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  • Bernie Sanders Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Bernie Sanders Fast Facts | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of US Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont and former 2020 presidential candidate.

    Birth date: September 8, 1941

    Birth place: Brooklyn, New York

    Birth name: Bernard Sanders

    Father: Eli Sanders, paint salesman

    Mother: Dorothy (Glassberg) Sanders

    Marriages: Jane (O’Meara) Sanders (1988-present); Deborah (Shiling) Messing (married and divorced in the 1960s)

    Children: With Susan Mott: Levi; stepchildren with Jane (O’Meara) Sanders: Heather, Carina, David

    Education: Attended Brooklyn College, 1959-1960; University of Chicago, B.A. in political science, 1964

    Religion: Jewish, though he has told the Washington Post he is “not actively involved with organized religion”

    Although independent in the US Senate, Sanders has run as a Democrat in his two bids for the presidential nomination, in 2016 and 2020.

    His father’s family died in the Holocaust.

    During the 1960s, he spent half a year on a kibbutz in Israel.

    Was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League while at the University of Chicago.

    The longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.

    Sanders applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War.

    Nominated for a Grammy Award but did not win.

    August 28, 1963 – Attends the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

    1972, 1976, 1986 – Unsuccessful bids for governor of Vermont.

    1972, 1974 – Unsuccessful bids for the US Senate.

    1981 – Wins the race for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by 10 votes, running as an independent.

    1981-1989 – Mayor of Burlington for four terms.

    1988 – Unsuccessful bid for the US House of Representatives.

    1990 – Wins a seat on the US House of Representatives by about 16% of the vote.

    1991-2007 – Serves eight terms in the US House of Representatives.

    1991 – Co-founds the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

    2006 – Wins a seat on the US Senate with 65% of the vote.

    January 4, 2007-present – Serves in the US Senate.

    December 10, 2010 – Holds a filibuster for more than eight hours against the reinstatement of tax cuts formulated during the administration of President George W. Bush. The speech is published in book form in 2011 as “The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class.”

    2012 – Wins reelection for a second term in the US Senate. Receives 71% of the vote.

    2013-2015 – Serves as chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

    April 30, 2015 – Announces his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in an email to supporters and media.

    May 1, 2015 – Sanders’ campaign raises more than $1.5 million in its first 24 hours.

    January 17, 2016 – Sanders unveils his $1.38 trillion per year “Medicare-for-All” health care plan.

    February 9, 2016 – Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary, claiming victory with 60% of the vote. He’s the first Jewish politician to win a presidential nominating contest.

    July 12, 2016 – Endorses Hillary Clinton for president.

    August 21, 2017 – Sanders pens a commentary article in Fortune magazine outlining his health care proposal “Medicare-for-all.”

    November 28, 2017 – Is nominated, along with actor Mark Ruffalo, for a Grammy in the Spoken Word category for “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.”

    February 26, 2018 – Sanders’ son, Levi Sanders, announces he is running for Congress in New Hampshire. He later loses his bid in the Democratic primary.

    November 6, 2018 – Wins reelection to the US Senate for a third term with more than 67% of the vote.

    January 2, 2019 – The New York Times reports that several women who worked on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign had come forward alleging they had experienced sexual harassment, pay disparities and targeted disrespect by campaign members. Sanders immediately responds to the allegations, claiming that he was not aware of any of the claims and apologizes to “any woman who feels like she was not treated appropriately.”

    February 19, 2019 – Announces that he is running for president during an interview with Vermont Public Radio.

    February 20, 2019 – According to his campaign, Sanders raises nearly $6 million in the first 24 hours following the launch of his 2020 presidential bid.

    March 15, 2019 – Sanders’ presidential campaign staff unionizes, making it the first major party presidential campaign to employ a formally organized workforce.

    August 22, 2019 – Sanders unveils his $16.3 trillion Green New Deal plan.

    October 1, 2019 – After experiencing chest discomfort at a campaign rally, Sanders undergoes treatment to address blockage in an artery. He has two stents successfully inserted.

    October 4, 2019 – The Sanders campaign releases a statement that he has been discharged from the hospital after being treated for a heart attack. “After two and a half days in the hospital, I feel great, and after taking a short time off, I look forward to getting back to work,” Sanders says in the statement.

    February 3, 2020 – The Iowa Democratic caucuses take place, but the process descends into chaos due to poor planning by the state party, a faulty app that was supposed to calculate results and an overwhelmed call center. That uncertainty leads to delayed results and a drawn-out process with both Sanders’ and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaigns raising concerns.

    February 27, 2020 – Sanders’ presidential campaign challenges the results of the Iowa caucuses partial recount just hours after the state’s Democratic Party releases its results. In a complaint sent to the Iowa Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee, the Sanders campaign claims the state party violated its own rules by allowing the Buttigieg campaign to partake in the process because they didn’t meet the proper requirements.

    February 29, 2020 – The Iowa Democratic Party certifies the results from the state’s caucuses, with Sanders coming in second behind Buttigieg and picking up 12 pledged delegates to Buttigieg’s 14. The certification by the party’s State Central Committee includes a 26-14, vote, saying the party violated its rules by complying with the Buttigieg campaign’s partial recanvass and recount requests.

    April 8, 2020 – Announces he is suspending his presidential campaign.

    April 13, 2020 – Endorses former Vice President Joe Biden for president.

    January 28, 2021 – Sanders raises $1.8 million for charity through the sale of merchandise inspired by the viral photo of him and his mittens on Inauguration Day.

    June 20, 2023 – Launches a Senate investigation into working and safety conditions at Amazon warehouses.

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  • Archdiocese of Philadelphia agrees to pay $3.5 million to settle sexual assault case, plaintiff’s attorneys say | CNN

    Archdiocese of Philadelphia agrees to pay $3.5 million to settle sexual assault case, plaintiff’s attorneys say | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle a case alleging one of its priests sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy nearly 20 years ago, according to the plaintiff’s lawyers.

    “This latest settlement holds the archdiocese accountable for failing to protect our client and other children,” David Inscho, an attorney for the plaintiff, said in a statement Wednesday.

    The incident took place in 2006 when the plaintiff was 14 years old and in seventh grade, serving as an altar boy and attending religious school at a parish in a Philadelphia suburb, according to court documents filed in the civil case.

    The plaintiff said he was taken to the office of pastor John Close, who was overseeing children’s religious education classes at the parish for counseling around 2006, the complaint said.

    Close told the boy he needed to be “cleansed” and then raped him, according to the complaint. Then, Close said the boy would “suffer eternal damnation” if he did not stay quiet about the assault, according to a pre-trial memorandum.

    The following year, the boy stopped serving as an altar boy after Close cornered him before mass while he was changing clothes, according to the complaint. Close retired in 2012 and died in 2018, according to the archdiocese.

    In a statement, the archdiocese acknowledged the settlement and said it had no knowledge of this allegation prior to Close’s death, adding it reported the allegation to law enforcement when it was brought to their attention by the plaintiff’s attorneys in 2019.

    “With today’s announcement, the Archdiocese reaffirms its longstanding commitment to preventing child abuse, protecting the young people entrusted to its care, and providing holistic means of compassionate support for those who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of our clergy,” the archdiocese said.

    “We deeply regret the pain suffered by any survivor of child sexual abuse and have a sincere desire to help victims on their path to healing.”

    The victim’s lawyers said the rape had a “catastrophic” effect on their client’s life, resulting in “severe psychological effects, substance abuse and the loss of educational, economic and personal opportunities throughout his life,” according to a pre-trial memorandum.

    The complaint, filed in 2020, accused the archdiocese of “negligence, recklessness and outrageous conduct” for “failing to observe and supervise the relationship” between the plaintiff and Close, failing to identify the priest’s “prior sexual abuse of children” and failing to remove Close from the ministry despite allegations he had abused children.

    The complaint alleged the archdiocese was made aware of two reports of sexual assault against Close prior to the 2006 incident. In both instances, the archdiocese did not report the allegations to law enforcement or remove the priest from ministry, the court document said.

    “The Archdiocese received an allegation in 2004 from an adult serving a prison sentence for murder alleging that he had been sexually abused by Close from 1967 to 1969. The Archdiocese determined that the allegations were unsubstantiated after an investigation by a former FBI agent and submission of the results to the Archdiocesan Review Board,” the archdiocese said in its answer to the complaint.

    The plaintiff’s lawyers alleged in the complaint the archdiocese was aware of Close’s abusive behaviors.

    “However, the Archdiocese consciously disregarded this risk and failed to act to protect future children,” the lawyers’ statement said.

    In 2011, another victim told the archdiocese that Close had sexually assaulted him in the 1990s, prompting the archdiocese to put the priest on administrative leave pending an investigation, according to the court document.

    But the following year, the archbishop determined the alleged abuse was “unsubstantiated” and Close was “suitable for ministry,” the complaint said.

    In its response to the complaint, the archdiocese said it did not breach any duty of care to the plaintiff and “was not on notice of any substantiated claims of sexual abuse against Close before the time of the alleged abuse.”

    The victim’s attorneys noted that at the time of his death, Close was in good standing with the Catholic Church and held the honorary title ‘Monsignor.’

    Beyond the specific allegations against Close, the client’s lawyers allege in the complaint the archdiocese’s decades-long pattern of covering up predatory behavior by a number of its priests contributed to the victim’s assault.

    The victim’s lawyers cite a Philadelphia grand jury report finding “credible allegations” against 300 “predator priests.” The grand jury report said over 1,000 child victims were identifiable from the church’s records.

    “We believe that the real number of children whose records were lost or who were afraid ever to come forward is in the thousands,” reads the grand jury report, which was released in 2018.

    “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all,” the report states. “For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected.”

    If you suspect child abuse, call Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in over 170 different languages.

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  • A day of legal action in Trump imbroglio previews a chaotic 2024 election year | CNN Politics

    A day of legal action in Trump imbroglio previews a chaotic 2024 election year | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A whirl of developments in a quartet of cases in four separate cities encapsulate the vast legal quagmire swamping Donald Trump and threatening to overwhelm the entire 2024 presidential campaign.

    But Monday’s hectic lawyering was just a tame preview of next year when the ex-president and current Republican front-runner may be constantly shuttling between courtroom criminal trials and the campaign trail.

    A day of legal intrigue brought revelations, judgments, disputes and filings in cases related to Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election, the classified documents case, efforts to thwart Joe Biden’s win in Georgia, and even in a defamation case dating back to Trump’s personal behavior toward women in the 1990s.

    It’s already almost impossible for voters who may be asked to decide whether Trump is fit for a return to the Oval Office – or at least to carry the GOP banner into the election – to keep pace with all the competing legal twists and the scale of his plight.

    A confusing fog in which all the cases blend together could work to the former president’s advantage as he seeks a White House comeback while proclaiming he’s a victim of political persecution by the Biden administration.

    But the deeper his legal mire gets, Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination are getting braver in suggesting that his fight against becoming a convicted felon could be a general election liability. Trump’s dominance in the GOP primary has been boosted from his criminal indictments to date. But the sheer volume of cases unfolding alongside his campaign is increasingly daunting.

    In Washington, Trump’s lawyers just beat a deadline to file a brief in a dispute over the handling of evidence ahead of a trial in the election subversion case, and accused the government of seeking to muzzle his voice as he runs for a new White House term.

    In another glimpse into the breadth of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that could prove troubling to the ex-president, CNN exclusively reported that Trump ally Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, met Smith’s investigators for an interview on Monday. The discussion focused on what Trump’s former attorney and Kerik’s associate, Rudy Giuliani – otherwise known as Co-Conspirator 1 – did to try to convince the former president he actually won the 2020 election. The question will be a key one when the case finally comes to trial.

    Trump’s tough day in the courts had opened with a judge in Manhattan throwing out his defamation counter suit against E. Jean Carroll, which he did in stark language that recalled the ex-president’s loss in an earlier civil trial in which the jury found he sexually abused the writer.

    Then, in a surprise move in West Palm Beach, Florida, the Trump-appointed judge who will oversee his classified documents trial asked lawyers for co-defendant Walt Nauta to comment on the legality of prosecutors using a Washington grand jury to keep investigating. The fact the probe is still active despite several indictments is hardly a good sign for Trump. And Judge Aileen Cannon’s move revived debate over whether she was favoring the ex-president’s team following criticism of her earlier handling of a dispute over documents taken from Trump’s home in an FBI search.

    There were also new signs in Atlanta that indictments could be imminent in a probe into efforts to steal Biden’s election win in the key state, as it emerged that ex-Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican and CNN political contributor, has been subpoenaed to testify to a grand jury.

    All of this frenzied activity unfolding on one day represents just a snapshot of the complex legal morass now surrounding Trump. It’s just a taste of the enormous strain the ex-president is about to feel as he campaigns for a return to the Oval Office. The crush of cases will also impose increasing financial demands. Already, Trump’s leadership PAC has been diverting cash raised from small-dollar donors to pay legal fees for the former president and associates that might instead have gone toward the 2024 campaign.

    In several of the cases on Monday, there were signs of the extraordinary complications inherent in prosecuting a former president and the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Judges, for instance, are faced with decisions that would normally go unnoticed by the public in the court system but that will now attract a glaring media and political spotlight.

