Police have arrested an 83-year-old former pastor on murder charges nearly 50 years after he allegedly abducted and killed 8-year-old Gretchen Harrington in Pennsylvania, officials said Monday.
David Zandstra has been charged with criminal homicide, first, second and third degree murder, kidnapping of a minor and the possession of an instrument of crime. He was interviewed during the initial investigation in 1975, but it wasn’t until a police interview this year that investigators were able to gather enough information for an arrest, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said.
Harrington left her Marple home around 9 a.m. on the morning of Aug. 15, 1975 for her summer bible camp, Stollsteimer said. The camp used the premises of both the Reformed Presbyterian Church and the Trinity Church Chapel Christian Reform Church, where Zandstra was a pastor.
Zandstra would run opening exercises at Trinity and was one of the people responsible for bringing the kids from Trinity to Reformed, where Harrington’s father worked as the pastor, officials said.
David Zandstra, 83, is charged with murder in the 1975 killing of 8-year-old Gretchen Harrington.
Office of the Delaware County District Attorney
On the day of her disappearance, Harrington’s father became worried when she didn’t arrive at Reformed, and police were contacted by 11:23 a.m.
Harrington’s skeletal remains were found two months later in Ridley Creek State Park, authorities said.
During the investigation, a witness told police they’d seen Harrington speaking with the driver of either a two-tone Cadillac or a green station wagon, the latter of which Zandstra was known to use. Police interviewed Zandstra in October of 1975, but he denied seeing Harrington on the day she’d disappeared.
On Jan. 2 of this year, investigators spoke with a woman who alleged Zandstra had abused her as a child. The alleged victim, who was not identified, was best friends with Zandstra’s daughter and slept over at the home often, authorities said. She told police that during one sleepover when she was 10, she woke up to Zandstra groping her. She told Zandstra’s daughter what had happened and the daughter “replied that the defendant did that sometimes,” the district attorney’s office said.
Investigators then met with Zandstra in Marietta, Georgia, where he currently lives, on July 17, officials said. At first, he denied his involvement in Harrington’s disappearance, but after he was confronted with the evidence provided by the alleged groping victim, Zandstra admitted to seeing Harrington on the day she vanished.
He admitted that he was driving a green station wagon that day and said he’d offered Harrington a ride and taken her to a wooded area.
“The defendant stated that he had parked the car and asked the victim to remove her clothing,” officials wrote in a news release. “When she refused, he struck her in the head with a fist. The victim was bleeding, and he believed her to be dead. He attempted to cover up her body and left the area.”
Trooper Eugene Tray, who interviewed Zandstra, said the alleged killer seemed relieved.
“I don’t know if he’s sorry for what he did, but this is a weight off his shoulders for sure,” Tray said.
Zandstra was taken into custody in Georgia, and he remains in jail in Cobb County without bail. He is fighting extradition and officials are working to get a governor’s warrant to bring him to Pennsylvania.
“We’re going to convict him,” Stollsteimer said. He’s going to die in jail and then he’s going to have to find out what the God he professes to believe in holds for those who are this evil to our children.”
Harrington’s father has since died, but her mother and three sisters are still alive, officials said.
Officials are investigating if there could be other victims connected to Zandstra, who lived in Plano, Texas, and then in Marietta after Harrington’s death.
The impact of the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes aren’t just being felt in Los Angeles or New York, but also in states such as Georgia, Florida and Texas, which have seen a spike in film and television production in recent years. Mark Strassmann reports.
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The man sought after for the fatal shootings of four people in Hampton, Georgia, died following a stand-off with law enforcement that left at least two officers injured, authorities said.
Andre Longmore, 40, “hit the ground running” after returning fire at law enforcement officers Sunday, Henry County Sheriff Reginald B. Scandrett said at a news conference.
“We gave chase, reengaged the suspect, he produced a handgun again, gunfire was exchanged and the suspect was neutralized,” Scandrett said.
Two officers were injured during the confrontation. A deputy was shot in the back and is expected to survive. Another suffered more severe, undisclosed injuries, according to police.
“The monster is dead,” Scandrett said. “The citizens of Hampton, the county of Henry, the metro Atlanta area, and the entire state of Georgia can breathe a little easier tonight. The suspect is off the street.”
