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  • Republicans must overcome deep splits to choose a speaker as Israel crisis exposes failure to govern | CNN Politics

    Republicans must overcome deep splits to choose a speaker as Israel crisis exposes failure to govern | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Republicans must mend gaping splits in their conference if they are to succeed in picking a new speaker – as dangerous global crises in Israel and Ukraine expose the steep cost of their malfunctioning majority.

    The two declared candidates, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, must demonstrate their capacity to either control or co-opt hardliners who ousted Kevin McCarthy last week and are making the United States look like an ebbing superpower that cannot govern itself – let alone lead a world in turmoil.

    Republicans on Wednesday are meeting for internal secret ballot elections to determine who will become their nominee to be second in line to the presidency. But the gravity of outside events is apparently doing little to shake the GOP out of its endless internal conflict because serious doubts remain over whether either Scalise or Jordan can win the necessary overwhelming support of the Republican conference in an eventual floor vote of the full House.

    The House GOP already looked deeply negligent with time running out to stave off another government shutdown drama by the middle of next month. But if the House remains paralyzed much longer it will undermine the country’s capacity to respond to the horrific Hamas assault on Israel. And Ukraine’s battle to survive as a sovereign state will soon reach a critical point if its next aid package doesn’t make it through the House.

    Republican lawmakers met Tuesday night as Jordan and Scalise made their pitches. The situation is so fraught because the tiny House GOP majority means that a candidate for speaker can only lose four Republican votes and still win the gavel in a full House vote. Democrats refused to save McCarthy from a revolt by eight hardliners last week and on Tuesday named their leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, as candidate for speaker, suggesting they will sit on the sidelines again, content to expose the dysfunction in the GOP ahead of next year’s election.

    Rep. David Valadao, a California Republican who faces a tough reelection fight, said it could be difficult for either Scalise or Jordan to win outright. “I think both candidates are going to struggle. … But I don’t know exactly where their numbers are,” Valadao said. “It seems like they are both scrambling and they’re both working hard. So I don’t know if anyone is super confident right now.”

    The faces are different but the GOP fault line remains the same

    A week on from McCarthy’s rejection, after less than nine months as speaker, the fundamental fault line in the party remains as glaring as ever. Far-right Republicans have demands for massive spending cuts but fail to acknowledge that Democratic control of the Senate and the White House means that GOP leaders have no choice but to eventually compromise. McCarthy fell after using Democratic votes to pass a stopgap bill to keep the government open, fearing that Republicans would pay a harsh political price for a shutdown that could, over time, affect millions of Americans.

    The key question on Wednesday will be whether Scalise or Jordan can unite enough of the party behind them before a full floor vote, which could happen as soon as later that day. Republicans are conducting the initial process behind closed doors to avoid a repeat of the public demonstration of disarray that unfolded during the 15 rounds of balloting McCarthy required to win the top job in January. They’ll be debating and voting on a proposed change to conference rules to raise the threshold for winning the nomination – from a simple majority of the conference to a majority of the current House – as part of their effort to avoid January’s theatrics. Both Jordan and Scalise committed to supporting one another if they become the nominee, lawmakers said after Tuesday’s candidate forum.

    Rep. Mike Garcia of California warned after the forum that the fate of the speakership was still up in the air. “I think it’s 50/50 odds right now,” he said. Some of his colleagues were even more pessimistic. Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida said, “No one is close to 217.” Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who is backing Jordan, was asked the chances of a new speaker being selected Wednesday and replied: “I’d put it at 2%.”

    Jordan, a vehement supporter of Donald Trump who’s echoed his false claims of election fraud in 2020, has the former president’s backing. The Ohio Republican, who was a co-founder of the conservative Freedom Caucus, has devoted his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee to trying to prove Trump’s accusations that the government has been weaponized against him as he faces four criminal trials and is also a leading figure in the impeachment probe into President Joe Biden.

    Jordan said he had a plan to head off a new government funding cliff-hanger, but he’d have to reconcile the demands of right-wingers and also get such a measure through the Senate and the White House. “Nobody wants a shutdown,” Jordan said. Several lawmakers in the meeting said the Judiciary chairman said he’d pitch for a long-term stopgap plan that cut spending by 1% to allow time for passing individual spending bills.

    Rep. Don Bacon, a key moderate from Nebraska who is leaning Scalise’s way, suggested he was pleasantly surprised by Jordan’s argument. “Because of his past, I think we expected to hear the Freedom Caucus message. It was not that. It was very pragmatic,” Bacon said Tuesday.

    Scalise is also an authentic conservative and vocal supporter of Trump. (Both men voted against certifying Biden’s win in 2020.) But he’s known as less of a flamethrower than Jordan. And as a member of leadership with fundraising bona fides, he could be more palatable to moderate Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen districts that paved the way to the narrow GOP majority in last year’s midterms and that will be critical to its hopes in 2024. The Louisianan emerged from the meeting Tuesday evening warning that the country needed a Congress that can work. “What people have really liked about my approach is I’ve been a unifier,” he said, though such skills would face an extreme test if he wins the gavel.

    If neither Scalise nor Jordan is able to win sufficient support, there could be an opening for a compromise candidate that all wings of the party could get behind. Some freshmen have been pushing for a return of McCarthy. But the former speaker asked that he not be nominated in the race – without closing the door to getting his job back.

    “There are two people running in there. I’m not one of them,” the California Republican told CNN’s Manu Raju.

    Even if a new speaker does emerge on Wednesday, they will face the same relentless pressure imposed by a tiny majority, the split balance of power in Washington and a GOP that has riotously resisted the efforts of the last three Republican speakers to unify the conference and provide long-term governance.

    Most immediately, the victor will have to decide whether to try to amend the rule that any one member can call a vote to oust the speaker – a concession McCarthy had offered to hardliners in order to win the gavel in January. Then, looming a few weeks away, is a possible repeat of the crisis that led to McCarthy’s defeat and the current power vacuum in the House. Unless Congress passes more funding by November 17, the government will close down, creating a series of adverse consequences, including the possibility that troops go unpaid and public services are severely disrupted.

    To avoid this scenario, the House will either have to pass a series of complex spending bills in a month – a near impossibility given their size and the time wasted on the speaker’s race – or opt for another short-term spending patch that significant numbers of Republicans may oppose. Even if the House can manage to pass a spending plan, any measure acceptable to the entire House GOP is unlikely to win support in the Senate or the White House since hardliners are demanding cuts far below those previously agreed to by McCarthy and Biden earlier this year.

    A Speaker Scalise or Speaker Jordan – or whoever can get the job – would almost certainly have to make the same fateful choice that faced McCarthy. Do they shut down the government if they can’t jam concessions out of the White House or Senate? Or seek to punt the choice down the road with a temporary funding bill that will probably need Democratic votes to pass? Jordan’s approach that calls for 1% spending cuts would likely be a non-starter among Democrats, meaning he would need to convince moderate Republicans it was in their interests.

    The House must also soon wrestle with the president’s request for more than $20 billion in military aid to Ukraine as it fights the Russian invasion. Many Republicans oppose additional funding, and it’s another measure that would need Democratic votes to get through the House. The question has become even more complicated following the attack on Israel, with some Republicans arguing that the US should send the Jewish state as much help as it wants while being reluctant to continue propping up the Ukrainian war effort.

    Such is the complexity of the untamed nature of the GOP majority that further turmoil certainly lies ahead, even if Republicans somehow settle on a new speaker on Wednesday.

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  • 2024 Presidential Debates Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    2024 Presidential Debates Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the 2024 presidential debates.

    Event Type: Republican Debate
    Location: Fiserv Forum Milwaukee, WI
    Hosts: Fox News, Young America’s Foundation and Rumble
    Moderators: Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum
    Participants: Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott
    Transcript

    Event Type: Republican Debate
    Location: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Simi Valley, CA
    Hosts: FOX Business, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, Rumble and Univision
    Moderators: Ilia Calderón, Dana Perino and Stuart Varney
    Participants: Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott

    Event Type: Republican Debate
    Location: Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County Miami, FL
    Hosts: NBC News, Salem Radio Network, Republican Jewish Coalition and Rumble
    Moderators: Hugh Hewitt, Lester Holt and Kristen Welker
    Participants: Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott

    Event Type: Republican Debate
    Location: Tuscaloosa, Alabama
    Hosts: NewsNation, The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM, the Washington Free Beacon and Rumble
    Moderators: Eliana Johnson, Megyn Kelly and Elizabeth Vargas

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  • Nevada GOP Senate candidate raised money to help other candidates — the funds mostly paid down his old campaign’s debt instead | CNN Politics

    Nevada GOP Senate candidate raised money to help other candidates — the funds mostly paid down his old campaign’s debt instead | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown created a political action committee to “help elect Republicans” but most of its funds were spent paying down debt from his failed previous campaign. The group donated less than 7% of its funds to the candidates it was set up to support, according to campaign finance records – a move one campaign finance expert likened to using the PAC as a “slush fund.”

    Brown formed the Duty First PAC in July 2022, saying the organization would help Republicans take back Congress. A month earlier, Brown lost the Republican Senate primary to Adam Laxalt after raising an impressive $4.4 million for his upstart campaign, but his campaign was left with more than $300,000 in debt.

    Now Brown is running again in Nevada as a top recruit of Senate Republicans.

    A former Army captain, Brown made lofty promises when launching his PAC, Duty First.

    “With your support, we will: Defeat the socialist Democrats. Help elect Republicans who believe in accountability to the Constitution and service to the people. Stand with the #DutyFirst movement, chip in with a grassroots contribution today,” he said in a tweet announcing the PAC.

    “We’ll ensure that the socialist agenda of the Democrats does not win in November, and the Republicans continue to be held accountable to defending our Constitution and defending our conservative principles. The country’s counting on us,” Brown said in an accompanying video for the PAC’s launch in July 2022.

    Since then, the PAC raised a small amount – just $91,500 – and used the majority of their money – $55,000 – to repay debt from Brown’s failed campaign for Senate, which Brown had transferred over. Campaign finance experts told CNN this falls into a legal gray area.

    Of the $90,000 spent so far, just $6,000 made its way to five Nevadan Republican candidates’ committees. An additional payment for $1,000 was listed as going directly to congressional candidate Mark Robertson as a contribution but lists the amount as being directly paid to the candidate at his home – not to his committee.

    Instead, the Duty First PAC made over a dozen debt payments. A combined $23,000 was spent on website and software services used by Brown’s Senate campaign. Another $11,275 went towards paying down the failed campaign’s credit card, with an additional $3,000 spent on credit card interest fees.

    Duty First paid off over $1,200 in credit card debt accrued at a country club near where Brown previously lived in Dallas, Texas, and ran for the state house in 2014. A spokesman for the Brown campaign said in an email to CNN the “facility fee” charges were for a fundraiser “hosted by supporters of Sam’s campaign.”

    The most recent FEC filing shows Brown is now trying to dispute over $80,000 in remaining debt from the previous campaign, which the spokesman said “will be resolved in due course.” A majority of the disputed debt owed is for direct mail services used by Brown’s previous campaign.

    Duty First PAC is also responsible for eventually repaying Brown $70,000 that he personally loaned his committees.

    The spokesperson for Brown’s campaign defended the PAC’s spending.

    “The PAC promised to support conservative candidates in Nevada, and it did exactly that by donating to every Republican candidate in Nevada’s federal races during the 2022 general election,” they said.

