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Tag: press conferences

  • Zohran Mamdani, the Everywhere Mayor

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    I thought of Boorstin on a Thursday afternoon early this month, as City Hall reporters trooped into the Blue Room, the traditional site of mayoral press conferences. Half the room’s seats had been cordoned off. A staffer directed members of the press to the right, then clarified—“Stage right,” i.e., the left. At the front of the room, next to the main lectern, stood a second lectern approximately half as high. We waited for an unseen curtain to rise.

    The Mayor’s public schedule had promised a “child care announcement” with the New York City Public Schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels. The announcement turned out to be that the city was releasing an R.F.I. “Like so many of you, the first time I saw it, I said, ‘What is an R.F.I.?’ ” Samuels told the assembled press. “Well, it is a request for information.” The city was putting out a call for providers interested in participating in its new 2-K and established 3-K programs, something that, in the case of the latter, had not happened in the past five years. (“Today, we say, ‘No more,’ ” Mamdani said.) This worthy, if dry, news offered a pretext for the afternoon’s real show: watching as the Mayor joshed amiably with his other guests, four pre-K students from District Two.

    Julian Shapiro-Barnum, who runs a web series called “Recess Therapy,” on which he interviews small children for his 3.2 million followers on Instagram, was seated in the front row of the press area. Reporters were instructed to confine themselves to on-topic questions, but Shapiro-Barnum was allowed to interpret this expansively. “Do any of you have a favorite farm animal, or aquarium animal?” he asked the intermittently on-message group gathered around the short lectern.

    “My favorite one is a gold snake that can move and it has gold eyes and it has a long tail, a super, super-duper tail, and it can snap cars and crash the cars,” a boy with shaggy blond hair said.

    “And, Mr. Mamdani—”

    “It’s also the golden snake,” the Mayor said. He then delivered a précis on the 3-K and pre-K application process and encouraged parents to submit applications by February 27th.

    Shapiro-Barnum posted a video of the exchange two days later, followed by a companion video a few days after that, reminding parents about the deadline. If different in form, these were not far removed in tone from the videos the Mayor’s office itself releases, bouncy and uncowed by any risk of sounding corny. For a spot promoting public bathroom access, Mamdani washed his hands in a Harlem park men’s room; for a video about municipal finance, he explained the rudiments of the city’s “incredibly confusing” budget process. (“What can I say? We’re perfectionists. And bound by the reforms of the nineteen-seventies fiscal crisis.”) His droll explanatory mode calls to mind the “Hamilton” era of educational entertainment for adults—a twenty-tens wave of earnest pop-culture optimism that New York magazine once termed “Obamacore.” But if do-gooder didacticism has worn thin in the context of, say, a streaming series (think of Aziz Ansari diligently explaining why sexism is bad on “Master of None”), it has now found a more appropriate home. If anyone’s entitled to a cheerful, dorky P.S.A., surely it’s the city government.

    Mamdani’s approach seems intended to project a new relationship between New Yorkers and City Hall, one that relies on insistently personal terms and emphasizes care and communication. (In the time since the new administration took over the official mayoral social-media channels, Instagram posts regularly inspire engagement orders of magnitude greater than they did under Eric Adams, despite the former mayor’s rivetingly weird presence.) The P.S.A.s, the social-media posts, and the special guest appearances constitute a parasocial civic bond—and, maybe, something more. In a culture even more media-saturated than the one Boorstin described, I have at times wondered whether such pseudo-events might come back around to being real. Creating wide awareness and participation is essential to a universal program like 3-K; if an onslaught of cute videos inspires sufficient public engagement, will it be fair to say that cute videos were instrumental to that program’s success? After all, before “performative” became a buzzword meaning “only doing something for show,” it meant, essentially, the opposite: saying or doing something that actually changes reality.

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    Molly Fischer

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  • CES 2026: What to expect from tech’s big January conference

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    The new year is upon us, and that means CES 2026 is imminent. The biggest tech trade show of the calendar comes with a bevy of new and notable announcements that set the tone for trends and expectations for the subsequent 12 months. The CES 2026 show floor is officially open from January 6 through 9, but the fun kicks off with events on Sunday January 4, followed by a host of press conferences on Monday. As always, product demos, announcements and networking will be happening at the Las Vegas Convention Center and other hotels all over the city. As usual, Engadget will be covering the event in-person and remotely, bringing you news and hands-ons straight from the show floor.

    More specific details and pre-announcements are already trickling out as CES approaches, and thanks to the schedule of the Consumer Technology Association (the trade organization that runs the show) we have a full itinerary of press conferences. We’re also using our experience and expertise to predict what tech trends could rear their heads at the show.