    And while Monday was notable for a head-spinning sequence of legal maneuvering, it did not even encompass all of the pending cases against Trump. He is also due to go on trial in March – in the middle of the GOP primary season – in a case arising from a hush money payment to an adult film star. As with his other indictments, Trump has pleaded not guilty.

    For all his capacity to operate in the eye of converging storms of scandal and controversy, Trump’s mood is becoming increasingly agitated. In recent days he has attacked Smith, the Justice Department, the judge in the election subversion case, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, and even the US national women’s soccer team after they crashed out of the World Cup on penalties.

    One of Trump’s most incendiary posts on his Truth Social network was at the center of one of Monday’s legal dramas – wrangling between Smith’s prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers over the handling of evidence at the center of the forthcoming trial.

    Prosecutors cited Trump writing on his Truth Social network on Friday, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” in a filing that requested strict rules on how he could use evidence that will be turned over to the defense as part of the pre-trial discovery process. Trump’s lawyers had asked for an extension to Monday’s deadline, but Judge Tanya Chutkan refused, in a fresh sign of her possible willingness to schedule a swift trial, which the ex-president wants to delay until after the 2024 election.

    In its brief, the defense proposed narrower rules than those sought by prosecutors. Spats over discovery aren’t unusual early in a trial process. But Trump’s filing added insight into how his team will approach a case in which he has pleaded not guilty.

    “In a trial about First Amendment rights, the government seeks to restrict First Amendment rights,” the attorneys said in the court filing.

    When it comes to Smith’s indictment, Trump’s lawyers are arguing that he was within his rights to claim the election was stolen. Smith’s strategy is, however, apparently designed to avoid a First Amendment trap, and alleges that the criminal activity occurred not in what Trump said, but in actions like the ex-president’s pressure on local officials over the election and on former Vice President Mike Pence to delay its certification.

    The Trump team’s filing went on to claim that the case was in itself an example of political victimization of their client, underscoring the fusion between his courtroom defense and his presidential campaign.

    “Worse, it does so against its administration’s primary political opponent, during an election season in which the administration, prominent party members, and media allies have campaigned on the indictment and proliferated its false allegations,” the filing said.

    In a Monday night order, Chutkan signaled she would hold a hearing this week on the dispute and told the parties to come up with, by 3 p.m. Tuesday, two options for when such a hearing could be held this week.

    Any prolonged debate over the terms of the pre-discovery process – let alone the many other expected pre-trial motions – will play into the hands of the defense. Trump is showing every sign that part of his motivation in running for a second White House term is to reacquire executive powers that could lead to federal cases against him being frozen. The timing of the January 6, 2021, case, and any potential conviction, is therefore hugely significant with a general election looming in November 2024.

    Trump has called for the recusal of Chutkan, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama. His legal team has called for a shift of trial venue away from the diverse US capital, potentially to West Virginia, one of the Whitest and most pro-Trump states in the nation. These pre-trial gambits are unlikely to succeed. But they help to create extreme pressure on the judge and to build a case for Trump supporters that the legal process is biased against him – a narrative that could provide especially inflammatory if he is eventually convicted.

    Trump’s rhetoric about the case has raised some concerns about the possibility of witness intimidation – especially as some of his supporters who were tried for their part in the mob attack on the US Capitol on January 6, have testified that they were spurred to action by his rhetoric.

    CNN observed increased security around Chutkan on Monday. Security is also increased around the Superior Court in Fulton County, Georgia, where a decision is expected in days on whether to hit Trump with a fourth criminal indictment.

    Any normal political candidate would have seen their political ambitions crushed by even one of the cases in Trump’s bulging portfolio of legal jeopardy. It is, however, a sign of the ex-president’s extraordinary and unbroken hold on the Republican Party and its voters that he is still the runaway front-runner in the primary.

    But one of his top rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is slowly becoming more willing to criticize Trump publicly, after being cautious about alienating Trump supporters who feel the ex-president is the victim of a political witch hunt. DeSantis told NBC that “of course” Trump lost the 2024 election, as he blitzes early voting states New Hampshire and Iowa and makes the case that the ex-president’s legal exposure is a distraction the GOP cannot afford if it is to oust Biden from the White House after a single term. It may seem absurd that DeSantis is risking his political career by stating the obvious truth about the 2020 election, but Trump has made signing up to his false reality a test of loyalty among base voters.

    And Pence, who rejected Trump’s public pressure to thwart the certification of Biden’s election – a scheme at the center of Smith’s case – indicated over the weekend that he may testify in Trump’s trial if required to do so by law.

    The spectacle of a former vice presidential running mate testifying against the man who picked him for his ticket would be an extreme twist even in the Trump era of shattered political conventions.

    Thanks to Trump’s unfathomable and widening legal nightmare, nothing about the 2024 election is going to be anywhere near normal.

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  • DeSantis on Trump’s 2020 claims: ‘Of course he lost’ | CNN Politics

    DeSantis on Trump’s 2020 claims: ‘Of course he lost’ | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “of course” Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his the most direct comments on the matter in the nearly three years since the former president’s defeat.

    “Of course he lost,” DeSantis told NBC News in an interview that aired Sunday. “Joe Biden’s the president.”

    The remarks follow DeSantis’ comments on Friday in which he told reporters in Decorah, Iowa, that “theories” put out by the former president and his associates following the 2020 election were “unsubstantiated” and “did not prove to be true.”

    DeSantis had previously avoided such forceful pronouncements about Trump’s defeat. He was among the first to suggest that state legislatures could change election results in certain states, earning public praise from Trump’s inner circle at the time. In the years after, though, DeSantis has largely ducked questions about the veracity of the election results.

    Yet DeSantis continues to argue it was not a “perfect election” – citing actions taken by states to ease voting access during the pandemic – and went on to criticize Trump for funding mail-in ballots through the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill passed in 2020 in response to the coronavirus crisis.

    “But here’s the issue that I think is important for Republican voters to think about: Why did we have all those mail votes? Because of Trump turned the government over to (Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). They embraced lockdowns. They did the CARES Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country,” DeSantis told NBC.

    Unmentioned by DeSantis is that he once praised the CARES Act when it was signed, saying it provided “critical resources” in the fight against Covid-19.

    “We thank President Trump for this much-needed support and look forward to our continued work to defeat Covid-19 and emerge stronger than before,” DeSantis said at the time.

    Nor did DeSantis note that he, too, took unilateral action as governor to let local election offices process mail-in ballots earlier than state law allows to address concerns about adequate staffing and a surge in voting remotely due to the coronavirus. Elsewhere, Republican state legislatures blocked Democratic requests to take similar measures in states like Pennsylvania, where the prolonged counting of ballots became fodder for election conspiracies.

    Voting by mail is incredibly popular in Florida, including by voters from his party. Nearly 2.8 million Floridians voted by mail in 2022 – when DeSantis was reelected by a historically wide margin – including more than 1 million registered Republicans.

    As he often does when faced with questions about the 2020 election, DeSantis in his interview with NBC motioned toward the future and how the 2024 election must be a “referendum on Joe Biden’s policies” and “failures” rather than relitigating the past.

    He argued Republicans will lose if they focus on “January 6, 2021, or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago.” However, as Trump stares down three criminal indictments related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents, hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, these issues have taken center stage, all while Trump maintains an overwhelming lead.

    On Friday in Waverly, Iowa, DeSantis made the case for “healing divisions” and moving beyond Trump’s legal woes.

    “We got to look forward. We got to start healing divisions in this country,” DeSantis told reporters. “All of this stuff that’s going on, I think it’s just exacerbating the divisions. And so sometimes there’s a larger picture that you have to look at, and I will be looking at that larger picture wanting to move forward for the sake of the country.”

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  • The anti-abortion movement is fractured over what it wants from its first post-Roe GOP presidential nominee | CNN Politics

    The anti-abortion movement is fractured over what it wants from its first post-Roe GOP presidential nominee | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Bernie Hayes has spent most Mondays since the overturning of Roe v. Wade meeting with friends outside of an Iowa Planned Parenthood trying to stop abortions one at a time. He huddles monthly with other like-minded activists plotting more wholesale paths to halting the procedure.

    Lately, Hayes, an elder at Noelridge Park Church in Cedar Rapids, has observed more dissent among anti-abortion allies who once worked in harmony. Some see the fall of Roe as a one-time chance to ban abortion entirely while others are worried about the political consequences of pushing too hard too quickly.

    “Sadly, it becomes divisive to the point where we just get fractured,” Hayes said. “I can only imagine what the division looks like on a national scale.”

    Those divisions are spilling out into the 2024 Republican presidential primary, as leading anti-abortion organizations are offering candidates conflicting guidance on an issue that has galvanized the political right for half a century. Recent polling shows Republican voters aren’t providing candidates much more clarity.

    Lynda Bell, the president of Florida Right to Life, bristled at the suggestion that Republican candidates must back a federal abortion ban.

    “There’s nothing in the Constitution that talks about abortion and this issue should be decided by the states,” she said.

    But other leaders of anti-abortion groups want GOP candidates to be unflinching in their support for more hardline policies.

    “Anyone in the pro-life movement is looking very carefully at the current candidates that are running for president, and those who are not advocating strongly on this issue are going to be the ones that are not going to get the confidence and get the vote of the pro-life movement,” said Maggie DeWitte, the executive director of the Iowa anti-abortion group Pulse Life Advocates.

    Candidates are cautiously navigating the unclear expectations of conservative voters as they search for their first presidential nominee in a post-Roe America. Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the two highest-polling candidates for the GOP nomination, have routinely dodged questions on the trail about whether they would sign a national abortion ban and at how many weeks into a pregnancy they would support such federal legislation.

    Meanwhile, candidates who have expressed more defined views on the topic – like former Vice President Mike Pence, a backer of a federal ban, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who said the federal government “should not be involved” in the abortion debate – have yet to gain traction with Republican voters.

    Whoever is the GOP nominee will face an electorate that has so far handed anti-abortion advocates a series of stinging defeats since the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson last summer. In the immediate aftermath of the court’s ruling, Kansans voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion legal in the state. In November, Michiganders at the ballot box enshrined abortion access in the state constitution. This week in Wisconsin, liberal justice Janet Protasiewicz started her term on the state Supreme Court after winning a spring race, during which she campaigned on protecting abortion access.

    The enthusiasm displayed by abortion-rights activists in the past 12 months will be tested again on Tuesday when Ohioans will decide whether to raise the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment, a referendum that would have significant implications for a fall ballot question ensure “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s reproductive decisions.”

    “We need to start winning hearts and minds,” Hayes said. “I don’t think we can worry about a federal ban until you can do that.”

    Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a national anti-abortion group, has clashed with the GOP contenders for the nomination as the organization enforces its own red line for presidential candidates: a 15-week federal ban.

    When Trump’s campaign suggested in April that abortion should be decided at the state level, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the organization’s president, called it “a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.” It was a stunning break between one of the country’s most influential anti-abortion groups and the president who nominated the three Supreme Court justices that helped secure the movement’s watershed victory. Trump and Dannenfelser later met to clear the air, though Trump has still evaded outlining his views on the issue.

    Dannenfelser similarly said it was “not acceptable” when another candidate, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, stated “it’s not realistic” to expect a gridlocked Congress to find consensus on federal abortion legislation.

    And, in a blistering rebuke this week, Dannenfelser questioned DeSantis’ leadership after he once again declined to back a federal abortion.

    “A pro-life president has a duty to protect the lives of all Americans,” she said. “He should be the National Defender of Life.”

    DeSantis dismissed the criticism during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, where he noticeably drops references to his state’s new abortion law – which bans most abortions after six weeks – from his stump speech.

    “Different groups, you know, are gonna have different agendas, but I can tell you this: Nobody running has actually delivered pro-life protections,” DeSantis said. “I have done that.”

    South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott seized on the fissure between DeSantis and the leading abortion group, writing in a social media post that, “Republicans should not be retreating on life.” He added, “We need a national 15-week limit to stop blue states from pushing abortion on demand.”

    Scott, though, also struggled to define the federal role in the next frontier for the anti-abortion movement after he entered the presidential race in May.

    The anti-abortion movement is not totally aligned behind Dannenfelser. Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, said she thought it was a mistake to have a political litmus test for Republican presidential candidates on abortion and argued doing so would only serve to splinter the party ahead of the general election. It “doesn’t help” for SBA Pro-Life America to set a 15-week national ban as its standard for GOP candidates, Tobias said, arguing that there were more realistic goals to work towards, like ensuring zero tax dollars are used to fund abortions

    “If we’re not going to get a national law on abortion through Congress, why focus on it?” Tobias told CNN.

    Republican voters appear similarly divided. A New York Times/Siena College national survey released this week found more Republicans favored some exceptions (33%) than a total ban (22%). Meanwhile, one-third said they believed abortion should be mostly or always legal.

    But among White evangelical Republican voters – whose influence is especially pronounced in the early nominating contests in Iowa and South Carolina – opposition is higher. More than three-fourths responded that abortion should be always or mostly illegal.

    Further complicating the calculus for the Republican field is that the GOP voters least likely to vote for Trump are among the most likely to support at least some protections for abortion. For those Republicans who said they are not open to voting for Trump, only 11% support a total ban while more than half said they want abortion to be legal in most situations.