    According to a CNN analysis of Duty First PAC’s FEC filings, of all the money raised, less than 7% went to candidates. When considering Brown’s personal loans, debt the PAC took on from Brown’s campaign, and expenditures, fewer than 2% of the PAC’s funds went towards candidates in 2022

    The money not spent on debt went to a variety of consulting and digital marketing expenses. The PAC spent $1,090 on a storage unit, more than it donated to the winning campaign of Republican Rep. Mark Amodei.

    Despite this, Brown played up his PAC’s donations to candidates in interviews and in posts on social media.

    “I have pledged to help defeat the Democrats in Nevada,” he added in an email, announcing the launch of the PAC.

    The PAC’s donations were from grassroots donors, who typically donated $50 or less.

    Just a day before the 2022 midterm election, Brown announced donations to several candidates running for office in Nevada.

    Records with the FEC show the 2022 donations to House candidates were made on October 31, while the donation to Laxalt’s Senate campaign was made in early September.

    “The Duty First PAC proudly supports conservatives fighting for Nevada,” he said in a tweet after making the donations on November 7, 2022. “This past week, we donated funds to the four Republicans working to take back the House. Join us in supporting them right now!”

    Later, following the 2022 midterms in a late November interview on a local Nevada radio station, Brown played up the PAC’s work and said it would continue to work between election cycles.

    “Duty First is here to kind of work between the cycles, so to speak and help candidates who are running,” Brown said. “In fact this cycle, you know, we had raised money and supported all of our Republican federal candidates, Adam Laxalt, as well as the four Congressionals.”

    “And so, it’s our way of pushing back against the Democrat agenda and their representation,” Brown said. “But, also, it gives Duty First supporters and people that believe in our mission, a sort of platform to remind Republicans what we’re about.”

    Campaign finance experts CNN spoke to said Brown marketing the Duty First PAC as a way for people to financially support conservative candidates was a “creative way” for Brown to pay off old campaign debts behind the scenes.

    “It creates a situation where contributors to a PAC may think that PAC is doing one thing, which is supporting political candidates, when in fact what it’s doing is being used to pay off long standing debts from a previous campaign,” said Stephen Spaulding, vice president of policy at Common Cause and former advisor to an FEC commissioner.

    Since the FEC has not issued an advisory opinion that would “apply to that candidate and any other candidate that has a very similar situation,” Spaulding said transferring debts between campaign committees and PACs is a gray area in campaign finance law. In Brown’s case, his candidate committee was rolled into a PAC, Sam Brown PAC, that was associated with his candidacy, which the campaign finance experts agree is a common maneuver for candidates. But what struck the experts as odd was that Brown terminated the Sam Brown PAC, and transferred his outstanding loans and debts to the Duty First PAC.

    Brown’s 2024 candidate committee, Sam Brown for Nevada, is an entirely new committee with its own FEC filings, despite having the same name as his previous committee. This committee, formed in July 2023, is not affiliated with the Duty First PAC, nor is it obligated to pay off the remaining $271,000 in previous campaign debt and loans.

    “Unfortunately, Sam Brown, like too many other politicians, has given almost no money to other candidates and, instead, has used his PAC as a slush fund,” said Paul S. Ryan, executive director at Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation. “Many donors would understandably be upset if they learned their money wasn’t used to help elect other candidates like Brown – the reason they made their contributions,” he added.

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  • Hunter Biden is a sensitive topic that advisers rarely broach with the president | CNN Politics

    Hunter Biden is a sensitive topic that advisers rarely broach with the president | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Long among the most sensitive subjects inside the West Wing, Hunter Biden’s legal saga now appears destined to play out amid his father’s bid for reelection, frustrating the president but so far causing little real concern among his advisers.

    The probe into Hunter Biden is now one of two special counsel investigations – the other being an inquiry into his father’s handling of classified documents after leaving the Senate and the vice president’s office – that both appear poised to extend for months to come.

    Even some of Biden’s allies acknowledge they threaten to complicate or erode the moral high ground the president asserts as he seeks reelection. Hunter Biden, of course, is not himself running for president and the White House has taken pains to avoid interference in the case – all points of contrast with the president’s most likely Republican rival.

    The cases and consequences are entirely separate for both investigations. Although President Biden is so far not a part of special counsel David Weiss’s investigation into his son, his aides expect that he may be interviewed as part of special counsel Robert Hur’s documents probe.

    Still, both investigations take away the fundamental element of control for a White House heading into an election cycle. As multiple Biden advisers conceded privately this week, special counsels have a history of uncovering information they hadn’t set out initially to discover. The fact that it’s also a delicate family matter, people close to Biden say, is creating a level of personal angst unlike any other challenge for the president.

    David Weiss, left, and Hunter Biden

    ‘This is just a debacle’: Ex-federal prosecutor on length of Hunter Biden investigation

    How and whether those factors play into Biden’s reelection chances remains to be determined. Next to a likely rival who has now been indicted four times, Biden’s predicament is vastly different. Democratic strategists believe swing voters see Hunter Biden as a private citizen and are more concerned about the economy.

    Given the facts currently known, strategists say, these voters don’t believe President Biden has been implicated in any wrongdoing. Yet Biden’s advisers also concede the topic is mostly verboten with the president, raising the prospect of a critical blind spot heading into a bruising campaign where nothing will be off limits with their Republican rivals.

    “Hunter Biden is not a topic of discussion in campaign meetings,” a senior aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the subject. “It’s just not addressed.”

    It was a surprise to the West Wing last week when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he was giving special counsel status to Weiss – originally a Trump appointee – a fact that further underscores the separation between the White House and the Justice Department on the case. The decision was met with a range of responses by Biden’s allies last week, from resignation to frustration.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks at the Department of Justice, Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, in Washington. Garland announced Friday he is appointing a special counsel in the Hunter Biden probe, deepening the investigation of the president's son ahead of the 2024 election. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

    Garland appoints special counsel to Hunter Biden case

    For the president himself, the decision to name a special counsel amounted to another page in a chapter he would like to close. Even as the president and first lady try to move on from a dark period surrounding their son’s addiction, Republicans and now the Justice Department are extending the scrutiny into an indeterminable future.

    Just two weeks ago, the couple had hoped Hunter Biden’s expected plea deal would be a moment to admit mistakes and move on, one person familiar with the president’s thinking had said.

    But that plea deal fell apart and the special counsel appointment moves the legal issues into a new phase, including potentially a trial.

    From the beginning, the Bidens have tried to approach Hunter Biden’s issues through a personal lens, expressing their love and support for their son but otherwise declining to comment on the investigation. They have kept him close amid the legal proceedings with Hunter Biden appearing at family events and White House functions including a lavish state dinner days after his initial plea agreement was announced.

    President Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter Biden upon returning from a trip to Ireland, at Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, on April 14.

    For some close to the president, however, there are now questions over how the matter has continued to persist, despite work toward a plea deal on tax and gun related charges, the resolution of a child support battle and no evidence yet that President Biden himself was implicated in any wrongdoing.

    They pin the blame mainly on Republicans, whom the White House blasted this week for waging years-long investigations into the president that haven’t produced evidence showing President Biden engaged in wrongdoing.

    “If you think about what Republicans in Congress have tried to do for years, they have been making claims and allegations about the president on this front over and over again. And month after month, year after year, they have been investigating every single angle of this and looking for any evidence to back their allegations,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week. “And what’s been the result of that, if you ask yourself what we have seen from that? They keep turning up documents and witnesses showing that the president wasn’t involved.”

    Beneath the surface, however, private questions are now brewing among some Democrats about the abilities of Hunter Biden’s legal team and the wisdom of his visible presence around his father.

    On Tuesday, Hunter Biden’s lead criminal defense attorney asked a federal judge on Tuesday for permission to withdraw from the case because he could now be called as a witness in future proceedings. To some Biden advisers, the surprise collapse of a plea deal only exacerbated existing concerns about Hunter’s legal team.

    “I’m sure this didn’t land all that well over in the White House because I think they’d love this Hunter Biden case to be behind them. The Republicans are sort of pointing to it for purposes of what-about-ism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser in the Obama White House and CNN senior political commentator, who said Republicans were eager to make false comparisons – essentially saying, “what about” Hunter’s legal issues?

    “They need to have a countervailing argument and their countervailing argument is, ‘Oh two standards of justice, they’re not indicting Hunter Biden,’” he said. “And they’re beating that horse to death, even though they’ve failed to make the connection between Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in the way that they allege. So I think that anything that extends the Hunter Biden case into the election year is not welcome news for Joe Biden.”

    Hunter Biden walks to a waiting SUV after arriving with US President Joe Biden on Marine One at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, on July 4, as they return to Washington after spending the weekend at Camp David.

    CNN reporter details why Hunter Biden’s top lawyer asked to withdraw from case

    Indeed, the actions of Hunter Biden are now becoming a central discussion point for Republicans in Congress and presidential candidates, who frequently point to the president’s son in their argument of a false equivalency in the Justice Department.

    Republicans have criticized the now defunct plea agreement between Hunter Biden and federal prosecutors as a “sweetheart deal,” and they scoffed when Weiss was appointed as special counsel, despite many previously supporting the appointment of a special counsel.

    Some of the president’s potential Republican rivals also blasted the special counsel decision. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argued Hunter Biden would receive “soft glove treatment.” A spokesperson for former President Donald Trump argued the Biden family has “been protected by the Justice Department for decades” – even though Trump appointed Weiss to his position and Biden kept him in the post upon taking office.

    Hunter Biden at a ceremony at the White House in Washington, July 7, 2022.

    The matter is likely to arise at the first Republican presidential debate next week in Milwaukee. The Democratic National Committee is not preparing specific responses to any criticism leveled against Hunter Biden at the Republican presidential debate but will be ready to respond as needed, a party official says.

    In 2020, plans were similarly laid ahead of general election debates with Trump, who seized on Hunter Biden as an attack line. Biden’s defense of his son and his pride in his sobriety proved one of the most memorable moments of that year’s debate circuit.

    First lady Dr. Jill Biden had previously told CNN that the investigations into their son Hunter did not impact the president’s decision to seek reelection this year.

    Some Democrats view the development as an opportunity to demonstrate the party’s view of a fair judicial system – a contrast to many Republicans who have cried foul at the multiple indictments of Trump.

    “If Hunter has done something beyond the tax issue and beyond the gun issue that deserves to be investigated, then that should happen. No one is above the law,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat. “That’s why you’re not hearing Democrats say that, you know, this is the weaponization of the Justice Department. No. We’re being consistent. When we say no one’s above the law when it comes to Donald Trump, we mean it even if it’s one of our own.”

    This story has been updated to clarify that the DNC may respond to criticism leveled against Hunter Biden but has not prepared any specific responses.

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  • North Carolina governor vetoes election overhaul bill | CNN Politics

    North Carolina governor vetoes election overhaul bill | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Thursday vetoed an election overhaul bill passed by the Republican-controlled legislature last week.

    The Democratic governor called the legislation dangerous.

    “Right now, legislative Republicans in North Carolina are pushing an all-out assault on the right to vote, using the advice of Trump’s hand-picked election denier, Cleta Mitchell, who was on the call trying to help him overturn the election in Georgia,” Cooper said at the start of a video posted on his official social media accounts announcing his veto. “This attack has nothing to do with election security, and everything to do with keeping and gaining power.”

    Senate Bill 747 would overhaul the existing election laws of the Tar Heel State, adding new restrictions and deadlines and further empowering partisan poll watchers, among other changes. The measure would also change current same-day registration rules during the early voting period. Under the new legislation, same-day registrants would have to use a “retrievable ballot” that can be discarded if the county board of elections cannot verify their address.

    Cooper also promised to veto another election-related bill still working through the legislature, Senate Bill 749, if it eventually makes it to his desk.