Hampton Police Chief James Turner identified the four victims of Saturday’s shooting as Scott Levitt, 67, Shirley Levitt, 66, Steve Blizzard, 65, and Ronald Jeffers, 66. The victims lived in the Dogwood Lakes area of Hampton, police said.
Authorities had launched a manhunt for Longmore on Saturday, offering a $10,000 reward for information that led to his arrest and prosecution. The 40-year-old was considered “armed and dangerous,” according to police.
“Wherever you are, we will hunt you down in any hole you may be residing in and bring you to custody,” Scandrett said.
The timeline of events is unclear, but the situation unfolded around 10:45 a.m. on Saturday in the Dogwood Lakes area of Hampton, Georgia, according to the social media posts from the Henry County Government. Hampton is a city of about 8,000 and is located in Henry County, about 36 miles from Atlanta.
The motive is unknown, but Hampton Police Chief James Turner said the four homicides occurred at different locations, and that the suspect is a resident of the city of Hampton.
The Hampton Police Department is leading the investigation, with the help of the Henry County Police Department and the sheriff’s office, in addition to Henry County Homeland Security and the Henry County Crime Scene Unit. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has also been notified.
“Today is a sad and somber occasion that we gather here today,” said Mayor Ann Tarpley during the news conference. “The city of Hampton has had a tragedy, but we are sworn to and convinced that each and every person that is responsible for this tragedy in our community is brought to justice.”
A manhunt continued on Saturday afternoon for a suspect identified as Andre Longmore who is being sought by authorities after the fatal shootings of four people in Hampton, Georgia.
During a news conference, Henry County Sheriff Reginald B. Scandrett told the media to call 911 if Longmore, 40, is spotted, since he is known to be “armed and dangerous.” Scandrett said a $10,000 reward is being offered for the suspect’s arrest and prosecution.
“Wherever you are, we will hunt you down in any hole you may be residing in and bring you to custody,” Scandrett said.
The timeline of events is unclear, but the situation unfolded around 10:45 a.m. on Saturday in the Dogwood Lakes area of Hampton, Georgia, according to the social media posts from the Henry County Government. Hampton is a city of about 8,000 and located in Henry County, about 36 miles from Atlanta.
The motive is unknown, but Hampton Police Chief James Turner said the four homicides occurred at different locations, and that the suspect is a resident of the city of Hampton. It is also not known, Turner said, if the suspect is related to the victims.
All four people killed were adults — three men and one woman — according to Turner. Their names are not being released until family has been notified, Turner said.
Authorities said the suspect is known to drive a black 2017 GMA Acadia with the license plate DHF756.
The Hampton Police Department is leading the investigation, with the help of the Henry County Police Department and the sheriff’s office, in addition to Henry County Homeland Security and the Henry County Crime Scene Unit. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has also been notified.
“Today is a sad and somber occasion that we gather here today,” said Mayor Ann Tarpley during the news conference. “The city of Hampton has had a tragedy, but we are sworn to and convinced that each and every person that is responsible for this tragedy in our community is brought to justice.”
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At least 4 people are dead after a shooting in Hampton, Georgia, Saturday morning, a county official says.
The suspect is still at large, Melissa Robinson, a spokesperson for Henry County, told CNN.
Hampton is a small city about 29 miles south of Atlanta in Henry County.
Robinson said the first call about the shooting came in around 10:45 a.m. ET. The incident happened in an area close to the Dogwood Lakes subdivision, an area that features lake-front homes and a nearby baptist church.
“The Hampton Police Department is leading the investigation with the assistance of the Henry County Police Department, Henry County Sheriff’s Department, Henry County Homeland Security and Henry County Crime Scene Unit,” a statement on the Henry County Government Facebook page reads.
An investigation into the shooting is “active and ongoing,” according to the Facebook post.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has also been notified of the shooting.
Officials advised the public to avoid the area near the incident.
At a Saturday afternoon news conference, Hampton Mayor Ann Tarpley said “today is a sad and somber occasion” and vowed the person responsible would be held responsible and “brought to justice.”
“We ask that you lift up the families and the victims in your prayers, your thoughts, and that you give them the privacy that they may need to overcome this horrific tragedy,” she went on. “We have full confidence in our law enforcement that they will perform their duties and bring the suspect to justice.”