    The clashing opinions underscore the political tightrope Republican candidates are walking after their party underperformed in the 2022 midterms in an election held just months after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Some Republicans – including Trump – have blamed it for the party’s losses, pointing to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s failed attempt to push a federal ban through Congress last year as strategically unsound.

    “I thought, ‘What is Lindsey Graham doing?’” Bell said. “The Supreme Court just said it was a state decision. I was baffled.”

    But there are also fears within the anti-abortion movement that Republicans won’t act to preserve their chances at the ballot box.

    “Some say, ‘Let’s just ignore it,’” Hayes, the Cedar Rapids church elder, said. “For me the worst thing can happen is that it’s either very diluted or taken out of the platform all together. I hope we won’t go there. But if we’re going to talk about it, we need to do it in a smart way.”

    In Hayes’ state, Republicans that control Iowa’s government moved to ban most abortions in the state as early as six weeks into pregnancy. Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the measure into law at last month’s Family Leadership Summit, where most of the GOP field had assembled to speak directly to the state’s evangelical and Christian voters. Many Republican candidates heaped praise on Reynolds for signing the law, though most have not advocated for similar legislation at the federal level.

    Trump, who has notably not weighed in on Iowa’s law, did not attend the summit and has privately said he considers abortion a losing issue for Republicans. Publicly, he called Florida’s six-week abortion ban “too harsh,” testing conservatives who once celebrated Trump’s place in ending Roe.

    “I think many in the pro-life movement were disappointed to hear him talk about life not being a winning issue, and sort of attacking the heartbeat bill and some of the other legislation that’s coming down as being ‘too harsh,’” DeWitte said. “I think that really turned off people in the pro-life movement.”

    Joni Lupis, a pastor and president and director of March For Life New York, said she is wary of candidates who aren’t taking a stance on the issue or offering realistic answers.

    “Let’s be honest: The president can’t just declare no more abortion in the whole world,” Lupis said. “They can say they will but it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. That’s politics and we’ll have to wait and see what they have to do. I like a person that says what they believe. If you believe something, you should stand behind and declare it.”

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  • Trump and team seek to destroy credibility of his election subversion trial before a date is even set | CNN Politics

    Trump and team seek to destroy credibility of his election subversion trial before a date is even set | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump and his legal team are escalating efforts to discredit and delay a trial over his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as his fight to avert criminal convictions becomes ever more indistinguishable from his presidential campaign.

    The former president’s attorney Sunday vowed to petition to relocate the trial from Washington, DC, claiming that a local jury won’t reflect the “characteristics” of the American people. And as prosecutors seek a speedy trial, he warned that his team will seek to run out the process for years in an apparent attempt to move it past the 2024 election.

    Trump demanded the judge set to hear the case recuse herself in a flurry of assaults on the process that may fail legally, but will play into his campaign narrative that he is a victim of political persecution by the Biden administration designed to thwart a White House comeback.

    Trump pleaded not guilty when he was arraigned in Washington last week – his third such plea in a criminal case in the past four months. But his new efforts to tarnish an eventual trial in this case mirror his long-term strategy of seeking to delegitimize any institution – including the courts, the Justice Department, US intelligence agencies and the press – that contradicts his narrative or challenges his power.

    They unfolded as the precarious nature of his position after his third indictment began to sink in and the ramifications for the 2024 election widened.

    Mike Pence, speaking on CNN this weekend, did not rule out providing testimony in a Trump trial if compelled, which would be a staggering potential scenario for a vice president to provide evidence against his ex-running mate.

    Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr, meanwhile, dismissed one of the arguments the ex-president and his allies have turned to – that he was simply exercising his right to freedom of speech in seeking to reverse the election result in 2020. Barr, who told Trump there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud during his final weeks in office, also said Sunday that “of course” he would appear as a witness at the trial if asked.

    Trump’s status as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination has left his rivals with a painful political tightrope walk as they seek to take advantage of his plight while avoiding alienating GOP primary voters. But several candidates stiffened their criticism of the former president over the issue this weekend as campaigning heated up.

    Pence said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that in the tense days ahead of Congress’ certification of President Joe Biden’s election, Trump asked him to put loyalty to him above his oath to the Constitution and halt the process. “I’m running for president in part because I think anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Pence told Dana Bash.

    And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went a tiny bit further in his criticism of Trump, while still arguing that the Biden administration is weaponizing justice against the former president. On a campaign swing through Iowa on Friday, DeSantis – who is battling to preserve his tottering status as the No. 2 Republican in primary polls – said Trump’s false claims about election fraud were “unsubstantiated.”

    In a subsequent interview with NBC, DeSantis added: “Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on January 20 every four years is the winner.”

    “Of course, he lost,” DeSantis said. “Joe Biden’s the president.” The Florida governor also, however, chastised people in the media and elsewhere for acting like “this was the perfect election.”

    The fast-moving developments since Trump’s indictment last week are offering a preview of one of the most monumental criminal trials in American political history. They also suggest this case, and two others in which Trump has pleaded not guilty – to mishandling of classified documents and to charges arising out of a hush money payment to an adult film actress – are certain to deepen a corrosive national political estrangement.

    Defense teams have the right to use every courtroom mechanism within legal bounds to their client’s best advantage. Attempts to delay trials with pre-trial litigation are not unusual and prosecutors and defense lawyers often differ over matters of procedure and evidence. But Trump’s case is unique, given the visibility of the accused, the fact that he’s a former president running for another White House term, and that he is using his power and fame to mount a vitriolic campaign outside the courtroom to drain public confidence in the justice system. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no distinction between his legal strategy and his political one in an election that is now consumed by his criminal exposure and the possibility of convictions.

    In posts on his Truth Social network that highlighted a furious state of mind, Trump on Sunday demanded the recusal of Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee who is presiding over the case, and a venue change out of the capital. He blasted special counsel Jack Smith as “deranged” and claimed that the US was being “destroyed.” On Saturday night, in a speech in South Carolina, Trump demanded that Senate Republicans do more to protect him.

    His threatening rhetoric is already having a direct impact on pre-trial preparations as both parties shadow box ahead of a decision by the judge on a trial date.

    Smith’s prosecutors asked the court late Friday to impose strict limits on how Trump can publicize evidence that will be handed over as part of the discovery process. Trump’s team sought an extension of a Monday afternoon deadline to file on the matter, but Chutkan refused their request. Prosecutors want the judge to impose a protective order limiting how Trump could use such evidence because of his previous public statements about witnesses, judges, attorneys and others. In their filing, they included a screenshot of a Truth Social post in which Trump warned: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

    Trump’s lawyer John Lauro argued on “State of the Union” Sunday that the special counsel was seeking to withhold evidence about the case from the press and the American people that “may speak to the innocence of President Trump.”

    Trump is seeking to delay and prolong the trial so that the country won’t have a final answer on his alleged culpability until after the election. If Trump wins the White House in November 2024, he will again gain access to executive powers and status that could freeze federal prosecutions against him or mitigate any guilty verdicts.

    Lauro said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he had not known any similar case go to trial within two or three years of an indictment. He also said on other talk show appearances that he planned to relitigate the 2020 election, which he said had never been drawn out in court, as a way of challenging Smith’s charges. Trump, however, made multiple attempts to have the 2020 result overturned in court, and judges repeatedly threw out his claims of voter fraud as having no merit.

    Lauro also further revealed his hand on defense strategy by arguing that despite being told multiple times by officials and campaign advisers that he lost the election, Trump’s actions were not criminal since he was convinced he won.

    “The defense is quite simple. Donald Trump … believed in his heart of hearts that he had won that election,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “And as any American citizen, he had a right to speak out under the First Amendment. He had a right to petition governments around the country, state governments, based on his grievances that election irregularities had occurred.”

    But Barr, a conservative Republican who had been a staunch Trump defender until the very end of his administration, said that while Smith’s case was certainly “challenging,” he didn’t think it “runs afoul of the First Amendment.”

    Trump’s prospective defense raises the possibility that any future politician could create an alternative reality that bears no relation to the facts of an election outcome, and then take actions designed to retain power.

    Barr sought to clear up what he said was confusion about the case. “This involved a situation where the states had already made the official and authoritative determination as to who won in those states, and they sent the votes and certified them to Congress,” Barr said on “Face the Nation.”

    “The allegation, essentially, by the government is that, at that point, the president conspired, entered into a plan, a scheme that involved a lot of deceit, the object of which was to erase those votes, to nullify those lawful votes.”

    Another claim by Trump’s team being amplified on conservative media is that the former president cannot get a fair trial in Washington, where he won only 5% of the vote in the 2020 election. Lauro instead suggested one of the most pro-Trump states in the union, where the ex-president racked up nearly 70% of votes cast in the last election. “I think West Virginia would be an excellent venue to try this case,” he said on CBS.

    Most legal experts think a change of venue is unlikely. Such a step would implicitly strike at the heart of the legal system since it would suggest that verdicts and juries in one jurisdiction are more valid than those elsewhere and could set a precedent that politicians could choose juries in politically advantageous regions.

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of the handful of Republicans running for the 2024 nomination on an explicitly anti-Trump platform, insisted that Trump could get a fair trial in the nation’s capital.

    “I believe jurors can be fair. I believe in the American people,” Christie said on “State of the Union.”

    Christie: I believe DC jurors can be fair to Trump

    Christie, a former federal prosecutor in a blue state, also rejected the argument that Trump’s post-election conduct is protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. He argued that proof of Trump’s culpability lies in his failure to immediately seek to stop the ransacking of the US Capitol by his supporters during the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021.

    “He didn’t do that. He sat, ate his overdone hamburger in the White House Dining Room he has off the Oval Office and enjoyed watching what was going on,” Christie said.

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  • Jim McGreevey Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Jim McGreevey Fast Facts | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Jim McGreevey, former governor of New Jersey.

    Birth date: August 6, 1957

    Birth place: Jersey City, New Jersey

    Birth name: James Edward McGreevey

    Father: Jack McGreevey, trucking company director

    Mother: Veronica (Smith) McGreevey, teacher

    Marriages: Dina (Matos) McGreevey (2000-2008, divorced); Kari (Schutz) McGreevey (1991-1997, divorced)

    Children: with Dina (Matos) McGreevey: Jacqueline; with Kari (Schutz) McGreevey: Morag

    Education: Columbia University, B.A., 1978; Georgetown University, J.D., 1981; Harvard University, M.Ed., 1982; General Theological Seminary, M.Div., 2010

    Religion: Raised Roman Catholic; received into the Episcopal Church in 2007

    Served in the New Jersey State Senate while also serving as mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey.

    1982-1983 – Middlesex County, New Jersey, assistant prosecutor.

    1983 – Begins working for the New Jersey Assembly Majority Office.

    1985-1987 – Executive director of the New Jersey State Parole Board.

    1990-1991 – Serves in the New Jersey State Assembly.

    1991 – Is elected mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey.

    1994-1997 – Serves in the New Jersey Senate.

    1995 and 1999 – Reelected mayor of Woodbridge.

    1997 – Runs unsuccessfully for governor of New Jersey, losing to Christine Todd Whitman by 1%.

    November 6, 2001 – Is elected governor of New Jersey by a wide margin over Republican Bret Schundler, former mayor of Jersey City.

    January 15, 2002 – Is sworn in as the 51st governor of New Jersey.

    January 2002 – Appoints Golan Cipel, an Israeli citizen ineligible for federal security clearance, to be the state’s anti-terrorism adviser. Cipel steps down in August 2002.

    August 12, 2004 – Announces he is gay and will resign as governor in three months. Also, admits to an extramarital affair with a man, whom aides say is Cipel, and asks for his family’s forgiveness.

    August 13, 2004 – Cipel releases a statement saying he was the victim of sexual harassment by McGreevey. The governor claims the affair was consensual.

    August 30, 2004 – Cipel’s attorneys announce that their client will not file a lawsuit against McGreevey.

    November 15, 2004 – McGreevey officially leaves office.

    September 2006 – McGreevey’s memoir, “The Confession,” is published.

    2010 – Begins working at Integrity House, an addiction treatment facility in Newark, New Jersey.

    2013 – HBO airs the documentary “Fall to Grace” about McGreevey and his work counseling women at Hudson County Correctional Center.

    July 12, 2013 – Is named executive director of the Jersey City Employment and Training Program.

    2014-present – Chairman of the New Jersey Reentry Corporation (NJRC), a non-profit that helps participants returning from incarceration find employment.

    January 7, 2019 – McGreevey is fired as director of the Jersey City Employment and Training Program amid accusations of financial mismanagement. McGreevey tells the Jersey Journal that the accusations are false.

    February 27, 2020 – Is appointed chairman of the Essex County Correctional Facility Civilian Task Force, an independent panel tasked with reviewing the facility’s “systematic issues and concerns.”

    July 2023 – Forms a civic association, named the Jack and Ronnie McGreevey Civic Association in honor of his late parents, with the intention of serving the Jersey City and Hudson County communities.

    November 9, 2023 – Officially announces he will run for mayor of Jersey City in 2025.

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  • Trump’s indictments — and mug shot — are deepening his supporters’ anger and revving up their support | CNN Politics

    Trump’s indictments — and mug shot — are deepening his supporters’ anger and revving up their support | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Phil Jensen wore a bright red T-shirt with Donald Trump’s mug shot and “NEVER SURRENDER!” printed on it to the former president’s rally in Rapid City, South Dakota, last week. The longtime state legislator loved the shirt so much, he planned on giving half a dozen to his friends and family.