    Republicans have a supermajority in both the state House and Senate and have successfully overridden more than a dozen vetoes by Cooper this session. In addition to holding a veto-proof majority in the legislature, Republicans now also hold a majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court, raising the prospect that they could prevail in any court fights over the election overhaul measure.

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  • ‘Crooked Coffee’: The alleged election office breach in the Trump indictment was part of a years-long pattern, some locals say | CNN Politics

    ‘Crooked Coffee’: The alleged election office breach in the Trump indictment was part of a years-long pattern, some locals say | CNN Politics

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    Douglas, Georgia
    CNN
     — 

    The breach of the Coffee County elections office can seem almost out of place in the 97-page Georgia indictment of former President Donald Trump and associates.

    The sprawling racketeering allegations spread from centers of power with pressure on the vice president to ignore the Constitution, reported calls to secretaries of state to change vote counts, and the creation of slates of fake electors for Congress. They also include the invitation of a tech team to a non-public area of a small-town administration building.

    But to some people in Coffee County, deep in southern Georgia and far from interstates, the alleged crimes were merely the latest chapter in a local history of failing to secure the rights and votes of residents. And they worry it’s a history that will repeat.

    Among the 19 mugshots that flowed from the charges brought 200 miles north in Atlanta were faces that were familiar in Douglas, the seat of Coffee County.

    Prosecutors allege that former county Republican Party chair Cathy Latham and former elections supervisor Misty Hampton helped to facilitate employees from a firm hired by Trump attorneys to access and copy sensitive voter data and election software. Surveillance video captured Latham waving the visitors inside, and Hampton in the office as they allegedly accessed the data. Both have pleaded not guilty.

    Mike Clark, owner of some small businesses in Douglas, said he was struck by the way the surveillance footage showed the election officials entering the building in broad daylight. “You walk inside the voter registration office with no mask on, and they just give you the votes. They just give them to you! Why? Why would that be?” Clark said. “That shows you right there it ain’t just started. It’s always been just like that.”

    Coffee County businessowner Mike Clark said the ground was laid for the alleged election breach long ago.

    Douglas City Commissioner Kentaiwon Durham agreed. “That’s what power and privilege do. It makes you feel as if you can do anything you want to do,” he said. “They thought they were above the law and above the Constitution.” Durham, who like Clark is Black, thought it would be “a whole different ballgame” if it were his face in the surveillance footage.

    Douglas is a majority Black city, and the surrounding Coffee County is about 68% White and 29% Black. Like many places in the South, Black citizens have had to fight for democratic rights in court – repeatedly suing for representative districts for the election of local officials since the 1970s. In the late summer, it’s unbearably hot – so hot that if you sit outside too long people ask if you’re crazy. If you have a latent southern accent, the town will draw it out.

    When CNN asked local people how to put the alleged election office breach in the broader context of voting rights in the county, nearly everyone suggested we speak to “Miss Livvy.” Olivia Coley-Pearson is a Douglas city commissioner, the first Black woman elected to the position. She’s a tall woman who wore a Barbie-pink blazer when we met, and like many others CNN spoke with in Coffee County, she saw the involvement of her county in the alleged Trump scheme as part of a long local pattern of voter suppression and intimidation.

    “There’s power – a certain amount of power and control when you’re in certain offices,” Coley-Pearson told CNN. “Some people will do whatever it takes to maintain it. … And if it takes voter intimidation to do it, some people willing to intimidate to maintain that power and control.”

    Olivia Coley-Pearson was arrested, charged and acquitted of a crime for accompanying a voter who legally asked for assistance.

    Coley-Pearson, named a “human rights hero” by the American Bar Association, follows in the footsteps of her mother, who was a political activist in Coffee County in the 1970s, the decade after segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox had picked the county to host many of his speeches. Gladys Coley is commemorated with others in a memorial plaque for fighting for civil rights in Douglas and across the county.

    Coley-Pearson is well-known for helping people who may need a ride to the polls. Not everyone around town appreciates her efforts, however. In a Facebook Live video posted a couple days before the alleged breach, Latham complained about Coley-Pearson’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Georgia’s runoff elections to the US Senate.

    “Olivia Pearson’s up to her normal – handing out hamburgers and hot dogs … to people who voted and stuff,” Latham said, running her fingers through her cropped blonde hair in apparent exasperation. “So, all kinds of things happening in Coffee County just to get people to come vote. Yeah, it’s not a really good situation down here.”

    Former county GOP chair Cathy Latham, pictured in her booking photo, escorted visitors to the election office days after urging people to

    Latham urged her viewers to vote. “We got to out-vote the fraud,” she said. She has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

    Coley-Pearson had tangled with local officials over voter access several times. Georgia law allows people who are disabled or illiterate to get assistance in voting, and Coley-Pearson helped with that in the 2012 election. At the time, it seemed uneventful.

    But Coffee County officials complained to the Georgia secretary of state’s office that she helped people who didn’t qualify for assistance. It led to a years-long investigation, and though the state didn’t prosecute her, she was charged locally with two felonies. After one trial ended in a hung jury, she was found not guilty in the second in 2018.

    The city of Douglas is majority Black and the surrounding Coffee County is majority White.

    Then, during early voting in October 2020, Coley-Pearson asked a question about the buttons on a voting machine, sparking a confrontation with then-election supervisor Misty Hampton. Coley-Pearson says Hampton was “hollering” that she must not touch the machine. Hampton, who is White, has said in a deposition that she spoke in a “normal voice” and told Coley-Pearson she was being “disruptive.” The voter Coley-Pearson assisted said in a deposition she felt afraid of Hampton.

    Coley-Pearson left the polling place to pick up another voter, Rolanda Williams. In the meantime, Hampton called the police. “She’s out here touching my darn machines,” Hampton told the police, as recorded in a police video. At one point, after saying Coley-Pearson had improperly touched the ballot, Hampton said, “I don’t care what I got to file, what I got to do, she is not to come back to my office. If I have to say I feel threatened I don’t care. Because I do!” Hampton has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

    When Coley-Pearson returned to the polling place with Williams and stepped out of the car, she was met by police officers. They said she was banned from the property for yelling, she remembers. “I guess they didn’t like me asking why, and I got arrested. I was put in handcuffs,” Coley-Pearson said, beginning to cry at the memory.

    “She was telling the cop that the handcuffs were too tight. And to me, he was trying to get them tighter,” Williams, the voter Coley-Pearson was driving, told CNN. When Williams went inside the polling place, she said Hampton began asking her questions. “She was asking me where I work – which, I felt was none of her business. … She actually pulled up a Facebook page of mine. And I felt like I was into some type of trouble or something.”

    “I was scared and fearful,” Williams said. “I didn’t want to go back up there to vote. And I won’t go back and vote, because of everything that’s going on. I didn’t understand why they call this ‘Crooked Coffee.’ But now I understand.”

    Coley-Pearson is now suing the city and election officials over her treatment. The city says it did not violate her constitutional rights.

    Disappointment and fear

    Many locals said the town was divided, though not neatly along racial lines. Jim Hudson, a White man with white hair and a neatly tucked-in button-down shirt, has been pushing local officials to appoint an independent counsel to investigate what happened around the apparent breach and advise how to make sure it never happens again.

    A retired lawyer, Hudson said he was “shocked … and very disappointed, and hurt” when he started researching what happened. His investigation had gone deep, reading transcripts of depositions in a related court case and analyzing the surveillance video from the election office. “I still feel that way, because of the failure of the commissioners as well as the board of elections to take action.”

    Hudson was distressed by the sense he hadn’t known the county as well as he’d thought. “It’s my home,” he said. “I’ve been here many years. I’m going to die here. And I want a place that we can all be proud of.”

    Hampton resigned in February 2021 as election supervisor over falsifying timesheets.

    New election supervisor Christy Nipper said residents had come to her office asking if their votes would be counted.

    Christy Nipper, the new election supervisor, said, referring to the breach, “There’s not a lot of people anywhere in the county that I’m aware of that have spoken a lot about it.” She said she felt a responsibility to do so. “Obviously, I feel like the public needs reassurance, and it’s going to be hard to move past this if we don’t give them that. I feel like they deserve it,” Nipper said. She said she tried to do so when citizens came into her office asking if their votes would be counted. The breach had not changed the vote totals, she said, and she would not let anyone into the secure election data area.

    CNN often encounters people who have smart things to say but are scared to speak publicly, fearing a social media pile-on from strangers. But in Douglas, people feared backlash from people they know in town. Mickeayla Clark, head of the Coffee County Democrats, said some were afraid they’d risk their livelihoods if they spoke out.

    A woman at a bar asked CNN to follow her outside for a smoke. She said she was afraid she wouldn’t be welcome back if she talked, but she did anyway. She said she was for Trump all the way – she voted for him in 2020 and would do it again – but, speaking of the alleged breach, she said, “That election sh*t wasn’t right. They shouldn’t have done that.”

    Tommy Crozier and Zip Grantham, right, argued the end of official segregation showed racial discrimination was also gone from Coffee County.

    The bar crowd tipped CNN off to a group of older White men known for holding court over breakfast every morning at the restaurant Hog-N-Bones. After debating with CNN the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, Zip Grantham and Tommy Crozier agreed to an interview. They said they didn’t think there was racial discrimination in the county anymore – Black people, they said, could serve in the military and learn at the same schools. The men said they’d vote for Trump in the 2024 election if he was the Republican nominee, but maybe not in the primary.

    “Do I like Trump? I wouldn’t want him sitting at the table with me this morning talking,” Grantham said. “But yeah, I think he had good values.”

    Still, he said of the former president, “maybe he should be held responsible.”

    And with the spotlight on Coffee County, city commissioner Durham said he welcomed a reckoning.

    Of Latham, Hampton and the others indicted, he quoted his grandma: “You make the bed up, you gotta lay in it.”

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  • Judge rejects Mark Meadows’ bid to move Georgia election interference case to federal court | CNN Politics

    Judge rejects Mark Meadows’ bid to move Georgia election interference case to federal court | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge on Friday rejected former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ bid to move his Georgia criminal case to federal court, a significant setback for Meadows and a troubling sign for former President Donald Trump.

    US District Judge Steve Jones found that the allegations against Meadows contained in the Fulton County district attorney’s indictment on election subversion charges were largely “related to political activities” and not to Meadows’ role as White House chief of staff.

    “The evidence before the Court overwhelmingly suggests that Meadows was not acting in his scope of executive branch duties during most of the Overt Acts alleged,” wrote Jones, a Barack Obama appointee.

    The Friday ruling has significant implications for the former president and his 18 co-defendants in the Fulton County district attorney’s sprawling racketeering case, though the judge said the ruling did not apply to the other defendants. Meadows was the first of five defendants who already filed motions to move the case to federal court – and Trump is expected to do so, too.

    Meadows unsuccessfully argued that his case, now playing out in Georgia state court, should be moved because the allegations in the indictment were connected to his official duties as White House chief of staff. His lawyers wanted the case in federal court so they could try to get it dismissed altogether, invoking federal immunity extended to certain individuals who are prosecuted or sued for conduct tied to their US government roles.

    The judge’s decision could set the tone for the other defendants also trying to move their cases. It’s an ominous sign for the defendants who are hoping to invoke the same federal immunity protections.

    The judge explicitly stated in his ruling that he is not offering any opinion about Fulton County’s underlying criminal case against Meadows, who has pleaded not guilty.

    Jones wrote in the decision that Meadows had not met even the “‘quite low’ threshold for removal” to federal court, because his activities for the Trump campaign were outside the scope of his federal role as White House chief of staff.