One day in March, Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Cobb County, Georgia, read “My Shadow Is Purple” by Scott Stuart, which she had purchased at an in-school book fair, to her class. Now, she’s fighting to get her job back.
In June, a monthslong investigation determined that she should be terminated from her position at Due West Elementary School because reading the book had violated a Georgia law which bans educators from teaching about so-called “divisive concepts” like systemic racism — but the school district hasn’t yet explained which part of the law Rinderle had broken.
The book is about acceptance, being true to oneself and moving beyond the gender binary.
“I really resonated with its message of acceptance of oneself and others, and every book I had in my classroom is one of acceptance,” Rinderle told CNN. “I knew that this book would fit perfectly in my classroom.”
According to Rinderle, a parent complaint led to an investigation by the Cobb County School District of the 10-year veteran teacher, and the elementary school’s principal asked Rinderle to resign. When she declined, she was terminated.
Last year, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed three educational laws that impacted what teachers can say and do in the classroom — and empowered parents to file complaints against educators they presumed to be in violation of these laws.
“After these laws were passed, it created a ripple of fear among teachers,” Craig Goodmark, a Georgia-based attorney who is representing Rinderle, told HuffPost.
Rinderle has been accused of violating the “divisive concepts” law, which prohibits teachers from discussing “divisive” issues such as saying that the United States is fundamentally racist. The law does not mention discussions or instruction on gender. (It does, however, carve out exceptions for teaching about racism in an academic context so long as educators are objective.) School districts are responsible for creating their own complaint processes.
As soon as it was passed, Georgia educators criticized the law for being too vague and difficult to interpret.
“It’s unclear if one particular parent would draw the line somewhere that the community at large would not draw the line,” Georgia Association of Educators President Lisa Morgan said last July. “How will principals and administrators handle that parent?”
“This has really caused a chaotic impact in the classroom where teachers don’t know what they can and can’t teach.”
– Craig Goodmark, a Georgia-based attorney representing Katie Rinderle
In Cobb County, it seems as though a single parent complaint can lead to an investigation and eventual removal.
Rinderle and her lawyer have both said that the school has not yet explained how reading “My Shadow Is Purple” was against the law. “When Katie was being investigated, she asked what part of the law she was violating,” Goodmark said. “And they couldn’t tell her.”
When HuffPost asked the school district which part of the law Rinderle had broken, a spokesperson said that all the facts and policies would be reviewed at a hearing set for Aug. 3: “Without getting into specifics of the personnel investigation, the District is confident the hearing is appropriate considering the entirety of the teacher’s behavior and history. The District remains committed to strictly enforcing all Board policy, and the law.”
The impact of the vague law goes beyond just Rinderle’s firing. “This has really caused a chaotic impact in the classroom where teachers don’t know what they can and can’t teach,” Goodmark said. “No one really understands how it’s supposed to be interpreted and it’s bad for Georgia students.”
Education and civil rights groups have announced their plans to sue the state of Georgia over its “divisive concepts” law, which they’re calling a censorship law. Last November the Southern Poverty Law Center, National Education Association and Georgia Association of Educators sent a letter of intent to the state.
“Efforts to expand our multicultural democracy through public education are being met with frantic efforts in Georgia to censor educators, ban books, and desperate measures to suppress teaching the truth about slavery and systemic racism,” Mike McGonigle, general counsel for the GAE, said in a statement.
There are already similar lawsuits in Florida and Oklahoma, where Republican legislatures have passed similar laws that limit what educators can say in the classroom.
Republicans nationwide have made a concerted effort to impose conservative beliefs onto public schools.
From laws that limit what teachers can say about gender, sexuality, and race to policies that allow parents to control which books students are allowed to have access to, the GOP is seeking to remake public schools into a right-wing paradise. The impact of laws that censor teachers and remove books from libraries has been felt across the country.
Goodmark said he will ask Cobb County to defend its termination of Rinderle at the hearing.
“Our very first question is … defend what a divisive concept is and explain why ‘My Shadow Is Purple’ violates it,” Goodmark said.
He says that she has a record of good performance reviews. “She was a leader in the Due West community, somebody who parents wanted to be in the classroom.”
