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  • Trump and company liable for fraud in New York lawsuit, judge rules

    Trump and company liable for fraud in New York lawsuit, judge rules

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    A judge on Tuesday ruled that Donald Trump and his company are liable for fraud by misstating the true values of multiple real estate properties for years and thus grossly overstating the former president’s net worth by billions of dollars.

    Judge Arthur Engoron in his bombshell decision also canceled the New York business certificates of Trump, the Trump Organization, and the other defendants, including two of his sons, in a lawsuit by the state Attorney General’s Office.

    The judge said he would appoint an independent receiver to manage the dissolution of the corporate entities whose business certificates he canceled.

    It is not clear whether Engoron’s decision means the Trump Organization and related entities will have to completely cease doing business in New York, or whether the companies can be legally reconstituted later.

    A spokeswoman for Attorney General Letitia James declined to comment on that question.

    But Trump’s lawyer Chris Kise, who called the decision “outrageous,” said it “seeks to nationalize one of the most successful corporate empires in the United States and seize control of private property all while acknowledging there is zero evidence of any default, breach, late payment or any complaint of harm.”

    “While the full impact of the decision remains unclear, what is clear is that President Trump and his family will seek all available appellate remedies to rectify this miscarriage of justice,” Kise said.

    Engoron’s ruling, which also dismissed Trump’s request to dismiss the case, did not settle six other claims in dispute in the case whose defendants included him, the company and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as well as former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, company executive Jeff McConney.

    Those issues remaining claims will be addressed at a nonjury trial due to begin Monday.

    James is seeking $250 million in damages in the case and wants Trump and his two adult sons barred from doing business in the state.

    Engoron, in granting partial summary judgment to James on the fraud claim, found that Trump made false and misleading valuations for multiple real estate assets in statements to insurers and banks for years as he sought more favorable terms on insurance coverage and loans.

    Because of those misstatements, Trump also inflated his true net worth in annual financial statements by billions of dollars, according to the decision.

    “In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies,” Engoron wrote.

    “That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”

    Engoron also ordered sanctions of $7,500 for five attorneys who represented the Trump defendants for making frivolous and previously rejected arguments in court filings. Kise is among those fined by the judge.

    “Today, a judge ruled in our favor and found that Donald Trump and the Trump Organization engaged in years of financial fraud,” James wrote in a post on the X social media site.

    “We look forward to presenting the rest of our case at trial,” James added.

    Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, separately faces a total of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases. Two of those cases relate to efforts to reverse his re-election defeat in 2020. Another case involves his retention of classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, a property that is mentioned in Engoron’s ruling Tuesday.

    In the fourth criminal case, Trump is charged with falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

    He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

    Engoron in his ruling wrote that James’ office in its civil fraud suit “has prevailed on liability on its first cause of action … as against all defendants.”

    The judge added that if liability for fraud is established under New York law, that statute allows the attorney general to obtain an order enjoining defendants from continuing to do business or “any fraudulent or illegal acts.”

    Even after Engoron appointed an independent financial monitor for the Trump Organization last year, “defendants have continued to disseminate false and misleading information while conducting business,” the judge wrote.

    “This ongoing flouting of this Court’s prior order, combined with the persistent nature of the false [statements of financial condition] year after year, have demonstrated the necessity of canceling the [defendants’ business] certificates … as the statute provides,” the judge wrote.

    Engoron’s 35-page ruling details how Trump fraudulently valued his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, once by more than 2,000%, Trump Park Avenue and 40 Wall Street in New York City, his Seven Springs property in Westchester County, New York, and his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.

    “Time and time again, the Court is not comparing one appraisal to another; it is comparing an independent professional appraisal to a pie-in-the-sky dream of concocted potential,” Engoron wrote.

    After noting that Trump submitted statements falsely claiming that the Trump Tower apartment in which he resided for decades was nearly three times its actual size, and was worth a whopping $327 million, the judge wrote, “a discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.”

    “The documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business,” Engoron wrote.

    “Defendants respond that: the documents do not say what they say; that there is no such thing as ‘objective’ value; and that, essentially, the Court should not believe its own lying eyes,” the judge noted.

    Kise, the Trump attorney, said Engoron’s “outrageous decision is completely disconnected from the facts and governing law.’

    “The Court ignored fully the Appellate Division mandate and basic legal, accounting and business principles,” Kise said. “Without even conducting a trial, the Court substituted its own judgment for that of nationally recognized experts from the NYU Stern School of Business and beyond.  More importantly, the Court disregarded the viewpoint of those actually involved in the loan transactions who testified there was nothing misleading, there was no fraud, and the transactions were all highly profitable.”

    Another Trump attorney, Alina Habba, in a statement said, “It’s important to remember that the Trump Organization is an American success story and the fact that a judge without trial would say there is no question of fact and issue a decision like this in summary judgement is concerning.”

    Habba who was among the attorneys sanctioned by Engoron.

    Trump responded to Engoron’s ruling by reposting a statement on social media attacking James and the judge, while doubling down on his claims of having a much higher net worth than what was displayed on the financial statements at the center of the fraud case.

    “It is very unfair, and I call for help from the highest Courts in New York State, or the Federal System, to intercede,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social site.

    In a tweet Tuesday, Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization with Donald Trump Jr., wrote, “In an attempt to destroy my father and kick him out of New York, a Judge just ruled that Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach Florida, is only worth approximate ‘$18 Million dollars’ “

    “Mar-a-Lago is speculated to be worth [well] over a billion dollars making it arguably the most valuable residential property in the country. It is all so corrupt and coordinated,” Eric wrote.

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  • Supreme Court returns for first private meeting of the term amid even more controversy | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court returns for first private meeting of the term amid even more controversy | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court returns to Washington to face a new term and the fresh reality that critics increasingly view the court as a political body.

    In the wake of a series of controversial decisions made possible by former President Donald Trump’s three nominees, including the seismic reversal of Roe v. Wade, the justices find themselves catapulted into the very center of the political discourse.

    Their opinions feature prominently on the campaign trail, approval ratings have plummeted to new lows and Democrats in Congress are vowing to regulate the third branch in the midst of allegations justices are skirting ethics rules and attacks on the very legitimacy of the court.

    So far, they have struggled to respond. At public appearances they grasp at the promise of judicial independence while sending mixed signals about changes that might be afoot.

    Tuesday, the justices will meet in person for their first closed-door conference of the term.

    Chief Justice John Roberts is at the center of it all.

    How he navigates this term will shape the trajectory of his tenure going forward. Some say he’ll remain on the sidelines, out of the fray. Others say he cannot afford to do so.

    Earlier this year, Roberts declined an invitation to appear before the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss Supreme Court ethics, citing separation of powers concerns. In May, speaking before an audience in Washington, Roberts said he wanted to assure the public that the court is committed to adhering to the “highest standards of conduct.”

    It was one line in one speech.

    But at the end of June, as controversy continued amid a raft of high-profile decisions that largely broke along ideological lines, Roberts made an unusual choice. In a 6-3 opinion striking down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, the chief strayed from the case at hand.

    He said that it had become a “disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of government.”

    He appeared to be responding to the dissent penned by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “In every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper limited role in our Nation’s governance,” Kagan began.

    Noting her disagreement, Roberts took the occasion to write, “we do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement.” He added: “Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he wrote.

    It was unclear if the line was directed at his dissenting colleagues or critics outside of court or both, but it was an unusual digression from a justice who, by definition, lacks an obvious pulpit to defend his branch of government.

    The way forward for Roberts is not obvious.

    Even if he did believe a formal ethics code is necessary, it’s unclear whether he would need a unanimous vote to move forward. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito might, for instance, balk at such a move arguing that it would never satisfy critics whose true goal is to damage the institution.

    Some believe Roberts ultimately will steer clear of the controversy.

    “I don’t see him moving in any direction to encourage further disclosure reforms, and I don’t see Congress as being able to get sufficient traction,” Cate Stetson, a lawyer at Hogan Lovells, said at the Cato Institute earlier this month.

    But if the court does nothing, pressure will continue.

    Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, a Democrat, traveled to the Supreme Court on September 12 as an invited guest to the annual meeting of the Judicial Conference – the policymaking body for the federal courts.

    Sitting next to the chief justice on Roberts’ home turf, Durbin lobbied him to adopt an enforceable code of conduct directed specifically at the justices, according to a source.

    Roberts and others have continuously stressed how difficult it would be to adopt such a code, particularly when it comes to recusal issues.

    In April, all nine justices released a new statement hoping to provide “clarity” to the public about their ethics procedures, noting that they consult a “wide variety of authorities” when addressing specific ethics issues. They noted that while the Judicial Conference has a code of conduct followed by lower court judges, the conference “does not supervise the Supreme Court.”

    The statement outlined complications that distinguish the Supreme Court from the lower courts.

    At the lower court level, for instance, federal judges can substitute for each other if one judge recuses from a case. That’s not true at the high court where only members can hear a dispute.

    The statement did little to appease critics who say the justices can no longer continue to voluntarily follow rules that govern lower court judges. They must, critics say, have a code of conduct that binds them directly.

    Response from the bench

    Some conservatives believe there is no impending judicial crisis. Instead, they say, critics of the court are manufacturing a controversy to delegitimize the institution and staunch the flow of conservative opinions.

    Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, who is also a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, tweeted recently that the problem is not corruption.

    “The problem is the coordinated campaign by dark money activists, radical politicians, and a willing media to imply there is corruption, undermining the Court’s integrity and selectively smearing the justices they disagree with,” she wrote.

    Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe, has taken a radically different approach than the chief justice.

    In an interview in July that appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, Alito said forthrightly that Congress should stay out of the Supreme Court’s business.

    “I know this is controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” he said. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court – period.”

    Alito said that he marveled “at all the nonsense that has been written about me in the last year” and noted that in the face of a political onslaught he was rejecting the notion that judges and justices “should be mute” and leave it to others to defend them.

    “I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself,” he wrote.

    A month earlier he sought to preempt a ProPublica report that had not yet been published concerning allegations that he should have disclosed luxury travel from 2008.

    Over the summer, other justices were asked about ethics and the court’s legitimacy by friendly questioners at universities and judicial conferences – although they never addressed specifics.

    Unlike Alito, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in August that here was some daylight on the question of whether Congress has a role to regulate the Supreme Court. Last week, she told an audience in Indiana that she thought it would be a “good” idea if the court were to adapt the ethics code used by lower court justices to fit the Supreme Court.

    For her part, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that criticism of the court is nothing new. At an appearance before a judicial conference in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, she said that “critiques of the court” are part of its history. Public criticism “comes with the job” she said.

    Justice Brett Kavanaugh had a different message in Ohio saying he was “hopeful” that there would be some “concrete steps” taken soon to address the ethics issue.

    But his sentiment may have been aspirational.

    As the justices grapple with how to respond, they are hampered by an additional factor.

    Change at the high court comes slowly. The court’s unofficial mascot – the tortoise – can be found at the bottom of bronze lampposts on the building grounds. The tortoises are meant to symbolize the slow and steady pace of justice.

    Almost nothing at the high court comes quickly, and the institution is not new to controversy. The justices may decide to ride out the storm.

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  • Who is C.Q. Brown, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? | CNN Politics

    Who is C.Q. Brown, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Charles Q. Brown builds on an already historic career in becoming the the country’s next most senior ranking military officer.

    Before being confirmed Wednesday as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Brown, who goes by C.Q., was the first Black service chief in US military history when he was confirmed as chief of the Air Force in 2020.

    Brown is only the second Black man to serve as chairman – following Gen. Colin Powell – where he will act as the principal military adviser to President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and the National Security Council.

    Brown’s confirmation also marks the first time that both of the Defense Department’s top leaders – the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs – are African American.

    President Joe Biden nominated Brown in May and described the general as “a warrior” and a “fearless leader and unyielding patriot.” But his nomination became ensnared in a monthslong blockage on Pentagon nominations by Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville in the Senate.

    The Senate ultimately voted 83-11 to confirm his nomination Wednesday.

    Commissioned in 1984 from the ROTC Program at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, Brown has commanded a fighter squadron, two fighter wings, US Air Forces Central Command and the US Air Force Weapons School, according to his official biography.

    Prior to becoming the Air Force chief of staff, Brown served as the commander of Pacific Air Forces – the air component of US Indo-Pacific Command.

    While serving as the commander of the Pacific Air Forces, the typically reserved Brown made headlines by releasing a deeply personal video in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. In the video, he said he was “full with emotion” for “the many African Americans that have suffered the same fate as George Floyd” and recalled being one of the few Black people at his school, his platoon and in leadership.

    “I’m thinking about the pressure I felt to perform error-free, especially for supervisors I perceived had expected less of me as an African American. I’m thinking about having to represent by working twice as hard to prove their expectations and perceptions of African Americans were invalid,” he said.

    He added: “I’m thinking about how I can make improvements personally, professionally and institutionally, so that all Airmen, both today and tomorrow, appreciate the value of diversity and can serve in an environment where they can reach their full potential.”

    Brown’s confirmation was held up after Tuberville said he would object to confirming military nominees as a group by unanimous consent in protest of the Pentagon’s policy providing a travel allowance for troops and their families who must travel to receive an abortion because of the state laws where they are stationed. He instead suggested that Brown and other military nominees be brought to the Senate floor one-by-one – a process that could take hundreds of hours.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer ultimately caved to Tuberville’s demand and agreed to bring a handful of votes on military promotions to the floor.

    The Senate is expected to vote to confirm Gen. Eric Smith as commandant of the Marine Corps and Gen. Randy George as Army chief of staff later this week.