    “The Court finds that the color of the Office of the White House Chief of Staff did not include working with or working for the Trump campaign, except for simply coordinating the President’s schedule, traveling with the President to his campaign events, and redirecting communications to the campaign,” Jones wrote. “Thus, consistent with his testimony and the federal statutes and regulations, engaging in political activities is exceeds the outer limits of the Office of the White House Chief of Staff.”

    The Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in political activity as part of their official duties, was “helpful in defining the outer limits of the scope the White House Chief of Staff’s authority,” the judge said.

    “These prohibitions on executive branch employees (including the White House Chief of Staff) reinforce the Court’s conclusion that Meadows has not shown how his actions relate to the scope of his federal executive branch office. Federal officer removal is thereby inapposite,” the judge wrote in the decision.

    Meadows on Friday swiftly appealed the ruling to the US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    The indictment identifies eight overt acts Meadows allegedly took in furtherance of the scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. Meadows argued that these actions were part of his federal duties – and thus, the case should be moved to federal court – but Jones disagreed.

    “The Court finds insufficient evidence to establish that the gravamen, or a heavy majority of overt acts alleged against Meadows relate to his role as White House Chief of Staff,” Jones wrote, adding that “Meadows failed to provide sufficient evidence that these actions related to any legitimate purpose of the executive branch.”

    One of Meadows’ most critical actions was his participation in Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in early January 2021, when Trump infamously prodded Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for him to overcome Joe Biden’s margin of victory.

    Jones ruled that this phone call “was made regarding private litigation brought by President and his campaign” and was “therefore outside Meadows’ federal role as an executive branch officer.”

    Meadows other actions in late 2020, including contacts with state lawmakers that Trump hoped would help him undermine the election results, also weren’t tied to his government role, Jones concluded.

    “The Court finds that the underlying substance of those meetings and calls were related to political activities and not to the scope of Meadows’s federal office,” the judge wrote.

    The ruling is also a personal blow to Meadows, who took a significant risk by testifying about the removal bid at a recent hearing, where he was questioned under oath by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ team. Prosecutors could potentially use his testimony against him in future proceedings.

    After the charges against Trump and his 18 co-defendants were filed, the former president’s lawyers signaled they intended to try to move Trump’s case to federal court, just as Trump had unsuccessfully sought to do in his New York criminal case. Trump’s lawyers told the judge overseeing the state case on Thursday that he may seek to move the case to federal court, but they haven’t filed the legal motions yet.

    Trump has 30 days from the time he entered his not-guilty plea to file to move his case.

    CNN has reached out to lawyers for Meadows and Trump for comment.

    In addition to Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, the former Trump administration DOJ official, and three Georgia GOP officials who served as Trump’s fake electors have also filed to move their cases to federal court. Former Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer and former GOP Coffee County Chairwoman Cathy Latham have a joint hearing scheduled on September 20, while the third fake elector seeking federal removal – Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator – has a hearing on September 18.

    While Meadows’ motion was rejected, Shafer, Still and Latham have made a slightly different argument: They say they acted as fake electors at Trump’s direction. But unlike Meadows, who worked in the White House in 2020, the fake electors have a more tenuous link to the federal government, as nominees to serve as real electors for Trump if he won Georgia, who would’ve participated in the federally mandated Electoral College process.

    In his decision Friday, Jones noted that his ruling regarding Meadows “does not, at this time, have any effect on” the other defendants who are also trying to move their case to federal court. Those motions are still pending before Jones, and evidentiary hearings are scheduled for later this month.

    “The Court will assess these Defendants’ arguments and evidence following the forthcoming hearings…. independent of its conclusion” in the Meadows case, Jones wrote.

    There are several reasons why it would be advantageous for Meadows and the other defendants to move their cases to federal court. In addition to making immunity claims under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, a federal trial would likely have a jury pool more sympathetic to Trump and his co-defendants.

    While the state courthouse for this case is based in deep-blue Fulton County, the federal court district that includes Fulton also contains the more-Republican northern part of the state.

    At his hearing last month, Meadows surprisingly took the stand trying to help move his case to federal court, testifying for more than three hours about what happened in the White House after the 2020 election.

    Meadows tried to argue that all of his work as the president’s top adviser fit into his role as chief of staff – even when it spilled into politics.

    “It’s still part of my job to make sure that the president is safe and secure and able to perform his job. And that’s what I was doing,” Meadows said, later adding, “serving the president of the United States and … it takes on all kinds of forms.”

    But the Fulton County prosecutors peppered Meadows with questions about how his official job involved things like setting up phone calls involving campaign lawyers, such as Trump’s infamous January 2021 phone call Raffensperger.

    Jones concluded that some of Meadows’ high-stakes testimony on the witness stand was lacking – and even used some of it against him in the ruling.

    “When questioned about the scope of his authority, Meadows was unable to explain the limits of his authority, other than his inability to stump for the President or work on behalf of the campaign,” Jones wrote, saying he would give Meadows’ testimony on that topic “less weight” than the other evidence.

    Jones also cited Meadows’ acknowledgment that the lawyers he included in the phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state were working for Trump or his campaign – not the government.

    Fulton County prosecutors also subpoenaed Raffensperger to testify at Meadows’ hearing, where Raffensperger said plainly there was no role for the federal government in certifying Georgia’s elections.

    “It was a campaign call,” Raffensperger testified.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Conservative justices suggest South Carolina GOP gerrymandering was based on politics, not race | CNN Politics

    Conservative justices suggest South Carolina GOP gerrymandering was based on politics, not race | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court’s conservatives expressed doubt at oral arguments Wednesday that South Carolina GOP lawmakers engaged in impermissible racial gerrymandering when they redrew congressional lines for a House seat to benefit Republicans.

    The case is one of several racial and political gerrymandering-related lawsuits that could impact which party controls the House after next year’s congressional elections.

    The district at issue was reworked in 2020 to benefit the GOP and current incumbent, Rep. Nancy Mace – one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker last week.

    The South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and a Black voter named Taiwan Scott say the use of race dominated the decision-making process and that the state worked to intentionally dilute the power of Black voters. A federal court agreed, referring to the revised map as “bleaching.”

    Several of the conservative justices on Wednesday suggested that map drawers had taken politics into consideration, not race.

    Chief Justice John Roberts said those challenging the map had “no direct” evidence that race had predominated in the decisionmaking process. He said that there were no “odd-shaped” districts drawn and that there existed a “wealth of political data” that would justify the chosen boundaries. He said the challengers had only presented “circumstantial evidence” and suggested the court would be “breaking new ground” in its voting jurisprudence if it were to side with them.

    Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly suggested that a lower court had made serious legal error in invalidating the map by relying upon erroneous expert testimony. He said the Supreme Court could not “rubber-stamp” the district court’s finding and he noted that the individual charged with drawing the maps had years of experience and had worked for both Democrats and Republicans.

    Alito contended that there was “nothing suspicious” if a map drawer is aware of race as long as it is not a predominant factor when drawing lines.

    Justice Neil Gorsuch said there was “no evidence ” that the legislature could have achieved its “partisan tile in any other way.”

    For their part, the liberals on the court suggested that the Republican-controlled South Carolina Legislature adopted the maps by considering race as a predominant factor, in violation of the equal protection clause of the US Constitution.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that Republicans were launching “pot shots” at the experts who claimed the maps could only be explained by race. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the challengers are not required to produce a “smoking gun” to prove their point.

    The dispute comes as the justices this year ordered Alabama to redraw its congressional map to account for the states’ 27% Black voting population. That decision, penned by Roberts, came as a welcome relief to liberals who feared that the court was poised to make it harder for minorities to challenge maps under Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act. A federal court approved a new map last week that significantly boosts the Black population in a second district, which could lead to the pickup of a Democratic seat next year.

    The South Carolina case raises different questions rooted in the Constitution concerning when a state crosses the line between permissible partisan goals and illegal racial discrimination.

    The state chapter of the NAACP and Scott are challenging the state’s 1st Congressional District, located along the southeastern coast and anchored in Charleston County. Although the district consistently elected Republicans from 1980 to 2016, in 2018 a Democrat was elected in a political upset.

    Two years later a Republican candidate, Mace, regained the seat in a close race. When the state House and Senate began considering congressional reapportionment in 2021, the Republican majorities sought to create a stronger GOP tilt in the district, one of seven in the state. A new map could make the seat more competitive.

    After an eight-day trial featuring 42 witnesses and 652 exhibits, a three-judge district court panel in January held that District 1 amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because race was the predominant factor in the district’s reapportionment plan.

    “To achieve a target of 17% African American population,” the court said, “Charleston County was racially gerrymandered and over 30,000 African Americans were removed from their home district.” The court referred at one point to the “bleaching” of Black voters out of the Charleston County portion of the district.

    “State legislators are free to consider a broad array of factors in the design of a legislative district, including partisanship, but they may not use race as a predominant factor and may not use partisanship as a proxy for race,” the court concluded.

    South Carolina Republicans, led by state Senate President Thomas Alexander, appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the maps had not been drawn impermissibly based on race, but instead with politics in mind.

    The person who devised the map testified in federal court that he was instructed to make the district “more Republican leaning,” but that he did not consider race while drawing the lines. He did, however, acknowledge that he examined racial data after drafting each version and that the Black voting-age population of the district was viewed during the drafting process.

    “If left uncorrected, the panel’s holding would place States in an impossible bind by exposing them to potential racial gerrymandering liability whenever they decline to make majority-white, modestly-majority Republican districts majority-Democratic,” argued John Gore, a lawyer for the Republicans.

    Mace filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the high court in support of the Republicans, charging that the lower court “ignored one of the most important traditional districting principles – the preservation of the core of existing districts.”

    Joined by other GOP members of Congress from South Carolina, Mace argued that constituent services, voter education and the seniority of long-serving members of the House are “vital interests” and that the lower court was “bent on destroying the legislatures’ duly enacted and carefully negotiated map.”

    Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund told the justices in court papers that the state impermissibly used race as a predominant factor when drawing the district.

    “Using race as the predominant means to sort voters is unconstitutional even if done for partisan goals,” they argued.

    They said the lower court made clear that the state “intentionally exiled more than 30,000 Black Charlestonians from CD1 predominately because of their race.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Judge Chutkan temporarily freezes Trump gag order in 2020 election subversion case | CNN Politics

    Judge Chutkan temporarily freezes Trump gag order in 2020 election subversion case | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    US District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Friday temporarily froze the gag order she issued on Donald Trump in the former president’s federal 2020 election subversion criminal case.

    In a brief order, Chutkan, who is overseeing the case against Trump in Washington, DC, said she was issuing the administrative stay of the gag order entered earlier this week to give the parties more time to brief her on the former president’s request to pause the order while his appeal of it plays out.

    Chutkan also said that the Justice Department has until Wednesday to respond to Trump’s request for a longer pause on the gag order and that Trump would have until the following Saturday to reply to the government’s filing.

    Trump has already appealed the gag order to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and in a 33-page filing on Friday, his attorneys urged Chutkan to pause the order while that appeal plays out.

    The pause comes days after Chutkan presided over a contentious hearing where Trump’s attorneys and federal prosecutors clashed over how Trump would be able to discuss special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution against him on the campaign trail.

    “I understand that you have a message you want to get out,” Chutkan said at the time. “I do not need to hear any campaign rhetoric in my court.”

    The gag order, which was limited in scope, had prohibited Trump from making certain types of statements about the special counsel’s team or potential witnesses, including any comments that directly targeted court personnel, potential witnesses or the special counsel and his staff.

    However, the gag order did not prevent Trump from making disparaging comments about Washington, DC, where the trial is slated to take place next year. Trump was allowed to make certain comments about the Justice Department at large. Chutkan had specified that Trump “can certainly state that he is being unfairly prosecuted.”

