The Archive

IN THIS EDITION

How to scoop a D.C. spy scandal

Inside the House GOP’s fundraising freakout

Policy shifts in the hallway

Why covering tech on the Hill is so important

THE TOP

How to scoop a D.C. spy scandal

Welcome to The Readback, our weekend digest featuring the best of Punchbowl News this week – a quick roundup of all our scoops, analysis and Capitol Hill insight you won’t find anywhere else. We’ve also included a few of our favorite outside reads from the week.

And coming next week, The Readback podcast! Our Max Cohen will take listeners behind the scenes with reporters and others on Capitol Hill, getting the scoop on the top stories of the week. Catch The Readback podcast in your Daily Punch feed next Saturday morning.

Now from Andrew…

I’ve been covering Congress for almost a decade now and very little surprises me. But when I first learned of the incident we scooped earlier this week, I was truly taken aback.

In case you missed it, here’s a quick synopsis.

The FBI is investigating a deepfake operation that targeted Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin (D-Md.). Cardin and a few top SFRC aides held a Zoom call last week with who they thought was the recently former foreign minister of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba. It turned out to be an elaborate deepfake.

The individual impersonating Kuleba was asking questions that were obviously intended to provoke a controversial response from Cardin, including: “Do you support long-range missiles into Russian territory? I need to know your answer.”

Yikes.

The backstory: I obtained an email describing the incident in detail. The email came from a Senate security official and was sent on Monday morning at 10 a.m. to a select few leadership aides and security chiefs for some committees.

The email stated that the deepfake effort had “technical sophistication and believability.” The individual who orchestrated the call used artificial intelligence to essentially recreate Kuleba, including his voice. It’s yet another example of how malign actors — whether they’re affiliated with a hostile foreign government or just a practical jokester — are increasingly turning to AI as part of these influence operations. More on that in a minute.

I also spoke with three people briefed on the investigation. I later obtained a cybersecurity alert sent to Senate staffers to warn them about generic attempts by “threat actors posing as representatives of a foreign dignitary [to request] an official video call.”

By close of business on Wednesday, the story was ready to go. It was slated to run at the top of our Thursday AM edition. But we quickly got word that the news might leak sooner. So we rushed the story to your inboxes via a special edition newsletter.

Within a minute of our story publishing, Cardin’s office released a statement from the senator. The statement was vague and didn’t mention Kuleba or any of the other details we reported. Cardin simply said that “a malign actor engaged in a deceptive attempt to have a conversation with me by posing as a known individual.”

Other news organizations, including NBC and the New York Times, eventually matched our reporting.

Who’s behind it? Lawmakers have a built-in target on their backs, especially the most powerful ones. Cardin undoubtedly fits into that category as SFRC chair.

And while the FBI hasn’t determined who was behind the Kuleba deepfake, it should go without saying that the Russian government would be supremely interested in carrying out something like this. It would fit perfectly into their propaganda efforts surrounding the war in Ukraine.

In 2018, I reported on similar but less technologically advanced efforts by malign Russian actors. They tried to hack into then-Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D-Mo.) office emails through a phishing campaign. And they tried posing as a Latvian diplomat to get insider information from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) about U.S. sanctions against Russia.

What happened to Cardin was much more sophisticated and believable — and it’s likely going to happen again to other lawmakers. Luckily, Cardin and his staff were able to figure it out before the conversation delved into anything overly sensitive or politically controversial.

What I’m watching: It’s #RedOctober, baby! Go Phillies! John Middleton wants his trophy back.

— Andrew Desiderio

You can find The Readback in your inbox every Saturday at 8 a.m. And don’t hesitate to reach out to readback@punchbowl.news with feedback. Enjoy The Readback.

Inside the House GOP’s fundraising freakout

This week, I pulled back the curtain on an issue that has been lighting up Republican leadership circles lately: The House GOP’s fundraising struggles.

We had been hearing for a while that senior Republicans were growing increasingly alarmed about their cash gap with Democrats. But last Friday, those problems came into sharp focus when the NRCC announced it only raised $9.7 million in the month of August, $12.6 million less than the DCCC.

So we started asking plugged-in Republican sources: Who is to blame for the massive money disparity? And what are leaders trying to do to reverse the trend in the final stretch before the election?

There’s a whole host of reasons we were given for the GOP’s anemic numbers: Democrats typically outraise Republicans. Vice President Kamala Harris entering the presidential race gave a big bump to down-ballot candidates. Speaker Mike Johnson is still new to the fundraising circuit. And the list goes on.

But one response that really piqued our interest: The NRCC had a big hole in its budget in part because it had been counting on former President Donald Trump to do a fundraising event for them this cycle. That hasn’t happened yet, though not for lack of trying.

Trump was tentatively supposed to headline the campaign committee’s spring dinner — an event that has drawn eight figures with Trump involved in the past — but couldn’t attend because of the court schedule for his New York hush money trial.