    The CES 2026 schedule

    Press conferences and show floor booths are the bread and butter of CES. The CTA has already published a searchable directory of who will have an official presence at the show, along with a schedule of every official panel and presentation. However, the press conference schedule gives us a more digestible rundown of the first 48 hours of big events.

    On Sunday, January 4, Samsung will kick-off CES with “The First Look,” a presentation hosted by TM Roh, the CEO of Samsung’s DX Division, on the company’s “vision for the DX (Device eXperience) Division in 2026, along with new AI-driven customer experiences.” Ahead of that, though, Samsung has already outlined a variety of more specifics (scroll down for details). Concurrent with the Samsung presentation will be the official CES Unveiled mini-show, which is generally comprised of smaller and start-up vendors.

    That’ll be followed by multiple press conferences throughout Monday, January 5. The LG CES 2026 press conference, titled “Innovation in Tune with You,” is ostensibly to share “its vision for elevating daily life through Affectionate Intelligence.” But, like Samsung, this fellow Korean giant has already spent the three weeks leading up to CES pre-announcing many of its new products, so this may be more of a summary than breaking news.

    Following LG, we’ll also see press conferences from Bosch and Hisense, as well as the first-ever CES appearance from Lego. As the Las Vegas afternoon rolls around, we get the first of three chip giants: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang takes the stage on January 5 at 1PM PT (4PM ET) and, according to the website, his presentation will last about 90 minutes. Based on the description on the listing, the presentation will “showcase the latest NVIDIA solutions driving innovation and productivity across industries.” NVIDIA’s presser is concurrent with one from Hyundai, where the Korean automotive company will focus on in-cabin car tech and robotics.

    Later in the day, we get to hear from NVIDIA frenemies Intel and AMD. Intel’s 3PM PT (6PM PT) event will ostensibly feature its new Core Ultra Series 3 processors, and AMD CEO Lisa Su will cover AMD’s upcoming chip announcements at a keynote address that closes out the day. But expect both of them to be very heavy on AI applications, of course. Sandwiched in between those chip manufacturers will be Sony Honda Mobility. The joint venture will be offering yet more details on its Afeela EV.

    Finally, on Tuesday, January 6, Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang will host Lenovo’s Tech World Conference at the Las Vegas Sphere, using the large and decidedly curved screen to share the company’s “commitment to delivering smarter AI for all by constantly redefining how technology can engage, inspire, and empower.” It’s worth noting that Lenovo is the parent company of Motorola, which still makes phones and foldables that feature AI tools, so it’s possible those devices feature in the presentation as well.

    Samsung and LG vie for pre-show publicity

    As noted above, both Samsung and LG have continued their recent trend of spoiling nearly all of their respective CES announcements in the days and weeks before the show. LG, for example, has said it will debut its first Micro RGB television at CES. While details are scarce, the company’s press release for the LG Micro RGB evo did confirm it has received certifications by Intertek for 100 percent color gamut coverage in DCI-P3 an Adobe RGB, and that it has more than a thousand dimming zones for brightness control.

    Elsewhere in the TV space, LG is throwing its hat into the “art TV” ring that Samsung pioneered with its Frame TVs: The LG Gallery TV will debut in 55- and 65-inch screen sizes, and it will of course show off various artwork when it’s not otherwise in use. And if PC gaming displays are more your speed, LG will have that covered, too, with a new line of 5K-capable gaming monitors on deck with built-in AI upscaling.

    But LG’s not just showing off displays. The Korean multinational will also introduce a Dolby-powered modular home audio system, a new line of its xboom speakers (developed with will.i.am) and the company will flex its automation muscles with a humanoid home automation robot named CLOiD. We’re also looking forward to checking out the company’s new ultralight Aerominum laptops.

    Of course, Samsung refuses to be outdone by its hometown rival, and has also released a pre-CES press release document dump. Samsung will be launching its own lineup of Micro RGB TVs at CES, for starters. The company already introduced its first Micro RGB TV at CES 2025, which was a 115-inch model available for a cool $30,000. Next year, Samsung is expanding the range with 55-, 65-, 75-, 85-, 100- and 115-inch models that use the next evolution of the company’s Micro RGB technology.

    Samsung is also countering LG’s 5K monitors with a 6K model that aims to deliver glasses-free 3D (another long-time CES staple). It’ll be one of several new displays in the company’s Odyssey gaming line. And the company is also updating its Freestyle projector for 2026, too.

    And on the audio front, Samsung has teased several new soundbars and speakers, including Sonos-style Wi-Fi streaming models call the Music Studio 5 and Studio 7.

    Outside of the formal introduction of new products and initiatives, reading the tea leaves of what was announced last year and what companies are reportedly working on, we can make some educated guesses at what we could see at CES 2026.