    Meanwhile on Friday, the former president was fined $5,000 by a New York judge presiding over his civil fraud trial for violating another gag order that bars him from speaking about any members of the court staff.

    Judge Arthur Engoron had issued the order in that case earlier this month after Trump posted about the judge’s clerk on Truth Social.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • John Boehner Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    John Boehner Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    Here is a look at the life of John Boehner, former speaker of the US House of Representatives.

    Birth date: November 17, 1949

    Birth place: Cincinnati, Ohio

    Birth name: John Andrew Boehner

    Father: Earl Henry Boehner, bar owner

    Mother: Mary Ann (Hall) Boehner

    Marriage: Debbie (Gunlack) Boehner (1973-present)

    Children: Lindsay and Tricia

    Education: Xavier University, 1977, B.A. in Business

    Military: US Navy, honorably discharged for medical reasons, 1969

    Religion: Roman Catholic

    One of 12 children, he worked his way through college as a janitor. He met his wife, Debbie, during this time.

    Avid golfer.

    1982 – Starts his political career as a township trustee in Union, Ohio.

    1984–1990 – Member of the Ohio House of Representatives.

    1990 – Defeats Gregory Jolivette (D) with 61% of the vote for the US House of Representatives seat.

    January 3, 1991-October 31, 2015 – US Representative (Republican from Ohio’s 8th District).

    1992 – Defeats Fred Sennett (D) and wins reelection to the US House of Representatives with 71% of the vote.

    1994 – Runs unopposed and wins reelection to the House.

    1996 – Runs against Jeffrey Kitchen (D) and wins reelection to the House with 70% of the vote.

    1998 – Defeats John Griffin (D) and wins reelection to the House with 71% of the vote.

    1998 – Files a federal lawsuit against Jim McDermott (D-Washington) for releasing a 1996 illegally taped telephone conversation to the press. According to court transcripts, the recording contained Republican leaders, including Boehner, discussing an ethics case against Newt Gingrich.

    2002 and 2004 – Runs against Jeff Hardenbrook (D), winning reelection to the House in both elections.

    2006 – Wins reelection to the House against Mort Meier (D).

    February 2006 – Is elected House Majority Leader, replacing Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

    January 2007–January 2011 – House Minority Leader.

    2008 – A US District Court judge rules that Rep. McDermott (D-Washington) owes Boehner more than $1 million in legal fees in their fight over an illegally taped phone call McDermott leaked to the media.

    2008 – Defeats Nick Von Stein (D) and wins reelection to the House with 68% of the vote.

    2010 – Defeats Justin Coussoule (D) and wins reelection to the House with 66% of the vote.

    November 17, 2010 – Republicans unanimously pick Boehner to be speaker of the House.

    January 5, 2011 – Takes over as speaker of the House from Nancy Pelosi (D-California).

    November 6, 2012 – Wins unopposed reelection to the House.

    January 3, 2013 – Is reelected speaker of the House.

    November 4, 2014 – Runs against Tom Poetter (D); wins with 67% of the vote.

    January 6, 2015 – Boehner is elected to a third term as speaker of the House after a tense floor vote that saw a remarkably large chunk of his own party attempt to remove him.

    September 24, 2015 – After accepting a formal invitation from Boehner, Pope Francis speaks to a joint meeting of Congress.

    September 25, 2015 – Boehner announces to House Republicans that he is resigning at the end of October.

    October 29, 2015 – Boehner gives his farewell remarks on the floor of the US House of Representatives.

    September 15, 2016 – It is announced that Boehner has joined the tobacco company Reynolds American as a director.

    September 20, 2016 – Announces he is joining the lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs as an adviser.

    April 11, 2018 – Announces he is joining the board of cannabis company Acreage Holdings.

    February 8, 2019 – Helps launch the National Cannabis Roundtable advocacy group, as its honorary chairman.

    November 19, 2019 – Boehner’s official portrait is unveiled during a ceremony at the US Capitol.

    April 13, 2021 – Boehner’s book, “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” is published.

    April 12, 2022 – The 10 Campaign, LLC, files a breach of contact lawsuit against Boehner and Squire Patton Boggs, alleging Boehner reneged on his agreement to become the marijuana legalization lobbying firm’s chairman, and took their proprietary information before he joined another group in 2019.

    December 14, 2022 – Tears up while praising House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the official unveiling of her portrait at the US Capitol.

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  • Jeff Sessions Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Jeff Sessions Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Jeff Sessions, former US attorney general and former Republican senator of Alabama.

    Birth date: December 24, 1946

    Birth place: Selma, Alabama

    Birth name: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III

    Father: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Jr., business owner

    Mother: Abbie (Powe) Sessions

    Marriage: Mary Blackshear Sessions (1969-present)

    Children: Mary Abigail, Ruth and Samuel

    Education: Huntingdon College, B.A., 1969; University of Alabama, J.D., 1973

    Military service: US Army Reserve, 1973-1986, Captain

    Religion: Methodist

    Is an Eagle Scout.

    Served on the Senate Budget, Judiciary, Armed Services, and Environment and Public Works Committees.

    Voted against both of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

    Supported building fencing along the US border, saying in 2006 that “good fences make good neighbors.”

    Was an opponent of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill.

    1973-1975 – Practices law in Alabama.

    1975-1977 – Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.

    1981-1993 – US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.

    1986 – President Ronald Reagan nominates Sessions to become a federal judge. The Senate Judiciary Committee opposes the nomination following testimony that Sessions made racist remarks and called the NAACP and ACLU “un-American.”

    1995-1997- Alabama Attorney General. During this time, an Alabama judge accuses Sessions of prosecutorial misconduct related to the handling of evidence in a case but ultimately, Sessions is not disciplined for ethics violations.

    1996 – Elected to the US Senate. Reelected in 2002, 2008 and 2014.

    1997–February 2017 – Republican senator representing Alabama.

    February 2, 2009 – Votes in favor of the confirmation of Eric Holder as attorney general.

    April 23, 2015 – Votes against the confirmation of Loretta Lynch as attorney general.

    February 28, 2016 – Becomes the first sitting US senator to endorse Donald Trump’s presidential bid.

    November 18, 2016 – President-elect Trump announces he intends to nominate Sessions to be the next attorney general.

    January 3, 2017 – An NAACP sit-in to protest the nomination of Sessions as US attorney general ends when six people are arrested at Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama, office.

    February 8, 2017 – After 30 hours of debate, the US Senate confirms Sessions as attorney general by a 52-47 vote.

    March 1, 2017 – The Washington Post reports that Sessions failed to disclose pre-election meetings with the top Russian diplomat in Washington. Sessions did not mention either meeting during his confirmation hearings when he said he knew of no contacts between Trump surrogates and Russians.

    March 2, 2017 – Sessions recuses himself from any involvement in a Justice Department probe into links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

    March 10, 2017 – The DOJ abruptly announces the firing of 46 US attorneys, including Preet Bharara of New York. Bharara said that during the transition, Trump asked him to stay on during a meeting at Trump Tower.

    April 3, 2017 – The Department of Justice releases a memorandum ordering a review of consent decrees and other police reforms overseen by the federal government in response to complaints of civil rights abuses and public safety issues. During his confirmation hearing, Sessions expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of Justice Department interventions in local police matters.

    July 21, 2017 – The Washington Post reports that Sessions discussed policy-related matters with Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak before the 2016 election, according to intelligence intercepts. Sessions had previously claimed that he did not talk about the campaign or relations with Russia during his meetings with Kislyak.

    October 4, 2017 – In a memo to all federal prosecutors, Sessions says that a 1964 federal civil rights law does not protect transgender workers from employment discrimination and the department will take this new position in all “pending and future matters.”

    November 14, 2017 – During a House judiciary committee hearing, Sessions says he did not lie under oath in earlier hearings regarding communications with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, and denies participating in any collusion with Russia. Sessions also says the DOJ will consider investigations into Hillary Clinton and alleged ties between the Clinton Foundation and the sale of Uranium One.

    January 4, 2018 – Sessions announces that the DOJ is rescinding an Obama-era policy of non-interference with states that have legalized recreational marijuana. The reversal frees up federal prosecutors to pursue cases in states where recreational marijuana is legal.

    March 21, 2018 – Sessions issues a statement encouraging federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for certain drug-related crimes, as mandated by law. Seeking capital punishment in drug cases is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to combat opioid abuse.

    May 7, 2018 – Sessions announces a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings, warning that parents could be separated from children if they try to cross to the United States from Mexico. “If you cross the border unlawfully, even a first offense, we’re going to prosecute you. If you’re smuggling a child, we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.” On June 20, Trump signs an executive order that will keep far more families together at the border.

    May 30, 2018 – Trump again expresses regret for choosing Sessions to lead the Justice Department. In a tweet, he quotes a remark from Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) who said that the president could have picked someone else as attorney general. “I wish I did!,” Trump tweets. He had first said that he was rethinking his choice of Sessions as attorney general during a July 2017 interview with the New York Times.

    June 2018 – More than 600 members of the United Methodist Church issue a formal complaint against Sessions, arguing that the US government’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration, which was separating migrant parents from their children at the US-Mexico border, violates church rules and may constitute child abuse. On August 8, church officials confirm that the charges filed against Sessions have been dropped.

    August 23, 2018 – In response to Trump saying during a Fox News interview that Sessions “never took control” of the Justice Department, Sessions issues a rare statement, saying, “I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in…While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations…”

    November 7, 2018 – President Trump asks Sessions to resign, effectively firing him. “At your request I am submitting my resignation,” Sessions writes in a letter delivered to White House chief of staff John Kelly.

    November 7, 2019 – Announces he is running for his former Alabama Senate seat.

    July 14, 2020 – Sessions loses the Alabama Senate GOP primary runoff to former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville.

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  • What happened this week and what’s next in Trump legal world | CNN Politics

    What happened this week and what’s next in Trump legal world | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s legal schedule is getting fuller by the day as the political season heats up, with the former president facing multiple criminal charges with more possibly on the way.

    This week, Trump was indicted on charges of leading a conspiracy to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat and had to travel to Washington, DC, to plead not guilty in federal court.

    Now comes a flurry of legal filings and the possibility of yet another indictment, this time in Georgia, where a grand jury is looking at efforts to flip his defeat in the Peach State.

    READ: Tracking the criminal indictments in one place

    Here’s what happened this week and what’s next:

    Special counsel Jack Smith dropped the hammer against Trump on Tuesday, charging the former president with conspiracy and attempting to obstruct Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory. That effort ultimately led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

    “(F)or more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won,” the indictment states.

    “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false,” it adds, referring to Trump. “But the defendant disseminated them anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

    READ: CNN’s annotation of the indictment

    Trump took the short trip from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club to appear in federal court on Thursday to enter a not guilty plea to all charges.

    The arraignment was at a courthouse that’s been central to the efforts to hold people accountable for the January 6 riot. Over 1,000 people charged in Capitol riot cases have made a similar appearance as Trump’s – the building is located within sight of the Capitol and judges there have overseen trials or sentencing of the rioters.

    One of the next major issues in the Trump case will be when to set a trial date. Judge Tanya Chutkan – who has sentenced multiple rioters – appears to be moving quickly on that front.

    The Trump team signaled Thursday that it doesn’t think this case can be sent to trial in the normal timeline as dictated under a federal law known the Speedy Trial Act that allows for exemptions in certain circumstance. The special counsel’s office disagrees.

    Trump has until Tuesday to file a motion that would pause the clock under the Speedy Trial Act, which would help to slow the pace down, and prosecutors have until August 13 to issue any objection to the request.