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  • Donald Trump Jr.’s X account was hacked, his spokesman says | CNN Business

    Donald Trump Jr.’s X account was hacked, his spokesman says | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A spokesman for former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Donald Trump Jr.’s account on X – the platform formerly known as Twitter – had been compromised after the account began sharing a series of unusual and erratic posts.

    “Don’s account has been hacked,” Andrew Surabian posted on X, adding that a post claiming the former president had died was “obviously not true.”

    In addition to falsely pronouncing the death of the senior Trump, the compromised account also claimed that Trump Jr. would be running for president himself. Within minutes, the post had been reshared more than 1,000 times on X and viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

    Another post appeared to threaten the country of North Korea, while a pinned post on the account’s profile insulted President Joe Biden with the use of a racist epithet.

    Roughly a half-hour after the posts surfaced, they had been removed. X did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    The incident raises fresh questions about X’s role in securing user accounts, particularly those belonging to high-profile political figures as the platform prepares for the 2024 elections. In August, X said it is staffing up on its safety and election teams following mass layoffs last year that according to owner Elon Musk ultimately eliminated more than 80% of the company’s headcount.

    It is also unclear whether the compromise may have resulted in unauthorized access of Trump Jr.’s private direct messages, or whether Trump Jr. may have had two-factor authentication enabled on his account.

    X is still under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over the company’s ability to sufficiently protect user privacy and whether it may have violated binding commitments it made in 2011 to securing the platform. The investigation began after the company’s former security chief, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower disclosure first reported by CNN and The Washington Post last year that alleged widespread and unaddressed security vulnerabilities.

    This is not the first time high-profile accounts on the platform have been taken over. In 2020, for example, hackers gained control of accounts belonging to former President Barack Obama, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and others including Biden and Musk themselves by posing as Twitter’s IT support. At the time, Twitter admitted that the hackers had downloaded account data that potentially included private messages.

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  • John King is going all over the map in 2024. What he’s learned so far | CNN Politics

    John King is going all over the map in 2024. What he’s learned so far | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    You’re more likely to read about people in the aggregate in this newsletter – how groups are affected by something the government is doing and how polls suggest those groups feel about it.

    CNN’s John King is looking at the 2024 presidential race from the other side in his new “All Over the Map” project. Building relationships with individuals in key states, he plans to chart how their opinions shift over the course of the campaign.

    He’s filed reports from Iowa and New Hampshire so far:

    I talked to King to hear what he’s learned so far. Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below.

    WOLF: What are you finding when you talk to people out in the country?

    KING: This is how I started covering politics 106 million years ago. It’s just at this moment in the country where you have this weird combination of polarization and disaffection and a lot of people who are in the middle who would be moderate Republicans or true independents or centrist Democrats are just disgusted and they’re sitting out.

    The people who are sitting out are empowering the extremes, and they know it, but they just can’t stomach national politics. So they vote for mayor and they vote for governor and sometimes they vote for Senate and Congress, but even that pisses them off. So it’s just a weird time.

    WOLF: What I really like in these reports is the nuance of people’s opinions. They don’t fit into the buckets that we create for them here in Washington. How do you find people who will talk to you? I’ve talked to other reporters who have trouble doing that.

    KING: It can be hard sometimes. We’re doing this a number of ways. Some of these are through people I know. The fishermen in New Hampshire we found through a woman I met years ago who’s part of an advocacy group for these independent small fishermen …

    They’re interesting because they’re young, they’re Republican-leaning, they’re really hardworking, blue-collar people. People that when I started doing this – 35 years ago was my first campaign – they were Democrats.

    Michael Dukakis only won 10 states in 1988, but he won West Virginia and Iowa. Farmers and coal miners and fishermen and people who work with their hands were Democrats then. And they are more and more Republicans now.

    The idea here is to build relationships with them all the way through next November and hopefully beyond. But in the 2024 campaign context, we’re not going in to get people at a rally to say, “Are you for (former President Donald) Trump or are you for (President Joe) Biden? Are you for (former South Carolina Gov. Nikki) Haley or are you for (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis?”

    We care about that, but I care much more about how they got there. Have they always been there? And again, in all caps in boldface to me is the question: why?

    WOLF: You talk to a solar panel salesman who backs Trump and a commercial fisherman, who you just mentioned, who says Republicans are for the working man. What motivates people whose livelihoods are directly related to climate change to back Republicans who are largely opposed to having any government involvement with doing anything about it?

    KING: That part’s fascinating. Chris Mudd is the solar panel guy in Iowa and Andrew Konchek is one of the fishermen in New Hampshire. And to your point, our business makes the mistake – and the candidates, the politicians and the parties way too often make the mistake – of trying to put people in their lanes and in their boxes. And guess what, everybody is different. It’s a cliche, but it’s true.

    So Chris Mudd – his family has an advertising business that employs just shy of 100 people in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It’s an anchor of the community, especially in a part of the country where you’ve had a lot of economic turmoil in the last 25 years, manufacturing disappearing. These guys are heroes in their communities. They are employers.

    Then he started the spinoff solar installation business, and he admits straight up his business benefits – and quite significantly – from the Biden green energy tax credits. And yet, he says, he would take his chances without them because he thinks that money should be redirected to the border wall. That Trump should finish his border wall.

    It’s not just immigration. It’s American sovereignty and the border. And so he’s willing to take an economic hit for his business. He thinks it would survive, but he would take a hit because immigration, American security, comes first to him.

    The fisherman, on the other hand, wants to stay on the water. He came to Trump in 2016 because Trump was a newcomer, he was the insurgent. He loves the policies. In Andrew’s case, he does not like the tweets. He does not like the chaos. Prefers Trump would talk more about the future, not the past.

    But his industry is in decline. And he says Trump is for less regulation – so they won’t be regulating the fishing industry as much – and he knows Trump hates wind energy farms, and he thinks the biggest immediate threat to his job, two or three years down the road, is a plan to build all these wind turbine farms off the coast of New Hampshire and off the coast of Maine.

    And he thinks they’re gonna kill his business. So he’s for Trump because he wants to pay his mortgage.

    WOLF: You talk to another guy in New Hampshire who’s switching from Trump to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conventional wisdom would be that Kennedy would pull from Biden’s support because he is, at least technically, a Democrat. What is happening there?

    KING: So that to me is fascinating on a couple levels. No. 1, Lucas was a Trump 2016 primary voter in New Hampshire. He quickly got turned off by the chaos. He was not for Trump in 2020. He went third party. But he’s a Republican-leaning guy who likes Trump’s policies. Does not like the Trump performance art, I’ll call it.

    You would think he’d be looking for another Republican in this campaign, but he gets all the way over to Robert Kennedy.

    A buddy of his, a crew mate, gave him a Joe Rogan podcast with Bobby Kennedy on it. And Kennedy is talking about how years ago, he helped these fishermen who were being hurt by industrial pollution when he was at the National Resources Defense Council.

    So what was he thinking here? They don’t trust politicians. Politicians promised to help them all the time, and in their view, they never do. So here’s a guy who’s running for president, who actually helped people who do what he does. Done. That’s it. Right?

    Yes, he knows there’s a lot of other controversy about Robert Kennedy. He says there’s going to be controversy about any politician. Here’s a guy who has helped people just like him.

    WOLF: You talked about a couple of people just now who don’t like the Trump noise or chaos, but CNN ‘s latest polling – we just had one in New Hampshire. Trump leads there. He leads in Iowa, according to polling there. What does your reporting on the ground suggest is behind the fact that none of these many Trump challengers have caught on?

    KING: Well, one of the issues is just that there are so many of them. The numbers are part of it, without a doubt. But a lot of these Republicans also view Trump as kind of an incumbent. And to a degree, he also benefits from the cynical effort to convince so many Republicans that he didn’t lose last time, even though we all know he did.

    If you look at our New Hampshire poll, even a lot of Republicans who support the other candidates think Trump is the strongest general election candidate. That’s helping him. I think the bigger part there is just that the base is loyal to him.

    He can be beat. Six in 10 Republicans in New Hampshire want somebody else, but there are 10 other people running and the support is fractured. Until you have a singular alternative, there’s no way to beat Trump.

    The only thing I would add to that is what several Trump voters in New Hampshire (told us). They’re planning to vote for him, make no mistake, but they say it’s not as exciting. It’s not the same as it was in 2015 and 2016, when he was new, when that hostile takeover was so dramatic and to many Republicans so exciting.

    The establishment didn’t think so, but a lot of Republican voters found it very exciting. Trump is not the new guy anymore. And in some ways, he’s the new establishment. That doesn’t mean his people aren’t loyal, but in the back of their mind, there does seem to be a little bit of, “I’m open to some change.”

    WOLF: Joe Biden didn’t win either Iowa or New Hampshire in the 2020 primaries. And for a complicated and very strange Democratic reason, he may not take part in those contests this year. His nomination is probably a foregone conclusion, but what did you hear from Democrats in those states?

    KING: I want to be a little careful here because we haven’t spent a ton of time with Democrats. The project’s going to expand over the next 13, 14 months, through the election.

    The biggest question right now is can Trump be stopped and who is the Republican nominee going to be? So that’s where we have put 75, 80% of our energy and focus. Doesn’t mean when we go into the states, we’re not meeting and talking to Democrats, but I would be more careful about taking the anecdotal reporting we get from six, eight, 10, 12 voters and projecting it out.

    I will say that a number of Democrats ask us, “Do you think there’s any chance he doesn’t run still?” Or they will share their own worries that there will be some event that will force him to not run again.

    The age thing is a nagging thought for Democrats. Age, or is he up to the job might be a better way to put it. Does he have the stamina for another term? That’s lingering.

    You don’t see any evidence that there’s anybody – no Democrat is running who has a serious chance or anything like that. We’re going get to the swing states as we go forward. I have a number of questions about whether key pieces of the Biden coalition are energized for any number of reasons.

    Sometimes you hear this age, stamina, up-to-the-job question. Other times you hear, if you talk to organizers and activists, that some of the people absolutely critical to the Democratic coalition – blue-collar Black workers, blue-collar Latino workers – are still feeling it from inflation, don’t feel like the economy’s bounced back.

    Those are things to cover as we go forward. I would not make any big sweeping findings in my reporting on the Democrats so far. I’ve got more questions than I have answers.

    WOLF: Let me tweak that a little bit. Separating you from these reporting trips, as somebody who’s covered so many presidential elections, what could be the potential effect of the president not taking part in the first two contests?

    KING: New Hampshire is very parochial. There are a lot of Democrats there who are, forgive my language, but pissed off at him. I think he could be “embarrassed” in New Hampshire.

    Now, does it have any lasting meaning? Let’s see what happens.

    The president did something, actually, that’s pretty courageous. I do not remember one cycle where there hasn’t been at least a conversation about, “Is it time to change this Iowa and New Hampshire thing?”

    The Iowa electorate is 90% White. The New Hampshire electorate is 90% White. The numbers are even higher than that if you look at the Republican electorate. They’re overwhelmingly White states. They do not reflect the diversity, both from an ethnic perspective and even an economic perspective, of the Democratic Party.

    This conversation comes up every four years in both parties. Are you gonna change it? Biden had the guts to do it. The cynic would say he did it for the reasons you mentioned – that he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, and he’s lost them before. That wasn’t the first time and so he wanted a new way. He wanted the Biden way.

    Of course that’s one of the reasons he did it. Because he has more success in South Carolina. He has a history. So he has tilted the Democratic playing field to his favor. A bad number in New Hampshire might be embarrassing, but I think they’ve actually more protected themselves than exposed themselves by doing it this way.

    My bigger question is does the way they’ve changed the Democratic (process) actually mask weaknesses? If there’s a weakness in Democratic enthusiasm, if there’s a turnout problem, they need to get a handle on that as soon as possible.

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  • RFK Jr. is polling high for an independent. But it may not last | CNN Politics

    RFK Jr. is polling high for an independent. But it may not last | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to announce Monday that he is dropping out of the Democratic presidential primary and will run as an independent. The move would come after Kennedy’s calls for a debate with President Joe Biden went nowhere and with Biden continuing to hold a 50-point advantage in primary polling.

    But while Kennedy’s bid for the Democratic nomination was largely inconsequential, he could play a big role as an independent candidate in determining the winner of the general election.

    The polling on an independent run by Kennedy is limited, but the data we do have suggests he would start out as one of the strongest third-party or independent candidates this century.

    A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this past week among likely voters finds former President Donald Trump at 40%, Biden at 38% and Kennedy at 14% in a hypothetical November 2024 matchup. The 2-point difference between Biden and Trump looks a lot like other surveys we’ve seen and is well within the margin of error.

    But from a historical perspective, the 14% for Kennedy is quite unusual. Consider Gary Johnson, the 2016 Libertarian nominee for president. Like this cycle, the two major party nominees in 2016 (Democrat Hillary Clinton and Trump) were unpopular. Johnson, though, appears to never have hit 14% in any poll when matched up against Clinton and Trump.

    Indeed, I can’t find any instance of an eventual third-party or independent candidate getting to 14% in a national poll since Ross Perot in the 1996 cycle.

    Now, the chance of Kennedy garnering 14% of the vote next November is not high. Non-major-party candidates almost always fade down the stretch.

    We can see this, again, by using the Johnson example from 2016. The former New Mexico governor polled at 4% or above in every national poll before September 2020 that met CNN’s standards for publication. He averaged 8% of the vote in those polls and frequently registered in the double digits.

    Johnson ended up getting a mere 3% come Election Day.

    And he isn’t alone. At one point in the 1992 campaign, independent Perot led both major-party nominees; he ultimately ended up a distant third. Independent John Anderson was often polling in the 20s in national surveys of the 1980 election, before getting less than 7% that November.

