber Command went after them, but they're back and they have responded to the fact that the US government and Microsoft came at them. They have responded to that by locking up multiple US hospitals, computer systems, so that multiple US computers, US hospitals tonight cannot take patients and they can't give computer driven cancer treatments and they can't access online patient documents or electronic patient records or anything else that happens on a computer.

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And they have done this while we are in the middle of a huge third surge of an infectious viral disease that is completely out of control in our country right now, and that has put Americans in the hospital by the tens of thousands. This isn't good. And it comes alongside a bunch of other, smaller but still worrying reports, there's a county in north Georgia called Whole County. That's where Gainesville, Georgia is. Earlier this month, we learned that whole county had been hit with a ransomware attack.

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Its computer systems were infiltrated. The county was threatened that they had to pay up or else we don't know if they paid up or not. Howell County, Georgia, has been very, very tight lipped about how they're dealing with this, including to their local press. But today, The Wall Street Journal reports that apparently the or else part is starting in Hall County, Georgia, with the hackers that attacked the county, now posting online sensitive elections data that was stolen from the county's computers, computer systems, including things like named individual voters and Hall County, who have submitted provisional ballots that have been flagged for signatures, not matching also voter names and voter registration numbers and an inventory of whole county's elections equipment, all this sensitive stuff that hackers have stolen from the county and are now posting online after having threatened whole county at the beginning of this month, that they had infiltrated the county systems and would start attacking them if the county didn't pay.

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Now, Georgia, of course, is a swing state and a very important one, both for the presidential race and for the Senate whole county, that state is not a particularly swing. County Hall County, Georgia, went for Trump in twenty sixteen, but I think about almost like 50 points. All right. But who's attacking them and infiltrating their election related computer networks and now posting sensitive election related records online while publicly gloating about how much damage they can do?

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This whole county isn't paying up. And that's happening in Hall County, Georgia, tonight, right now, where else could that happen? Is that the same ransomware hackers that we are seeing hitting the hospitals? And that all of these elections experts were telling us we're potentially going to target the election with this Russian criminal bot network that would be ideally suited to locking us up on election night. Was a week ago tonight that the FBI and that cyber security agency at Homeland Security was a week ago tonight, that they warned that Russian hackers, state hackers had accessed dozens of state and local governments and aviation networks in the United States starting last month.

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The Washington Post later reported that among the known successful Russian incursions were election systems in California and Indiana and again, California and Indiana. Not the swingiest states in the world, but still. What are Russian state hackers doing inside election software in California and Indiana now? Literally, what are they doing there? If US officials know they're in there, know enough to for somebody to tell it to The Washington Post, can we the people know? And not for nothing, but who did this to the Trump campaign website this week?

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This was the Trump campaign website earlier this week. This was the homescreen lasted about half an hour before they got it back. But the official Trump campaign website was taken over by hackers unknown who changed the website to this. They said they'd broken into it and stolen important data and they put forward competing ransom demands to either release the data they'd stolen or keep it hidden. And the Trump campaign denied that anything was taken. But this really was a sitting president's re-election campaign homepage taking over.

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And that's not right.

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I mean, the way these things are supposed to work, they're malign magic, the way these things are supposed to work is that they're supposed to work on us. I mean, yes, they're designed to wreak havoc, right. Or to threaten to wreak havoc with with computer systems. But most of all, they're supposed to freak us out whether or not the actual technical harm is ever really caused. Right now, in the case of the hospitals being attacked, the risk of real physical harm to patients is high and urgent.

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We've got hospitals already that have been hit by this ransomware attack turning away patients. Right, that is dangerous and those individual hospitals, it's potentially deadly, particularly in places where hospitals are already overtopped. So that's one thing. The risk, the physical risk to patients there is is high and urgent when it comes to the hospital attacks, when it comes to election systems being attacked. The highest and urgent risk there is that, yeah, maybe they can shut some of that stuff down or corrupt it or change it or lock it up or deface it.

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But the highest and urgent risk there in terms of harm to our country is that these kind of things, even if they are brought to in a small scale way, they will make us we the people not trust that our election is real, that the results are real, and that we should trust and abide by the results because our democracy is sound. So there is a balance here of which I am exquisitely cognizant. I believe that it is not an option to pretend this stuff isn't happening, particularly when it's happening like this.

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But the best way I know to not help them do their work of freaking us out is to make sure that even the not not very tech minded among us understands realistically what this is, that we understand realistically how this stuff works, what the real risks are and what we can do about it. In other words, I think the best defense here is to. Aim at keeping calm, defending the election and carrying on, but we need to talk to people who know these things, who can explain it in clear terms, even to the not tech minded among us, in order to have our feet in the ground while we confront these very real risks.