    Another critical filing will be next Thursday, when the special counsel must propose a trial date and say how long it will likely take them to put on their case before the jury. Trump must respond by August 17.

    The next hearing – the first before Chutkan – will be August 28. Trump does not have to appear in person.

    Meanwhile, the first Republican primary debate is August 23, though it’s unclear if Trump will participate.

    Meanwhile, Smith’s indictment cites six unnamed co-conspirators who allegedly worked with Trump to support his efforts. CNN can identify five of the six.

    “Co-Conspirator 1” is former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “2” is former Trump lawyer John Eastman, who masterminded the plan to appoint false electors and is now facing disbarment proceedings in California. “3” is former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who worked with Giuliani in court. “4” is former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who Trump at one point hoped to install as acting attorney general to help him overturn the election. “5” is pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who sent an email to Giuliani about the fake electors plot.

    The identity of “6” is unclear. The indictment says this person is a political consultant who is tied to the fake elector slate in Pennsylvania.

    The next moment in the criminal case against Trump is Thursday, August 10, when a magistrate judge in Florida will hear the plea of Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly attempted to delete security camera footage at the former president’s resort after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for it.

    Trump, via court filing Friday, pleaded not guilty to the charges recently added to the case and indicated to the court that he would not be physically present for the arraignment.

    Lawyers for co-defendant Walt Nauta will be present to enter their client’s plea to the new counts.

    READ: Mar-a-lago indictment annotated

    A grand jury hearing evidence in Smith’s investigation returned the superseding indictment in late July against Trump, who had already faced 37 criminal charges, charging the former president with one additional count of willful retention of national defense information and two additional obstruction counts.

    Also next week, Trump’s lawyers will have a chance to respond to claims by prosecutors that he is unwilling to travel to a secured facility to access classified documents being turned over to the defense for the case. By August 10, Trump will have to respond to Smith’s proposal for a protective order restricting access to classified discovery in the case, and in the filings with the proposal, prosecutors have said that Trump has requested to view the documents in Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster – a request Smith’s team opposes.

    Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to ask a grand jury to file charges by September 1 in her probe into efforts by Trump and allies to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result.

    “The work is accomplished,” Willis told CNN affiliate WXIA at a back-to-school event. “We’ve been working for two and half years. We’re ready to go.”

    Security at the Fulton County courthouse has notably increased in anticipation of Willis’ actions.

    READ: Timeline of Trump’s efforts in Georgia to overturn the election

    A federal judge last week dismissed a $475 million defamation lawsuit Trump brought against CNN that accused the network of defaming him by using the phrase “the big lie” and allegedly comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

    District Judge Raag Singhal, a 2019 appointee of Trump’s, said that use of the phrase or similar statements are opinion that don’t meet the standard for defamation.

    “CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people. No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference,” Singhal wrote.

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  • Republican voters think Trump is electable. They may be right | CNN Politics

    Republican voters think Trump is electable. They may be right | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A plurality of Americans and independents think Donald Trump should have been charged with a crime in each of his four indictments, according to ABC News/Ipsos polling. A majority of Americans said in a new AP-NORC survey that they definitely won’t vote for the former president in the 2024 general election.

    Yet, Trump continues to hold a mammoth lead for the Republican presidential nomination and is polling within the margin of error of President Joe Biden in a hypothetical general election matchup.

    While paragraphs one and two seem contradictory, they’re really not. Americans don’t like Trump, but Republicans do. And general elections aren’t referendums on one candidate but a choice between two or more – and Americans, as a whole, dislike both Trump and Biden.

    If anything, Trump’s position within his party has become stronger since the beginning of the year. A majority (54%) of Republicans have a strongly favorable opinion of him in Fox News polling released this week, which is up 11 points from the end of last year. No other Republican candidate for president reaches even half of Trump’s current percentage.

    If you’re going to win a primary over Trump – who is expected to skip next week’s first GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee – there needs to be some outside force that makes Republicans deviate from the candidate they love.

    You could make the argument that four indictments just might do that.

    The problem is Republican voters have been consistent in what they think about the different Trump indictments. Despite the charges against the former president, ranging from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election to allegations that he mishandled classified documents, Republicans see them all the same way. Between 14% and 16% of Republicans believe Trump should have been charged, according to recent ABC News/Ipsos surveys. The vast majority don’t.

    Republicans justify their stance by saying that the charges are politically motivated. Over 80% of Republicans agree in the new polling from ABC News/Ipsos and the AP that both the Fulton County district attorney in Georgia and the Department of Justice are playing partisan politics.

    This has caused Republicans to not only stick to Trump but also double down on him. His primary polling advantage has swelled from the single digits at its lowest point to nearly 40 points today over his nearest competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    You might also expect Republicans to abandon Trump if they think he can’t beat Biden in a general election – even if they like the former president and believe he is getting a raw deal. After all, he has been indicted four times, and a majority of Americans say they definitely won’t vote for him in November 2024.

    That reasoning hasn’t worked, either. Republicans by and large still say Trump is more electable than DeSantis.

    Indeed, I’m not sure they’re wrong. Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in general election surveys. Fox News and Quinnipiac University have the matchup within the margin of error nationally, and Trump has been ahead of Biden in more polls this year than during the entirety of the 2020 campaign.

    If we see Trump overperform in the swing states relative to his performance nationally this cycle – like he did in 2016 and 2020 – you could make the argument that he should be favored over Biden if the election were held today.

    Moreover, Trump is polling no worse against Biden nationally than his Republican rivals. If anything, he’s been doing slightly better, on average, this summer.

    The reason is simple: Biden’s polling is awful for an incumbent. He has one of the highest disapproval ratings on record for an incumbent at this point in his presidency: in the mid-50s, on average. Biden’s favorable rating generally runs a point or two better than Trump’s, though that isn’t saying much with the former president’s favorable rating in the high 30s, on average.

    After all, the AP-NORC poll found that a majority of Americans probably or definitely would not vote for Biden in 2024 – just as was true for Trump in the same survey.

    A situation in which a lot of voters don’t like either major-party nominee is one all too familiar to political analysts.

    Just seven years ago, both Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton had unfavorable ratings north of 50%. It wasn’t the same majorities that disliked both candidates. Most voters liked at least one of them.

    But a sizable bloc of the electorate (18%) disliked both candidates, according to the 2016 exit polls. Today, a slightly higher percentage of the electorate, on average, likes neither Biden nor Trump.

    You might think the edge for 2024 should go to the man who has a slightly higher average favorable rating (Biden). But that math didn’t work in 2016. More voters who disliked both Trump and Clinton went with Trump, and it won him the election.

    A lot of Republicans may be betting on that math again, and who is to say they’re incorrect? After all, history and the current polling tells us not to dismiss Trump’s chances.

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  • Here’s what Donald Trump’s return to X could mean for the platform’s business | CNN Business

    Here’s what Donald Trump’s return to X could mean for the platform’s business | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Nine months after Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s account on the social network previously known as Twitter, the former president has returned to what was once his platform of choice for communicating with the country.

    The return of Trump – who used to be one of the site’s most prominent, if controversial, users – could mark a turning point for the company now called X after months of turbulence. Trump, who has nearly 87 million followers, could attract a wide set of viewers, especially in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, where he is the front-runner for the Republican nomination. But it could also present a new set of challenges for the social network, including for its effort to revive its ad business, if Trump decides to resume regularly posting on the platform at all.

    Trump on Thursday night posted on the platform for the first time since January 2021, when he was suspended for violating Twitter’s rules against glorification of violence in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. On Thursday, he posted a photo of his mug shot – the first such photo of a US president in history – after his surrender in Georgia on more than a dozen charges stemming from his efforts to reverse the 2020 election results there. He also added a link to a fundraiser.

    Trump’s return appeared to be welcomed by X owner Musk, who has been encouraging politicians and public figures to post on the site in a bid to improve user numbers. He shared Trump’s X post saying, “Next-level.” Later, appearing to reference the former president without explicitly naming him, Musk posted that “the speed at which your message on this platform can reach a vast number of people is mind-blowing.”

    X declined to comment for this story.

    If Trump decides to return to regularly posting on X, it could be a major boon to the platform’s effort to attract an audience as it faces increased competition. In the wake of controversial policy decisions by Musk, a slew of Twitter copycats have popped up as users seek alternative platforms, including Meta’s Threads, which rolled out a key update this week. The week of July 17, traffic to then-Twitter was down more than 9% compared to the same period in the prior year, according to the most recent public report from web traffic intelligence firm Similarweb.

    Musk’s changes at the company have also irked some advertisers, weighing on X’s core business.

    When he was president, Trump’s posts on what was then Twitter often moved the markets, set the news cycle and drove the agenda in Washington – a fact that benefited the company in the form of countless hours of user engagement and almost certainly could again. And while Trump has remained mostly on his own platform, Truth Social, since he was suspended from many mainstream social networks in early 2021, X would give him a larger reach as he vies for the 2024 Republican nomination.

    Trump’s return “should have a positive impact on [X’s] engagement at a time when it needs it,” D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte told CNN in an email Friday.

    (It’s not clear how Musk – who has often been X’s main character since his takeover, thanks in some cases to his own policy decisions – would feel about sharing the spotlight.)

    That engagement could be a selling point for X in its quest to lure advertisers back to the platform. But Trump’s return could also raise fresh concerns for advertisers, some of whom have pulled back their spending on the platform over fears that their ads could run next to controversial or potentially objectionable content as Musk has reduced content moderation on the site.

    Musk said last month that the company still had negative cash flow because of a 50% decline in revenue from its core ad business, although CEO Linda Yaccarino said weeks later the company is now “close to break-even.”

    And while X’s leadership has said advertisers are returning thanks to new brand safety controls, at least two brands recently paused their spending on the platform after their ads were run alongside an account celebrating the Nazi party. (X suspended the account after it was flagged and said ad impressions on the page were minimal.)

    Trump frequently pushed boundaries when he was active on Twitter. For years, the platform took a light-touch approach to moderating his account, arguing at times that as a public official, the then-president must be given wide latitude to speak. Now, if Trump returns to his old habits – the former president has, for example, continued to falsely claim in posts on Truth Social that the 2020 election was stolen – Musk could be forced to decide whether to risk alienating additional advertisers or compromise his stated commitment to “free speech.”

    Forte said he will be closely watching the impact of Trump’s return on Twitter’s advertising business. “The increased engagement should be favorable, but there is a risk that heightened controversy could hamper ad sales,” he said.

    And it’s not yet clear whether Trump will actually return to being active on X beyond Thursday’s post, which was essentially a fundraising appeal, and similar to what he posted on Truth Social. After Facebook restored Trump’s account earlier this year, many of his posts on that platform have been aimed at directing users to donate or volunteer for his campaign.

    What’s more, after making his return to X, Trump appeared to try to clarify where his loyalty lies. “I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL. IT IS MY HOME!!” Trump posted on the X competitor platform.

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  • Nikki Haley’s gender is rarely mentioned on the campaign trail but always present | CNN Politics

    Nikki Haley’s gender is rarely mentioned on the campaign trail but always present | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    When Nikki Haley took the Republican presidential debate stage alongside her seven male rivals last month, she shone a spotlight on her gender only once – evoking a former British prime minister.

    “This is exactly why Margaret Thatcher said, ‘If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman,’” the former South Carolina governor interjected as Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy sparred during the Milwaukee debate.

    Haley, the only female competitor in the GOP race, has not made her gender central to her campaign pitch. Instead, she has zeroed in on the need for a new generation of leadership.