“She has a lot of support in our community,” he added. “We have a lot of parents who are against this. Katie is going to fight for her job.”
A rabid beaver bit a young girl while she was swimming in a northeast Georgia lake, local news outlets reported, prompting the girl’s father to kill the animal.
Kevin Buecker, field supervisor for Hall County Animal Control, told WDUN-AM that the beaver bit the girl on Saturday while she was swimming off private property in the northern end of Lake Lanier near Gainesville.
The girl’s father beat the beaver to death, Beucker said.
Don McGowan, supervisor for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Division, told WSB-TV that a game warden who responded described the animal as “the biggest beaver he’s ever seen.” The warden estimated it at 50 or 55 pounds, McGowan said.
The beaver later tested positive for rabies at a state lab.
“Once that rabies virus gets into the brain of the animal – in this case, a beaver – they just act crazy,” McGowan said.
Hall County officials have put up signs warning people of rabies. They’re asking nearby residents to watch for animals acting abnormally and urging them to vaccinate pets against the viral disease.
“We bring our kids here probably once a month during the summer. It’s awful to think something could happen to a child,” beachgoer Kimberly Stealey told WSB-TV.
State wildlife biologists said beaver attacks are rare. They said the last one they remember in Lake Lanier was 13 years ago.
According to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, beavers were almost eliminated from the state nearly a century ago because of unregulated trapping and habitat loss, but restoration efforts by wildlife officials over the decades have proven successful.
“Today, beavers are thriving statewide, harvest demands are low, and there is no closed season on taking beavers in Georgia,” DNR said.
What are the symptoms of rabies?
Rabies is a viral disease in mammals that infects the central nervous system and, if left untreated, attacks the brain and ultimately causes death.
If a person is infected, early symptoms of rabies include fever, headache, and general weakness or discomfort. There may be a prickling or itching sensation in the area of the bite. As the disease progresses, more specific symptoms will begin to show, including insomnia, anxiety, confusion, and agitation. Partial paralysis may set in and the person may have hallucinations and delirium. They’ll experience an increase in saliva, difficulty swallowing, and hydrophobia (fear of water) because of the difficulty swallowing.
How is rabies transmitted?
Rabies is transmitted to humans and other mammals through the saliva of an infected animal that bites or scratches them. The majority of rabies cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention each year occur in wild animals like raccoons, skunks, bats, and foxes.
In the United States, laws requiring rabies immunizations in dogs have largely eradicated the disease in pets but some dogs, particularly strays, do carry the disease. This is especially important to keep in mind when visiting other countries where stray dogs can be a big problem, Hynes says.
Parents should keep in mind that children are at particular risk for exposure to rabies.
What is the treatment for rabies?
If your doctor decides you need rabies treatment, you will receive a series of post-exposure anti-rabies vaccinations. The shots are given on four different days over a period of two weeks. The first dose is administered as soon as possible after exposure, followed by additional doses three, seven and 14 days after the first one.
The CDC also recommends a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG), which is administered once at the beginning of the treatment process. It provides immediate antibodies against rabies until the body can start actively producing antibodies of its own in response to the vaccine.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
New court filings in a defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani show the promoters of the election fraud narrative after Donald Trump lost the presidency failed to do basic vetting of the claims they were touting – and didn’t see such vetting as necessary.
For instance, in a December 2020 text cited in Tuesday’s filing, Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn said that the president wanted simple examples of election fraud, which didn’t need to be proven.
“Urgent POTUS request need best examples of ‘election fraud’ that we’ve alleged that’s super easy to explain,” Epshteyn wrote, according to evidence attached to the filing. “Doesn’t necessarily have to be proven, but does need to be easy to understand. Is there any sort of ‘greatest hits’ clearinghouse that anyone has for best examples?”
The documents were among a trove of evidence presented by two Georgia election workers suing Giuliani, a former Trump lawyer, for allegedly smearing them after the 2020 election. They are now asking a federal court to hold Giuliani liable for possibly losing crucial evidence after he pulled out of settlement talks.
Giuliani is feeling legal pressure related to his work for Trump to contest the election in 2020, after he sat for interviews with the special counsel’s criminal investigation in June and faces possible disbarment as an attorney. The evidence in the lawsuit from Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss of Georgia, who were at the center of Giuliani’s claims that vote-counting was fraudulent in the state, includes documents that could be pursued by criminal investigators as well.