    We obviously don’t know if or how much Kennedy’s polling might change between now and the election. Still, even if he ends up with the same level of support as Johnson, it could make a big difference.

    At the moment, Biden and Trump are close in the national polls. Some surveys have Biden slightly ahead. Others give Trump the edge. The same is true in swing states like Pennsylvania, where Biden and Trump are within the margin of error of each other.

    If Kennedy takes disproportionately from either Biden or Trump, it could tip the balance of the election.

    The question, therefore, is: Which one of them should fear a Kennedy candidacy more?

    The answer is far from clear at this early stage. Although Kennedy has so far been running in the Democratic primary, his favorability ratings are far higher among Republicans. He was just announced as a speaker at an upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference event, after all.

    Still, most of Kennedy’s admirers on the GOP side also hold a favorable view of Trump, according to a Quinnipiac University poll from last month. It’s tough to see Trump-supporting Republicans voting for Kennedy, even if they like him too.

    When you drill down to Democrats (and independents who lean their way) and Republicans (and GOP-leaning independents) who don’t hold a favorable view of their party’s front-runners, Kennedy is about equally liked. His favorability rating among this group of Democrats is 31%, while it’s 32% among this group of Republicans.

    In the Ipsos poll of a potential general election, Kennedy got 12% from Republicans and 9% from Democrats. This isn’t a big difference, but you could see it helping Biden in a very close election.

    The Ipsos poll also found that when an unnamed third-party candidate is matched up against Biden and Trump, Biden comes in with 43% to Trump’s 42%. That 1-point deficit for Trump (within the margin of error) is worse for him than his 2-point lead (again, within the margin of error) when Kennedy is included instead of a generic third-party candidate. Kennedy’s presence on the ballot could therefore benefit Republicans a tad more.

    One thing that does seem true from the Ipsos and Quinnipiac data is that among voters who either didn’t vote in 2020 or aren’t likely to vote this time around, Kennedy has better net favorability ratings and trails the front-runners by a narrower margin.

    This means Kennedy could drive up voter turnout but still not affect the election outcome.

    The race between Biden and Trump is so close, though, that I’m not sure either side wants to risk a Kennedy candidacy potentially taking votes away from them.

    We’ll see what happens over the next 13 months.

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  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces independent run for president, ending Democratic primary challenge to Biden | CNN Politics

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces independent run for president, ending Democratic primary challenge to Biden | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Environmental lawyer and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Monday his independent candidacy for president, officially ending his effort to defeat President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary in favor of a long-shot general election bid.

    “I’m here to declare myself an independent candidate for president of the United States,” Kennedy said in remarks in Philadelphia.

    Kennedy’s announcement comes after several weeks of speculation about his future in the 2024 field. CNN previously reported Kennedy met with the chair of the Libertarian Party earlier this year to discuss their common beliefs. And last week, a super PAC supporting Kennedy’s presidential campaign released the results of a poll they conducted testing Kennedy’s strength in a hypothetical three-way race between Biden and former President Donald Trump.

    The campaign will host a series of events in Texas, Florida and Georgia later this month, a campaign official told CNN, pledging to travel “everywhere” in the lead-up to next year’s general election. The official said the campaign is confident they’ll gain ballot access in every state ahead of November 2024.

    Independent and third-party candidates have struggled in the past to garner substantial support in presidential elections. In 1992, Texas businessman Ross Perot mounted one of the most successful independent presidential candidacies in recent history, which ended with him receiving 8% of the vote in the general election that was ultimately won by Bill Clinton.

    On Monday, Kennedy acknowledged the unsuccessful history of independent presidential campaigns but said he’s optimistic about his chances.

    “Today, we turn a new page in American politics. There have been independent candidates in this country before, but this time it’s going to be different. Because this time, the independent is gonna win,” he said.

    Mark Gorton, co-founder of American Values 2024, the super PAC supporting Kennedy’s campaign, said the candidate will need to prove viability to voters by consistently increasing his support in the polls in order to have a realistic chance of winning the election. He feels they’ve “got a shot” to pull off a historic upset.

    “I think it’s very important that Bobby a year from now be polling at the very least in the mid-to-high 30s in order to be seen as viable as anyone,” Gorton told CNN. “We need to be getting 1%, 1.5% of the electorate each month, but that’s a doable task.”

    Kennedy’s campaign as an independent could further complicate a general election race that’s already expected to be closely contested. A Reuters/Ipsos poll of a hypothetical three-way race between Biden, Trump and Kennedy conducted last week among likely voters found 14% of voters supported Kennedy, with 40% supporting Trump and 38% supporting Biden. With over a year until the general election, it’s unclear whether the Kennedy campaign can translate that level of support into votes in November 2024. Kennedy said he hopes to win the election by pulling in both Biden and Trump supporters.

    “They say my impact is only going to draw votes from the other candidates. The Democrats are frightened that I’m gonna spoil the election for President Biden, and the Republicans are frightened that I’m gonna spoil it for President Trump,” he said. “The truth is, they’re both right. My intention is to spoil it for both of them.”

    “Voters should not be deceived by anyone who pretends to have conservative values. The fact is that RFK has a disturbing background steeped in radical, liberal positions,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that criticized Kennedy over his positions on China, guns, the environment and abortion. “… A RFK candidacy is nothing more than a vanity project for a liberal Kennedy looking to cash in on his family’s name.”

    Trump’s allies and advisers have been building opposition research against Kennedy, intending to go on the offensive and paint Kennedy as a “liberal parading in conservative’s clothing,” one adviser told CNN, pointing to his past record as an environmental activist.

    Kennedy first launched his campaign to defeat Biden in the Democratic primary in April and frequently visited early primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina. But his efforts did little to sway Democratic primary voters, with just 9% of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire expressing support for Kennedy in a CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released in September.

    The Republican National Committee issued a statement just prior to Kennedy’s announcement, characterizing him as “just another radical, far-left Democrat.”

    Kennedy is the son of former US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy. Some of his siblings issued a joint statement on Monday, calling his decision to run against Biden in a general election “dangerous to our country.”

    “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country, ” Rory Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Joseph P Kennedy II and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said in a statement.

    A lifelong Democrat prior to announcing his run as an independent, Kennedy acknowledged his and his family’s long history with the Democratic Party and called the decision to disavow the party “very painful.” But he said he wants to fight against the two-party system, which he says has failed to provide Americans with viable options for the presidency. He criticized Biden’s age and competency as well as Trump’s ongoing legal troubles as a symptom of a corrupt political process.

    “That’s what two-party politics has given us, and that’s why we need to pry loose from the hammerlock of the corrupt powers in Washington, DC, and make this nation ours again.”

    The crowd of supporters in Philadelphia received Kennedy warmly, particularly when he discussed his plans to create a “tamper-proof election system” while expanding voting rights and called for the US “to pull our nation back from the brink of war with Russia.” A staunch anti-war advocate, Kennedy notably did not address the outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas over the weekend. Prior to Kennedy’s remarks, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a friend and informal adviser to Kennedy, spoke about the war and called for a moment of silence for victims in Israel.

    When asked by CNN following the event about Kennedy not mentioning Israel and Hamas in his remarks, Boteach dismissed the oversight and said his involvement in the event spoke loudly about Kennedy’s stance toward Israel.

    “I think that was very brave of him and showed tremendous solidarity that he asked a rabbi who’s his close friend. You know, he moved away from the political figures who could have introduced him and endorsed him,” Boteach said. “The fact that I’m the one that introduced him, I think said it all.”

    Kennedy’s lack of mention of Israel’s war with Hamas comes after he received criticism from Jewish groups in July after he falsely claimed during a dinner in New York City that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people are “most immune” to Covid-19. Kennedy strongly pushed back against the accusations of antisemitism from those groups.

    Kennedy has never held public office but has inspired a small contingent of supporters drawn to his advocacy against public health mandates and the influence of money on decisions made by government and private corporations. Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense, an organization that regularly spreads anti-vaccine misinformation, and has promoted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories at campaign events.

    Attendees at Monday’s event spanned the ideological spectrum, with conservatives, liberals and independents all gathering in Philadelphia for the announcement.

    Walter Rodriguez, a teacher from New Jersey who identifies as an independent, said he plans to support Kennedy if he’s on the ballot in his home state. Otherwise, he said, he doesn’t plan to vote at all.

    “I’m excited about the energy they bring to the table as a candidate, and I think some of the things that he’s talking about are things that I identify with,” Rodriguez said. “Not relying so much on central control of everything, pharmaceuticals, politics. So the fact that he’s declaring himself as independent today, that is the right way to go.”

    Karl Hagstrom came to Philadelphia from Westchester County, New York. He said he supported Trump in 2016 and 2020, but said he plans to support Kennedy in 2024. He said he’s drawn to Kennedy because he feels the political outsider can bring unity to the country, unlike Trump, who he said has been too divisive.

    “Just the constant insanity, the tweeting, the negativity, the just out-of-left field reactions to things. It’s not sustainable, it’s not something that can bring people together,” Hagstrom said.

    Sarah Shulman drove to the event with a group of supporters from the Boston area. A practicing pediatrician, Shulman attended Kennedy’s Democratic campaign launch event in Boston in April and said Kennedy’s anti-corruption message and his position on vaccines inspired her to support him. She said she voted for Biden in 2020 and has never considered supporting a Republican but has felt disconnected from Biden’s message since he took office.

    “He’s speaking our language,” Shulman said of Kennedy. “A Democrat, somebody in the liberal mind that’s compassionate, caring, who also is making sense.”

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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  • How bad is it for Ron DeSantis? He’s polling at RFK Jr.’s level | CNN Politics

    How bad is it for Ron DeSantis? He’s polling at RFK Jr.’s level | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the past few months running to the right ahead of his expected entry into the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign. From signing into law a six-week abortion ban to fighting with Disney, the governor has focused on satisfying his party’s conservative base.

    So far at least, those efforts have not paid off in Republican primary polling, with DeSantis falling further behind the current front-runner, former President Donald Trump.

    Things have gotten so bad for DeSantis that a recent Fox News poll shows him at 21% – comparable with the 19% that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed debunked conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, is receiving on the Democratic side.

    DeSantis was at 28% in Fox’s February poll, 15 points behind Trump. The Florida governor’s support has dropped in the two Fox polls published since, and he now trails the former president by 32 points.

    The Fox poll is not alone in showing DeSantis floundering. The latest average of national polls has him dropping from the low 30s into the low 20s.

    This may not seem like a big deal, but early polling has long been an indicator of how well presidential candidates do in the primary the following year. Of all primary elections since 1972 without incumbents running, candidates at around 30% in early primary polls (like DeSantis was in February) have gone on to become their parties’ nominees about 40% of the time. Candidates polling the way DeSantis is now have gone on to win about 20% of the time.

    I will, of course, point out that 20% is not nothing. DeSantis most certainly still has a chance of winning. The comparison with Kennedy is not a remark on Kennedy’s strength but on DeSantis’ weakness.

    There is no historical example of an incumbent in President Joe Biden’s current position (over 60% in the latest Fox poll) losing a primary. At this point in 1995, Bill Clinton was polling roughly where Biden is now, and he had no problem winning the Democratic nomination the following year.

    In that same campaign, Jesse Jackson was polling near 20% in a number of early surveys against Clinton. So what we’re seeing from Kennedy now is not, as of yet, a historical anomaly.

    Jackson didn’t run in that 1996 race. The power of incumbency is strong enough to deter most challengers.

    The last three incumbents to either lose state primary elections (when on the ballot) or drop out of the race – Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 – were at less than 40% of the vote or up by fewer than 10 points at this point in primary polling.

    The good news for DeSantis is that he doesn’t need to beat an incumbent, though one could make the case that Trump is polling like one.

    In fact, DeSantis’ decline is at least in part because of Trump’s rise. The former president, who has been indicted on felony criminal charges in New York, has gone from the low to mid-40s to above 50% in the average 2024 polling. (Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)

    But one could also argue that DeSantis isn’t helping his cause. He has yet to formally announce his 2024 campaign – most past nominees had already done so or had filed with the Federal Election Commission at this point in the race. And the governor’s play to the right doesn’t line up with where the anti-Trump forces are within the Republican Party.

    Trump has continually been weakest among party moderates. A Quinnipiac University poll released at the end of March found that he was pulling in 61% among very conservative Republicans, while garnering a mere 30% from moderate and liberal Republicans.

    This moderate wing is the part of the party that is least likely to want a ban on abortion after six weeks. A KFF poll taken late last year showed moderate and liberal Republicans split 50/50 on whether they wanted a six-week abortion ban.

    This group isn’t small. Moderates and liberals made up about 30% of potential Republican primary voters in the Quinnipiac poll.

    Indeed, DeSantis’ other big newsmaking action (his fight with Disney) has managed to split the GOP as well, a Reuters/Ipsos poll from last week found. Although a clear majority sided with the governor (64%), 36% of Republicans do not.

    For reference, over 80% of Republicans said in a Fox poll last month that Trump had not done anything illegal, with regard to the criminal charges against him in New York.

    DeSantis, at the moment, is not building a base. He’s dividing Republicans and allowing Trump to claim an electability mantle. The general electorate remains opposed to a six-week abortion ban and his position on Disney.

    We’ll see if that changes should his polling position improve after an official campaign launch. If it doesn’t, this may end up being one of the most boring presidential primary seasons in the modern era, given Biden’s and Trump’s significant advantages.

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  • Why Biden’s orbit isn’t worried about Robert F. Kennedy’s 2024 campaign | CNN Politics

    Why Biden’s orbit isn’t worried about Robert F. Kennedy’s 2024 campaign | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden’s campaign didn’t respond to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign kick-off because, though there is now a major donor summit on the books for next week, there still technically is no Biden campaign.