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Joining us now is Clint. Once he's a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in the Alliance for Securing Democracy. It's really nice to see you. Thanks for making time to be here tonight. Thanks for having me, Rachel.

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First, let me just ask you if anything in the way that I've described this either seems wrong to you or if you feel like I'm putting the wrong emphasis or not enough emphasis on any one part of this.

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So racial. I think you're putting the right emphasis on one thing in particular, which is this is a lot of cyber activity going on at one time right now. I mean, we're looking at significant amounts of cyber activity from the criminal space. We're already worried about it from the state actors based both in terms of Russia and Iran. If you remember back just a week or so ago, we were looking at Cowboys' impersonation emails focused on voters in Florida.

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And so I think a way to think about this is primarily is cyber criminals, so that one of their networks, this trick but network was being disrupted and they started to move aggressively to try and use that tool at a time when covid, when we have not recovered from the US, means that the premiums to get access to health information are extremely high. I think the second part of it and second sort of way to think about it is we know that the Russian criminal groups can be a proxy for the Russian state, meaning that should the Russian state want to have some sort of plausible deniability or someone mess around in terms of cyber destruction, that is an avenue with which they can do it.

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And we've seen that in the past as well. I think what you're doing is right to alert people. And I think the reason we need to alert people to this, that, one, there is a threat that's out there, too. We do see actors doing something this time. Four years ago, if I had talked to you, we wouldn't have known about this at all. We wouldn't even been dealing with it. We didn't even know infrastructure was being hit.

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So this time we have defenders out there doing it. But at the same time, there is an ongoing everyday cyber battlefield that we don't really see that is occurring. And now we covid-19 and the election at the same time, battleground states, voter suppression. When you bring all of these together, that's a powder keg in cyberspace. And it really comes down to will we trust the results of the election? And I think we can as long as we reinforce the American public, that's going to take patience starting next Tuesday.

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We won't know the results on election night. And if there is a cyber attack, we've got to be patient with our defenders to try and find out what the truth is, where the ballots have been counted and how we can ensure the integrity of the vote. And to that point about the defenders, I think that's a really, really important point, and I'm struck by how much of this we can see in real time. We got the initial FBI alert from FBI and HHS yesterday, and then they put out an update on it earlier today.

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And just as we are getting on the air, I think they've put out another update with lots and lots of new technical information in each update advising the kinds of people who do cyber defense, cyber security and hospital systems, in this case, how they can defend and what to watch for and how they can protect their hospitals and their systems for this now. Well, once imminent, now ongoing attack. That is reassuring to me. Even if I don't know what all those lines of code mean, does it make sense to you that these updates are made available to us, the public, that we're sort of allowed to see how much hand-to-hand combat there is here between us, Cyber Command, between our defenders, as you put it, and between these Russian state criminal actors who appear to have these hospitals in their grip and have our election infrastructure in their sights.

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So it's a double edged sword, Rachel, when we put this out, it alerts everybody like us in the media, people that watch this space and say, wow, this is incredible. Look at all the activity that's going on. However, when I was working cyber security five, six years ago, it was like pulling teeth to get this kind of information out of the US government that has changed. And when that changes what it does, it enables all the private sector cybersecurity defenders that are out there, many of them who are extremely capable and have great technical systems to know what to look for and what to defend against.

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So it is a rapid way to disseminate, disseminate from the public sector, from the US government out into the private sector so that we can enable them to help defend themselves for the most part in the private sector. And health care is the weakest sector in terms of cybersecurity. By and large, it's it's pretty notorious over the last couple of years that they were the place to target. If we can help them get the right information, then we can help them defend themselves.

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I think that's the approach that they're trying to use also with the general idea that any vulnerability to infrastructure when it comes to cyberspace, when it comes to voting machines, this might help patch that as well. You're giving people information so that they can act on their own defense and you are helping them defend the country in doing that. That's right, and I think that applies to the public, too, in terms of understanding it as best we can, so bracing ourselves for this potential impact and knowing to anticipate it and keep calm about it rather than over reacting out of ignorance if it does happen in a way that is visible in the middle of our election.

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Clinton senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Thank you for helping us. I know this is a really difficult topic for a lot of people and it raises a lot of fear. Thanks for helping us be straight about it. It is, thanks, Rachel. All right. Much more ahead tonight. Stay with us. Fall is my favorite time of year. I love haunted houses and scary movies and yes, all things pumpkin, but my favorite new discovery is Hunter Killer.