Freeman and Moss’s attorneys allege Giuliani never took necessary steps to preserve his electronic data after the election. They say Giuliani testified in a deposition that he had used multiple cell phones, email addresses and other communications applications after the election, but hadn’t looked thoroughly through those records in the course of the lawsuit. Instead, he said his phones had been “wiped out” after the FBI seized them in April 2021 as part of a separate criminal investigation.
“Sanctions exist to remedy the precise situation here—a sophisticated party’s abuse of judicial process designed to avoid accountability, at enormous expense to the parties and this Court. Defendant Giuliani should know better. His conduct warrants severe sanctions,” Moss and Freeman’s attorneys wrote to the federal court on Tuesday night.
Giuliani already was fined $90,000 to reimburse the Georgia workers’ attorneys for a previous dispute they had over evidence gathering.
In recent days, Giuliani’s attorney approached Freeman and Moss’ lawyers to discuss an “agreement,” or at least a partial settlement, according to court filings. On Monday, however, Giuliani told them he couldn’t agree to “key principles” both sides had negotiated, keeping the lawsuit alive, according to the latest filing.
In a statement, Giuliani adviser Ted Goodman said the plaintiffs are attempting to “embarrass” the former mayor.
“The requests by these lawyers were deliberately overly burdensome, and sought information well beyond the scope of this case—including divorce records—in an effort to harass, intimidate and embarrass Mayor Rudy Giuliani,” Goodman said. “It’s part of a larger effort to smear and silence Mayor Giuliani for daring to ask questions, and for challenging the accepted narrative. They can’t take away the fact that Giuliani is objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history who took down the Mafia, cleaned up New York City and comforted the nation following 9/11.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers have deposed key players like Bernie Kerik, who was tasked with helping Giuliani to collect supposed fraud evidence; Christina Bobb, the then-OANN correspondent who moonlighted as a legal adviser to the Trump team; and Giuliani himself.
In excerpts of a deposition Giuliani gave in the case, the former New York mayor says that he cannot recall running a criminal background check to firm up a claim he made that Freeman had an arrest record and a history of voter fraud.
“You didn’t think it was important to do that before you accused them of having a criminal background?” the plaintiffs’ lawyer asked Giuliani, referring to his clients.
“I just repeated what I was told,” Giuliani said.
In the litigation, his attorneys have acknowledged that she had no such criminal record, but Giuliani said in the March 1 deposition that he had only in recent days asked Kerik to run a criminal background check on her.
Giuliani was also questioned about a strategic plan – partially tweeted out by Kerik in late December 2020 – that laid out several claims of voter fraud across the country. According to evidence obtained by the plaintiffs described in the Giuliani deposition, Giuliani had noted that the communications plan needed “confirmation of arrest and evidence.”
Giuliani testified that he believed that, before the allegations were handed to the White House, they should be confirmed. But Giuliani could not say for sure whether the uncorroborated version of the claims was ultimately shared with the White House.
“This is so confusing, I don’t know what they told the White House,” Giuliani said in the deposition, adding that “I was not at the meeting, by design.”
In the deposition excerpts, Giuliani goes to great lengths to distance himself from the so-called “Strategic Communications Plan of the Giuliani Presidential Legal Defense Team.” Kerik, meanwhile, testified in his deposition for the lawsuit that Giuliani was aware of the strategic communications plan, which was focused on getting allegations of election fraud in front of state legislators. According to Kerik, the plan and allegations were continually discussed over six weeks.
The plaintiffs are also touting examples of when Giuliani, according to what they have collected, was made aware that some of the allegations he was making about supposed election fraud in Georgia were false.
In one email they obtained that was sent to his assistant in December 2020, a Fox News reporter asked Giuliani for comment on statements by an investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office that debunked the claims Trump allies were making about the Georgia election workers.
A group of grand jurors in Georgia may soon consider charges against former President Donald Trump and his allies who sought to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Trump lost both Georgia and the presidential election that year. CBS News congressional correspondent Nikole Killion reports from Atlanta.
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A group of Georgians selected Tuesday to be grand jurors may soon consider charges against former President Donald Trump and allies who sought to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results, which he lost.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has indicated in letters to county officials that potential indictments in the case could come between July 31 and Aug. 18.