    “He looks defiant,” Jensen said of the photo taken at an Atlanta jail after Trump was indicted over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

    “And I love it because he has every right to be,” the South Dakota Republican said. “He was railroaded.”

    In more than 40 interviews with CNN in Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Alabama, South Dakota and Texas, Trump supporters said the 91 criminal charges in four separate cases against him have only deepened their support of the former president. They repeated Trump’s unfounded claims that he was the subject of a politically motivated “witch hunt” and said they believed the charges showed the system was rigged against him – and, by extension, them.

    A majority of Americans think that the charges against Trump are valid and that he should be prosecuted, recent polls show, but Trump maintains a tight grip on the Republican Party and his front-runner status in the 2024 GOP presidential primary is undisputed.

    “What they’re doing to him is persecution,” said Corey Bonner of Texas. “They’re going after an old American president, they’ve been going after him since the beginning, they haven’t stopped, and they’re not going to stop. And this is where we have to stand up and fight.”

    At a summer gathering for Alabama Republicans, 81-year-old retired schoolteacher Carolyn McNeese echoed Trump’s attacks on the prosecutors who have charged him and said she thought they were “evil.”

    “They want him out because they’re scared of him,” McNeese said.

    Those interviewed said they believed that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was the one who needed to be charged and that Republicans faced a different standard under the justice system. And some said that perhaps Trump did commit crimes, but it didn’t change their opinion of him because, as Texas resident Bobby Wilson put it, “We all have sinned; we all have some things that we’ve done.”

    “He’s probably guilty, but it doesn’t matter,” said Jace Kirschenman, an 18-year-old in South Dakota who works in construction.

    He said nothing could deter him from voting for Trump next year.

    “You show me a perfect person in this world, and I’ll show you a blue pig with wings,” said Corey Shawgo, a 34-year-old truck driver in Pennsylvania who attended Trump’s rally in Erie. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

    Like many other Trump supporters interviewed, Scott Akers of Alabama immediately pointed to Hunter Biden when asked about Trump’s mounting legal peril.

    “We have something finally start to come out about the connection between Hunter Biden’s shady dealings and his father and then, like two days later, there’s a federal indictment,” Akers said. “The timing of it is very ironic.”

    The president’s son has been the subject of investigations by House Republicans and the federal Justice Department. The House GOP probe has so far failed to surface any evidence showing Joe Biden profited from his son’s business dealings, but it has found that the younger Biden used his father’s names to help advance deals. Separately, Hunter Biden was indicted on Thursday by special counsel David Weiss in connection to a gun he purchased in 2018.

    Intertwined with their outrage over the indictments, some Trump supporters are raising the specter of heightened political violence if Trump were to be convicted.

    “This country’s a powder keg. You know, we’ve ‘bout had it,” said Frank Yurisic, 76, who attended Trump’s Pennsylvania rally.

    “I think there could very well possibly be violence,” Yurisic said. “If they march on Washington, I’ll be one of the ones there. I don’t think they realize how upset the people are in this country about what’s going on.”

    The predictions of possible violence made by some Trump supporters in interviews with CNN echo Trump’s warnings of what could happen were he to be convicted.

    Before Trump’s first indictment in March, he had warned about “potential death and destruction” if a Manhattan grand jury were to indict him on charges related to a hush money payment to an adult film star. When asked in an Iowa radio interview in July how he thought his supporters would react if he did ultimately end up behind bars, Trump said, “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters.”

    “There’ll be backlash, and it’ll probably be severe,” said Jim Vanoy, an 80-year-old Trump supporter who lives in Alabama. He said he thought there would be a “good degree of violence” if Trump is convicted.

    Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the US has seen “vastly increased” political violence since Trump took office in 2017.

    “He unleashed some of the worst parts of the American id in normalizing violence as a way to solve political differences. And so we’re seeing neighbors killing neighbors, people killing business owners over political disputes all over the country,” she said.

    But Kleinfeld pointed to the lengthy prison sentences meted out to some participants in the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol as a potential deterrent to political violence. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right militia group Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison and Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the far-right Proud Boys, was sentenced to 22 years. Kleinfeld also noted the two-and-a-half-year prison sentence handed down to an Iowa man for threatening Arizona’s attorney general and a Phoenix-area election official.

    “What we’re seeing now is a summer of a lot of accountability, where people are starting to be held to account for violence, and that is the best possible thing for reducing future violence,” she said.

    Trump supporter Amanda Hamak-Leon and her boyfriend are seen at his Rapid City, South Dakota, rally on September 8, 2023.

    Trump continues to defend his supporters who were part of the January 6 mob and said in a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that there was “love and unity” among those who had gathered in Washington that day.

    His lies about the 2020 election, which fueled the riot at the Capitol, were repeated on the campaign trail by his supporters in interviews with CNN. Many said they felt confident in Trump’s chances in a rematch with Biden in 2024.

    “Unless they convict him of something, I don’t care,” said Mark Roling, 63, of Pennsylvania. “In fact, I kind of like it. Every time they indict him, he gets stronger.”

    Trump has widened his polling lead over the rest of the GOP field since his first criminal charges were announced this spring, and his campaign has reported fundraising boosts in the wake of his indictments. That has vexed many Democrats, independents and more moderate Republican voters, who question how his supporters aren’t turned off by the serious and numerous criminal charges against Trump and believe the indictments should disqualify him from a second term as president.

    “He’s making a psychic connection between his troubles with government and people’s troubles with government. And it’s working,” said Craig Shirley, who has written four books on former President Ronald Reagan and has been a Republican strategist for decades.

    “So many Americans have had bad experiences with government over the years,” Shirley said. “They’ve had bad experiences with the IRS. They’ve had bad experiences with police forces. They’ve had bad experiences with school boards. They’ve had bad experiences with any manifestation of some form of government, and that has made them more and more anti-establishment.”

    Trump has been intentional on the campaign trail about making his supporters feel like his indictments are personal to them. “I’m being indicted for you,” he says at every rally. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way.”

    “It’s very much like a family protecting one of their own,” Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster, said of how Trump’s supporters have rallied around the former president.

    “He came down the escalator in 2015, saying, ‘I am doing this for you. I am your protector. I am the only one looking out for you. And an attack on me is an attack on you.’ And he has been beating that drum now for eight years, and it’s accepted as true by millions of his supporters,” Ayres said.

    The day after Trump was booked at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta, his campaign said it had the highest-grossing fundraising day of the entire campaign to date, raising $4.18 million. A few days later, the campaign said it had raked in nearly $3 million off mug shot merchandise alone.

    A vendor sells T-shirts featuring Trump's mug shot outside his Rapid City, South Dakota, rally on September 8, 2023.

    But the market for mug shot merchandise extends well beyond the official campaign store as private vendors see their sales skyrocket.

    “This is the new ‘Let’s Go Brandon,’” said Sam Smith, a private vendor at Trump’s Rapid City rally, referring to the right-wing slogan used to insult Joe Biden. Smith, who travels around the country to sell merchandise outside the former president’s events, said he made solid money for two years off “Let’s Go Brandon” products.

    Longtime Trump supporter Amanda Hamak-Leon bought matching mug shot T-shirts on Amazon that said “WANTED FOR PRESIDENT” for her and her boyfriend to wear to Trump’s rally in Rapid City.

    “It really ticked me off,” Hamak-Leon said of Trump’s indictments. “I just feel like now for six-plus years they’ve been going after him with anything that they can, taking shots in the dark. It just makes me like him more that he just keeps going and is not letting this stop him.”

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  • Pence intensifies attacks on Trump as GOP primary heats up | CNN Politics

    Pence intensifies attacks on Trump as GOP primary heats up | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Former Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday intensified his attacks on his former boss, hitting former President Donald Trump over everything from his abortion messaging to comments about the war in Ukraine.

    “When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. For four years, we did govern as conservatives, but, today, Donald Trump makes no such promise,” Pence told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    “He’s embracing the politics of appeasement on the world stage, walking away from our role as leader of the free world. He’s willing to ignore the debt crisis facing Americans. And he wants to marginalize the right to life,” Pence said.

    The comments from Pence represent a significant escalation in his campaign attacks on Trump. While the former Indiana governor has repeatedly denounced Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, he has been more cautious about going after the Republican front-runner on other issues.

    Asked about Trump’s comments to NBC that he would get Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a room and “have a deal worked out,” Pence said: “Look, the only way this war would end in a day, as my former running mate says, is if you let Vladimir Putin have what he wants, which, frankly, other candidates for the Republican nomination are advocating as well.”

    Pence similarly sought to distance himself from Trump on abortion at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s fall banquet Saturday night. Speaking to a friendly crowd of evangelical conservatives, Pence reiterated his support for a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy as a minimum, saying, “It’s an idea whose time has come.” Pence said Trump and other GOP candidates want to relegate the abortion issue to the states, “but I won’t have it.”

    And earlier this month, Pence called on his party to turn away from what he described as a growing threat of populism led by Trump and “his imitators.” The former vice president said that Trump often sounds “like an echo” of President Joe Biden and that Trump was ignoring a coming US debt crisis.

    The stream of attacks comes as Trump continues to hold what has proven to be an unshakeable position atop the Republican field of candidates vying to take on Biden next year, according to a CNN poll released earlier this month.

    More than 4 in 10 in the potential GOP primary electorate say they have definitely decided to support Trump for the nomination (43% are definite Trump backers, 20% are firmly behind another candidate, and 37% have no first choice or say they could change their minds).

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  • ‘It gave us some way to fight back’: New tools aim to protect art and images from AI’s grasp | CNN Business

    ‘It gave us some way to fight back’: New tools aim to protect art and images from AI’s grasp | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    For months, Eveline Fröhlich, a visual artist based in Stuttgart, Germany, has been feeling “helpless” as she watched the rise of new artificial intelligence tools that threaten to put human artists out of work.

    Adding insult to injury is the fact that many of these AI models have been trained off of the work of human artists by quietly scraping images of their artwork from the internet without consent or compensation.

    “It all felt very doom and gloomy for me,” said Fröhlich, who makes a living selling prints and illustrating book and album covers.

    “We’ve never been asked if we’re okay with our pictures being used, ever,” she added. “It was just like, ‘This is mine now, it’s on the internet, I’m going to get to use it.’ Which is ridiculous.”

    Recently, however, she learned about a tool dubbed Glaze that was developed by computer scientists at the University of Chicago and thwarts the attempts of AI models to perceive a work of art via pixel-level tweaks that are largely imperceptible to the human eye.

    “It gave us some way to fight back,” Fröhlich told CNN of Glaze’s public release. “Up until that point, many of us felt so helpless with this situation, because there wasn’t really a good way to keep ourselves safe from it, so that was really the first thing that made me personally aware that: Yes, there is a point in pushing back.”

    Fröhlich is one of a growing number of artists that is fighting back against AI’s overreach and trying to find ways to protect her images online as a new spate of tools has made it easier than ever for people to manipulate images in ways that can sow chaos or upend the livelihoods of artists.

    These powerful new tools allow users to create convincing images in just seconds by inputting simple prompts and letting generative AI do the rest. A user, for example, can ask an AI tool to create a photo of the Pope dripped out in a Balenciaga jacket — and go on to fool the internet before the truth comes out that the image is fake. Generative AI technology has also wowed users with its ability to spit out works of art in the style of a specific artist. You can, for example, create a portrait of your cat that looks like it was done with the bold brushstrokes of Vincent Van Gogh.

    But these tools also make it very easy for bad actors to steal images from your social media accounts and turn them into something they’re not (in the worst cases, this could manifest as deepfake porn that uses your likeness without your consent). And for visual artists, these tools threaten to put them out of work as AI models learn how to mimic their unique styles and generate works of art without them.

    Some researchers, however, are now fighting back and developing new ways to protect people’s photos and images from AI’s grasp.

    Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at University of Chicago and one of the lead researchers on the Glaze project, told CNN that the tool aims to protect artists from having their unique works used to train AI models.

    Glaze uses machine-learning algorithms to essentially put an invisible cloak on artworks that will thwart AI models’ attempts to understand the images. For example, an artist can upload an image of their own oil painting that has been run through Glaze. AI models might read that painting as something like a charcoal drawing — even if humans can clearly tell that it is an oil painting.

    Artists can now take a digital image of their artwork, run it through Glaze, “and afterwards be confident that this piece of artwork will now look dramatically different to an AI model than it does to a human,” Zhao told CNN.

    Zhao’s team released the first prototype of Glaze in March and has already surpassed a million downloads of the tool, he told CNN. Just last week, his team released a free online version of the tool as well.

    Jon Lam, an artist based in California, told CNN that he now uses Glaze for all of the images of his artwork that he shares online.

    Lam said that artists like himself have for years posted the highest resolution of their works on the internet as a point of pride. “We want everyone to see how awesome it is and see all the details,” he said. But they had no idea that their works could be gobbled up by AI models that then copy their styles and put them out of work.

    Jon Lam is a visual artist from California who uses the Glaze tool to help protect his artwork online from being used to train AI models.

    “We know that people are taking our high-resolution work and they are feeding it into machines that are competing in the same space that we are working in,” he told CNN. “So now we have to be a little bit more cautious and start thinking about ways to protect ourselves.”