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That's f u n d risc dotcom slashed arms to have your first 90 days of advisory fees waived in the summer of twenty sixteen, then Vice President Joe Biden made a one day visit to the nation of Turkey. Politico did a preview of his trip at the time. They framed it this way. Biden's nearly impossible task in Turkey. US Turkish relations were at a real low. Turkey hated the fact that the US was supporting the Kurds in Syria. Turkey wanted everybody to be against the Kurds and they hated that we were on their side.

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And then that was this more immediate and more bizarre tension, which is that Turkey's president was demanding that the US go get a Turkish cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and they wanted the cleric picked up in the Poconos in Pennsylvania and sent back to Turkey to be put on trial. Now, this cleric is a legal U.S. resident. The US had already said no to extraditing him, but the Turkish president is completely obsessed with this guy and they were constantly pressuring the US government about it.

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So we knew all that at the time. Biden's nearly impossible task in Turkey. Well, today, The New York Times reports on another very specific, difficult part of that trip, which we've never known about before. Now, at one point on that trip, the Turkish president reportedly told Vice President Biden aside under a tree for a one on one private conversation. Erdogan asked Biden to remove Preet Bharara, then the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office was in the early stages of an investigation into a state owned Turkish bank called Halk Bank.

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Halk Bank was suspected of violating US sanctions by funneling gold and cash to Iran. The investigation, led by preparer's office, threatened not only the bank but potentially members of Erdogan's family and his political party. So Erdogan told Biden that day under the tree, quote, that if the US really meant what it said about repairing US Turkish relations, the case needed to go away. Incidentally, Erdogan also told Biden under the tree that not only did he want him to get rid of Preet Bharara, the prosecutor, the US attorney, he also wanted Biden to get rid of the judge handling the case.

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He wanted the prosecutor and the judge taking out. Standing there with our and with the world's press watching, Biden made clear that no one, no one, not even the US president meddles in judicial affairs in the United States. I know it's hard, I don't know, I suspect it's hard for people to understand that is powerful, that my country is as powerful as Barack Obama is as president. He has no authority under our Constitution to extradite anyone.

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Only a federal court can do that. Nobody else can do that. If a president were to take this into his own hands, what would happen would be he would be impeached for violating the separation of powers.

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Spidey gets asked, hey, get rid of this investigation, get rid of the prosecutors leading this investigation, get rid of the judge in this case. I'm the president of Turkey. You're the vice president, the United States. Get rid of that for me. Biden responds. Says we didn't do we don't do it that way. In the United States, law enforcement is apolitical. In the United States, the president doesn't tell some prosecutor, some judge what to do.

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In some criminal case. That's not going to work. He'll be impeached. Turns out we now know the Turkish president didn't give up on those demands, but he found a far more willing partner with the next president. The New York Times details that in this blockbuster story today, headline is Turkish Bank Case Showed Erdogan's influence with Trump. Yet talk about understating it in the headline. This is the Iran Contra scandal updated for the twenty first century and on steroids.

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It is just astonishing. President Trump, you'll remember, has business interests in Turkey himself. He has prided himself also on his relationship with authoritarian leaders, the world order the world over. He was much more amenable to the Turkish leaders pressure on this, and he, in fact, instructed his Justice Department to back off in a way that Biden and Obama had balked at Trump's pressure. His acceding to Erdogan's pressure alarmed even some of his own closest aides.

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Quote, Trump sympathetic response to Erdogan was especially jarring. Former White House officials said they came to fear the president was open to swaying the criminal justice system to advance a transactional and ill defined agenda of his own.

[00:35:58]

After Trump fired Preet Bharara, Jeffrey Berman was picked as the new US attorney in the Southern District of New York by twenty eighteen, Jeffrey Berman and his team of prosecutors had already indicted nine people in this sanction scheme involving this Turkish bank. One witness had even testified that the operation was done with the direct knowledge of President Erdogan and Erdogan's son in law. But here's the thing. When those prosecutors in FDNY were ready to file charges against the bank, they were prevented from doing so.

[00:36:29]

As The Times reports today, Trump's acting attorney general at the time, Matt Whitaker, remember him, the bald guy, he explicitly, quote, rejected a request from Berman for permission to file criminal charges against the bank. In a separate meeting, Whitacre made clear, quote, that he did not want the case to move forward, that he wanted the matter shut down. Berman was also pressured into dropping the case by Whitakers successor, Attorney General Bill Barr.

[00:36:53]

According to the Times, at a meeting in June twenty 19, Bill Barr pressed Jeffrey Berman to allow the bank to avoid an indictment by paying a fine and acknowledging some wrongdoing. In addition, the Justice Department would agree under Barres proposal here would agree to end investigations in criminal cases involving Turkish and bank officials who are allied with Erdogan and suspected of participating in the scheme. So exactly what Erdogan had been pressing for pressing Biden and Obama for Biden responding and saying, no, that would be improper and unethical.