There will be two concurrent 23-person grand juries. One group will meet on Mondays and Tuesdays. The other will meet Thursdays and Fridays. Of the 23 Fulton County residents chosen for the grand jury, a majority, 12, would need to vote in favor of an indictment.
The investigation began shortly after a recorded Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was made public. In the call, Trump told Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes” — the number he would have needed to overtake Joe Biden.
The Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse is seen on February 16, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. Fulton County released some of its eagerly awaited grand jury investigation into possible election interference on Thursday as a result of a lawsuit brought by numerous media outlets.
Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images
The investigation ultimately developed into a sprawling probe of efforts to sway the election for Trump in the months after Mr. Biden’s win.
Over the course of six months in 2022, a special purpose grand jury — which had the power to issue subpoenas and produce a final report with indictment recommendations — interviewed 75 witnesses. In media interviews after the report was delivered to Willis’ office, the special purpose grand jury’s foreperson indicated multiple indictments were recommended.
The special purpose grand jury did not call Trump, but it did interview his allies, including his former attorney Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Lindsey Graham, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and political critics such as Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
In an interview with CBS News on Feb. 26, attorneys for Trump criticized the investigation.
“We absolutely do not believe that our client did anything wrong, and if any indictments were to come down, those are faulty indictments. We will absolutely fight anything tooth and nail,” said attorney Jennifer Little.
Trump, a Republican who is running again for president, denies wrongdoing and has defended the Raffensperger call as “perfect.” He has accused Willis, a Democrat who is the first Black woman to serve as Fulton County district attorney, of pursuing the investigation out of political animus and racism.
It’s a pair of accusations he also levied against Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, Democrat Alvin Bragg. In April, Trump entered a not guilty plea to 34 felony falsification of business records charges brought by Bragg’s office in connection with a “hush money” payment made to an adult film star days before the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.
That case made Trump the first former president in U.S. history to be charged with crimes.
That case is currently scheduled for trial on Aug. 14, but on Monday evening, Trump’s attorneys filed a motion for an indeterminate delay. They indicated they believe the trial should be held after the 2024 election.
They also cited Trump’s busy legal schedule. A trial in the Manhattan criminal case is scheduled for March 2023. A civil trial in another New York case, a $250 million lawsuit against Trump and his company over alleged widespread fraud, is scheduled to begin in October. That case was brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who is the first Black woman to hold that office. Trump has denied the allegations and accused James of political bias and racism for bringing the case.
Graham Kates is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, privacy issues and information security for CBS News Digital. Contact Graham at KatesG@cbsnews.com or grahamkates@protonmail.com
ATLANTA (AP) — An investigator with a metro Atlanta county prosecutor’s office was shot and wounded by another motorist while driving Friday evening, police said, and a widespread search was launched for the suspect using helicopters, canines and road patrols.
Initial information indicated the investigator with the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office was not on duty at the time and a motive for the shooting was not yet known, Sgt. Michele Pihera, a county police spokeswoman, said.
The investigator was apparently shot in the leg at an intersection shortly after 6 p.m., but he was talking with authorities at a hospital and his life was not in danger, Pihera said at a news briefing.
The head of the Switzerland’s dairy association says the country will import more cheese than it exports this year for the first time.
Sudan’s Ministry of Health says an airstrike in the city of Omdurman has killed at least 22 people. It says the attack took place Saturday in a residential area and left an unspecified number of people wounded.
The struggle to certify the results of Guatemala’s first-round presidential elections has suffered another setback, after the chief justice of the Supreme Court issued an order blocking the certification.
Vermont State Police say a Rutland City police officer was killed and two other officers were injured when a suspect crashed into two police cruisers pursuing him.
Investigators didn’t know whether it may have been “a road rage incident” or he may have been deliberately targeted or shot for some other reason, Pihera said. There were no “overt signs” or markings on the car to suggest he was an employee of the District Attorney’s office, she added.
“It doesn’t appear right now that the officer was attached to any police investigation. He was simply driving down the road when he was shot at,” the spokeswoman said.
Pihera said she didn’t know if the investigator fired back, but he managed to pull over at a gas station and call for help.