    New chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm

    CES is frequently the start of a cascade of new chip announcements for a given year, and one of the first places new silicon appears in real consumer products. AMD will likely use its keynote to introduce new versions of its Ryzen chips, including the recently spotted Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which is expected to offer better single-threaded performance, and the Ryzen 9000G series, which could be built with AMD’s Zen 5 architecture. The company might also use its CES stage to go over its new FSR Redstone AI upscaling tech.

    Intel has already publicly announced that it’ll launch its Panther Lake chips at CES 2026. The officially titled Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips fit into Intel’s overall “AI PC” push, but are specifically meant for premium laptops. Based on a preview from October 2025, Intel says the first chip made with its 2-nanometer 18A process will offer 50 percent more processing performance than previous generations and for the chip’s Arc GPU, a 50 percent performance bump from last generation.

    Qualcomm is also rumored to be targeting laptops at the show, building on the work it’s done moving its Snapdragon chips out of phones and tablets and into other types of computers. The company’s Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Premium chips should start appearing in laptops at CES 2026, offering a look at the improved speed and AI performance the company promised in 2025.

    Brighter, “truer” screens

    As noted above, Samsung and LG appear to be going all-in on Micro RGB display tech for TVs. Expect that to be a huge buzzword at CES, with Hisense and Sony debuting new models, too.

    Sony announced a collection of new Bravia TVs in April 2025, replacing the company’s flagship, filling in its midrange options and adding a new budget model to the mix. The star of this updated Bravia lineup is the Bravia 9, which features a QD-OLED panel, but Sony appears to be prepping entirely new display tech for 2026. In March 2025, Sony introduced a new RGB LED panel that uses individual Mini LED backlights colored in red, green and blue to produce even brighter, more accurate colors. In contrast to a QD-OLED, which filters a layer of blue organic light emitting diodes through quantum dots that change color, Sony’s “General RGB LED Backlight Technology” can get as bright as a Mini LED panel without needing an extra filter layer or worrying about OLED’s problems with burn-in.

    The company has already trademarked the name “True RGB,” which could end up being what Sony calls this new flavor of display if it decides to show them off at CES. It seems entirely likely, because CES is nothing if not a TV show — it’s a sure bet that we’ll see new TVs from the likes of LG and Samsung in addition to Sony. If the company doesn’t introduce new display tech for its TVs, it does have a new 240Hz PlayStation monitor coming in 2026 that it could show off at CES instead.

    Sony isn’t the only company hyped on bright screens. Samsung is reportedly pushing an updated version of the HDR10 and HDR10+ standards that could be ready to demo at CES 2026. The new HDR10+ Advanced standard would be Samsung’s answer to Dolby Vision 2, which includes support for things bi-directional tone mapping and intelligent features that automatically adapt sports and gaming content. Samsung’s take will reportedly offer improved brightness, genre-based tone mapping and intelligent motion smoothing options, among other improvements.

    And maybe your future TV won’t need a power cord, either: Displace will be showing off a mounting option that includes a 15,000mAh battery to juice up whatever giant TV screen you choose to attach.

    Ballie Watch 2026

    The ball-shaped yellow robot lovingly known as “Ballie” has been announced twice, first in 2020 and then again in 2024 with a projector in tow. Samsung said Ballie would go on sale in 2025 at CES last year and then shared in April 2025 that Ballie would ship this summer with Google’s Gemini onboard. But it’s nearly 2026, and Ballie is nowhere to be seen. It’s possible Samsung could make a third attempt at announcing its robot at CES 2026, but whether or not it does, robotics will still be a big part of the show.

    Robot vacuums and mops were a major highlight of CES 2025, and it’s safe to expect notable improvements from the new models that are announced at CES 2026. Not every company will adopt the retractable arm of the Roborock Saros Z70, but robot vacuums with legs for rising over small ledges like the Dreame X50 seem like they could become the norm. Roborock could also show off its new Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow, the first of its robot vacuums to feature a retractable roller mop.

    Beyond just traversing spaces more efficiently, improving robots’ navigation could also be a major concern at the show. Prominent members of the AI industry are turning their attention from large language models to world models, which aim to give AI a deep understanding of physical space. Those world models could be the key to making robots — like LG’s aforementioned CLOiD — competent at navigating homes and workplaces, and will likely be a significant talking point at CES 2026.

    We’ll be updating this article throughout the month as more rumors surface and new products are confirmed — stay tuned for future updates!

    Update, December 11 2025, 11:03AM ET: This story has been updated to include detail on Lenovo being Motorola’s parent company and how the latter might have a part in the Tuesday presentation.

    Update, December 16 2025, 1:33PM ET: This story has been updated to include the NVIDIA press conference, which was added to the CTA schedule within the last two days.

    Update, December 23 2025, 7:28AM ET: This story has been updated to include LG and Samsung’s Micro RGB TV announcements, which were made public in the past seven days. The intro was also tweaked to reflect how soon CES is at this point.