So in recent weeks, GOP leaders have been desperately trying to get Trump to speak at an event for them, we learned. Trump’s operation has privately indicated to leadership that he’s willing to, but nothing is on the books yet. And at this late stage in the game, it’s unclear whether an 11th-hour infusion of cash would make much of a difference.

But this could create some lasting tension in the GOP. The NRCC transferred $2 million to the RNC in January. Neither Trump nor the RNC have given the NRCC a dime this cycle. And that will surely be something House Republicans remember if they wind up losing the majority.

What I’m listening to: The 25th Anniversary of Christina Aguilera on Spotify. Aguilera performs live renditions of some of her biggest hits with cameos from some of today’s most popular artists.

– Melanie Zanona

Policy shifts in the hallway

On Thursday morning, I woke up to the realization that Punchbowl News and Politico had published the same near-bombshell financial news about 15 minutes apart: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) was ready to embrace the crypto sector.

To the outside viewer, this might have looked like a coordinated media rollout. But the timing of the stories was coincidental and random. My friend and competitor Eleanor Mueller did one interview with the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, I did another.

But the settings and tones of those interviews were distinct, and I think there’s something to be unpacked in that difference.

Eleanor wrote up a nice, long and newsy Q&A with Waters — the kind of agenda-setting, vision board-inspired sitdown session that pairs well with the end of a congressional work period. In that conversation, Waters said that “crypto is the future.” That’s a far more bullish tone than we’d ever heard from her in public.

But the day before that item was published, on Wednesday afternoon, I walked and talked with Waters en route to her office in Rayburn. We’d just wrapped another grueling hearing about Basel III capital reform, and the California Democrat was tired. But I asked about crypto and the Kamala Harris campaign, and Waters heard me out.

The first words out of Waters’ mouth immediately struck me as news: “Crypto is inevitable,” Waters said, adding that she was worried about the U.S. falling behind international competitors in developing a legal framework for it.

There’s a difference between crypto being “the future” and crypto being “inevitable,” and I think that has everything to do with how and where the interviews were done. The “future” sounds vaguely hopeful, or at least resolute, which makes sense for a forward-looking Q&A. “Inevitable” has an undertone of weariness or even retreat.

We don’t blame her for the latter. It was only in May that Waters urged her colleagues not to be afraid of “Big Crypto” and vote against the FIT for 21st Century Act. More than 70 of them didn’t listen.

But the difference is a good reminder about the humanity of the lawmakers we chase around Capitol Hill. Some days, they’re excited about what’s next. Others, they’re a little beaten down by the road they took to get here.

What I’m reading: Congress is gone, and that means I get to try reading books again! I’ve been enjoying “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,” by Daniel Immerwahr. The book is an attempt to broaden our understanding of U.S. history beyond what Immerwahr calls America’s “logo map” — the continental U.S. from Florida to Washington State — to the “Greater” United States, which includes Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and beyond.

One crazy stat: After the end of World War II, the federal government “claimed jurisdiction over more people living outside the states than in them,” including the Philippines. There’s plenty to unpack about how policymakers have treated those folks ever since.

– Brendan Pedersen

Why covering tech on the Hill is so important

I joined Punchbowl News three weeks ago. To me, Congress is the best vantage point for covering the twists and turns of the tech policy beat at a pretty consequential moment for the industry.

I’ve covered congressional tech policy for years, but always in the mix with courts, regulators, states, international bodies and the big companies.

Digging deeper into lawmakers’ minute-by-minute moves has been exciting and occasionally exhausting. Who knew how many extra steps it takes to move around the Capitol complex. And make sure you wear comfortable shoes — those marble floors are no joke.

But mostly the switch has reminded me that, as much as everything can change in a hearing or a request for UC, our little moment is just a blip in literal decades of policy conversations.

I spent the last hours before Congress left town until after the election asking lawmakers how they want to address AI in 2025.

Members had plenty of ideas. But what struck me was how they also talked about their visions for 2026, for 2030, even for 2040 — or hearkened back to work from 2010 or before. Here’s Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who recently introduced introduced a bill that would require testing for civil rights violations in artificial intelligence:

That vision of lawmaking for the ages is a little hokey. It can be a recipe for years on the fringes and a lack of legislative action.

But it’s also a good reminder that public policy is often about the long game. Congress is certain to be very active on AI in 2025. There will also be plenty of proposals introduced that may not go anywhere in the moment but that will be relevant and significant five, 10, 15 years from now.

With tech, there’s no doubt getting the policy right now will matter big-time. But the debates just starting to percolate will also matter long beyond our current time.

What I’m watching: I recently watched “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which confirmed my long-held view that (both versions of) “MacArthur Park” are accidentally brilliant. The movie then put me in a spooky Winona Ryder mood. So obviously now I’m doing a “Stranger Things” season one rewatch.

— Ben Brody