    What there is instead is an acceptance among most Democratic leaders that they may still have to wait a while for Biden to make it official – and a grudging embrace of that.

    To the confident advisers in the Biden orbit and their wider circle of supporters, the Kennedy challenge only serves to reinforce the president’s strength. Kennedy and spiritual author Marianne Williamson – mocked at a daily White House press briefing after her primary campaign launch – are the extent of the challenge Biden has drawn.

    The Democratic National Committee has made very clear, meanwhile, that the party apparatus is aligned with Biden. No plans for primary debates are underway. A White House aide did not respond when asked for comment about Kennedy’s kick-off.

    The furthest that New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley, who has been critical of Biden’s efforts to stop his state from holding its traditional first-in-the-nation primary, would go when asked about Kennedy’s candidacy was to say, “You just never know what catches the fancy of the voters.”

    “I think the president’s done a fantastic job. The amount of accomplishments is simply breathtaking,” Buckley said. “I don’t see a singular issue galvanizing opposition to him.”

    For at least a few hours on Wednesday, though, it looked like a real challenge. Like the bar across Boston Common that has the iconic “Cheers” sign but doesn’t actually look much like the set of the sitcom inside, Kennedy launch event at the Boston Park Plaza – with the “I’m a Kennedy Democrat” signs waving, the security with earpieces buzzing around – could, with a squint, look like any of the many campaigns from his famous family, including two against incumbent Democratic presidents, both of which ended with Republican wins.

    What many attendees were there for, they said, was Kennedy-style truth telling. What many of them cheered most loudly for through his meandering speech – “this is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years,” he joked with an hour left to go – were the oblique references to his Covid-19 vaccine skepticism. That skepticism has ostracized Kennedy from nearly every scientist, most Democratic leaders and many members of his family.

    Kennedy acknowledged that distance from his family, previously reported by CNN, by naming those family members who did attend the event, as well as others he said had written him “beautiful letters of love” about his launch even though they are opposed to him running.

    Inside the crowded ballroom on Wednesday, Kennedy told hundreds of supporters he knows he’s already being counted out.

    That, he said, was part of the point, and what made him just like his father and namesake, whose 1968 primary campaign took on Lyndon Johnson.

    “He was running against a president in his own party. He was running against a war. He was running at a time of unprecedented polarization in our country,” Kennedy said, calling his father getting into the 1968 race feeling like he had no chance to win.

    “That hopelessness of his campaign,” Kennedy said, “freed him to tell the truth to the American people.”

    Former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a two-time presidential candidate from the left, compared Kennedy to Paul Revere in his own introduction of the candidate. Kennedy noted that he’d timed his campaign launch to the anniversary of that ride, even reciting a bit of the famous Henry Longfellow poem, which he noted his grandmother Rose had made all her 29 grandchildren memorize.

    A new American Revolution is coming, he said, calling his campaign a mission to “end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.”

    But much of Kennedy’s speech returned to themes of how he had been trying to tell people what he thought was right, despite the government working against him – whether in his environmental work or when he called for an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.

    As a corner of Twitter lit up with “Curb Your Enthusiasm” jokes following the introduction of his wife Cheryl Hines (a star in the show), Kennedy plowed through his concerns at length. There were mentions of the CIA. There were mentions of the butterflies he worried his grandchildren would never get to see because of environmental degradation and the songbirds they’d never get to hear. There was an extended critique of the American health care system, which he said has failed in not effectively treating chronic diseases. “If I have not significantly dropped the number of children with chronic disease by the end of my second term, I do not want to get reelected,” he said. There were questions about whether the war in Ukraine is in the national interest.

    Kennedy knows he gets dismissed as a purveyor of misinformation, he said in his speech, but “a lot of the misinformation is just statements that depart from government orthodoxy.”

    More than an hour into his speech, the crowd erupted as he spoke about the rise in autism diagnoses since 1989, arguing that he has never met someone his age with autism.

    “Why aren’t we asking the question – what happened?” Kennedy asked.

    Over two hours – including when a fire alarm briefly interrupted the speech – Kennedy never explicitly said the word “vaccine” once.

    “He’s a truth teller,” said Rich Prunier, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, who remembered meeting John F. Kennedy during his 1956 Senate campaign and attended Wednesday’s event.

    Asked what he felt Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells the truth about, Prunier said, “name a subject.” His wife – wearing a matching “I’m a Kennedy Democrat” 2024 T-shirt – held up her copy of Kennedy’s book about “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

    Prunier, who said he has received other vaccines but none of the Covid-19 shots, said he had voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020, but abstained in the 2020 general election because he didn’t like Biden or Donald Trump. He said he just peeled his Sanders bumper sticker off and will soon be replacing it with the Kennedy one he just picked up.

    Elsewhere in the crowd, a small group posed for an iPhone photo while saying, “Freedom!”

    Karen Huntley, a 60-year-old bookkeeper who’d come from Connecticut after reading about the launch from a well-known vaccine skeptic, said she wasn’t ready to commit but that Kennedy “sounds like a good candidate” because of his position on vaccines.

    Huntley said she’d voted for Trump twice, but wouldn’t again – because of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration effort that helped accelerate development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

    “I consider Trump the father of the vaccine,” she said.

    His opposition to the vaccine, many leading Democrats say, disqualified Kennedy immediately.

    “Being a vaccine denier and causing harm to public health is not progressive,” California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, one of the newest progressive leaders elected to Congress, told CNN. “The Democratic Party – and the progressive wing – will be solidly behind President Biden. There is no support or appetite for a challenger.”

    Vaccine skepticism led Kennedy to a meeting at Trump Tower during the 2016 transition, after which he said the then-president-elect asked him to chair a commission on vaccines (the Trump transition later denied this, and the commission never came to be).

    Asked back then what his father or late uncles Ted Kennedy or John F. Kennedy would think of Trump as president, Robert F. Kennedy said, “He’s probably come into office less encumbered by ideology or by obligations than anybody who’s won the presidency since Andrew Jackson. We’ll see what happens.”

    By 2020, he said he had fully turned on Trump.

    “He’s a bully, and I don’t like bullies, and that’s part of American tradition. I think in many ways he’s discredited the American experiment with self-governance,” Kennedy told Yahoo News three years ago.

    While Kennedy says he’s running as a progressive, his first interview after declaring his candidacy was with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, in which he insisted that the American government is lying about the casualty rate in Ukraine.

    Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser and proud dirty trickster, wrote up his own thoughts about a campaign he called “intriguing and potentially substantially impactful on the 2024 presidential race.”

    “I believe that if he can pull together a minimally effective campaign, he could garner as much as a third of the Democrat primary vote,” Stone argued about Kennedy.

    Stone predicted that Democratic Party leaders would try to block that from happening, but if he turns out to be wrong, “Given America’s state of peril, if RFK performs better than expected, the former President should consider the drafting of RFK as the Republican vice presidential candidate in a ‘bipartisan’ unity ticket.”

    But though he and Kennedy were in a photo together backstage at an event last July, as part of the far-right Reawaken America tour, Stone said he has nothing to do with this campaign.

    “We are acquaintances,” Stone told CNN about Kennedy. “I met him once. I have no idea who is running his campaign, and therefore no contact with them.”

    In a long tweet last week, Kennedy denied speculation that has circulated in news reports that ties him to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

    “Is it a sign of my campaign’s strength that the Elite of DC’s establishment media simultaneously and shamelessly published an orchestrated and baseless lie to smear me, even before I announce my presidential campaign?” Kennedy wrote. “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with my presidential campaign. I have never discussed a presidential run with Mr. Bannon.”

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  • Supreme Court clears way for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed to try to use DNA to prove innocence | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court clears way for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed to try to use DNA to prove innocence | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court cleared the way on Wednesday for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed to seek post-conviction DNA evidence to try to prove his innocence.

    Reed claims an all-White jury wrongly convicted him of killing of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old White woman, in Texas in 1998.

    Texas had argued that he had waited too long to bring his challenge to the state’s DNA procedures in federal court, but the Supreme Court disagreed. Now, he can go to a federal court to make his claim.

    The ruling was 6-3. Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the opinion of the court and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

    Since Reed’s conviction, Texas courts had rejected his various appeals. Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Rihanna have expressed support, signing a petition asking the state to halt his eventual execution.

    The case puts a new focus on the testing of DNA crime-scene evidence and when an inmate can make a claim to access the technology in a plea of innocence. To date, 375 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 21 who served time on death row, according to the Innocence Project, a group that represents Reed and other clients seeking post-conviction DNA testing to prove their innocence.

    Kavanaugh, in his opinion Wednesday, said that the court agreed to hear the case because federal appeals courts have disagreed about when inmates can make such claims without running afoul of the statute of limitations. Kavanaugh said Reed could make the claim after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately denied his request for rehearing, rejecting an earlier date set out by the appeals court.

    “Significant systemic benefits ensue from starting the statute of limitations clock when the state litigation in DNA testing cases like Reed’s has concluded,” Kavanaugh said.

    He noted that if any problems with a defendant’s right to due process “lurk in the DNA testing law” the case can proceed through the appellate process, which could ultimately render a federal lawsuit unnecessary.

    Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

    Alito, joined by Gorsuch in his dissent, said Reed should have acted more quickly to bring his appeal. “Instead,” Alito wrote, “he waited until an execution date was set.”

    Alito charged Reed with making the “basic mistake of missing a statute of limitations.”

    Reed has been on death row for the murder of Stites.

    A passerby found Stites’ body near a shirt and a torn piece of belt. Investigators targeted Reed because his sperm was found inside her. Reed acknowledged the two were having an affair, but says that her fiancé, a local police officer named Jimmy Fennell, was the last to see her alive.

    Reed claims that over the last two decades he has discovered a “considerable body of evidence” demonstrating his innocence. Reed claims that the DNA testing would point to Fennell as the murder suspect. Fennell was later jailed for sexually assaulting a woman in his custody and Reed claims that numerous witnesses said he had threatened to strangle Stites with a belt if he ever caught her cheating on him. Reed seeks to test the belt found at the scene that was used to strangle Stites.

    The Texas law at issue allows a convicted person to obtain post-conviction DNA testing of biological material if the court finds that certain conditions are met. Reed was denied. He came to the Supreme Court in 2018 and was denied again. Now he is challenging the constitutionality of the Texas law arguing that the denial of the DNA testing violates his due process rights. 

    But the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals held that he waited too long to bring the claim. “An injury accrues when a plaintiff first becomes aware, or should have become aware, that his right had been violated.” The court said that he became aware of that in 2014 and that his current claim is “time barred.” 

    Reed’s lawyers argued that he could only bring the claim once the state appeals court had ruled, at the end of state court litigation. In court, Parker Rider-Longmaid said that the “clock doesn’t start ticking” until state court proceedings come to an end. He said Texas’ reading of the law would mean that other procedures in the appellate process are “irrelevant.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Senate Republicans confront 2024 primary challenges and Trump’s influence | CNN Politics

    Senate Republicans confront 2024 primary challenges and Trump’s influence | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Kari Lake – the unapologetic supporter of former President Donald Trump and vanquished candidate for Arizona governor – privately made a trip to National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters in February where she discussed the prospects of shaking up the map and running for Senate.

    But Lake, who has faced blowback over pushing baseless accusations of election fraud, was given this suggestion from NRSC officials: Shift to more effective messaging and away from claims about a stolen election, according to sources familiar with the matter.

    The meeting, which was described as a positive one, focused on how Senate bids often turn on issues that are different than governor’s races, multiple sources said. Top Republicans quietly acknowledge Lake could become a frontrunner if she runs in the primary, hoping to steer her towards a viable campaign if she mounts one, even as Arizona’s Pinal County sheriff is expected to soon jump into the race while independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema actively prepares a reelection bid herself.

    And that’s just one state.

    The Arizona race is one of several landmines that Republican leaders are navigating as they work behind the scenes to avoid a repeat of the 2022 debacle that saw weaker candidates emerge from contested primaries – only to peter out and collapse in the general election and hand Democrats a 51-49 Senate majority. Several of those candidates were backed by Trump as the NRSC – run at the time by Florida Sen. Rick Scott – opted to stay away from Republican primaries.

    Now, the NRSC – run by Sen. Steve Daines of Montana – has taken a much more hands-on approach to primaries, actively working on candidate recruitment and vetting. And the committee is weighing whether to spend big bucks in primaries to help root out weaker candidates, a move that risks setting up a clash with hard-right candidates aligning themselves with Trump.

    “You need to learn from your past mistakes,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, told CNN. “If you don’t make adjustments, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, it’s insanity.”

    Privately, Daines has spoken multiple times with Trump and has been in touch with his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., while national Republicans point to the NRSC’s early endorsement and fundraising for Rep. Jim Banks in the Indiana Senate race as an example of how the party’s warring wings can try to avoid messy primaries.

    The goal, GOP sources say, is to keep Trump aligned with Republican leadership – even as the former president has furiously attacked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the aftermath of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, and as the Senate GOP leader has stayed silent amid the former president’s indictment on 34 felony charges in New York. Daines, however, has been vocal in his defense of Trump.

    “I have a very good relationship with the president. We talk, and it’s no secret we’ve been friends for a long time,” Daines told CNN when asked about the Senate races. “And he provides great insights. And I also provide my thoughts as well. And we have open lines of communication.”

    Daines added: “Wherever we can find common ground is a good thing.”

