The Holdup at the Center of the Iran Talks, and Trump’s Baseless New Claims of Voter Fraud

0:28I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic. From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, June 9th. Here's what we're covering.

0:44Yesterday, missiles and fighter jets were streaking across the Middle East as Iran and Israel launched a series of major attacks for the first time in months. As the fighting escalated, Israel was on the verge of launching another wave of strikes when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got a call from President Trump. According to U.S. and Israeli officials, Trump asked Netanyahu to stand down, claiming that the U.S. and Iran were within days of a breakthrough in their ongoing peace talks. President Trump has been saying for weeks now that Iran and the United States are just at the cusp of an agreement.

1:21But it continues to not materialize. So my colleagues and I have spent the past few weeks talking to mediators, trying to understand what is the hangup. Erica Solomon covers the Middle East for The Times. She says it's important to remember the deal they're hashing out right now is a preliminary agreement. It won't address Iran's nuclear program, but it would pause hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and potentially give Iran some access to frozen funds in the hopes that could pave the way for more comprehensive talks down the line. It's likely that some version of this preliminary deal will be agreed to by Washington and Tehran.

1:57The problem is how to frame it in a way that both sides can sell it as a win, particularly to the hardliners and hawks in their countries that feel like they should be pushing harder. On top of that, you have some of the oddities of the two leaders behind these countries' talks themselves. You have Mushtab al-Khamenei, Iran's new supreme leader, who's basically in hiding to avoid being targeted and is communicating with mediators through couriers. It sometimes takes days for them to get back in touch with each other. On the other side, you have a very mercurial President Trump who often in that time that negotiators are waiting to hear from Iran changes his mind about the terms.

2:36Just to give one example, at the very beginning of these talks in April, President Trump's envoys told the Iranians that they could agree to a 10-year suspension of Iran's nuclear enrichment program. The Iranians agreed and were shocked to discover hours later that President Trump was not okay with that and instead wanted a 20-year suspension. After that, the talks started to fall apart. This is the kind of chaos and confusion that has plagued and derailed the talks for weeks. And now mediators are hoping they can finally push this through and find that stopgap deal.

3:12Meanwhile, near the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, a U.S. Army Apache helicopter went down, according to two people briefed on the incident. The two crew members on board were safely rescued. It wasn't immediately clear what happened to the aircraft or whether or not it was hit by Iranian fire, but Apache helicopters have been pushing closer and closer to Iranian territory, part of an aggressive posture by the U.S. military, even as talks to end the war are ongoing.

3:45In Washington yesterday, President Trump formally nominated Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general. Blanche, who is Trump's former personal lawyer, has been doing the job in an acting capacity since early April and was deputy AG before that. During that time, my colleague Devlin Barrett says Blanche showed a willingness to execute on President Trump's demands. I think in some ways, a vote on Todd Blanche's nomination will be a test of everything that's happened at the Justice Department in the last year. Leaders of the Justice Department, including Todd Blanche, have fired more than 200 agents and prosecutors who worked on Trump-related cases or cases involving Trump's allies.

4:27At the same time, they have pursued investigations against some of Trump's longest enemies, like James Comey, the former FBI director. That's the kind of thing that raises a lot of concerns among current and former law enforcement officials who worry that the Justice Department is now being retooled and repurposed to go after the president's political targets, the people he thinks of as enemies, the people he wants to hurt. I think if Todd Blanch were to be confirmed, that would be a kind of green light for the Justice Department to not only continue what it's been doing, but to go further. Devlin says that the question of whether Blanche will be able to get the votes he needs from the Senate to be confirmed remains to be seen.

5:13Blanche's recent defense of Trump's proposed$1.8 billion fund triggered rare GOP backlash. But so far this term, Republicans have largely approved Trump's nominees for cabinet and other high-profile positions.