[00:37:23]

President would be impeached for doing that. Trump does. It tells Whiteaker to do it. Whiteaker does it. Tells Barr to do it. Ba ba ba. Leans on Jeffrey Berman in NY and Jeffrey Berman says no. As he argued, quote, The suggestion that the Justice Department would offer Turkish officials protection from criminal charges even without the agreement to assist in the investigation is unacceptable and unethical. Justice Department policy specifically says criminal conduct by individuals doesn't get resolved when a company admits wrongdoing.

[00:37:53]

Berman told Bar, quote, This is not how we do things in the southern district, added he, adding that he would not agree to such a move and that his office would not be part of it. As the Times reports, the administration's bitterness over Jeffrey Berman's unwillingness to go along with Barr's proposal would linger and would ultimately contribute to his dismissal as U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. That Turkish bank. It was eventually charged by NY prosecutors after they were given permission to do so by Bill Barr, not because of any change in evidence or circumstances surrounding the case.

[00:38:26]

Nothing that should be within the four corners of a prosecution. Ultimately, they got permission to go ahead with charges against the bank because of a dustup between Trump and Erdogan over Syria last year. They got into a personal fight. And so the president greenlit the charges, apparently trump it initially given Erdogan the green light to send troops into Syria. He faced an intense bipartisan backlash that Ledingham within days to take a tougher line with Turkey threatening economic reprisals. And that's why the prosecutors were essentially told, OK, now you can go ahead and indict that bank as if the prosecutors are just servants who work for the president in order to meet his personal needs.

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I mean, it's just a terrible piece of news in terms of what the president has been able to do and how two of his attorney generals have been operating under his orders. What does that mean for the independence and the operations of the Justice Department as we head into what is very likely going to be a hotly contested election? Stay with us. For a lot of us, our home is now more than just our home, it's your office, your gym, your kids classroom, even your hair salon.

[00:39:32]

And if you're a business owner or a manager, your home might also be where you do your hiring. That's where ZIP recruiter comes in. Zip recruiter makes hiring faster and easier because you can do it all from one convenient place. Zip recruiter dotcom slash NBC. No matter where you're hiring from. Zip recruiter does the work for you. Zip recruiters matching technology scans thousands of resumes and profiles to identify the most qualified people for your job. And if you're really interested in a candidate, you can even invite them to apply for your job with one click zip recruiter sends them an email for you.

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It's no wonder that four out of five employers who post on ZIP recruiters get a quality candidate within the first day, one day. And right now you can try as a recruiter for free a zip recruiter dotcom slash NBC. That's zip recruiter dotcom slash NBC. All you need is Wi-Fi to try it for free. Just go to zip recruiter dotcom, NBC zip recruiter. The smartest way to hire. In any other presidency, even in the week before an election, maybe especially in the week before an election, this would be an absolutely showstopping scandal.

[00:40:37]

Drop everything and this administration. It's a Thursday. But this remarkable reporting in The New York Times today tells the previously unknown story of the president apparently intervening relentlessly in criminal prosecutions, unrelenting pressure from Trump's Justice Department on federal prosecutors in New York to stop proceeding with an important criminal case after a foreign dictator told Trump that's what he wanted. I should mention, this is a foreign dictator in whose country the president has multimillion dollar business interests. Joining us now is Daniel Goldman, former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York.

[00:41:14]

He served as majority counsel and the impeachment inquiry against Trump. He was staff counsel to the House managers in the subsequent impeachment trial of the president. Mr. Goldman, it's really nice to see you. Thanks for making time tonight. Great to be with you, Rachel. So I am not a lawyer, I have become an increasingly obsessed observer of the legal process, particularly the criminal legal process over the course of this president, because there's been a lot of criminal law in this presidency, I personally was shocked by this, even at this late date that the president was asked by a dictator to drop a criminal prosecution, that the president said, OK, I will, and that not one but two of his appointed attorneys general tried to make it happen and leaned on standby to do it.

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Does it did this shock you in the same way that it shocked me? It did shock me, but it did not surprise me, unfortunately, because we are in an age that this country has not seen in modern history. We saw Donald Trump intervene in the case of Michael Flynn, his political ally. We saw Donald Trump intervene in the case of Roger Stone in order to prevent him from cooperating against Donald Trump. And now we have Donald Trump intervening for the benefit of a foreign dictator in whose country Donald Trump has business interests.