    That relationship could be put to the test in key battleground states. In West Virginia, Republican leaders are preparing to close ranks behind Gov. Jim Justice, who is seriously weighing a run for the seat occupied by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. A Justice bid would put him against Rep. Alex Mooney, who had won Trump’s backing in a competitive House race in the last cycle but now has the support of the conservative Club for Growth’s political arm.

    In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano – the controversial candidate who lost a bid for governor last fall but had the support of Trump in the primary – says he’s “still praying” on whether to mount a bid for the Senate, something Republicans in Washington fear. The NRSC plans to put its muscle behind the potential candidacy of David McCormick, the hedge fund executive who narrowly lost the Pennsylvania Senate GOP primary in 2022, according to Republican sources who view him as their best bet at picking up the seat next year.

    “I haven’t decided yet on 2024. I’m thinking about it,” McCormick told CNN. “You run for office … because you think you have something to contribute. You think it’s a moment where you might be able to serve, and if you lose, that motivation doesn’t necessarily go away.”

    And in Montana, Rep. Matt Rosendale, a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, is weighing a run in a race that could put him up against two other potential candidates viewed by senior Republicans as more electable – Montana attorney general Austin Knudsen and businessman Tim Sheehy – against Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. Rosendale attended an event last Tuesday in Mar-a-Lago following Trump’s arraignment in New York, a sign one Trump adviser saw as an effort to secure an endorsement ahead of a potential bid.

    Rosendale told CNN he’s in no rush to make a decision.

    “We’re just taking a nice slow time to let the people in Montana decide who they want to replace him with,” Rosendale said of Tester. “I feel very sure he will be replaced.” He added that Daines “is my senator” and that “I see him regularly.”

    Tester contended that the Republican nominee makes little difference to him.

    “I think the person who runs against me is the person McConnell chooses,” Tester said. “Whoever that is, I don’t think it matters much: Same election.”

    Top Republicans say they will have to make key strategic decisions on how to engage in some of these races – or whether to stay out altogether, as they might in Ohio as party leaders view the emerging field as full of electable candidates against Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

    If they come in too aggressively, it could prompt blowback and rally the right behind a potentially weaker candidate. But if they disengage, they could see their favored candidate struggle to gain traction.

    In Wisconsin, Republican officials are urging Rep. Mike Gallagher to run, though he could face a potential primary there as well, as former Senate candidate Eric Hovde and others weigh a run. Gallagher, who is chairing a House panel focused on China, said of a potential run against Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin: “I’m not thinking about it at present,” citing his legislative work and family commitments. But he left the door open.

    “I’d never conceived of this as a long-term thing; I don’t think Congress should be a career,” Gallagher said, adding: “I’m going to weigh all those factors and see where I can make the best impact.”

    In interviews with roughly a dozen top senators, nearly all of them agreed they need to be hyper-focused this cycle on helping candidates who can win not only a primary election, but a general election — repeatedly referencing “candidate quality” as their 2024 motto.

    Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a member of Senate GOP leadership and former NRSC chairman, has long had to contend with primary fights between the party establishment and activist base – battles that had effectively cost them the chance at the Senate majority in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, in addition to 2022.

    “It never goes away,” Cornyn said of the primary complications. “Republicans need to make up their mind. Do we want to win, or do we want to lose? And I think that it’s that simple, and I think people are tired of losing.”

    Yet some on the right are warning against party leaders picking and choosing their candidates – including Scott, who defends his hands-off approach in the last cycle.

    “I believe the citizens of the state ought to pick,” Scott said, adding: “A lot of these weaker candidates often are the ones who actually win. I was not the establishment candidate.”

    Scott’s fellow Florida Republican, Marco Rubio, was not backed by the NRSC in the 2010 election cycle. But he galvanized the GOP base and defeated Charlie Crist, who later became a Democrat.

    “I’m not a big believer that you can determine who the weaker candidate is. A lot of people up here then would not have been their choice,” Rubio told CNN. “Obviously there might be some exceptions here or there, but generally the NRSC should be engaged in helping whoever the Republican nominee is to win the general election.”

    Unlike the last cycle — when the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund and the Rick Scott-run NRSC clashed publicly over the approach to expanding the Senate map — this time, the two committees are largely aligned. Republicans are betting that their preferred chances will vastly improve with the help of big donors and nationwide fundraising – and potentially an aggressive ad campaign in the primary to derail weaker opponents.

    “As we look across the country and look at different traces, it’s pretty straightforward,” Daines said. “We want to see candidates who can win a primary election and also win a general.”

    The map heavily favors the GOP – with 23 Democratic and independent seats in cycle compared to just 11 Republicans facing re-election. But Republicans, burnt by their past failures, are well aware that defeating an incumbent is a difficult task and could grow more challenging in a presidential election year, especially in swing states if Trump is the nominee. Behind the scenes, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to limit Democratic retirements.

    And Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was skeptical that a more aggressive GOP intervention from Washington would solve Republican woes.

    “I’m not sure who the Republicans will put forward as their nominees, but normally the folks who get to determine who the nominee is are the voters in those individual states in the primaries,” Peters said in an interview. “If we look at what happened last cycle, those primary voters tended to pick highly flawed candidates, and I expect that will happen again.”

    The fight for the seat occupied by Sinema has quickly emerged as the messiest affair – for both parties.

    Sinema’s recent change in party identification — switching from a Democrat to an independent — poses a fresh challenge that party leaders will have to navigate, as it could set up an unpredictable three-way race. Sinema has not yet said if she will run again, but she has been raising enormous sums in preparation for a potential bid and has been meeting with strategists and advisers to map out plans for a possible campaign.

    And Democratic leaders are worried that backing a fellow Democrat in the primary could end up alienating Sinema and potentially lead her to caucus with the GOP, forcing them to stay neutral for now.

    “She’s a very effective legislator,” Schumer, who so far is neutral in the race, said when asked about Sinema recently.

    On the GOP side, several candidates who tried — and failed — to win statewide races last cycle are also complicating that strategy, making it a key source of anxiety among many top Republicans and the Senate committees, according to Republican sources.

    Those candidates include Lake and the 2020 Senate GOP nominee, Blake Masters, two of the most Trumpian candidates who lost last year. Both Lake and Masters garnered enormous support among the GOP base for leaning into 2020 election denials and the populist ideals that Trump touted throughout his presidency. Masters has discussed a potential 2024 Senate bid with several Republicans, though it’s unclear whether he will run, GOP sources say.

    Lake met with the NRSC for roughly an hour in February and is expected to meet with them again in the coming weeks, sources familiar with the meeting told CNN. The issue of focusing on claims of a stolen election was one point discussed at the meeting, the sources said.

    “The point that has been brought up, which Kari knows, is that the issue sets are different from a governor’s race. She knows you can’t run on that because it’s not something, as a senator, that you can fix,” a source close to Lake said, referencing her rhetoric around stolen elections. “The conversation was more about how the issues are different between a governor’s race and a Senate race.”

    Senior Republicans acknowledge that her ultimate decision on whether to enter the race could freeze out other candidates, particularly those wanting to run in the same lane, with the source close to Lake saying establishment-minded Republicans have been reaching out to her about a potential run. The source said Lake has a 200,000-plus donor list she could pull support from and believes she would have “widespread support” if she decides to run.

    But many in the top ranks are skeptical about her chances.

    “If you take a look at the race, where Sen. Sinema is probably going to take some of the right, left and center, it’s going to make for a difficult path for a Republican in that state in any scenario,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told CNN. “The party there is, I think, set on Lake if she decides to run with it, but, I mean, we just have to see how well she performs.”

    Tillis added that, given the “three-way race dynamic,” Lake “is not going to be able to make a lot of headway there.”

    Cornyn said of Lake: “Her recent track record doesn’t indicate that she would be successful. We need candidates who can broaden their appeal beyond the base and win a general.”

    Masters, meanwhile, has quietly reached out to some advisers about what another Senate run would look like and has spoken with some senior GOP officials about a 2024 run.

    Other potential GOP candidates include Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is expected to announce a Senate run as soon as this week and is viewed favorably by some top Republicans, according to GOP sources. Abe Hamadeh, formerly the Republican nominee for Arizona attorney general, is also weighing a run. And both Lamb and Hamadeh met recently with NRSC officials, but they have not met directly with Daines, according to a source familiar with the meetings.

    Two other Republicans, Jim Lamon and Karrin Taylor Robson, are also considering jumping into the race, sources familiar with the matter say. Lamon and Robson, who ran in 2022 for Senate and governor respectively, did not receive Trump’s support.

    Robson recently met with the NRSC, and many within the GOP committee “like her and see her as a quality candidate,” a source familiar with the meeting said. Lamon has not yet met with the NRSC, but is expected to set up a meeting in the coming months.

    Arizona’s Senate primary is not until August 6, 2024, and the filing deadline to enter is April 8, 2024 — giving them a long runway to decide whether or not to run — further complicating GOP leadership’s calculus on how to navigate the race dynamics.

    “I just think we’re, we’re more likely to get people elected if they’re focused on the future, as opposed to focusing on what happened in 2020,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican of Utah, said when asked about a potential Lake candidacy. “I think the American people have made their judgment about the election and want to move on. So, let’s talk about the future and where we’re headed, and if we’ve got a candidate that is consumed with his or her past, it’s most likely a losing candidate.”

    Caroline Wren, a senior adviser to Lake, told CNN, “There’s no doubt Kari Lake is a formidable force in the Republican party right now, but she’s still focused on her lawsuit in Arizona,” referring to her efforts to dispute her loss in the governor’s race.

    Rubio said that Lake could be a strong Senate candidate, despite her shortfall last year.

    “She was a very competitive candidate. I think I trust the Republican voters in Arizona to pick the nominee,” Rubio said. “I don’t think Washington should be stepping in to do it.”

    But Democrats believe that a Lake candidacy will only bolster their chances, even if Sinema decides to run.

    Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat running for his party’s nomination in the Senate race, suggested to CNN he was praying for a Lake candidacy.

    “I’m a practicing Catholic – so I have these votive candles for different things,” Gallego said. “I have a special candle for Kari Lake to jump in.”

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  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. files paperwork to run for president as a Democrat | CNN Politics

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. files paperwork to run for president as a Democrat | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in 2024 as a Democrat.

    The filing was confirmed Wednesday by his campaign treasurer, John E. Sullivan.

    The 69-year-old is the son of former New York senator, US attorney general and assassinated 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy.

    Kennedy Jr. is a longtime vaccine skeptic. He has promoted discredited claims linking vaccines and autism and founded the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He has also railed against the coronavirus vaccine and has criticized the federal government’s handling of the pandemic.

    In 2019, three members of his family – his sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, brother Joseph P. Kennedy II and niece Maeve Kennedy McKean – forcefully denounced his anti-vaccine views in a Politico Magazine op-ed, arguing that he was “part of a misinformation campaign that’s having heartbreaking – and deadly – consequences.”

    In 2022, Kennedy Jr. invoked Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. The previous year, Instagram took down his account “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”

    Kennedy had tweeted last month that he was considering a presidential run.

    “If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race,” he said.

    His tweet also pointed supporters to his website: “Let Bobby know you want to see his leadership in the White House,” the site says while asking for donations.

    As an environmental lawyer, Kennedy worked with a group that led the Hudson River cleanup. He also worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-founded an environmental law firm.

    Should he go through with his presidential bid, Kennedy would be the latest in a long line of family members to enter politics.

    His sister Kathleen served as the lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003. His brother Joseph was a congressman from Massachusetts from 1987 to 1999. And more recently, his brother Chris Kennedy was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Illinois in 2018.

    The last Kennedy to hold elected office was his nephew former Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy III, who lost a Democratic Senate primary in 2020. (He is now the US special envoy for Northern Ireland.) Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of former President Kennedy, is currently the US ambassador to Australia.

    The 2024 Democratic presidential race is only beginning to take shape, with President Joe Biden expected to announce his bid for a second term. Author Marianne Williamson launched a second long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last month.

    On the Republican side, former President Donald Trump jump-started the race for the party nomination, announcing his third bid for the White House last year. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy are also in the race, while other well-known contenders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, are weighing bids of their own.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • New York grand jury indicts former President Donald Trump in hush money payment case

    New York grand jury indicts former President Donald Trump in hush money payment case

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    A New York grand jury voted Thursday to indict former President Donald Trump in connection with a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, his lawyer told CNBC.

    Trump attorney Joe Tacopina told NBC News that Trump is expected to surrender to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office early next week.

    Trump is the first former president to be charged with a crime, a development that will reverberate around the country. The indictment comes as he is the leading contender seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

    The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg confirmed the indictment Thursday evening.

    “This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected,” said a spokesperson for Bragg’s office.

    The number of charges Trump faces in the indictment was not disclosed Thursday. And it was not known whether the indictment was limited to conduct related to the payment to Daniels or if it also includes conduct surrounding a separate hush money payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal by the publisher of The National Enquirer.

    Trump blasted the decision, calling it “Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history.” Just Wednesday, he had said in a social media post that he had “gained such respect for this grand jury.”

    The charge stems from the district attorney’s investigation into how the Trump Organization recorded a reimbursement to Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen after Cohen paid Daniels, who’s also known as Stephanie Clifford, to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006.

    Follow our live coverage of the New York grand jury vote to indict former President Donald Trump.

    Trump was filming his TV show, “Celebrity Apprentice,” at the time of that purported tryst, and was married to his current wife, Melania Trump, who had given birth to their son, Barron, a few months earlier.

    The Trump Organization in business records described the reimbursement to Cohen as a legal expense.

    Falsifying business records is normally a misdemeanor under New York law, but can be elevated to a felony if the misstatement was done to cover up another crime.

    Trump denies having sex with Daniels or committing wrongdoing of any kind.