5:33Now, two quick updates on elections around the country. First. Look at what's happening in California. Where's the evidence to that? It's four days. The Republicans are doing well in California. In California, it's... No, they're not. They're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you. President Trump, who has long made baseless claims about stolen elections and mail-in voting, is now calling California's primary results into question. His preferred candidate for Los Angeles mayor, a Republican, failed to advance to a runoff, even though early vote tallies showed him up. Ultimately, once more mail-in ballots were counted, the race was called in favor of a progressive candidate.

6:11Trump is now claiming, without evidence, that the state's standard drawn-out timeline for counting ballots is suspicious, and he's made similar accusations about the state's primary race for governor. Together, the claims could be a kind of preview of his strategy for the midterms. Republican candidates around the country are facing political headwinds in the run-up to the November elections. And Trump may try to claim any elections that Republicans don't win were rigged.

6:41Also, a handful of other states are having their primaries today. And the one that has drawn the most attention is Maine. For Democrats, Maine is key to their chances of taking control of the Senate. They're hoping they can unseat the longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins. Their leading candidate to do that is Graham Plattner, a Marine veteran, oyster farmer, and political progressive who's making his first ever run for office. But Plattner has faced a swirl of questions about his past behavior, from a tattoo he got resembling a Nazi symbol, which he later had covered up, to accusations from ex-partners who said he could be demeaning to women, and in at least one case, physically threatening.

7:23Plattner's campaign has said he, quote, strongly disputes any claims of physical intimidation, and Plattner has described himself as a flawed man who has worked to become a better person. Many Democratic voters told The Times they will be voting for Plattner today, and my colleague Lisa Lair has been reporting about the broader implications of the race. I think the country is going through a period of rethinking what kind of experience they want their political leaders to have and also what kind of things that were traditionally seen as political baggage they're willing to accept. And I think this Maine race is testing in a really big, really high-profile way how much Democratic primary voters are willing to prioritize someone that they feel authentically represents them over things they may not like about the person or even questions of their personal character.

8:16Lisa has more about the Maine primary on today's episode of The Daily.

8:30OpenAI, the company that kicked off the artificial intelligence boom when it released ChatGPT, has now filed to go public. There's no timeline for when that will happen, but it would be part of a wave of massive tech IPOs. SpaceX could list on Wall Street as early as this week. Anthropic could do that this fall. The valuations of these companies range from$700 billion to$1.77 trillion, and together they could unleash an avalanche of wealth for investors and employees. In addition to that, my colleague Casey Newton from the Times tech show Hard Fork says the IPOs could introduce some level of transparency and accountability for the biggest players in the industry.

9:12When your company goes public, you are introducing more democratic oversight and governance into it, right? These folks will now have to, like, report their earnings They will have to give us information about their financials. They will have to make certain disclosures as, you know, their products come out and as their company changes. Shareholders will be able to maybe vote on certain things. So, you know, right now we have almost no levers whatsoever that people can pull other than trying to prevent a data center from being built in their backyard. So maybe these give folks some new ones.

9:49And finally, imagine you're sitting in a meeting at work and your boss is up on the big screen giving a presentation from another office. She looks like your boss. She sounds like your boss. There's something slightly off, maybe a little glitchy. It's because she's AI. Your real human boss has sent an AI double of herself to this meeting. For a handful of executives and others who are experimenting with how to tackle their overwhelming schedules, this has become a new productivity hack. Like, I don't have time for the meeting, but you can talk to my AI twin. People are training these avatars by uploading their writing, their speeches, anything the AI can learn from.

10:31Now, at Harvard Business School, for example, some professors have incorporated AI versions of themselves into their office hours. They also run an online boot camp where aspiring entrepreneurs can pitch ideas to those AI professor lookalikes. The avatars then ask follow-up questions and dispense advice. Not everyone is into it. One professor told The Times he'd tried to offer his AI double for student meetings, but they wanted to meet with him in person. And as for the visual part of it, that is still kind of a work in progress. It is falling somewhere in the uncanny valley. Talking about his avatar, that same professor told The Times, quote, my wife doesn't like it.

11:13Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.