    Republican voters who are considering supporting Haley told CNN they welcome the fact that she doesn’t lead with her gender as she campaigns, but many said her experience as a mother and a military spouse were part of her appeal.

    “It’s not necessary to point out that a female would bring a fresh perspective,” said Melinda Tourangeau, a Republican voter from New Hampshire. “She has one, she’s nailing it and I think that stands on its own merits.”

    GOP strategists say that by simply showing up as who she is, and weaving elements of her gender into her pitch, Haley is likely to boost her support among suburban female voters – a constituency that helped fuel President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.

    “There’s no need for her to light her hair on fire and [stress] the fact that she’s a woman because she uses her ability and experience as a way to connect with voters,” said GOP strategist Alice Stewart, a CNN political commentator who advised former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann on her 2012 presidential bid. “What suburban women want is a candidate that’s going to speak the truth, and Nikki Haley is out there being truthful about Donald Trump’s record. She’s being truthful about what we can actually accomplish in the future on abortion.”

    When Haley, a former US ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, speaks on the campaign trail about personal experiences that have informed her policy positions, she underscores her identity as a mother, wife and female politician.

    “I am pro-life because my husband was adopted, and I live with that blessing every day. I am pro-life because we had trouble having both of our children,” Haley has said in explaining her stance on abortion.

    She expanded on that position at the Milwaukee debate last month in calling for a “respectful” approach to the divisive topic.

    “Can’t we all agree that we should ban late-term abortions?” Haley said. “And can’t we all agree that we are not going to put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty if she gets an abortion?”

    Haley also spoke of the difficulty of enacting a federal abortion ban, pointing to the difficulty in overcoming the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster.

    It was a nuanced perspective for a GOP candidate, and one that caught voters’ attention.

    “When she talked about abortion, I liked that because although she is totally pro-life, she is willing to make some concessions because she said it’s not about her. It’s about what the country thinks,” a female GOP voter from South Carolina told CNN after the debate. “She’s trying to meet people where they are or at least do away with late-term abortions and things like that.”

    Hear Nikki Haley answer questions about abortion

    Haley’s campaign said it raised more than $1 million in less than 72 hours following that first primary debate. The campaign also said it raised more online in the 24 hours after the debate than it had on any other day since Haley launched her presidential bid in February.

    GOP strategists believe that Haley’s approach to the abortion issue was a key factor in that surged interest.

    “I think there are two key issues that she addressed on the debate stage that are helping in fueling their fundraising drive, and the nuanced position on abortion is one and her strong support for Israel,” Stewart said.

    In her stump speeches, Haley also draws from personal experiences – highlighting her role as mother – to speak against the participation of transgender girls in girls’ sports.

    “The idea that we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports, it is the women’s issue of our time,” she said during a CNN town hall in June. “My daughter ran track in high school. I don’t even know how I would have that conversation with her.”

    Similarly, when Haley speaks about standing up for veterans’ families, she speaks about her husband, Michael Haley, a major in the South Carolina National Guard whose brigade deployed to Africa earlier this year in support of the United States Africa Command. He previously served in Afghanistan in 2013 when his wife was serving as governor, which meant she was a working mom alone at home with two children.

    “The first three months when he deployed to Afghanistan, one of them was crying every night,” Haley said at the Iowa State Fair this summer. “I feel for every military family out there because it is survival mode.”

    When asked about her gender, Haley’s campaign noted that it is a part of who she is but not her only defining trait.

    “Nikki is proud to be a woman, a military spouse, a mom, a governor, an ambassador, and an accountant. All these experiences make her the tough and honest leader she is. She brought this toughness to the establishment as South Carolina governor. She brought it to the UN when she took on the world’s dictators. And she will bring it to the White House,” campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement.

    Haley is the fifth prominent Republican woman to run for president, following Margaret Chase Smith in 1964; Elizabeth Dole, who dropped out before the 2000 primaries; Bachmann in 2012; and Carly Fiorina in 2016.

    In comparison to Haley, Fiorina spoke more often and more directly about her gender. That move was dictated, at least in part, by Trump attacking her looks and the leading opposition candidate also being a woman.

    “[Whether] or not you’re ready to … support me, in your heart of hearts, every single one of you know you would love to see me debate Hillary Clinton,” Fiorina told voters on the stump.

    Haley’s competition this cycle is different, and so is her tact.

    “She is a woman, but she leads with her merit and experience,” said Iowa state Sen. Chris Cournoyer, a Haley supporter who touted the fact that the former governor does not play the “woman card.”

    At an August event in New Hampshire for female Republican voters, Haley’s identity as a woman was celebrated.

    “Nikki Haley is an empowered woman, who empowers women, and she really gets it as a former state representative,” Elizabeth Girard, the president of the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women, said as she introduced Haley, who served three terms in the South Carolina House prior to her election as governor.

    SE CUpp unfiltered 0216

    SE Cupp: Nikki Haley promises youth, but will her policies reflect that?

    But when Haley took the stage – facing a gaggle of female voters – she didn’t tailor her message to the audience. She ticked through her regular stump speech, closing out with her signature call for a new generational leader and a candidate who can win the general election.

    Many of the potential female voters in the room that day appreciated Haley’s approach.

    “I think that’s a good thing,” Kim Rice, 50, told CNN after the event when asked about Haley not making her gender a focus of her pitch. “I don’t think that should be the reason people vote for her. I think her policy points are her strongest points. That’s what should draw people to her.”

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  • Fact check: Trump falsely claims polls show his Black support has quadrupled or quintupled since his mug shot | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Trump falsely claims polls show his Black support has quadrupled or quintupled since his mug shot | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that polls show his support among Black Americans has quadrupled or quintupled since his mug shot was released.

    The booking photo was taken on August 24, when Trump was arrested in Fulton County, Georgia, on charges connected to his efforts to overturn his defeat in the state in the 2020 election.

    On Wednesday, Trump claimed in a falsehood-filled interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt that “many Democrats” will be voting for him in the 2024 election because they agree with him that the criminal charges against him in four cases are unfair. He then made this assertion: “The Black community is so different for me in the last – since that mug shot was taken, I don’t know if you’ve seen the polls; my polls with the Black community have gone up four and five times.”

    Facts First: National public polls do not show anything close to an increase of “four and five times” in Black support for Trump since his mug shot was taken, either in a race against President Joe Biden or in his own favorability rating; Trump’s campaign did not respond to CNN’s request to identify any poll that corroborates Trump’s claim. Most polls conducted after the release of the mug shot did find a higher level of Black support for Trump than he had in previous polls – but the increases were within the polls’ margins of error, not massive spikes, so it’s not clear whether there was a genuine improvement or the bump was just statistical noise. In addition, one poll found a decline in Trump’s strength with Black voters in a race against Biden, while another found a decline in his favorability with Black respondents even as he improved in a race against Biden.

    Because Black adults make up a relatively small share of the overall population, they tend to have small sample sizes in national public polls. That means the margins of error for this group are big and the results tend to bounce around from poll to poll. And even if Trump’s recent polling improvement captures a real change in voter sentiment, there is no evidence that change has anything to do with his mug shot, which no poll asked about; it could just as well have to do with, say, the summer increase in the price of gas or any of numerous other factors affecting perceptions of Biden.

    Regardless, Trump greatly exaggerated the size of the recent uptick seen in some polls. Here’s a look at what polls actually show about his recent standing with the Black population, plus a fact check of three of Trump’s many other false claims from the Hewitt interview.

    CNN identified five national public polls that: 1) included data on Black respondents in particular; 2) were conducted after Trump’s mug shot was released on August 24; 3) were conducted by pollsters who had also released polls in the recent past.

    Four of the polls showed gains for Trump among Black respondents, though much smaller gains than the quadrupling or quintupling he claimed to Hewitt.

    Trump gained 3 percentage points with Black respondents in polling by The Economist and YouGov, though within the margin of error – going from 17% against Biden in mid-August to 20% in late August. (The earlier poll asked the Trump-versus-Biden question of Black adults regardless of whether they are registered to vote, while the later poll asked the question to Black registered voters, so the results might not be directly comparable.) At the same time, Trump’s favorability with Black respondents was down 9 percentage points to 18%.

    Trump gained 3 percentage points with Black registered voters between a Messenger/Harris X poll in early July and a survey by the same pollster in late August, edging up from 22% against Biden to 25%. Trump gained 6 percentage points among Black adults in polling by the firm Premise, going from 12% against Biden in an Aug. 17-21 poll to 18% in an Aug. 30-Sept. 5 poll. He gained 8 percentage points among Black registered voters in polling by Republican firm Echelon Insights, going from 14% against Biden in late July to 22% in late August. Based on the sample sizes reported for Black respondents in each poll, all of those changes are within the margin of error.

    One of the five polls, by Emerson College, showed Trump’s standing with Black registered voters worsening after the mug shot was released, though this change was also within the margin of error. In Emerson’s mid-August poll, Trump had about 27% Black support in a race against Biden; in its late-August poll, he had about 19% support.

    In addition to looking at those five polls, we contacted The Wall Street Journal about an Aug. 24-30 poll, conducted jointly by Republican and Democratic pollsters, for which the newspaper has not yet released detailed demographic-by-demographic results. Aaron Zitner, a Journal reporter and editor who works on the poll, told us that Trump’s level of support with Black voters “didn’t change at all” between the paper’s April poll and this new poll, though Biden’s standing declined slightly within the margin of error.

    Exit polls estimated that Trump received 12% of the Black vote in the 2020 election. A post-election Pew Research Center analysis found that he received 8%.

    Mike Pence’s standing in 2016

    Trump made another false polling-related claim to Hewitt.

    This one was about how Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president and his current opponent for the Republican nomination, had performed in polls during his 2016 campaign for reelection as governor of Indiana. Pence ceased his Indiana campaign when Trump selected him as his running mate in July 2016.

    Trump said Wednesday: “I’m disappointed in Mike Pence, because I took Mike from the garbage heap. He was going to lose. You know, he was running for governor, reelection. He was running for governor again, to continue his term, and he was absolutely, you know – he was down by 10 or 15 points.”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim that Pence was trailing by “10 or 15 points” in his 2016 race is false. It’s true that Pence had faced a tough battle for reelection as governor before he ended the campaign to run nationally with Trump, but no public poll had shown him down big.

    A May 2016 poll (commissioned by a Republican group that was founded by an opponent of Pence’s right-wing stance on gay rights and other issues) had showed Pence with 40% support and his Democratic opponent, John Gregg, with 36% support; the Indianapolis Star called this a “virtual dead heat” because of the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, but nonetheless, Pence certainly wasn’t “down by 10 or 15 points” like Trump said. An April 2016 poll had showed Pence with 49% support to Gregg’s 45%, again within the margin of error but not with Pence trailing.

    “There would not be any poll that would show Pence down 10-15 points to John Gregg at that time or frankly at any point even if Pence had stayed for the reelection campaign,” Christine Matthews, the president of Bellwether Research & Consulting and a Republican pollster who conducted surveys during that 2016 race in Indiana, including the May 2016 poll mentioned above, told CNN on Wednesday. Matthews said Pence could possibly have lost the race if he had remained in it, “but no poll would have shown him down by 10-15 points in that process.”

    Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina in 2020

    Trump repeated his usual lies about the 2020 election – saying, among other things, that “it was rigged and stolen.” In support of those lies, he said: “One of the top people in Alabama said you don’t win Alabama by 45 points or whatever it is I won, and then win South Carolina in a record, nobody’s ever gotten that many votes, and then you lose Georgia by just a couple of votes. It doesn’t work that way.”