    “This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” Trump said in a statement. “The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable — indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.”

    Tacopina and another Trump lawyer, Susan Necheles, said: “President Trump has been indicted.  He did not commit any crime.”

    “We will vigorously fight this political prosecution in Court,” the defense lawyers said.

    The indictment, which will be prosecuted by Bragg’s office, is the first in what could end up being several criminal cases against Trump, the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

    Trump is also under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice in two separate criminal cases. One is related to his efforts to overturn the Electoral College victory of President Joe Biden in the 2020 election as he made false claims of widespread ballot fraud in the popular vote that year. The other probe is focused on Trump’s removal of government records from the White House, and whether he obstructed justice by keeping them at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, for more than a year as government officials sought their return.

    A state prosecutor in Atlanta is also separately investigating Trump and a number of his allies over their attempt to get Georgia officials to reverse his loss to Biden in the state in 2020.

    Former US President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Waco, Texas, on Saturday, March 25, 2023.

    Brandon Bell | Getty Images

    Cohen, in a statement to NBC News, said: “For the first time in our Country’s history, a President (current or former) of the United States has been indicted. I take no pride in issuing this statement and wish to also remind everyone of the presumption of innocence; as provided by the due process clause.”

    “However, I do take solace in validating the adage that no one is above the law; not even a former President,” Cohen said. “Today’s indictment is not the end of this chapter; but rather, just the beginning. Now that the charges have been filed, it is better for the case to let the indictment speak for itself. The two things I wish to say at this time is that accountability matters and I stand by my testimony and the evidence I have provided to” the Manhattan district attorney, he said.

    CNBC Politics

    Read more of CNBC’s politics coverage:

    The Manhattan prosecution of Trump comes more than four years after Cohen, who loyally served him for years before that, turned on Trump and began cooperating with federal, state and local law enforcement officials in New York.

    Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal criminal charges that included campaign finance violations for both the Daniels payment and a separate payment he facilitated to McDougal, the former Playboy model, to buy her silence over an affair she said she started with Trump in 2006.

    The Federal Election Commission in 2021 fined the publisher of The National Enquirer $187,500 for “knowingly and willfully” violating campaign law by paying McDougal a $150,000 “catch and kill” fee to buy her story and bury it ahead of the 2016 election.

    Michael Cohen, former attorney for former U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives to the New York Courthouse in New York City, U.S., March 13, 2023. 

    Eduardo Munoz | Reuters

    Cohen said the payments were designed to protect Trump’s chances in that election, when he faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump escaped punishment from the FEC.

    Cohen met 20 times with investigators from the DA’s office before testifying over two days last week before the grand jury in Manhattan Criminal Court. That panel began meeting in late January and heard testimony from multiple witnesses before Cohen.

    Trump and a number of Republican elected officials have accused Bragg, who is a Democrat, of pursuing the investigation to harm him politically.

    Bragg’s focus on the payment to Daniels in recent months came as a surprise, as it was considered by many to be the weakest possible criminal case against Trump in a probe that began four years ago under Bragg’s predecessor as DA, Cyrus Vance Jr.

    Adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels speaks US Federal Court with her lawyer Michael Avenatti (R) on April 16, 2018, in Lower Manhattan, New York.

    Eduardo Munoz Alvarez | AFP | Getty Images

    In February 2022, two top prosecutors who were working on the investigation quit after Bragg indicated he was suspending the probe.

    At the time, that investigation was focused on Cohen’s allegations that Trump and the Trump Organization reported different values for the same real estate properties to lower their tax burden and insurance costs and to maximize the value of loans against them, among other things.

    One of the prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz, in his resignation letter said Trump was “guilty of numerous felony violations,” which related to the “preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition,” which “were false.”

    Attorney General Letitia James in September filed a civil lawsuit seeking at least $250 million in penalties from Trump, his company, and three of his adult children, alleging widespread fraud in financial statements.

    James’ lawsuit, which is headed to trial later this year, seeks to permanently bar Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump from serving as an officer of a company in New York and permanently prohibit the Trump companies named in the suit from doing business in New York state.

    In December, a Manhattan jury convicted two subsidiaries of the Trump Organization of multiple crimes related to a scheme that since 2005 had sought to avoid paying taxes on executive compensation in the form of perks including free apartments and luxury cars to then-chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.

    Trump was not personally charged in that case, but he “knew exactly what was going on,” a prosecutor said in closing arguments in Manhattan Supreme Court.

    The Trump subsidiaries convicted in the case were fined $1.6 million for the scheme in January at sentencing.

    Weisselberg, who had pleaded guilty in that case in August, was sentenced in January to five months in jail. He is scheduled to be released from the notorious Rikers Island jail on April 19, which factors in time off his sentence for good behavior.

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  • DeSantis needles Trump as he breaks silence on hush money case | CNN Politics

    DeSantis needles Trump as he breaks silence on hush money case | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Breaking his silence on Donald Trump’s legal troubles, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday criticized the Manhattan district attorney who is pursuing charges against the former president and vowed his office would not be involved if the matter trickles into Trump’s adopted home state.

    But DeSantis, a rising rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, stopped well short of offering support for the former president and instead seemed to poke fun at the situation Trump has found himself in as he attempts a political comeback and a third campaign for the White House. A grand jury is in the final stages of determining whether Trump should face charges over an alleged payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels related to a supposed affair.

    “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” DeSantis said as laughter broke out at a news conference in Panama City, Florida. “I just, I can’t speak to that.”

    DeSantis added: “I’ve got real issues to deal with here in the state of Florida.”

    The dismissive quips traveled quickly across the state to Mar-a-Lago, where Trump has decamped while he awaits for word on the New York grand jury’s findings. His allies immediately started attacking DeSantis across social media, suggesting he would face a political price for failing to recognize Republicans are rallying around Trump amid his mounting legal threats.

    Trump responded in a statement posted to his social media site, Truth Social, leveling a series of personal attacks against DeSantis.

    “Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!). I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!” Trump wrote.

    As part of the post Trump also shared a photo that suggested DeSantis had behaved inappropriately with teenage girls while teaching history in Georgia in his early 20s, an image the former president previously shared on social media to go after the Florida governor.

    The episode Monday was illustrative of the increasingly fraught rivalry between two of the GOP’s biggest stars as they battle for party supremacy — one made more awkward by their proximity inside the Sunshine State. Trump has suggested his arrest is forthcoming, and if he is in Florida at that moment, it could require a coordinated effort by police in DeSantis’ state.

    DeSantis said he is not aware of any arrangements with local law enforcement regarding Trump, and he said he had “no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus.”

    The delayed remarks by DeSantis stand in stark contrast to the forceful defense he offered on Trump’s behalf last August when federal authorities seized documents from the former president’s Palm Beach estate. Just hours after the raid, DeSantis on Twitter called the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves.”

    But there was no such tweet this time from DeSantis, who had remained quiet for days amid reports that a New York grand jury was interviewing witnesses and has largely avoided discussing Trump at all amid escalating attacks from the former president and his allies. DeSantis instead last week held events focused on relief for Hurricane Ian victims and the pandemic. He posted a picture from the World Baseball Classic picture standing next to the Miami Marlins mascot.

    Over the weekend, as other Republicans criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, for pursuing charges in a case that dates back to the 2016 election, Trump allies engaged in a coordinated pressure campaign to get DeSantis to speak out in defense of the former president.

    “Thank you, Vice President @Mike_Pence and @VivekGRamaswamy, for pointing out how Radical Left Democrats are trying to divide our Country in the name of Partisan Politics,” Trump campaigdn adviser Jason Miller wrote on Twitter. “Radio silence from Gov. @RonDeSantisFL and Amb. @NikkiHaley.”

    Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., wrote in a tweet on Sunday: “Pay attention to which Republicans spoke out against this corrupt BS immediately and who sat on their hands and waited to see which way the wind was blowing.”

    MAGA, Inc sent several emails tracking which Republicans had commented on the potential criminal charges and hitting DeSantis for “remaining silent.” Trump allies acknowledged that this was a concerted effort to force DeSantis to weigh in on the matter, believing that he would have to offer support to Trump.

    When DeSantis finally weighed in Monday, it came during an unrelated press conference about central bank digital currencies, a recent area of concern among some conservatives but hardly the topic of the day, given the revelations about Trump’s legal case. He didn’t address Trump’s legal situation until asked by an individual from the Florida Standard, a conservative website friendly to DeSantis.

    DeSantis echoed other criticism of Bragg, accusing the Democrat of seeking charges against Trump for political reasons. He compared Bragg to the local state attorney in Tampa, Andrew Warren, who DeSantis controversially removed from office last year over his politics, and linked them both to George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire and progressive donor often at the center of conservative conspiracies.

    “If you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush money payments, you know, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office, and I think that that’s fundamentally wrong,” DeSantis said.

    But DeSantis also seemed to downplay Bragg’s pursuit of Trump as a lesser concern compared to issues related to crime in the city.

    “That’s bad, but the real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans in all these different jurisdictions that they get victimized every day because of the reckless political agenda that the Soros DAs bring to their job,” he said. “They ignore crime and they empower criminals.”

    Haley weighed in later Monday, saying a prosecution of Trump would be “for political points.” The former South Carolina governor, who announced her White House campaign last month, told Fox News’ Bret Baier, “And I think what we know is that when you get into political prosecutions like this, it’s more about revenge than it is about justice.”

    “I think the country would be better off talking about things that the American public cares about than to sit there and have to deal with some revenge by some political people in New York,” added Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • MLK invoked as Tyre Nichols’ life is celebrated in song and tributes in Memphis | CNN

    MLK invoked as Tyre Nichols’ life is celebrated in song and tributes in Memphis | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Mourners, from Vice President Kamala Harris to the activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, on Wednesday celebrated the life of Tyre Nichols, whose death at the hands of police in Memphis led to second-degree murder charges against five officers.

    “Mothers around the world, when their babies are born, pray to God when they hold that child, that that body and that life will be safe for the rest of his life,” Harris said to applause during Nichols’ funeral service in a packed Memphis sanctuary.

    “And when we look at this situation, this is a family that lost their son and their brother through an act of violence at the hands and the feet of people who had been charged with keeping them safe.”

    Nichols, 29, who was Black, was subdued yet continuously beaten after a traffic stop by Memphis police on January 7. He died three days later.

    “The people of our country mourn with you,” Harris told Nichols’ family.

    Sharpton, in a painfully familiar role, delivered an impassioned eulogy that paid tribute to Nichols’ life and served as a clarion call for justice.

    Sharpton said he visited the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. He called out the five Black former officers charged in Nichols’ death.

    “There’s nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us that fight to open doors, that you walked through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight for to get you through them doors. You didn’t get on the police department by yourself,” Sharpton said.

    If Nichols had been white, Sharpton said, “you wouldn’t have beat him like that,” referring to the five former officers.

    “You don’t fight crime by becoming criminals yourself… That ain’t the police. That’s punks.”

    The reverend invoked King’s 1968 “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, where King said he had reached the peak and seen the Promised Land. The former cops accused of killing Nichols, he said, failed to live up to that legacy. “He expected you to bring us on to the Promised Land,” Sharpton said.

    Flanked by the Rev. Al Sharpton and her husband, Rodney Wells, RowVaughn Wells speaks during the funeral service for her son Wednesday.

    RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother, remembered her son as “a beautiful person” and echoed others at the celebration of life in calling for passage of the George Floyd Policing Act.

    “There should be no other child that should suffer the way my son and all the other parents here (who) have lost their children,” she said.

    Nichols’ older sister, Keyana Dixon, recalled looking after her younger brothers.

    “With Ty, I didn’t mind,” she said. “He never wanted anything but to watch cartoons and a big bowl of cereal. So it was pretty easy to watch him.”

    Dixon said all she wants is her “baby brother back.’

    Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Nichols’ family, said the charges against the five ex-officers in Nichols’ death set a precedent. Within 20 days of his death, the former officers were indicted on charges that included murder and kidnapping.

    “We can count to 20 and every time you kill one of us on video, we’re going to say the legacy of Tyre Nichols is that we have equal justice swiftly,” he said.

    Tyre Nichols, 29, was a free spirit with a passion for skateboarding and capturing sunsets on his camera.

    For the day, mourners at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church shifted the focus from the heart-wrenching footage of the beating that Nichols in a hospital bed with his face badly swollen and bruised before his death, sparking protests across the country.

    Harris was joined other senior level Biden administration officials, including White House Director for the Office of Public Engagement Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta, and Senior Adviser to the President Mitch Landrieu.

    Representing other Black people killed by police, Tamika Palmer – whose daughter Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police during a botched raid in March 2020 – attended the service.

    Also there was Philonise Floyd, the younger brother of George Floyd, whose name reverberated across the nation following his May 2020 death after an ex-cop Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck and back for more than 9 minutes.

    “The family needs all the support that they can get,” Gwen Carr, whose son, Eric Garner, died after being placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer in 2014, told CNN Wednesday before attending the service. “It’s so fresh for them but for me, it just digs into old wounds.”

    The service was scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. local time but was pushed back because of bad weather and travel delays. It began shortly after 1 p.m. on the first day of Black History Month with African tribal drummers and a gospel choir.

    With Nichols’ black casket, draped in a white bouquet of flowers, as a centerpiece, the young man was praised by the Rev. J. Lawrence Turner as “a good person, a beautiful soul, a son, a father, a brother, a friend, a human being – gone too soon.”

    Mourners watched slide shows of a smiling Nichols at different times in his life. A photo montage opened with a quote from Nichols: “My vision is to bring my viewers deep into what I am seeing through my eye and out through my lens.”