Authorities were searching for a male suspect believed to be driving a silver SUV with some damage on the rear passenger side, according to police. It wasn’t known if anyone else was in the suspect vehicle.
A helicopter clattered overhead as Pihera spoke, and she said county officers in the air and on ground patrol were spreading out.
The wounded official was not immediately identified, and there was no immediate statement issued by the District Attorney’s office.
Authorities urged people to stay away from the shooting site, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) northeast of downtown Atlanta.
Gwinnett is Georgia’s second-most populous county, with more than 950,000 people.
TBILISI — Georgia’s annual LGBT+ Pride event was evacuated by the police on Saturday after hundreds of counter-protesters stormed the site.
In a statement, organisers of the festival in the capital of Tbilisi announced that they had been forced to shut down the annual festivities after the authorities failed to maintain the perimeter.
“Today’s developments indicate that today’s planned events were pre-coordinated and agreed upon between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the violent group Alt-Info,” Tbilisi Pride said.
The interim deputy minister of internal affairs, Aleksandre Darakhvelidze, said that “the pride festival was to take place in an open territory” and therefore authorities were “unable to provide protection.”
Smoke rose above the site, a field just outside the city, as LGBT+ rainbow flags were burned and right-wing activists danced to traditional Georgian folk music. Attendees had been told to board buses for safety moments before.
Reacting to the attacks, the British Ambassador to Georgia, Mark Clayton, said he was “shocked and saddened to see that despite the planning and preventive measures, Tbilisi Pride festival was cancelled due to safety risks for participants.”
Shocked and saddened to see that despite the planning & preventive measures, @Tbilisipride festival was cancelled due to safety risks for participants. I call on authorities to ensure that all who broke law & aggressively disrupted a peaceful gathering will be brought to justice. pic.twitter.com/6rOsPQqm8n
He called on the Georgian government to “ensure that all who broke law and aggressively disrupted a peaceful gathering will be brought to justice.”
Despite the condemnations, Shalva Papuashvili, chairman of Georgia’s parliament, insisted “the police had an appropriate response” and “properly ensured the safety of both participants and journalists.”
Rémy Bony, executive director of LGBT+ NGO Forbidden Colours, said that EU countries should give refuge to the organisers at their embassies because “their lives are in danger. Thousands of anti-LGBTIQ hooligans are hunting them down.”
🏳️🌈🇬🇪The Embassies of the EU member states in Georgia must open their doors for the organisers of Tbilisi Pride immediately.
Their lives are in danger. Thousands of anti-LGBTIQ hooligans are hunting them down. Georgian authorities are not able to provide safety. pic.twitter.com/8cYtIoRP6N
Alt-Info, a far-right group with close ties to the Georgian Orthodox Church, has repeatedly organized counter-protests against the annual festivities. In 2021, dozens of journalists were injured at the annual event and a cameraman later died.
In the wake of the violence that year, the EU mission to the country issued a strongly-worded letter to the government in which they decried “direct attacks on Georgia’s democratic and pro-European aspirations” and criticized the burning of an EU flag outside the parliament.
Speaking to POLITICO from the crowd on Saturday, Levan Chachua, the leader of the nationalist, religious Georgian Idea political group, said: “I would refuse to … join the EU if that will prevent us from entering the heavenly kingdom.”
Georgia has a stated intention to join the EU. But Brussels has warned that its government, which has sought closer ties with Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine, has presided over a significant backsliding in human rights and civil liberties.
An unusually warm winter damaged Georgia’s peach crop this year. As climate change continues, researchers are working to develop a peach that will be more resilient to warmer weather. Mark Strassmann has more in “Eye on America.”
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Paul Ronzheimer is the deputy editor-in-chief of BILD and a senior journalist reporting for Axel Springer, the parent company of POLITICO.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned European allies that it would be “suicidal” not to accept Ukraine into NATO after the war with Russia is over.
Kuleba’s comments come ahead of a NATO summit in mid-July when Kyiv’s membership bid is set to be the most politically sensitive point of discussion. Ukraine is looking to get a commitment from the defense alliance on its NATO aspirations, but a number of allies say a serious discussion on Ukraine in NATO can happen only after Russian forces are no longer on its territory.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on June 22 that the NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11-12 should focus on strengthening Ukraine’s military power instead of opening a process for Kyiv to join the transatlantic alliance.