    Facts First: Trump hedged his claim that he won Alabama by “45 points,” adding the “whatever it is I won,” but the “45 points” claim is not even close to correct no matter what “one of the top people” told him; he won Alabama by about 25.5 percentage points in 2020. He lost Georgia by far more than “just a couple of votes”; it was 11,779 votes. And while he did earn a record number of votes in South Carolina, he did not win the state with anything close to a “record” margin of victory; his roughly 11.7-point margin in 2020 was about 2.6 points smaller than his own margin in 2016 and also smaller than the margins earned by numerous previous winners.

    In addition, Trump’s claim that “it doesn’t work that way” – winning some states big while losing a nearby state – is also baseless. Even neighboring states are not the same. Georgia, which Trump lost fair and square, has key demographic and social differences from South Carolina and Alabama, as we explained in a previous fact check.

    Polls and election results weren’t the only things Trump exaggerated about in the interview.

    He invoked the price of bacon while criticizing the Biden administration for speaking positively about the state of inflation, which has declined sharply over the last year but remains elevated. “They try and say, ‘Oh, inflation’s wonderful.’ What about for the last three years, where bacon is five times higher than it was just a few years ago?”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim that the price of bacon has quintupled over the last few years is grossly inaccurate. The average price of bacon is higher than it was three years ago, but it is nowhere near “five times higher.” The average price for a pound of sliced bacon was $6.236 per pound in July 2023, up from $5.776 in July 2020, according to federal data – an increase of about 8%, nowhere near the 400% increase Trump claimed.

    You can come up with a larger percentage increase if you start the clock at a different point in 2020; for example, the July 2023 average price is a 13.4% increase from the February 2020 average price. But even that larger increase is way smaller than Trump claimed.

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  • Trump says it was ‘my decision’ to try to overturn 2020 election results | CNN Politics

    Trump says it was ‘my decision’ to try to overturn 2020 election results | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump said that he received counsel from numerous people shortly after the 2020 election but that it was his decision to push the false claim he won the presidency and try to overturn the results.

    “It was my decision, but I listened to some people,” Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview that aired Sunday.

    Trump has been indicted over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election results. He has pleaded not guilty in all cases and denied any wrongdoing.

    A central premise of special counsel Jack Smith’s case, according to his indictment of the former president, is that Trump knew the election claims he was making were false after being told by close aides that he had lost but disseminated them anyway to make them appear legitimate – all in service of an alleged criminal conspiracy.

    “I was listening to different people, and when I added it all up, the election was rigged,” Trump told Kristen Welker in the interview, again pushing the false claim as he seeks the 2024 Republican nomination for president.

    “You know who I listen to? Myself. I saw what happened,” Trump said.

    The former president said he didn’t listen to his attorneys who told him he lost the election because he didn’t respect them.

    “You hire them, you’ve never met these people, you get a recommendation, they turn out to be RINOs (Republicans in name only), or they turn out to be not so good. In many cases, I didn’t respect them,” Trump said. “But I did respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged.”

    Following his election loss, Trump tried multiple avenues to overturn the election results. He pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and another official to “recalculate” the numbers and “find” enough votes to let him win.

    Trump’s campaign also tried to install fake GOP electors in seven swing states.

    The House select committee that investigated Trump’s actions in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection argued that the evidence shows he actively worked to “transmit false Electoral College ballots to Congress and the National Archives” despite concerns among his lawyers that doing so could be unlawful.

    “That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him,” the committee’s final report states.

    Smith’s federal election interference investigation is one of four criminal cases against the former president. Trump is facing four charges in Smith’s case, including obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

    Trump was also charged in a sweeping Georgia indictment accusing him of being the head of a “criminal enterprise” to overturn the 2020 election.

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  • Two more Trump co-defendants plead guilty. What next? | CNN Politics

    Two more Trump co-defendants plead guilty. What next? | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    With the frightening Israel-Hamas war and a major spoke of the US government – the House of Representatives – unsolvably speakerless and in a state of paralysis, a pair of guilty pleas in a Georgia courtroom almost feels like Page 2 news.

    But these particular guilty pleas this week come from two of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants, the second and third such admissions of guilt in the criminal case brought against him for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result.

    • Sidney Powell, a public face of Trump’s attempts to challenge the election results in 2020 and 2021, pleaded guilty Thursday. The former Trump attorney will avoid jail time but agreed to testify as a witness and pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors for conspiracy to commit intentional interference, downgraded from felony charges she had faced.
    • Kenneth Chesebro, a less public face of the effort, was an attorney who helped engineer the fake electors plot. He pleaded guilty Friday to a single felony, conspiracy to commit filing false documents. He’s also likely to avoid jail time.
    • Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, pleaded guilty last month after being accused of conspiring to unlawfully access voter data and ballot-counting machines at the Coffee County election office on January 7, 2021.

    That leaves Trump and 15 other co-defendants awaiting trial in the case. Trial dates have not been set, and Trump has pleaded not guilty.

    Along with the three other upcoming criminal trials in New York, Washington, DC, and Florida and the ongoing civil trial in New York, the Georgia proceedings are part of a complicated web of legal problems percolating beneath the 2024 election.

    Chesebro admitted to entering into a conspiracy specifically with Trump to create a slate of fake electors in Georgia, along with two other attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

    CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams noted that the Georgia case, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, has had its detractors, because it included 18 co-defendants along with Trump, which could make it seem politically motivated.

    But guilty pleas, Williams said, are now evidence that crimes were committed as Trump tried to make Joe Biden’s 2020 victory disappear.

    “This ought to pour cold water on the notion that this was just a partisan witch hunt to target the president and his allies,” Williams told Jim Sciutto on CNN Max.

    CNN’s report on his guilty plea notes that “Chesebro acknowledged in the plea that he ‘created and distributed false Electoral College documents’ to Trump operatives in Georgia and other states, and that he worked ‘in coordination with’ the Trump campaign.”

    All but one charge against Chesebro was dropped, and he has agreed to testify at trial.

    Just because Powell’s plea agreement did not mention Trump does not mean she might not be asked about him under oath, as CNN’s Marshall Cohen notes:

    Most notably, Powell attended a White House meeting on December 18, 2020, where some of Trump’s most extreme supporters encouraged him to name her as a special counsel to investigate supposed voter fraud, to consider declaring martial law and to sign executive orders that would direct the military to seize voting machines.

    Cohen adds that whatever Powell tells Georgia prosecutors could be used in the federal election subversion case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

    One gag order was issued by Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal 2020 election subversion case in Washington, DC. Trump is appealing, arguing she “took away my right to speak,” and on Friday Chutkan put a temporary freeze on the order.

    Chutkan has been insistent that the federal case get underway on schedule, in March, at the pinnacle of primary season.

    Trump made those comments about his freedom of speech as he entered a courtroom in New York, where he faces a civil fraud trial brought by the state attorney general. He is also under a gag order in that case, and that judge, Arthur Engoron, fined Trump $5,000 on Friday for violating the gag order after a social media post targeting a court employee was left up on Trump’s campaign website.

    Engoron said future violations could even ultimately lead him to imprison Trump.

    The court developments are an important reminder that as Trump cruises toward the Republican presidential nomination, at least according to public opinion polls, he is also in very real legal peril – something Trump acknowledged, before the gag-order-related threat from Engoron in New York, when the former president talked about the prospect of prison during an event in Clive, Iowa.

    “What they don’t understand is that I am willing to go to jail if that’s what it takes for our country to win and become a democracy again,” Trump said at the rally.

    There is some bizarre irony in the comments since he’s charged in connection with trying to subvert an election, one of the fundamental pillars of democracy.

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is among those challenging Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said on CNN that he doesn’t believe Trump is willing to go to jail.

    “The last place he wants to spend five minutes is in jail,” Christie said. He complained that Trump has failed to appear at Republican presidential debates.

    “Donald Trump doesn’t want any legitimate debate or discussion about his conduct,” Christie said.

    Republicans like Christie are running out of time and opportunity to challenge Trump. Another debate is scheduled for November 8 in Miami, but Christie has not yet qualified. NBC is sponsoring the debate, along with the right-wing outlets Salem Radio Network and Rumble.

    Oliver Darcy, CNN’s senior media reporter, argues the arrangement creates strange bedfellows.

    “It’s no surprise that the GOP, which veered sharply to the right during Donald Trump’s presidency, would select Salem and Rumble as partners,” Darcy writes, “but it is striking that NBC News would agree to link arms with such organizations.”

    Anti-Trump Republicans want some of the candidates challenging him to drop out of the race so that the opposition can coalesce around an individual alternative. The debate stage November 8 is expected to be much smaller, perhaps with only a few people.

    But don’t expect the former president to show. Trump is planning a rally nearby to draw attention away from his rivals.

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  • Dennis Hastert Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Dennis Hastert Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    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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  • First on CNN: Fulton County DA to present Trump election subversion case to grand jury early next week | CNN Politics

    First on CNN: Fulton County DA to present Trump election subversion case to grand jury early next week | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    An Atlanta-area prosecutor has notified at least two witnesses to appear before a grand jury early next week, the most significant indication of her intention to seek indictments in the investigation of how Donald Trump and others tried to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.

    Former Georgia Lt. Gov Geoff Duncan, a Republican, said Saturday on CNN that he has been told to appear Tuesday before a Fulton County grand jury to testify about the efforts by Trump and his allies. Independent journalist George Chidi posted on social media later Saturday that he’d been told to appear before the grand jury on Tuesday, too.

    The upcoming appearances signal that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is moving forward with a grand jury presentation where she’s expected to seek charges against more than a dozen people stemming from her investigation into the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

    The Fulton County probe brings the possibility of a fourth indictment against Trump, taking the GOP frontrunner even further into uncharted legal territory. Trump’s legal troubles have dominated the Republican primary for months, with the former president casting his indictments as politically motivated and frequently utilizing them in fundraising pitches.

    “I did just receive notification to appear on Tuesday morning at the Fulton County grand jury and I certainly will be there to do my part in recounting the facts,” Duncan, a CNN contributor, told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield on Saturday.

    “I have no expectations as to the questions, and I’ll certainly answer whatever questions are put in front of me,” Duncan said.

    Willis, an elected Democrat, has been eyeing conspiracy and racketeering charges in her probe, which would allow her to bring a case against multiple defendants. The wide-ranging criminal investigation has focused on efforts to pressure state election officials, the plot to put forward fake electors and a breach of voting systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia.

    A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment on Saturday.

    The expected charges would mark the culmination of a nearly three-year investigation, which Willis launched in early 2021 soon after Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressured the Republican to “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win the state.

    At a campaign event earlier this week, Trump continued to insist it was a “perfect phone call.”

    The charges in Georgia would follow special counsel Jack Smith’s federal charges against Trump over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as well as the special counsel’s indictment of Trump for the mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and New York state criminal charges over falsified business records. Trump denies wrongdoing in all cases.

    The witnesses Willis has subpoenaed to testify when she presents her case include Duncan, Chidi and former Georgia state Sen. Jen Jordan, a Democrat. All of them previously testified before a special purpose grand jury tasked with investigating the Trump case, which heard from more than 75 witnesses in all.

    Georgia law is unusual in that special purpose grand juries – which have broad investigative powers – are not permitted to issue indictments. When the subpoenaed witnesses appear before the regular grand jury, those grand jurors will hear the witnesses’ testimony for the first time with a narrower purpose at hand: to approve or reject indictments.

    As her investigation has expanded, Willis has been weighing racketeering charges in the Trump case. RICO – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – is a statute the district attorney has spoken fondly of and used in unorthodox ways to bring charges against teachers as well as musicians in the Atlanta area.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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