    The Rev. Al Sharpton introduces the family of Tyre Nichols.

    Tiffany Rachal, the mother of Jalen Randle, a 29-year-old Black man killed by a Houston police officer last year, offered her condolences to the family before singing, “Lord I will lift my eyes to the hills.”

    On Tuesday, Sharpton and Nichols’ family gathered at the Mason Temple Church of God In Christ headquarters in Memphis – where King Jr. delivered his famous “Mountaintop” speech the night before he was killed.

    “We will continue in Tyre’s name to head up to Martin’s mountaintop,” Sharpton said from the “sacred ground” where MLK delivered his speech 55 years ago.

    Tyre Nichols' funeral service took place less than a week after Friday evening's public release of footage of the brutal attack on him.

    Sharpton reflected on the family’s loss as their son’s name is added to a vast pantheon of Black people who died after encounters with police.

    “They will never ever recover from the loss,” Sharpton said.

    Before Wednesday’s service, Dan Beazley, 61, carried a towering wooden cross over his shoulder outside the Memphis church. He said he drove 12 hours – including through an ice storm – from Northville, Michigan, to pay his respects and shine a light.

    Dan Beazley, 61, left, carries wooden cross outside Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church.

    Nichols has been described as a devoted son who had tattooed his mother’s name on his arm, a loving father to a 4-year-old boy, and a free spirit with a passion for skateboarding and capturing sunsets on his camera.

    Public outrage over the disturbing arrest video led to firings or disciplinary action against other public servants who were at the scene, including the firings of three Memphis Fire Department personnel. Two sheriff’s deputies have been put on leave. Additionally, two more police officers have been placed on leave.

    Nichols’ funeral took place less than a week after Friday evening’s public release of footage of the attack on him shook a nation long accustomed to videos of police brutality, especially against people of color.

    The brutal attack sparked largely peaceful protests from New York to Los Angeles as well as renewed calls for police reform and scrutiny of specialized police units that target guns in high crime areas.

    Up to 20 hours of video recordings haven’t been released, Shelby County District Attorney Steven Mulroy told CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” on Wednesday. The audio from the recordings is “probably more useful” in some cases than what the video shows, Mulroy said.

    He didn’t specify what can be heard on the recordings, which he said include sound captured after the beating took place.

    The release of that footage will be determined by city officials, he added.

    The prosecutor said he has asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to expedite its investigation into the other emergency responders – those besides the five already indicted – to see whether any charges are warranted for them. Those people include the officers who filed the paperwork, he said.

    Nichols was the baby of his family, the youngest of four children, according to RowVaughn Wells.

    He moved to Memphis from California right before the Covid-19 pandemic and remained there after the mandatory lockdowns prompted by the health crisis, his mother has said.

    Nichols was a regular at a Germantown, Tennessee, Starbucks where he befriended a group of people who set aside their cellphones at a table and talked mostly about sports, particularly his beloved San Francisco 49ers.

    His visits to Starbucks were typically followed by a nap before heading to a his job at FedEx. He would come home for dinner during his break.

    Nichols was also a fixture among the skateboarders at Shelby Farms Park, where he photographed memorable sunsets, according to his mother.

    In fact, taking pictures served as a form of self-expression that writing could never capture for Nichols, who had written on his photography website that it helped him look “at the world in a more creative way.”

    He preferred capturing landscapes.

    “I hope to one day let people see what i see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work,” he wrote.

    Before moving to Memphis, Nichols lived in Sacramento, California, where a friend recalled that “skating gave him wings.”

    On Wednesday, one song performed at the end of the service was a gospel version of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

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  • Tech CEO apologizes for quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in layoff announcement | CNN Business

    Tech CEO apologizes for quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in layoff announcement | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A tech CEO is apologizing after quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in a layoffs announcement.

    On January 24, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada sent a letter to employees announcing the digital operations management company would eliminate about 7% of its workforce.

    Tejada quoted King at the end of that letter.

    “I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’” she wrote. “PagerDuty is a leader that stands behind its customers, its values, and our vision — for an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust.”

    On Friday, Tejada apologized for quoting King.

    “The quote I included from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was inappropriate and insensitive,” she said in the memo. “I should have been more upfront about the layoffs in the email, more thoughtful about my tone, and more concise. I am sorry.”

    When asked for additional comment, a representative for PagerDuty pointed to the blog post updated with Tejada’s apology.

    The tech industry has seen a spate of layoffs in recent weeks. Amazon announced in early January that it would lay off more than 18,000 workers. And Salesforce said it plans to cut about 10% of its staff. Microsoft, meanwhile, is laying off 10,000 employees.

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  • ‘I Have a Dream’ is MLK’s most radical speech — not because of what he said then, but because of how America has changed since | CNN

    ‘I Have a Dream’ is MLK’s most radical speech — not because of what he said then, but because of how America has changed since | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    It’s been called “the moment that changed everything,” the day America “turned the mystic corner,” and “the greatest political speech of the 20th century.”

    As the nation celebrates the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s national holiday tomorrow, millions of Americans will once again hear what has become the day’s unofficial soundtrack: King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

    The speech King gave 60 years ago in Washington has been endlessly replayed, dissected and misquoted. It’s his most famous speech. But here’s another way to look at it:

    It is also the most radical speech King ever delivered.

    That declaration might sound like sacrilege to those who will point to King’s thunderous takedowns of war, poverty and capitalism in other sermons. But “I Have a Dream” has arguably become his most radical speech — not because of what he said but because of how America has changed since that day.

    Forget the nonthreatening version of the speech you’ve been taught that emphasizes King’s benign vision of Black, White and brown Americans living in blissful racial harmony.

    The core concept in King’s dream is racial integration – and it still terrifies many people 60 years later.

    Integration is “too threatening to the status quo to ever consider fully,” says Calvin Baker, author of “A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Integration, and the Future of America.”

    The concept of integration that King evoked in his “I Have a Dream” speech is the most “radical, discomfiting and transformative” idea in US politics, adds Baker, a novelist and professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

    “It’s the thing the mainstream fears the most,” he says. “It’s a beautiful speech and it’s descriptive of integration. It sounds really good. And then you understand – whew – the work that’s required.”

    This is the tragic irony behind King’s holiday. Millions of Americans applaud the idyllic vision of integration he depicts in “I Have a Dream.” But many of America’s schools, churches and neighborhoods remain racially segregated today — a racial status quo that people on both the left and the right have come to accept.

    If that seems like an overstatement, consider this:

    When was the last time you heard a prominent religious or political leader use the term “integration” while talking about solutions for racial injustice?

    To understand why King’s message is so radical, it’s good to ask what he meant when he evoked integration at the climax of his speech.

    At first glance, the answer seems to be physical proximity. In his speech King declared he dreamed of a day when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”

    But King didn’t just preach that all Americans should be able to sit at that table, historians say. He also said they should all have an equal chance at getting a slice of the economic pie being served.

    “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee,” King once said.

    Historians say King never saw integration as assimilation – urging people of color to act like White people.

    “He didn’t have in mind a romantic mixing of colors, or what I would call a kind of ‘rubbing shoulders and elbows’ approach to integration,” says Lewis V. Baldwin, author of “The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.” “Dr . King meant mutual acceptance, interpersonal living and shared power.”

    Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. waves to supporters on August 28, 1963, on the Mall in Washington. His speech spoke of Black and White people sitting together

    The power part is what often gets edited out during the ritualistic replays of King’s speech. There is an economic component of King’s dream that’s hardly ever mentioned. The original title of that August 28, 1963, event, for example, was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

    “Integration is not just hanging out (together). It’s having access to credit, it’s seeing the value of your home increase, it’s accumulating wealth,” says Leonard Steinhorn, co-author of “By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and The Reality of Race.”

    “It involves employment, quality education and all of those things together.”

    Historians say King’s ultimate goal was not just equal economic opportunity but something even more ambitious, and even spiritual: An America where mutual mistrust between races and religions would be virtually eliminated by people living, worshiping and going to school together. They would see their common humanity and celebrate their shared identity as Americans.

    “We must always be aware of the fact that our ultimate goal is integration, and that desegregation is only a first step on the road to the good society,” King said in a speech called “The Ethical Demands for Integration.”

    It can all seem abstract, but Steinhorn distills what that world might look like in one pithy example:

    “If an African-American knocks on the door of a White neighbor and asks for a cup of sugar, that White neighbor should see a neighbor.”

    Here’s another reason why King’s dream was so radical. His concept of integration is what Baker, the scholar and author, calls “the biggest threat to the existing racial order.”

    The existing racial order is still defined by one dynamic that shows little signs of changing: Many White Americans, on the left and right, refuse to stay in communities where the ratio of Black people exceeds a certain level. When non-White people arrive in larger than token numbers, Whites invariably tend to move out. Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon – it’s called a “racial tipping point.”

    Members of the New York Youth Committee for Integration sit at a lunch counter in a Woolworth's store in April 1960 to protest segregation.

    Although many US suburbs have grown more diverse, this stubborn dynamic is why residential and school segregation remain high 60 years after King’s speech, even though there is some evidence that racial segregation is slowly declining. It’s why Black homeowners often must hide any signs that they live in a home they’re trying to sell, because home appraisers often devalue Black-owned homes.

    It’s why even some progressive White folks with Black Lives Matter signs in their lawns get angry when they’re asked to send their kids to a public school where most of the students are minorities.

    This dynamic is why what looks like a racially mixed neighborhood is often one that’s on the way to becoming all-Black, says Steinhorn, who is also a professor at American University in Washington.

    “Integration exists only in the time span between the first Black family moving in and the last white family moving out,” Steinhorn wrote in “By the Color of Our Skin.”

    This impulse to flee communities turning Black and brown goes deeper than abstract debates over property values, neighborhood schools and freedom.

    It’s deeply rooted in American history, as the late author Toni Morrison said in an interview with Time magazine.

    She said every immigrant group learned that to be associated with Black people is to be associated with someone at the bottom.

    “In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me – it’s nothing else but color,” Morrison said. “Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, ‘I am not that.’

    Neighborhood kids of fictional Hawkins, Indiana, in Netflix's

    Steinhorn says many White Americans prefer something he calls “virtual integration.” Their primary exposure to Black people comes through TV series, movies and ads, he says. In that virtual world, King’s dream comes alive: Black, White and brown people drink beer together, trade jokes and visit each other’s homes.

    To Steinhorn, virtual integration functions like a placebo: it gives White Americans the feel-good illusion that they are having repeated contact with Black people.

    “With the possible exception of the military,” Steinhorn says, “the television screen may be the most integrated part of American life.”

    Here’s another irony associated with King’s acclaimed speech.

    King’s potent critiques of capitalism, war and poverty were shocking at the time. He turned off allies when he called for the redistribution of wealth, argued for a guaranteed income and came out against the Vietnam War.

    Those positions don’t sound so radical anymore. After the 2008 Great Recession, the failed Iraq War and polls showing a majority of young Americans now hold a negative view of capitalism, his views on those issues wouldn’t sound out of place today.

    But his calls for integration have been virtually banished from public discourse. Many don’t even use the word’s close cousin, “post-racial,” anymore.

    The concept of integration that King evoked has become so discredited that even many of those who believe in its goals no longer use the term.

    Students enter Central Elementary School in Petoskey, Michigan, for the first day of the 2022-23 school year.

    Amanda Shaffer is one such person – and someone who says her life was enhanced by her experience with integration. She was a White student who was bused to a Black public high school in Cleveland, Ohio after refusing to follow her friends to a White private academy. She credits the experience with given giving her a level of empathy she would not have found otherwise.

    “It shifted my point of view,” Shaffer told CNN in 2014 for a story about being a White minority in Black settings. “It’s like when you go to the optometrist, and they slap those new lenses on you — you see the world differently.”

    Shaffer works today as a diversity consultant and a professional coach. She says she still believes in the necessity of people of different races living, working and going to school together and tries to promote those values in her work.

    Still, she won’t use the term “integration” in her diversity work. She says the term “triggers” some White people.

    “For me, integration is left over from all that 1950s and ’60s stuff that made a lot of people feel bad,” she says. “The problem with integration is that it feels like mixing or assimilation, and that’s where you get some of these folks who think, ‘If everybody is intermarrying and then we’re all shades of brown, where does my identity go?’ Integration is a term that pushes against people’s identity.”

    Perhaps it only pushes against people’s identity if they define themselves by their color and not as Americans.

    One reason King’s speech is so powerful is that it goes to the heart of how Americans are taught to define themselves: By adherence to a set of ideas, not by superficial physical appearances. The nation’s motto is “Out of Many, One.”

    It’s no accident that King quoted from or evoked the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address in his epic speech. In his telling, integration was seen as a fulfillment of the American dream – the endpoint of the pursuit of a more perfect union.

    An estimated 250,000 people gathered on the Mall in Washington to hear King's speech that day.

    “It was the ultimate expression of the melting pot idea, that the most victimized and vilified part of American society could be integrated seamless into mainstream life, and the white majority could overcome its prejudice and welcome Black Americans as full brothers and sisters in our national community,” Steinhorn wrote in “By The Color of Our Skin.”

    How many Americans still believe that is possible?

    Not Baldwin, the King scholar who has spent his life studying the civil rights leader.

    He talks movingly about growing up in segregated America and going to hear King speak in person two years after the civil rights leader gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Close your eyes when Baldwin talks and his rich, honeyed Southern baritone even sounds like King.

    Baldwin says the election of former President Trump, a new wave of antisemitic harassment and the rise of Christian White Nationalism has convinced him that King’s vision of an integrated America really is just a dream.

    He, too, doesn’t use the term “integration” anymore.