“After the war ends, it will be suicidal for Europe not to accept Ukraine into NATO because it will mean that the option of … war will remain open,” Kuleba told Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company, in an interview on Friday in Kyiv.
“The only way to shut the door for the Russian aggression against Europe and Euro Atlantic space as a whole is to take Ukraine in NATO, because Russia will not dare to repeat this experience again,” Kuleba said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a vision for Ukraine to join NATO, as well as the EU, once Kyiv has repelled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Ukrainian Ambassador to NATO Natalia Galibarenko told POLITICO in late June that Kyiv is seeking “some kind of invitation — or at least commitment … to look at the timeframe and modalities of our membership” at the Vilnius summit.
Kuleba in the interview pushed back on Germany and others advocating against such a commitment, warning against an outcome similar to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, when Berlin and Paris rejected NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
“Do not repeat the mistake Chancellor Merkel made in Bucharest in 2008 when she fiercely opposed any progress towards Ukraine’s NATO membership,” he said.
“This decision opened the door for Putin to invade Georgia and then to continue his destabilizing efforts in the region, and then eventually illegally annexing Crimea,” Kuleba said. “Because if Ukraine was accepted in NATO by 2014, there would not [have been] the illegal annexation of Crimea. It would not be war in Donbas, there would not be this large-scale invasion,” he said.
Kuleba rejected statements by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that it will be “impossible” for Ukraine to win against Russia, saying he is “tired of countering all these meaningless arguments.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger spoke with federal prosecutors Wednesday as part of an investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The meeting likely focused on a 2021 phone call between Raffensperger and then-President Trump, where Trump was recorded telling Raffensperger to “find” the votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa joins “Prime Time” to discuss the significance of the interview.
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There were no reports of injuries after at least eight tornadoes ripped through Alabama and Georgia on Wednesday, damaging buildings and downing trees and power lines. The unstable weather is expected to continue across the South. Mark Strassman has the latest.
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The former president, she noted, had warned that his arrest would lead to “the biggest protest we have ever had” and predicted that the people of the country wouldn’t stand for it.
“There’s no shame in not having people protest your arrest and indictment,” she said. “Except when you have begged people to, and told people to, and in fact promised publicly that people would.”
That, she said, is “personally embarrassing” for Trump.
Fellow MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said that’s bad news for Trump ― and the former president is now painfully aware of the fact that the crowds aren’t coming on his command anymore.
“Trump knows better than any of us: They’re not coming,” he said, then referred to the potential scene of a next possible indictment: “They wont come to Georgia. They’re not coming. That stuff is completely over… he doesn’t have that anymore.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who has tried to steer the Republican Party away from Donald Trump, called the latest charges against the former president a “distraction” from issues that he says presidential candidates should be talking about.
“For us to win the presidential race in 2024, we don’t need to be distracted,” Kemp told CBS News’ Robert Costa in an interview on Monday. “We need to be focused on the future. We need to be telling the American people what we’re for.”
“President Trump has been targeted in a lot of different ways — many of them unfairly,” he added. “But also I think there’s some serious concerns in this indictment. But at the end of the day, there’s a jury that’s going to make that decision. And quite honestly, I think it’s a distraction politically. I think in some ways it’s exactly what the Democrats want.”
Kemp said Republican candidates should be focused on issues like inflation, crime and border security, arguing that voters care more about those issues than the accusations against Trump.
“That’s really what I believe Republicans need to stay focused on, and not get bogged down in the politics of this indictment,” he said.
Kemp defied the former president by refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state as Trump falsely claimed he won. When Trump congratulated North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in a recent social media post, Kemp responded: “Taking our country back from Joe Biden does not start with congratulating North Korea’s murderous dictator.”
“The reason I was critical of President Trump is because I think he needs to stay focused just like anybody else running for president on tackling those issues,” Kemp told CBS News. “I don’t think, ya know, congratulating Kim Jong Un is that kind of play that helps us win in November of 2024.”
Kemp said any candidate hoping to win the swing state of Georgia must focus on the future.
“I think any politician that’s running can be beaten and any politician that’s running can win,” he said. “If you’re going to win at the end of the day in November, you better be focused on the future and you better be telling people what you’re for.”