    While Glaze can help ameliorate some of the issues artists are facing for now, Lam says it’s not enough and there needs to be regulation set regarding how tech companies can take data from the internet for AI training.

    “Right now, we’re seeing artists kind of being the canary in the coal mine,” Lam said. “But it’s really going to affect every industry.”

    And Zhao, the computer scientist, agrees.

    Since releasing Glaze, the amount of outreach his team has received from artists in other disciplines has been “overwhelming,” he said. Voice actors, fiction writers, musicians, journalists and beyond have all reached out to his team, Zhao said, inquiring about a version of Glaze for their field.

    “Entire, multiple, human creative industries are under threat to be replaced by automated machines,” he said.

    While the rise of AI images are threatening the jobs of artists around the world, everyday internet users are also at risk of their photos being manipulated by AI in other ways.

    “We are in the era of deepfakes,” Hadi Salman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CNN amid the proliferation of AI tools. “Anyone can now manipulate images and videos to make people actually do something that they are not doing.”

    Salman and his team at MIT released a research paper last week that unveiled another tool aimed at protecting images from AI. The prototype, dubbed PhotoGuard, puts an invisible “immunization” over images that stops AI models from being able to manipulate the picture.

    The aim of PhotoGuard is to protect photos that people upload online from “malicious manipulation by AI models,” Salman said.

    Salman explained that PhotoGuard works by adjusting an image’s pixels in a way that is imperceptible to humans.

    In this demonstration released by MIT, a researcher shows a selfie (left) he took with comedian Trevor Noah. The middle photo, an AI-generated fake image, shows how the image looks after he used an AI model to generate a realistic edit of the pair wearing suits. The right image depicts how the researchers' tool, PhotoGuard, would prevent an attempt by AI models from editing the photo.

    “But this imperceptible change is strong enough and it’s carefully crafted such that it actually breaks any attempts to manipulate this image by these AI models,” he added.

    This means that if someone tries to edit the photo with AI models after it’s been immunized by PhotoGuard, the results will be “not realistic at all,” according to Salman.

    In an example he shared with CNN, Salman showed a selfie he took with comedian Trevor Noah. Using an AI tool, Salman was able to edit the photo to convincingly make it look like he and Noah were actually wearing suits and ties in the picture. But when he tries to make the same edits to a photo that has been immunized by PhotoGuard, the resulting image depicts Salman and Noah’s floating heads on an array of gray pixels.

    PhotoGuard is still a prototype, Salman notes, and there are ways people can try to work around the immunization via various tricks. But he said he hopes that with more engineering efforts, the prototype can be turned into a larger product that can be used to protect images.

    While generative AI tools “allow us to do amazing stuff, it comes with huge risks,” Salman said. It’s good people are becoming more aware of these risks, he added, but it’s also important to take action to address them.

    Not doing anything, “Might actually lead to much more serious things than we imagine right now,” he said.

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  • US Coast Guard leaders long concealed a critical report about racism, hazing and sexual misconduct | CNN Politics

    US Coast Guard leaders long concealed a critical report about racism, hazing and sexual misconduct | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    For nearly a decade, US Coast Guard leaders have concealed a critical report that exposed racism, hazing, discrimination and sexual assault across the agency.

    The 2015 “Culture of Respect” study, a copy of which was obtained by CNN, documented how employees complained of a “boys will be boys” and “I got through it so can you” culture. Many said they feared they would be ostracized and retaliated against for reporting abuse and that those who did come forward often had their complaints dismissed by supervisors.

    Some of the report’s core findings mirrored those of another secret investigation into rapes and sexual assaults at the Coast Guard’s academy. The existence of that probe, which was dubbed Operation Fouled Anchor and completed in 2019, was revealed by CNN earlier this year. That investigation found that serious misconduct had been ignored and, at times, covered up by high-ranking officials, allowing alleged offenders to rise within the ranks of the Coast Guard and other military branches.

    Following CNN’s stories on the Fouled Anchor investigation and subsequent Congressional outrage, the Coast Guard’s commandant, Linda Fagan, apologized to cadets and the workforce, and acknowledged that the Coast Guard needed to be more transparent to service members, Congress and the public about such matters.

    “Trust and respect thrive in transparency but are shattered by silence,” she wrote.

    But under her watch, the Coast Guard continued to keep the report hidden from the public even though she had been asked to release it long before the Fouled Anchor controversy unfolded this summer. And although the Culture of Respect study is more than eight years old, more than a dozen current and recent Coast Guard employees and academy cadets told CNN many of the problems that were identified continue to plague the agency.

    In response to questions from CNN this week, a spokesman for Fagan said the commandant plans to make the report public next week as part of her “commitment to transparency,” alongside the findings from a 90-day internal study of sexual assault and harassment within the agency, prompted by the Fouled Anchor reporting.

    Coast Guard officials further said in a statement that the Culture of Respect report was not originally intended to be released widely to the workforce, but rather was to be used by senior leaders to inform policy decisions. Officials, however, did not explain why Fagan had not found a way to release the report sooner, particularly since alleged victims or perpetrators were not named in the report.

    The document has long been shrouded in secrecy. The copy of the report obtained by CNN states that it was to be stored in “a locked container or area offering sufficient protection against theft, compromise, inadvertent access and unauthorized disclosure.” It was to be distributed only to people on a “need to know basis” and should not be released to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, the report stated.

    The study, which was conducted internally and included interviews from nearly 300 people from across the organization, highlighted concerns that “blatant sexual harassment of women” and hazing were regularly accepted as just part of the culture. Those accused of discrimination, assault and other misconduct, were allowed to “escape accountability and instead resign, retire, or transfer,” the report found, with some offenders getting rehired by the Coast Guard in civil service positions even after being forced to retire or otherwise leave military service. “We are allowing potentially dangerous members back into society with no punishment,” stated one employee. Others said leaders brushed serious problems ‘under the rug,” and that “senior leaders care about themselves and their careers” instead of “the folks that work for them.”

    Authors of the report also noted a common concern among victims of misconduct, who said they believed coming forward would mean putting their careers on the line with little hope of their alleged perpetrators facing serious consequences. “Victims are ostracized, there is a stigma,” one person told interviewers. “No one believes them, no one helps them.”

    Even seeking mental health treatment could prove risky, they said, with one interviewee bringing up how the Coast Guard could “involuntarily discharge” employees diagnosed with a mental health condition in the wake of an assault or other traumatic experience on the job.

    Examples cited in the report reveal a culture in which service members faced pervasive assault, harassment, sexism, racism and other discrimination. In one case, multiple witnesses saw a supervisor striking a subordinate but nobody came forward to report it because of fear of retaliation.

    Improving the Coast Guard’s culture would in some cases require “fundamentally different approaches,” the report concluded. The Coast Guard said this week it had enacted or partially enacted 60 of 129 recommendations, including additional training and additional support services for victims. Nine more are in the works, according to the Coast Guard’s statement agency, and the it “found better ways to achieve the desired result” for 20 others.

    The original report had also recommended that a new review be conducted every four years, but that did not happen. The Coast Guard said other studies of the workforce culture have been conducted instead.

    Recent government data and records, meanwhile, show that dangerous and discriminatory behavior is still rarely punished at the agency.

    Almost half of female service members who reported a case of sexual harassment said the person they complained to took no action, according to a 2021 military survey. Nearly a third said they were punished for bringing up the harassment. Meanwhile, the vast majority of women who allegedly experienced “unwanted sexual contact” said they chose not to report it, often citing concerns about negative consequences or that the process wouldn’t be fair and that nothing would end up coming of their allegations.

    Instead, records show how employees found to have committed serious wrongdoing have escaped court martial proceedings or military discharge. As a result, alleged perpetrators avoided criminal records and their retirement benefits were not affected.

    A cadet at the Coast Guard Academy accused of sexual assault by two different classmates in the 2019-20 school year, for example, was kicked out of the academy but allowed to enlist in the Coast Guard to pay back the cost of the schooling he had received. Around the same time, a lieutenant commander was allowed to resign in lieu of going to trial for military crimes including sexual assault and drunk and disorderly conduct. Even when another officer was found guilty at a court martial of abusing his seniority to “obtain sexual favors with a subordinate,” he received only a letter of reprimand.

    The Coast Guard did not comment on concerns that problems remain at the agency, or the statistics or examples cited by CNN.

    The limited access to the Culture of Respect has been a topic of contention for years within the workforce and even Congress.

    Fagan was asked about the report last year by Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman in a list of questions submitted as part of Congressional testimony. She criticized the agency for not releasing it publicly, saying this was “limiting the workforce and the public’s visibility into the problems that were identified and the recommended solutions.”

    Watson Coleman also pushed Fagan, who took the helm of the Coast Guard in June of 2022, to commit to completing a new study and releasing it to the public this time, but Fagan did not directly answer the question – instead citing other recent studies.

    More recently, Fagan was asked about releasing the report while attending a faculty meeting at the Coast Guard Academy. She was there following the Fouled Anchor debacle, promising more transparency when a captain who taught at the school called upon her to release the Culture of Respect report, according to multiple people who attended the meeting.

    Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman questioned US Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan shortly after she became the first female head of the agency in June 2022.

    Retired Coast Guard Commander Kimberly Young-McLear, who is a Black lesbian woman, has been perhaps the most vocal in requesting that the report be released.

    Her efforts to get the report disseminated stem from her own complaints about “severe and pervasive bullying, harassing, and discriminating behavior” based on her race, gender, sexual orientation and advocacy for equal opportunity in the Coast Guard.

    After filing a whistleblower complaint in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General found that she had indeed faced unlawful retaliation. Yet to this day, none of the accused service members from her case have faced any consequences. Young-McLear said she has never received a written apology from Coast Guard leaders despite requests from Congress, and that the years of harassment and lack of accountability have taken a significant mental toll on her.

    She said she learned about the existence of the Culture of Respect report while she worked at the Coast Guard’s academy and that she was able to read it when she attended a small summit discussing its findings in 2019. She was outraged when she saw that it exposed the same issues she had reported.

    “Had the Coast Guard actually taken the 2015 Culture of Respect report results seriously… then perhaps the years of bullying, harassment, intimidation, and retaliation I endured could have been prevented altogether,” Young-McLear said in Congressional testimony at 2021 hearing on diversity and accountability within the Coast Guard, questioning why the report still hadn’t been made public.

    In the last four years, Young-McLear said she has asked for the report to be released more than two dozen times, to various admirals and to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard. A handful of other academy employees have made similar pleas at faculty meetings with the school’s superintendent, she said. “We’ve been saying it until we’ve been blue in the face.”

    The Coast Guard’s secrecy and inaction, she says, speak to the very same issues the Culture of Respect report and other examinations have repeatedly raised and show that the agency has failed to hold itself to task in the same way perpetrators have been let off the hook.

    “If we don’t hold individuals and institutions accountable,” said Young-McLear, “it is providing a safe haven for abusers and allowing them to rise through the ranks.”

    Do you have information or a story to share about the Coast Guard past or present? Email melanie.hicken@cnn.com and Blake.Ellis@cnn.com.

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  • Here’s what DeSantis, Christie and other Trump 2024 rivals are saying about the Georgia indictment | CNN Politics

    Here’s what DeSantis, Christie and other Trump 2024 rivals are saying about the Georgia indictment | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s biggest detractors in the 2024 Republican presidential race offered mixed reactions Tuesday to the former president’s indictment by a Georgia grand jury.

    Trump has remained defiant in the face of the new charges against him and 18 others stemming from their efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat. He now faces four separate indictments at the same time that he’s running for president as the front-runner for the GOP nomination.

    Two rivals argued that the charges Trump faces in Fulton County are similar to the election interference charges brought by federal special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, and said the federal case should take precedence.

    Here’s what Trump’s 2024 GOP opponents are saying about the latest indictment:

    Christie told Fox News that he is “uncomfortable” with what he views as an “unnecessary” indictment from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

    “I think that this conduct is essentially covered by the federal indictment,” he said. “I would have less of a problem with this if she decided, ‘OK, I’m not going to charge Donald Trump here, because he has been charged for, essentially this conduct, by Jack Smith.’”

    However, Christie said the Fulton County prosecution of Trump’s close allies, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, was “more defensible” because they “have not been charged at the federal level” like Trump has.

    Christie defended the timing of Willis’ indictment, saying that Trump’s decision to run in 2024 was “not an excuse” for the justice system to stop operating.

    “I think all of these judges in the end will make decisions based upon the reasonable availability of all the witnesses and everyone else,” he said.

    Later, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Christie was asked whether Willis might have brought charges against Trump because he wouldn’t be able to shut down the state case and pardon himself if he is elected president again in 2024, Christie said, “I don’t think that’s the prosecutor’s job. The prosecutor’s job is to look at how do you administer justice in this case.”

    He said Republican voters should ask themselves, “Is someone out on bail in four jurisdictions really our best chance to beat Joe Biden?”

    “Are we really going to continue to act as if this is normal conduct? It’s not,” he said.

    Hutchinson, who has long called for Trump to drop out of the race because of his conduct, said the latest indictment further strengthens his belief that the former president should not be seeking the 2024 GOP nomination.

    But much like Christie, he said he believes Willis may be stepping outside her jurisdiction, given the federal charges Trump faces.