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And I think what is so clear and troubling about this is Donald Trump. We now know, I think pretty much unequivocally operates solely in his personal interests. But what is scary to me as a former Department of Justice employee for 10 years is that Bill Barr would go along with all of these things and that the notion that because Donald Trump suggested to Bill Barr that this significant, significant investigation and prosecution of sanctions violations against Iran and let's remember Donald Trump's policy towards Iran is to pull us out of the jackpot and implement sanctions.

[00:43:30]

This prosecution was designed to prevent foreign entities from doing an end run around those sanctions. That is Donald Trump's policy. He should be happy with it. But he wasn't. And Bill Barr actually suggested to the prosecutors that they should drop the case. It's already charged cases that they should just drop them. That's almost never happens generally. And it certainly never happens because of political reasons. It is just another demonstration of how far in the gutter we have gone and how the rule of law has just been trampled during this administration.

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And I again, I'm outside of this looking in, but from what I understand of Justice Department policy, when Attorney General Bill Barr went to the FDNY and told them to drop these charges, drop the investigations of all the individuals connected to this case, which is what this foreign dictator was after, as far as I understand it, that not only is wildly unethical, totally violative of our understanding of the impartial rule of law and all those other things, but it's directly against explicit Justice Department policy in terms of whether or not individuals are charged versus something like a bank is charged.

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I mean, he was violating the policies of his own department. Does that matter? Are there any consequences for that? If he if Trump gets re-elected and Barr stays on as attorney general, does he have to account for this in some way? Well, there's always the possibility of impeachment of Bill Barr as well, and I think that there have been a number of different instances that would be grounds for an impeachment of Bill Barr. We are so close to the election that sort of the first way to deal with this kind of corruption is to vote them out.

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But if there is another Trump term and Bill Barr remains there, that would be the only real avenue to keep him in check and to limit the effect of this this type of corruption in the Obama administration. The Department of Justice strengthened its policies against corporations and made it very clear that individual prosecutions should also be valued. And what you're referring to is a policy that folks that really does separate indictments or charges against corporations and entities and the individuals who are working for those.

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And what Jeffrey Berman correctly objected to is that Bill Barr was proposing some kind of a global settlement for the bank and all of its employees. But that's not how it works and that's not what Department of Justice policy is. And that's part of the reason why this smells so bad and why it's so clearly not because of any kind of legitimate reason why you would want to dismiss the case. But instead of shameful and illegitimate political interference, which is just as Joe Biden pointed out in twenty sixteen, that's not how our justice system traditionally has run.

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And it's not how it should run.

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It's not the way it runs or should run, even if a foreign dictator asks for it as a favor or perhaps especially, it's just incredible that Daniel Goldman, former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. And it's really nice to see you. Thank you for making time tonight.

[00:46:53]

You, too. Thanks so much. All right. We got a lot more ahead here tonight. Stay with us. The U.S. Elections Project reports that in the great state of Hawaii, the number of voters who have already cast their ballots this year is over four hundred and fifty seven thousand. Now, what's important about that is that that's more than the number of people who have voted in any election in Hawaii ever. And I don't mean that that is more than the number of people who have voted early in any Hawaii election.

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I mean, the number of Hawaii residents who have already voted this year is more than the total number of Hawaii residents who have voted in any previous election since Hawaii became a state. Ohmy. In Texas, about eight point nine million people voted in. Twenty sixteen already in this election this year, more than eight point five million Texans have voted, which means Texas is more than ninety five percent of the way to matching the total state turnout from twenty sixteen.

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And they're still early voting. Early voting still goes. There doesn't until tomorrow at 7:00 pm Harris County, where Houston is is planning to keep some polling locations open all night tonight. So everybody who wants to can get a chance to vote early before tomorrow's seven p.m. deadline. By now, of course, we are used to hearing every four years or maybe every two years of these election year fantasies from Democrats about how Texas might finally start turning blue and how that would change everything for the Democratic Party.

[00:48:18]

I don't know if Democratic fantasies are any more real this year than they usually are, but it is a real thing that vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris has scheduled. Not one, not two, but three campaign stops in Texas tomorrow, while Texas is absolutely voting its socks off. Watch this space. What do you think the odds are that this time next week, I not only will still be on TV, but I will still be on TV from when I sat down on Tuesday night.

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I have to get more comfortable pants. Oh, look, there you are, look, that does it for us tonight. See you again tomorrow on The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at nine Eastern on MSNBC. On Tuesday, joined MSNBC as Rachel Maddow, Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid and Brian Williams analyzed the election of our lifetimes. Steve Kornacki will break down the data. Stay with MSNBC until the last vote is counted.