    “People tend to want to be associated with their own kind. That seems to be a natural tendency in the human spirit,” Baldwin says, adding that he questions “the full actualization of the kind of integrated society Dr. King had in mind.”

    If racial integration is implausible, though, that leads to another question:

    Without racial integration, can the US still call itself a democracy?

    King didn’t think so, Baldwin says.

    “Dr. King made it clear that integration occurs before you have a multiracial democracy,” he says. “We have to learn to live together as a single people before we can create this kind of democracy.”

    Baker, the author, says the country can’t continue to give up on the dream of integration.

    “When hope dies, you’re defeated,” Baker says. “If you believe that it is possible, it is in fact possible. If you stop, you’ve given up the race before it’s started. It’s hard and demanding, but it’s deeply necessary.”

    Ten Black shoppers were gunned down in a racially motivated massacre at Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, New York. The gunman later pleaded guilty to charges of domestic terrorism as a hate crime.

    Steinhorn says he puts his hope in a new generation of young Americans. The Gen-Z generation, those from the late ’90s onward, is the most racially diverse in the nation’s history. He says polls show that they are more open on questions about race, ethnicity and sexual identity than any other American generation.

    “When you have a critical mass of that generation that subscribes to those principles and sets them as their North Star to be able to live in a society like that, that gives me a little bit of hope,” Steinhorn says.

    King believed in hope, too.

    “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope,” he once said.

    What’s the alternative to losing that infinite hope? Bill Moyers, a former White House press secretary under President Lyndon Johnson, once offered an answer while describing Johnson’s views.

    “He thought the opposite of integration was not just segregation,” Moyers said, “but disintegration – a nation unraveling.”

    What would that unraveling look like? It might look something like what we’ve seen in this country in recent years: The Jan. 6 insurrection, a resurgence of antisemitism, the “very fine people” marching with torches in Charlottesville, and White supremacist groups being designated as the nation’s biggest terror threat.

    It may no longer be fashionable to talk about integration, but the alternative is worse:

    A nation unraveling.

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  • Biden delivers sermon drawing on legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King: ‘This is a time of choosing’ | CNN Politics

    Biden delivers sermon drawing on legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King: ‘This is a time of choosing’ | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Joe Biden delivered remarks Sunday from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, becoming the first sitting president to deliver a Sunday sermon from the historic church where civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as pastor until his assassination in 1968.

    “You’ve been around for 136 years – I know I look like it, but I haven’t,” Biden joked, calling King one of “my only political heroes” since entering public service.

    In remarks from the pulpit, the president referred to the current moment in American history “the time of choosing.”

    “Are we a people who choose democracy over autocracy? You couldn’t ask that question 15 years ago, right? You would’ve thought democracy was settled – not for African Americans, but democracy as an institutional structure was settled. But it’s not, it’s not,” he said.

    “We have to choose a community over chaos. Are we the people … going to choose love over hate? These are the vital questions of our time, and the reason why I’m here as your president, I believe. Dr. King’s life and legacy show us the way, and we should pay attention,” Biden said.

    He offered praise for King and his legacy, noting that the civil rights pioneer “was born in a nation where segregation was a tragic fact of life.”

    Biden’s visit came amid a steady drip of revelations tied to his handling of classified documents after his time as vice president. The White House has faced increasing criticism for its lack of transparency with the public over the finding of classified material at Biden’s home and his former private office. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to take over the investigation into the classified documents found at the two locations connected to Biden.

    Biden was invited to speak Sunday by the current pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, on what would have been King’s 94th birthday. Warnock was recently elected to a full six-year term following an election in which he distanced himself from Biden on the campaign trail in Georgia, where polling showed a majority of voters disapproved of the president’s job performance.

    At the church, Biden spoke about King’s legacy and a number of issues, including civil and voting rights.

    “He had every reason to believe, as others in his generation did, that history had already been written, that the division be America’s destiny – but he rejected that outcome,” Biden said. “So often, when people hear about Dr. King, people think his ministry and the movement were most about the epic struggle for civil rights and voting rights. But we do well to remember that his mission was something even deeper – it was spiritual. It was moral.”

    The speech also came as the president is set to make a decision about his political future with his advisers readying plans for a possible reelection bid. Biden narrowly flipped Georgia in 2020, buoyed by support from Black voters, and the state could prove critical in next year’s presidential campaign.

    Ahead of Biden’s trip to Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the White House senior adviser for public engagement, and former mayor of Atlanta, called the visit “an inflection point,” as the president’s voting rights agenda remains stalled in Congress.

    “If you’ve come through the East Wing, you’ve seen the pictures of Dr. King meeting with Lyndon Johnson, meeting with other civil rights leaders, hashing out voting rights in the White House – and so the fact that we are still here talking about this in 2023, I think really speaks to the fact that we need action, we need that action from Congress,” Bottoms said.

    “The President has done and will continue to do all that he can do in his executive powers, but there’s only so much that he can do. We need Congress to act,” she added.

    A Democratic-controlled House passed a voting rights bill in 2021, but attempts by Senate Democrats to change filibuster rules to pass the legislation were unsuccessful amid opposition from moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Sinema has since become an independent, while continuing to caucus with Democrats, and Republicans won control of the House following the November midterm elections, further dashing hopes of finding compromise on voting rights.

    Bottoms defended the administration’s handling of the voting rights issue, telling reporters Friday that the Biden White House has “done all that we can do from the executive branch,” but if there were additional steps that would further the issue, “we welcome these suggestions.”

    While in Atlanta, Biden was expected to meet with members of the King family and civil rights organizations, the White House said.

    King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 at age 39.

    On Monday, when the nation honors King on his eponymous holiday, Biden will deliver the keynote address during the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Breakfast in Washington, DC, on the invitation of Rev. Al Sharpton.

    This story has been updated.

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  • Why Black voters are more important in Georgia than in any other state | CNN Politics

    Why Black voters are more important in Georgia than in any other state | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden is heading back to Georgia. On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he’s visiting Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the civil rights pioneer once preached. The trip makes a lot of sense, not just to pay tribute to King, but also because King helped lead the drive for equal voting rights for Black Americans.

    The Peach State is in many ways the place where the political importance of Black voters is clearest. They are one of the biggest reasons Georgia has swung from a red state to a purple one.

    The current list of swing states in American politics mostly features places where Black voters don’t play an outsize role – states such as Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin. Even in swing states where Black voters make up at least 10% of the voting public (e.g., Michigan and Pennsylvania), the Black portion of the electorate in the 2020 election was comparable to what it was nationwide (12%).

    Georgia is the big exception. According to US Census data, 33% of 2020 presidential election voters in the state were Black. That ranked second nationally behind deep-red Mississippi. Georgia’s own records show that a slightly smaller 29% of 2020 voters whose race was known were Black (or 27% when we include voters for whom race was unknown). That’s still the highest percentage in any swing state by far.

    Not only that, but the Black portion of the electorate is growing in Georgia as their percentage of the population has risen. State records show that Black adults made up 23% of voters in the 2000 election – which indicates a 6-point increase in the Black portion of the presidential electorate (whose race was known) from 2000 to 2020. There was an uptick of 1 point nationally over the same time span.

    To put into perspective how important this shift has been to Democratic fortunes, consider this math of the 2020 election results. Black voters in Georgia favored Biden by 77 points, according to the exit polls. Non-Black voters as a group (led by White voters) backed then-President Donald Trump by about 30 points. If Black voters had made up the same 23% of presidential election voters they did in 2000, Trump would have won the state by 6 points.

    Instead, Biden won Georgia by less than a point and became the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election since Bill Clinton in 1992.

    (Keep in mind, other datasets suggest that Biden won Georgia’s Black voters by an even larger margin, so this math may, in fact, underestimate how important Black voters were to Biden’s win.)

    There are other factors as to why Biden won Georgia when Democrats before him had failed. The state’s Asian and Hispanic populations are also way up from where they were 20 years ago. At the same time, White voters with a college degree in Georgia have shifted well to the left, matching recent national trends.

    All that said, Black voters are a huge reason why only a handful of states have swung more Democratic in presidential elections since 2004 than Georgia, which has moved 17 points more Democratic. None of the seven states with bigger Democratic swings had elections that were anywhere as close as Georgia’s was in 2020.

    Of course, it’s not just in presidential elections where the voting power of Black Georgians is felt.

    Both of Georgia’s US senators are Democrats, including the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church himself, Raphael Warnock. Without Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrats would be in the Senate minority instead of holding 51 out of 100 seats.

    Neither Warnock nor Ossoff would be in the Senate without Black voters. I’m not only talking about the fact that Black Georgians overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Ossoff and Warnock in twin Senate runoffs in 2021 or about the rise in the percentage of Black voters in the state since the beginning of the century.

    I’m talking about factors unique to the 2021 runoffs. Historically, Black turnout had dropped in general election runoffs in Georgia. That was not the case in 2021, when both Ossoff and Warnock scored narrow wins.

    Black voter turnout (relative to voters as a whole) was actually up in the 2021 runoffs compared with the November 2020 general election. Moreover, those who turned out were more Democratic-leaning than Black voters who had voted in the general election.

    Many of these same Black voters backed Warnock in huge numbers again in his victorious bid for a full six-year term in December’s Senate runoff.

    With the 2024 election around the corner, Georgia’s electoral fate depends on Black voter turnout and whether Democrats continue to win them in large numbers more than any other state. Expect Biden to be back in the Peach State rallying Black voters, if he runs for a second term.

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  • Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

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    Too many innocent people to count have died at the hands of devout Swifties, hell-bent on revenge. For your own safety, never say these things to a Taylor Swift fan.

    2 / 23

    “Her negligence led to a massive ground beef recall.”

    “Her negligence led to a massive ground beef recall.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    Unless you have a death wish, we would avoid blaming Taylor for any nationwide E. coli outbreaks.

    3 / 23

    “We have no idea where Taylor Swift was the morning of April 19th, 1995.”

    “We have no idea where Taylor Swift was the morning of April 19th, 1995.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    Sure, we’ve been told that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had no help blowing up the FBI headquarters in Oklahoma City, but Taylor’s lack of an alibi can’t be ignored.

    4 / 23

    “I don’t care if you got tickets, young lady. You’re not going out on a school night.”

    “I don’t care if you got tickets, young lady. You’re not going out on a school night.”

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    Mom, come on!

    5 / 23

    “She doesn’t even design her own album art.”

    “She doesn’t even design her own album art.”

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    Taylor’s fans hate being confronted with the fact that her Photoshop and Illustrator skills are mediocre at best.

    6 / 23

    “Her Capital One ads are uninspired.”

    “Her Capital One ads are uninspired.”

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    This is very insulting because all Taylor Swift fans watch these commercials on a loop for several hours each day.

    7 / 23

    “Every musician has their strengths and weaknesses.”

    “Every musician has their strengths and weaknesses.”

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    Eat shit and die, how about that?

    8 / 23

    “I loved her ‘Piano Man’ era.”

    “I loved her ‘Piano Man’ era.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    This is a common mistake, but that’s actually Billy Joel.

    9 / 23

    “The Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger was extremely problematic long before you saw fit to take notice.”

    “The Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger was extremely problematic long before you saw fit to take notice.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    Look, an antitrust ally is an antitrust ally, regardless of how they got there, okay?

    10 / 23

    “My favorite folklore is ‘Botan Dōrō.’”

    “My favorite folklore is ‘Botan Dōrō.’”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    No offense to the Japanese people, but this haunting parable about loving a ghost has nothing on the song “cardigan.”

    11 / 23

    “I know that her nice girl image is fake because she regularly eggs my house.”

    “I know that her nice girl image is fake because she regularly eggs my house.”

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    No need to ruin the façade for them too.

    12 / 23

    “She can only summon lightning when it’s stormy out.”

    “She can only summon lightning when it’s stormy out.”

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    Taylor can and will strike you dead by lightning on a sunny day just for saying that.

    13 / 23

    “More people are deserving of the Nobel Prize in physics.”

    “More people are deserving of the Nobel Prize in physics.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    I guess you haven’t read her research as the lead scientist of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

    14 / 23

    “I’ve written more songs about John Mayer.”

    “I’ve written more songs about John Mayer.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    That’s just a weird thing to brag about.

    “She can’t dance!”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    Well, neither could Martin Luther King Jr., but we still listen to all his bops.

    16 / 23

    “Taylor Swift is just a stage name. Her real name is Ogbert McCarthy.”

    “Taylor Swift is just a stage name. Her real name is Ogbert McCarthy.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    Don’t be mean, there’s no need to spoil her mystique.

    17 / 23

    “Midnights is good but it’s no Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

    “Midnights is good but it’s no Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    While it’s fair to say that Midnights doesn’t hold a candle to Wagner’s 15-hour epic opera, it’s not nice to remind people about that.

    18 / 23

    “She’s just for teen girls.”

    “She’s just for teen girls.”

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    No, she was just for teen girls, but now those teen girls are 30 and have developed an appetite for revenge.

    “The dubstep icon?”

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    Swifties have worked hard to forget Taylor’s brief electronic dance music phase back in the aughts.

    20 / 23

    “I work for Ticketmaster.”

    “I work for Ticketmaster.”

    Image for article titled Things To Never Say To A Taylor Swift Fan

    You really shouldn’t tell anybody that.

    21 / 23

    “I’m really only into K-Pop”

    “I’m really only into K-Pop”

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    It’s just a matter of time before she dominates that genre as well.

    22 / 23

    “She’s going to die someday, just like everyone else.”

    “She’s going to die someday, just like everyone else.”

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    No, you’ll die someday. And according to the posts on Taylor Swift message boards, that day is today.

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