    “Generally, state cases are deferential to the federal cases that have been brought, and I think you can make the case that Georgia should have been deferential because there’s overlap there as well, but it is what it is,” Hutchinson said.

    Another strident Trump critic, Hurd said in a statement that Trump’s latest indictment was “another example of how the former president’s baggage will hand Joe Biden reelection if Trump is the Republican nominee.”

    “This is further evidence that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election and was ready to do anything it took to cling to power,” Hurd said. “It’s time we move beyond dealing with the former president’s baggage. The Republican Party needs a leader who isn’t afraid of bullies like Trump.”

    The tech entrepreneur was sharply critical of the charges Trump faces in Georgia.

    At a NewsNation town hall Monday night, Ramaswamy said he hadn’t read the details of the indictments but painted the multiple investigations into Trump in multiple jurisdictions as an effort to negatively impact the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 election.

    “These are politicized persecutions through prosecution,” Ramaswamy said. “It would be a lot easier for me if Donald Trump were not in this primary, but that is not how I want to win this election. The way we do elections in the United States of America is that we the people – you all – get to decide who governs, not the federal police state.”

    DeSantis, Trump’s top-polling primary rival who has criticized the prosecution of the former president, told New England reporters Tuesday that the Georgia indictment is an example of the “criminalization of politics.”

    “They’re now doing an inordinate amount of resources to try to shoehorn this contest over the 2020 election into a RICO statute, which was really designed to be able to go after organized crime, not necessarily to go after political activity,” the governor told WMUR at a news conference, referring to a racketeering charge brought against Trump. “And so, I think it’s an example of this criminalization of politics. I don’t think that this is something that is good for the country.”

    DeSantis later told reporters in New Hampshire that he thinks Trump is currently leading in the 2024 GOP primary in polls in part because of how Republican voters have responded to the indictments.

    “Clearly, there’s been a change in some of the polling since the Alvin Bragg case was brought,” DeSantis said in reference to the indictment brought by the Manhattan district attorney against Trump related to an alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. “I think that’s just irrefutable.”

    Much like DeSantis, Scott, rather than criticizing Trump’s actions, lambasted the prosecution of the former president.

    “We see the legal system being weaponized against political opponents,” the senator told reporters Tuesday at the Iowa State Fair. “That is un-American and unacceptable.”

    Scott said he hopes to “restore confidence and integrity” to the legal system if he were to become president.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Judge finds no conflict for Trump attorney over Stormy Daniels communications in hush money case | CNN Politics

    Judge finds no conflict for Trump attorney over Stormy Daniels communications in hush money case | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A New York Supreme Court judge ruled that 2018 communications with adult film star Stormy Daniels should not sideline defense attorney Joe Tacopina from representing former President Donald Trump in his criminal trial related to an alleged hush money scheme to silence Daniels.

    Daniels’ communications with Tacopina and others at his firm included details relating to Daniels’ situation when she was seeking legal representation in 2018, her current lawyer, Clark Brewster, told CNN in March.

    Brewster, who claimed the communications show a disclosure of confidential information from Daniels, said he gave the exchanges to prosecutors. Ethics experts told CNN at the time that limits could be placed on Tacopina, including disqualification.

    Instead, Tacopina won’t question Daniels if she takes the stand at trial. “The court accepts your suggestion that you do not participate in the examination of Ms. Daniels if she is called as a witness at trial,” Judge Juan Merchan wrote.

    Tacopina has maintained there is no conflict of interest and said no confidential information was shared with him or his office.

    Merchan ultimately sided with Trump’s lawyer in a letter penned earlier this month telling Tacopina that he accepts the defense attorney’s representations that there is no conflict.

    The judge also said he’d revisit the issue with Trump at his next court appearance in February.

    “I have said from Day One there is no conflict. Now the court has said the same,” Tacopina told CNN Monday in response to the letter.

    Prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office first flagged the potential conflict to Merchan at Trump’s arraignment in April, saying Daniels will likely be a witness at Trump’s criminal trial.

    Trump, who has denied the alleged affair with Daniels, has pleaded not guilty to charges related to the alleged hush money scheme.

    Merchan instructed the former president to seek advice from other attorneys on the matter while it played out.

    Since the April arraignment, the parties submitted briefs and met for a sealed proceeding in July to further discuss the potential conflict, according to Merchan’s letter.

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  • 'Change is necessary': Coast Guard pledges reforms after mishandling reports of sexual assault | CNN Politics

    'Change is necessary': Coast Guard pledges reforms after mishandling reports of sexual assault | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The US Coast Guard, rocked by allegations that its leaders for years concealed damning information about sexual assaults and other serious misconduct, released a highly critical report Wednesday acknowledging it had “failed to keep our people safe,” while vowing to make reforms that would better protect them.

    After spending 90 days speaking with hundreds of service members, reading through more than 170 written comments and “sifting through a mountain of data,” an internal review team said it had heard a resounding message from the workforce that “these failures and lack of accountability are entirely unacceptable” and that leaders “must do something about it.”

    “Too many Coast Guard members are not experiencing the safe, empowering workplace they expect and deserve (and) trust in Coast Guard leadership is eroding,” the authors wrote in the roughly 100-page report, noting that they had heard from victims of sexual assault and harassment stretching from the 1960s to the current day who “expressed deep rooted feelings of pain and a loss of trust in the organization.”

    The scathing internal review was launched after CNN exposed a secret criminal investigation, dubbed Operation Fouled Anchor, which found that serious misconduct had been ignored and, at times, covered up by high-ranking officials. It wasn’t until CNN started asking questions about Fouled Anchor this spring that Coast Guard leaders rushed to officially brief Congress on the scandal — leading to outrage on both sides of the aisle, multiple government investigations and proposed legislation.

    CNN’s coverage of Fouled Anchor and subsequent reporting revealing that Coast Guard leaders declined to prosecute a retired officer for sexual misconduct “have led people to experience feelings ranging from disappointment to outrage,” the report said.

    “For so many victims, there are even deeper levels of broken trust: in leaders who failed them in preventing and responding to sexual violence; in a military justice system with antiquated legal definitions of rape; in non-existent support programs for those impacted prior to 2000,” it stated. While the report outlined a number of changes made in the last two decades, it also acknowledged that reforms to date have not been enough to prevent assaults and properly support victims.

    The review did not seek to hold past perpetrators or officials involved with the Fouled Anchor cover-up accountable, saying multiple government investigations launched by Congress remained ongoing.

    Instead, it looked to the future and focused on preventing future assaults and other misconduct, describing the report as a “road map aimed at improving” the agency’s culture.

    Along with the report’s findings, the Coast Guard announced a series of actions directed by the agency’s leader, Commandant Linda Fagan, through recommended changes to everything from training and victim support services to strengthening processes for holding perpetrators accountable.

    “This report acknowledges the Coast Guard’s failures and uses them to inform a way ahead, rebuild trust, and set the baseline for organizational growth,” the document states, noting that many of the actions require additional funding and authority to implement.

    Among the reforms are the creation of a mentorship program for victims to help them navigate the aftermath of a sexual assault, the development of a “safe to report” policy so that victims are not penalized for collateral minor misconduct (such as alcohol use at the time of an incident), more secure locks on Coast Guard Academy bedrooms and improved oversight of the school and its cadets – including a new chain of command for the academy head.

    Fagan also directed officials to better keep tabs on the academy’s hallmark “Swab Summer” training program, which is run by upperclassmen at the academy, and to consider strengthening policies that allow the agency to reduce pension payments for those found to have committed misconduct.

    The report was the Coast Guard’s most expansive response to the growing criticism of its handling of misconduct. And while it was being released publicly, and members of Congress had been briefed on its contents earlier, the report was specifically addressed to “U.S. Coast Guard workforce, past and present.”

    “You made it clear that you want and expect our Service to confront this issue and make it better. You want our Service to deliver meaningful change,” the report stated. “Whether you’re a member who has a story to share — or the shipmate standing beside them — this is our time. Let’s get it right.”

    While the Coast Guard is focused on the future, members of Congress are still determined to get answers about past failures as well.

    “This new report still does not hold anyone accountable for past failures—particularly those at the Coast Guard Academy,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, where the Coast Guard Academy is located. Murphy and other lawmakers have continued to slam the agency for its failure to be transparent about sexual assault and other misconduct. “It does lay out a modest plan to improve oversight, training, and support for survivors, but a report is nothing more than paper until concrete steps are taken.”

    Democratic Senators Maria Cantwell and Richard Blumenthal also criticized how, despite calling this effort an “accountability” review, the Coast Guard still failed to hold anyone to task for the mishandling of sexual assault cases. Cantwell reiterated the importance of an independent investigation, saying she is looking forward to seeing the results of the probe currently being conducted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General.

    Earlier this year, CNN reported how former Commandant Karl Schultz and his second-in-command, Vice Commandant Charles Ray, failed to act on plans to share the findings of Fouled Anchor with Congress and the public. Ray resigned from his position at a Coast Guard Academy leadership institute soon after, but no other current or former Coast Guard officials have publicly faced any consequences.

    “Current Coast Guard personnel are being told to trust their leadership, but their leaders aren’t holding predecessors accountable,” K. Denise Rucker Krepp, a former Coast Guard officer and former chief counsel of the Maritime Administration wrote in a recent letter to Congress, describing how she had attended a “community healing” event sponsored by the Coast Guard Academy Alumni Association last month.

    “Before my first cup of coffee I learned about a woman who was raped shortly after joining the service. She never told her parents about the crime,” she wrote. “While washing my hands in the bathroom, another woman shared that she was raped while attending the Coast Guard Academy in the late 1990s. Another woman shared that she was gang-raped by three students at the school and had spent two-thirds of her life on medication because of the crimes that occurred almost 40 years ago.”

    Next week, more survivors of sexual assault and harassment at the Coast Guard Academy are slated to share their experiences publicly in a Congressional hearing. The hearing, announced just yesterday, is part of an ongoing Senate probe launched in reaction to the Fouled Anchor cover-up.

    Do you have information or a story to share about the Coast Guard past or present? Email melanie.hicken@cnn.com and Blake.Ellis@cnn.com.

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  • Donald Trump is testing the resilience of Iowa’s evangelical voters | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump is testing the resilience of Iowa’s evangelical voters | CNN Politics


    Des Moines, Iowa
    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump is testing the resilience of his evangelical support in Iowa, a key constituency that could solidify – or slow – his march to the Republican presidential nomination.

    The former president’s latest comments on abortion, in which he called Florida’s six-week ban a “terrible mistake” and declined to offer a clear view on a federal ban, are being closely scrutinized by his rivals and Christian conservatives, a crucial GOP voting bloc in Iowa.

    “For evangelicals, there are probably four issues that matter. Life is usually right at the top,” said Mike Demastus, pastor of the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ. “Most people, the way they evaluate presidential elections, is what the gas price is. But for an evangelical? No.”

    Less than four months before the Iowa caucuses open the Republican nominating contest, nuances on abortion policy will be at the center of conversation here among faith leaders like Demastus, who has met with most of the GOP candidates.

    He expressed concern over Trump’s remarks on abortion since the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But he also acknowledged that Trump’s key role in the decision – appointing three of the six justices who voted with the majority – helps the former president keep evangelical voters in his corner, at least for now.

    “The fact that Trump is leading in polls – he is – but you can’t take it for granted. There’s so many unknowns with Trump right now,” Demastus said in an interview. “There’s a loyalty with Trump, and people that follow him. You can’t just peel that away from some, but I think many people in the evangelical community right now are willing to hear from other people.”

    Whether Iowa Republicans are willing to hear from – or actually vote for – one of Trump’s many challengers is an open question. The answer could rest inside Iowa churches, where candidates are going to great lengths to win over evangelicals, who in 2016 comprised nearly two-thirds of all GOP caucus attendees.

    “They are very appreciative of the former president, but they are exhausted as well,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president of influential Christian group The Family Leader. “Iowa is tailor-made to upend Trump. If he loses Iowa, there’s a competitive nomination process. If he wins Iowa, I think it’s over.”

    The Iowa caucuses, in effect, have become a furious race for second place.

    While Vander Plaats has been a leading Trump critic, his assessment of the Iowa caucuses is shared by allies of the former president, who plans to step up his Iowa appearances for the rest of the year. Starting with a visit to Dubuque on Wednesday, the Trump campaign is intensifying its focus here in hopes of “squeezing off the oxygen” for other rivals, a Trump adviser told CNN.

    The pursuit of evangelical voters is a top priority for most candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who bowed his head as he stood at the center of a prayer circle during a weekend stop at the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ.

    “Our rights are endowed by God,” DeSantis told those assembled in the sanctuary. “They do not come from the government.”

    The Florida governor leaned into the abortion debate Monday, seizing on Trump’s comments and offering a warning to voters during an interview with Radio Iowa: “I think all pro-lifers should know that he’s preparing to sell you out.”

    South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott called out his rivals by name Monday night at a town hall in Mason City, Iowa, telling voters which GOP contenders did not support a federal abortion ban. “I will use my entire presidency fighting for a 15-week limit,” he said.

    Scott also has long been highlighting his faith, often weaving in Bible verses on the campaign trail and in his television ads. Former Vice President Mike Pence frequently talks about his religious awakening and his support for a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, as a minimum.

    Trump was the only major presidential candidate to bypass the annual Faith and Freedom Coalition’s fall banquet this past weekend in Des Moines, but Rebekah Gerling proudly wore a Trump sticker as she walked through the convention center. She said she supports the former president as strongly as she ever has.

    “I love everything that he stands for,” Gerling said. “He’s willing to stand up for other people who do love God and believe.”

    When Gerling was asked whether she was troubled by the criminal indictments the former president is facing, her friend, Theresa Gibson, also wearing a Trump sticker, jumped in before she could answer, calling the charges “false accusations.”

    “They’re just going after him because he’s the front-runner,” Gibson said, “and he’s very highly supported.”

    Sally Hofmann, a Republican voter who said faith drives many of her decisions, credits Trump for his appointments to the Supreme Court. But she said she is open to supporting another candidate when she walks into her neighborhood caucus in January.

    “I like a lot of what Trump has done in office, but his personality concerns me a little bit,” Hofmann said. “I like what Nikki Haley is doing. I like DeSantis too. I’m in that range.”

    She said some of her friends and her daughter are concerned about Trump’s rhetoric and conduct. She said it bothers her too, but she’s willing to look beyond it if necessary.

    “Like I told my daughter, if I go to a doctor, and that doctor is such a good doctor to evaluate and treat my issue but doesn’t have the personality that I’m most comfortable with, I’ll still go to that doctor,” Hofmann said. “So that’s the way I look at Trump.”

    Inside the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ, where Demastus has preached for more than two decades, he explained how he came around to Trump in the first place. He supported Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in 2016 and was suspicious of Trump’s intentions before he took office.

    “He started to do what he said he would do,” Demastus said. “I said some pretty harsh things about him at the time, but let me be clear: He won me over. He won me over because he was consistent.”

    For now, Demastus echoes the sentiment of many other faith leaders, saying he is undecided, waiting and watching as the Republican presidential primary unfolds. He believes the indictments against Trump are politically motivated but worries they could weaken his chances in the general election.

    “With all the litigation that’s going on, what’s going to happen? Is he going to receive a felony conviction or not?” Demastus said, ticking through a list of uncertainties hanging over the race. “I think that’s why a lot of these candidates are still in it.”

    This story has been updated with additional reaction.

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  • Meta criticized for making reproductive health an R-rated issue | CNN Business

    Meta criticized for making reproductive health an R-rated issue | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Female reproductive health experts are calling on Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to rethink its restrictions on reproductive health content.

    The company has long faced criticism for removing and restricting female reproductive health information with a prominent report from the Center for Intimacy Justice early last year accusing Meta of systematically rejecting many female and gender diverse reproductive health ads. The CIJ report also accused Meta of having bias algorithms, stating that male reproductive health ads were found to be permitted, including ads that referenced male sexual pleasure.

    In bid to combat those concerns, Meta tweaked its “adult products or services” advertising policy last October to include clearer guidelines about reproductive health, clarifying that it allows the promotion of “reproductive health products or services” if the content is targeted to “people aged 18 or older.”

    Meta

    (FB)     argues the topic is sensitive, stating that as a global company it needs to take in to account the “wide array of people from different cultures and countries” to “avoid potential negative experiences.”

    However, female reproductive experts tell CNN that the advertising policy is still too restrictive and is creating barriers for how younger people around the world access information about female reproductive health issues, including the menstrual cycle, which can start as early as 8 years old.

    They argue that censoring content about normal and natural bodily functions plays into the shame that has long plagued how people learn about the female body and hormone cycle. That can hinder how people with uteruses advocate for their bodies in healthcare settings, including obtaining care for misunderstood and underdiagnosed conditions like endometriosis.

    The practice of censoring female reproductive health content is not unique to Meta, with similar issues reported on other social media platforms. However, Meta is under specific scrutiny for failing to adequately address the issue within its policy updates last year.

    The founder and CEO of the Center for Intimacy Justice, Jackie Rotman, told CNN that despite the policy update, Meta’s algorithms still seem to have a problem with female reproductive health content.

    “The policy says that reproductive health is allowed, but in practice their technology is still rejecting it,” Rotman said, explaining that images of uteruses are often mistakenly flagged as nudity, and words like period, menopause, endometriosis and vagina also commonly triggering sexually inappropriate warnings.

    Rotman outlined that while Meta’s reproductive health guidelines are targeted toward advertising content, unpaid posts are also often being impacted by Meta’s algorithms. She says shadow-banning, which refers to content being partially blocked from certain audiences, is common practice for organic content. Several reproductive health content creators told CNN that they experience shadow-banning, explaining that it is time consuming game of trial and error to determine what is considered too taboo.

    Dr. Hazel Wallace, author of “The Female Factor” told CNN she wishes she could be more direct in how she speaks about the female body and hormone cycle, including menstrual health. However, said has learned that “to educate people, you almost have to play the game.”

    She says she often experiences shadow banning, with her analytics showing less engagement if she uses words like period. She explained that her team experimented with Meta’s algorithm, finding they could often dodge restrictions by mis-spelling the word period as p3riod.

    “We found that it increased engagement because it doesn’t flag your content as being inappropriate to certain audiences,” Wallace outlined.

    While Meta on several occasions has apologized and re-instated female reproductive health content that it says was mistakenly removed, it still stipulates an age restriction in its policy. Therefore, even if the updated policy was perfectly implemented, Meta would still be green lighting the practise of censoring crucial content from certain audiences.

    CNN asked Meta about the reports that it is continuing to remove, restrict, and shadow-ban female reproductive health content. CNN also asked Meta why all female reproductive health, including menstrual health, is classified as an 18+ issue.

    In response, a spokesperson for Meta, Ryan Daniels, said, “We welcome ads for women’s health and sexual wellness products, but we prohibit nudity and have specific rules about how these products can be marketed on our platform.”

    In a bid to change the conversation, female reproductive health content creators are not letting Meta’s restrictions silence their voices.

    Wallace, a like so many others in her field, says she should not need to self-censor how she speaks about female reproductive health, arguing that censorship perpetuates a “hush hush” narrative about “normal experiences.”

    “Imagine a world where we are teaching young girls and women from puberty – this is what to expect, this is normal, this is not normal, this is when to ask for help. We would feel a lot more empowered,” Wallace stated.

    Categorizing reproductive health as an R-rated topic is an issue that extends far beyond Meta advertising policies, reflecting wider societal views, from politics to sex education curriculums.

    Tracey Lindeman, the author of “BLEED: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis,” says classifying all female reproductive health issues under the umbrella of sexual health “perpetuates the idea that our sexual organs are to be exploited and used for sexuality, even at a young age.”

    “You’re born with a reproductive system. Whether or not you’re having sex, you still have that system in your body, and it’s still affecting your body in different ways,” Lindeman reasoned.

    “How about we just teach people about how their bodies work first, before we start teaching them how they work to have sex,” Lindeman stated.

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  • House Oversight Committee launches investigation into Coast Guard after CNN report | CNN Politics

    House Oversight Committee launches investigation into Coast Guard after CNN report | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The House Oversight Committee has launched an investigation into the US Coast Guard’s “mishandling of serious misconduct” — including sexual assault, racism and hazing — after CNN exposed that its leaders concealed reports documenting those problems from its workforce, the public and Congress.

    The inquiry is the latest in a string of government probes announced in the wake of CNN’s reporting, which revealed the existence of a yearslong investigation that found rapes and other sexual abuse at the Coast Guard Academy had been ignored and, at times, covered up by high-ranking officials. Dubbed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” the internal probe was kept confidential by Coast Guard leaders for years until CNN started making inquiries into the report earlier this year.

    Last week, CNN exposed that Coast Guard leaders suppressed yet another report, this time a “Culture of Respect” review from April 2015, that documented racial and gender discrimination and assault across the service.

    In a letter sent Friday to the Coast Guard’s leader, Commandant Linda Fagan, House lawmakers lambasted the agency, saying that the Coast Guard “may have obstructed the ability of Congress to carry out constitutionally mandated oversight authority and legislation to address these issues,” “prevented actionable change within the agency” and “likely put more people at risk.”

    “[The Coast Guard] only notified Congress about Operation Fouled Anchor and its April 2015 Report when existence of these reports was going to be in the press,” wrote committee Chairman Rep. James Comer and Rep. Glenn Grothman, chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. “The Committee has serious concerns that congressional committees would not have been notified of these reports, and the serious allegations contained within them, if it had not been for the threat of public reporting.”

    The announcement comes on the heels of the Coast Guard’s own acknowledgment of past failures in a rare and highly critical internal report issued this week that also orders a series of changes to how the agency handles sexual assault. A number of congressional lawmakers and assault survivors were not satisfied, however, saying the agency still needs to hold past perpetrators and the leaders who covered up their dangerous and criminal behavior accountable – rather than only looking to the future.

    The committee requested a litany of documents and information “to assist the Committee in investigating these reports, the withholding of information from Congress, and the inaction of senior leadership to combat misconduct,” including a list of Coast Guard officials involved in the handling of sexual misconduct cases from the time of Fouled Anchor to present.

    CNN’s reporting showed that, over the years, alleged perpetrators weren’t being held accountable for misconduct. Many of the problems documented in the Coast Guard’s reports continue to plague the agency, according to interviews with current and former service members.

    Meanwhile, a probe by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General remains ongoing, as does a Senate inquiry – with a hearing scheduled next week where multiple whistleblowers and survivors of sexual assault and harassment will testify.

    Do you have information or a story to share about the Coast Guard past or present? Email melanie.hicken@cnn.com and Blake.Ellis@cnn.com.

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  • GOP senator says Trump should drop out and calls classified documents case ‘almost a slam dunk’ | CNN Politics

    GOP senator says Trump should drop out and calls classified documents case ‘almost a slam dunk’ | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy described the case against former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents as “almost a slam dunk” and said he thinks Trump should drop out of the 2024 presidential race.

    “I mean, you’re just asking me my opinion. But he will lose to Joe Biden, if you look at the current polls,” he told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on “State of the Union.”

    “I think any Republican on that stage in Milwaukee will do a better job than Joe Biden. And so I want one of them to win. If former President Trump ends up getting the nomination, but cannot win a general, that means we will have four more years of policies which have led to very high inflation … and to many other things which I think have been deleterious to our country’s future,” the Louisiana senator said.

    The comments from Cassidy, who was one of seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump in 2021 at his second impeachment trial, mark some of his strongest criticism of Trump to date. They come as the various charges against Trump continue to dominate the GOP primary, with the former president widely viewed as the party’s front-runner.

    Trump has been indicted by a federal grand jury in the special counsel’s investigation into the aftermath of the 2020 election and on dozens of federal counts related to the special counsel investigation into mishandling of classified documents. He also faces charges in Georgia over efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, and in New York, where he is accused of falsifying business records related to his role in a hush-money payment scheme involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

    Trump has denied all wrongdoing and deemed many of the cases politically motivated.

    Of the 91 charges against Trump in the four different criminal cases spanning four different jurisdictions, Cassidy called those related to mishandling classified documents “almost a slam dunk.” He mentioned the recording of the 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump discussed holding secret documents he had not declassified. “If it’s proven, we may have a candidate for president who’s been convicted of a crime,” Cassidy said.

    He added that President Joe Biden “needs to be replaced, but I don’t think Americans would vote for someone who’s been convicted.”

    Cassidy previously told CNN that he didn’t think Trump would be able to win a general election, pointing to the GOP’s disappointing performance in last year’s midterm elections, when several candidates endorsed by the former president were defeated.

    When pressed on whether he would vote for Trump should he become the GOP nominee, Cassidy demurred.

    “I’m going to vote for a Republican,” Cassidy said.

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  • Takeaways from the second Republican presidential debate | CNN Politics

    Takeaways from the second Republican presidential debate | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The second 2024 Republican presidential primary debate ended just as it began: with former President Donald Trump – who hasn’t yet appeared alongside his rivals onstage – as the party’s dominant front-runner.

    The seven GOP contenders in Wednesday night’s showdown at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California provided a handful of memorable moments, including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley unloading what often seemed like the entire field’s pent-up frustration with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

    “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say,” she said to him at one point.

    Two candidates criticized Trump’s absence, as well. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was “missing in action.” Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called the former president “Donald Duck” and said he “hides behind his golf clubs” rather than defending his record on stage.

    Chris Christie takes up debate time to send Trump a clear message

    The GOP field also took early shots at President Joe Biden. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said Biden, rather than joining the striking auto workers’ union on the picket line Tuesday in Michigan, should be on the southern border. Former Vice President Mike Pence said Biden should be “on the unemployment line.” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said Biden was interfering with “free markets.”

    However, what played out in the debate, hosted by Fox Business Network and Univision, is unlikely to change the trajectory of a GOP race in which Trump has remained dominant in national and early-state polling.

    And the frequently messy, hard-to-track crosstalk could have led many viewers to tune out entirely.

    Here are takeaways from the second GOP primary debate:

    Trump might have played it safe by skipping the debates and taking a running-as-an-incumbent approach to the 2024 GOP primary.

    It’s hard to see, though, how he would pay a significant price in the eyes of the party’s voters for missing Wednesday night’s messy engagement.

    Trump’s rivals took a few shots at him. DeSantis knocked him for deficit spending. Christie mocked him during the night’s early moments, calling him “Donald Duck” for skipping the debate and then in his final comments said he would vote Trump off the GOP island.

    “This guy has not only divided our party – he’s divided families all over this country. He’s divided friends all over this country,” Christie said. “He needs to be voted off the island and he needs to be taken out of this process.”

    However, Trump largely escaped serious scrutiny of his four years in the Oval Office from a field of rivals courting voters who have largely positive views of his presidency.

    “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest,” Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said in a statement.

    The second GOP primary debate was beset by interruptions, crosstalk and protracted squabbles between the candidates and moderators over speaking time.

    That’s tough for viewers trying to make sense of it all but even worse for these candidates as they attempted to stand out as viable alternatives to the absentee Trump.

    Further complicating the matter, some of the highest polling candidates after Trump – DeSantis and Haley – were among those least willing to dive into the muck, especially during the crucial first hour. The moderators repeatedly tried to clear the road for the Florida governor, at least in the beginning. But he was all but absent from the proceedings for the first 15 minutes.

    Ramaswamy fared somewhat better, speaking louder – and faster – than most of his rivals. But he was bogged down repeatedly when caught between his own talking points and cross-volleys of criticisms from frustrated candidates like Scott.

    The moderator group will likely get criticism for losing control of the room within the first half-hour, but even a messy debate tells voters something about the people taking part.

    All night, Scott seemed like he was looking for a fight with somebody and he finally got that when he set his sights on fellow South Carolinian Haley.

    He began his line of attack – which Haley interjected with a “Bring it” – by accusing her of spending $50,000 on curtains in a $15 million subsidized location during her time as the US ambassador to the United Nations.

    What ensued was the two Republicans going back and forth about the curtains. “Do your homework, Tim, because Obama bought those curtains,” Haley said, while Scott repeated, “Did you send them back? Did you send them back?” Haley then responded: “Did you send them back? You’re the one who works in Congress.”

    It wasn’t the most acrimonious moment of the night, but it was up there. The feuding between the two South Carolina natives seemed deep, but it’s worth remembering that about a decade ago, when Haley was governor, she appointed Scott to the Senate seat he currently holds after Republican Jim DeMint stepped down. That confidence in Scott seems to have dissolved in this presidential race.

    Confronted by his Republican competitors for the first time in earnest, DeSantis delivered an uneven performance from the center of the stage – a spot that is considerably less secure than it was heading into the first debate in Milwaukee.

    Despite rules that allowed candidates to respond if they were invoked, DeSantis let Fox slip to commercial break when Pence seemed to blame the governor for a jury decision to award a life sentence, not the death penalty, to the mass murderer in the Parkland high school shooting. (DeSantis opposed the decision and championed a law that made Florida the state with the lowest threshold to put someone on death row going forward.) Nor did he respond when Pence accused DeSantis of inflating Florida’s budget by 30% during his tenure.

    He later let Scott get the last word on Florida’s Black history curriculum standards and struggled to defend himself when Haley – accurately – pointed out that he took steps to block fracking in Florida on his second day in office.

    Before the first debate in Milwaukee, a top strategist for a pro-DeSantis super PAC told donors that “79% of the people tonight are going to watch the debate and turn it off after 19 minutes.”

    By that measure, the Florida governor managed to first speak Wednesday night just in the nick of time – 16 minutes into the debate. And when he finally spoke, he continued the sharper attacks on the GOP front-runner that he has previewed in recent weeks.

    DeSantis equated Trump’s absence in California to Biden, who DeSantis said was “completely missing in action for leadership” on the economy, blaming him for inflation and the autoworkers strike.

    “And you know who else is missing in action? Donald Trump is missing in action,” DeSantis said. “He should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record.”

    But DeSantis then largely pulled back from further targeting Trump – until a post-debate Fox News appearance when he challenged the former president to a one-on-one face-off.

    DeSantis ended the debate on a strong note. He took charge by rejecting moderator Dana Perino’s attempts to get the candidates to vote one of their competitors “off the island.” He ended his night forcefully dismissing a suggestion that Trump’s lead in the polls held meaning in September.

    “Polls don’t elect presidents, voters elect presidents,” he said, before pointing a finger at Trump for Republicans’ electoral underperformance in the last three elections.

    But as the super PAC strategist previously pointed out: By then, who was watching?

    In the final minutes of the debate, co-host Ilia Calderón of Univision asked Pence how he would reach out to those Latino voters who felt the Republican Party was hostile or didn’t care about them.

    “I’m incredibly proud of the tax cut and tax reform bill,” he said, referring to Republicans’ sweeping 2017 tax law. He also cited low unemployment rates for Hispanic Americans recorded during the Trump-Pence administration.

    Scott, faced with the same question, said it was important to lead by example. “My chief of staff is the only Hispanic female chief of staff in the Senate,” he said. “I hired her because she was the best, highest-qualified person we have.”

    Calderón focused much of her time on a series of policy questions that highlighted the candidates’ records on immigration and gun violence. At times, some of them struggled to respond directly.

    She asked Pence if he would work with Congress to find a permanent solution for people who were brought to the country illegally as children. The Trump-Pence administration ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gave those young people protected status. She repeated the question after Pence focused his answer on his work securing the border. He then talked about his time in Congress.

    “Let me tell you, I served in Congress for 12 years, although it seemed longer,” he said. “But you know, something I’ve done different than everybody on this stage is I’ve actually secured reform in Congress.”

    The candidates – and moderators – shy away from abortion talk

    It took more than a 100 minutes on Wednesday night for the first question on abortion to be asked.

    About five minutes later, the conversation had moved on. What is potentially the most potent driver (or flipper) of votes in the coming election was afforded less time than TikTok.

    Tellingly, no one onstage seemed to mind.

    Perino introduced the subject by asking DeSantis whether some Republicans were right to worry that the electoral backlash to abortion bans – or the prospect of their passage – would handicap the eventual GOP nominee.

    DeSantis, who signed a six-week ban in April, dismissed those concerns, pointing to his success in traditionally liberal parts of Florida on his way to winning a second term in 2022. Then he swiped at Trump for calling the new laws “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

    Christie took a similar path, arguing that his two terms as governor of New Jersey, a traditionally blue state, showed it was possible for anti-abortion leaders to win in a environments supportive of abortion rights.

    And with that, the abortion “debate” in Simi Valley ended abruptly. No more questions and no attempts by the rest of the candidates to interject or otherwise join the chat.

    Candidates pile on Ramaswamy

    Some of the candidates onstage didn’t want to have a repeat of the first debate, in which Ramaswamy managed to stand out as a formidable debater and showman.

    Early in Wednesday’s debate, Scott went after the tech entrepreneur, saying his business record included ties to the Chinese Communist Party and money going to Hunter Biden. The visibly annoyed Ramaswamy shifted gears from praising all the other candidates onstage to defending his business record. But Scott and Ramaswamy ended up talking over each other.

    A little later on Pence began an answer with a knock on Ramaswamy, saying, “I’m glad Vivek pulled out of his business deal in China.” At another point after Ramaswamy had responded to a question about his use of TikTok, Haley jumped in, saying, “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber from what you say” and then going on to say, “We can’t trust you. We can’t trust you.” As Ramaswamy tried to readopt his unity tone, Scott could be heard trying to interrupt him.

    Despite the efforts of moderators to pin them down, DeSantis and Pence struggled to respond when challenged on their respective records on health care.

    Asked about the Trump administration’s failure to end the Affordable Care Act as promised, Pence opted instead to answer a previous question about mass gun violence. When Perino pushed Pence one more time to explain why Obamacare remains not just intact but popular, the former vice president once again demurred.

    Fox’s Stuart Varney similarly pressed DeSantis to explain why 2.5 million Floridians don’t have health insurance.

    DeSantis found a familiar foil for Republicans in California: inflation. Varney, though, said it didn’t explain why Florida has one of the highest uninsurance rates in the country, to which DeSantis had little response.

    “Our state’s a dynamic state,” DeSantis said, before pointing to Florida’s population boom and the low level of welfare benefits offered there.

    Haley, though, appeared ready to debate health care, arguing for transparency in prices to lessen the power of insurance companies and providers and overhauling lawsuit rules to make it harder to sue doctors.

    “How can we be the best country in the world and have the most expensive health care in the world?” Haley said.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Dennis Hastert Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Dennis Hastert Fast Facts | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of Dennis Hastert, former Republican speaker of the House. Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison in a hush money case that revealed he was being accused of sexually abusing young boys while he was a teacher in Illinois.

    Birth date: January 2, 1942

    Birth place: Aurora, Illinois

    Birth name: John Dennis Hastert

    Father: Jack Hastert, former restaurant owner

    Mother: Naomi (Nussle) Hastert

    Marriage: Jean (Kahl) Hastert (1973-present)

    Children: Ethan and Joshua

    Education: Wheaton College, B.A., 1964; Northern Illinois University, M.S., 1967

    Religion: Protestant

    Goes by the nickname “Denny.”

    Hastert is diabetic.

    Was named Illinois Coach of the Year after leading the Yorkville High School wrestling team to the state championship.

    Instituted the so-called “Hastert Rule,” an informal guideline where only legislation supported by “the majority of the majority” party is brought to a vote on the House floor.

    1964-1980 – Wrestling and football coach and government/history teacher at Yorkville High School.

    1980-1986 – Member of the Illinois House of Representatives.

    January 3, 1987-November 26, 2007 – US representative from Illinois’ 14th congressional district.

    1995-1999 – House chief deputy minority whip.

    January 6, 1999 – Is elected speaker of the House, replacing Newt Gingrich.

    November 22, 2003 – Hastert fights hard to secure passage of a Medicare bill in the House. The vote takes three hours and lasts well into the night. It is signed into law by US President George W. Bush on December 8 after also being passed by the Senate.

    January 3, 2006 – Donates $70,000 of campaign contributions from companies associated with lobbyist Jack Abramoff to charity after Abramoff pleads guilty to corruption charges.

    June 1, 2006 – Surpasses Joe Cannon to become the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in US history.

    October 3, 2006 – Appears on “The Rush Limbaugh Show” and says he has no intention of resigning due to the controversy over Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-FL) sexually explicit emails to underage pages.

    November 7, 2006 – Is reelected to his eleventh term in Congress. Republicans lose their majority in the House, so Hastert loses his position as speaker of the House when the new Congress begins on January 4, 2007.

    August 17, 2007 – Announces that he will not run for reelection in 2008.

    November 15, 2007 – Announces his resignation on the House floor. He formally resigns on November 26 after 20 years in office.

    June 2008 – Joins the Washington lobbying firm of Dickstein Shapiro as a senior adviser.

    June 8, 2009 – Hastert’s son, Ethan, announces he will run for his father’s former congressional seat but later loses in the GOP primary.

    May 7, 2010 – Hastert is conferred the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun by Emperor Akihito of Japan.

    May 28, 2015 – Federal officials indict Hastert for lying to the FBI about $3.5 million he agreed to pay to an undisclosed subject to “cover up past misconduct.” The Justice Department alleges that Hastert paid the subject a total of about $1.7 million over a period of years beginning in 2010 and ending in 2014. Hastert resigns from the lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro.

    May 29, 2015 – Sources with knowledge of the federal investigation tell CNN Hastert was paying a former student to keep quiet about allegations of sexual misconduct from the time when Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach in Illinois.

    June 9, 2015 – Pleads not guilty to all charges related to lying to the FBI about $3.5 million he agreed to pay to an undisclosed subject.

    October 28, 2015 – Hastert pleads guilty to structuring money transactions in a way to evade requirements to report where the money was going.

    December 17, 2015 – A statement is released announcing that Hastert was admitted to the hospital in the first week of November 2015. He was treated for a stroke and sepsis. This was followed by two back surgeries.

    April 8, 2016 – Documents released by prosecutors allege Hastert sexually abused at least four boys when he coached high school wrestling in Illinois.

    April 25, 2016 – Hastert is sued by a former student in Illinois Circuit Court. The former student seeks to collect $1.8 million. This is the remainder of the $3.5 million promised him for covering up Hastert’s past misconduct.

    April 27, 2016 – Hastert is sentenced to 15 months in prison. He is ordered to pay $250,000 to a victims’ fund, must serve two years of supervised release once he finishes his prison term, and enter a sex offender treatment program.

    June 22, 2016 – Hastert begins serving his 15-month sentence at a federal medical prison in Rochester, Minnesota.

    July 18, 2017 – Is released from prison and is placed under the supervision of a residential reentry management field office in Chicago.

    November 20, 2017 – A judge in Kendall County, Illinois, throws out a lawsuit brought by a man who claims Hastert abused him when he was a child, saying the statute of limitations had passed.

    December 12, 2017 – New court-ordered restrictions ban Hastert from having contact with anyone under 18 unless an adult is present who’s aware that he pleaded guilty in the hush money case.

    September 10, 2019 – A judge in Kendall County, Illinois, rules that a lawsuit over the terms of a $3.5 million hush money deal can go to trial. One of Hastert’s former students filed the lawsuit in April 2016.

    September 29, 2021 – A Kendall County judge finalizes an out-of-court settlement between Hastert and a former student who alleged that Hastert sexually abused him, ending the lawsuit filed in April 2016 that was set to go to trial.

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