    Update, December 29 2025, 11:03AM ET: This story has been updated to include additional details on pre-announcements from Samsung, LG and Displace.

    Update, December 31 2025, 12:05PM ET: This story has been updated to include yet more early LG announcements.

    Update, January 3 2026, 8:45AM ET: This story has been updated to include still more Samsung and LG announcements.

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    Ian Carlos Campbell,Cherlynn Low

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  • What Will Happen to the American Psyche If Trump Is Reelected?

    What Will Happen to the American Psyche If Trump Is Reelected?

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    There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the taunts and the provocations; the incitements and the resentments; the disorchestrated reasoning; the verbal incontinence; the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soupçon of hydroxychloroquine. I forgot, almost, that we’d had a man in the White House who governed by tweet. I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds. I forgot, even, that we’d had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so dysregulated (this being a central irony, that our nation’s top executive had zero executive function) that the generals around him had to choose between carrying out presidential orders and upholding the Constitution.

    Explore the January/February 2024 Issue

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    I forgot, in short, that I’d spent nearly five years scanning the veldt for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin, just as Erica Jong believed that her concentration and vigilance were what kept her flight from plunging into the sea.

    Say what you want about Joe Biden: He’s allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he’s there.

    Adam Serwer: An incompetent authoritarian is still a catastrophe

    But now here we are, faced with the prospect of a Trump restoration. We’ve already seen the cruelty and chaos that having a malignant narcissist in the Oval Office entails. What will happen to the American psyche if he wins again? What will happen if we have to live in fight-or-flight mode for four more years, and possibly far beyond?

    Our bodies are not designed to handle chronic stress. Neuroscientists have a term for the tipping-point moment when we capitulate to it—allostatic overload—and the result is almost always sickness in one form or another, whether it’s a mood disorder, substance abuse, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or ulcers. “Increase your blood pressure for a few minutes to evade a lion—a good thing,” Robert Sapolsky, one of the country’s most esteemed researchers of stress, emailed me when I asked him about Trump’s effect on our bodies. But “increase your blood pressure every time you’re in the vicinity of the alpha male—you begin to get cardiovascular disease.” Excess levels of the stress hormone cortisol for extended periods is terrible for the human body; it hurts the immune system in ways that, among other things, can lead to worse outcomes for COVID and other diseases. (One 2019 study, published in JAMA Network Open, reported that Trump’s election to the White House correlated with a spike in premature births among Latina women.)

    Another major component of our allostatic overload, notes Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span, would be “technostress,” in this case brought on by the obsessive checking of—and interruptions from, and passing around of—news, which Trump made with destructive rapidity. Human brains are not designed to handle such a helter-skelter onslaught; effective multitasking, according to Mark, is in fact a complete myth (there’s always a cost to our productivity). Yet we are once again facing a news cycle that will shove our attention—as well as our output, our nerves, our sanity—through a Cuisinart.

    Read: ‘This is fine,’ the meme that defined a decade

    One might reasonably ask how many Americans will truly care about the constant churn of chaos, given how many of us still walk around in a fug of political apathy. Quite a few, apparently. The American Psychological Association’s annual stress survey, conducted by the Harris Poll, found that 68 percent of Americans reported that the 2020 election was a significant source of strain. Kevin B. Smith, a political-science professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, found that about 40 percent of American adults identified politics as “a significant source of stress in their lives,” based on YouGov surveys he commissioned in 2017 and 2020. Even more remarkably, Smith found that about 5 percent reported having had suicidal thoughts because of our politics.

    Richard A. Friedman, a clinical psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, wonders if a second Trump term would be like a second, paralyzing blow in boxing, translating into “learned helplessness on a population-level scale,” in which a substantial proportion of us curdle into listlessness and despair. Such an epidemic would be terrible, especially for the young; we’d have a generation of nihilists on our hands, with all future efforts to #Resist potentially melting under the waffle iron of its own hashtag.

    Which is what a would-be totalitarian wants—a republic of the indifferent.

    Ironically, were Trump to win, an important group of his supporters would bear a particular psychological burden of their own, and that’s our elected GOP officials. I’ve written before that Trump’s presidency sometimes seemed like an extended Milgram experiment, with Republican politicians subjected to more and more horrifying requests. During round two, they’d be asked to do far worse, and live in even greater terror of his base—and even greater terror of him, as he tells them, in the manner of all malignant narcissists, that they’d be nothing without him. And he wouldn’t be wholly wrong.

    The Trump base, however, will be intoxicated. We should brace ourselves for a second uncorking of what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”: The Proud Boys will be prouder; the Alex Jones conspiracists will let their false-flag freakishness fly; the “Great Replacement” theorists will become more savage in their rhetoric about Black, Hispanic, and Jewish people. (The Trump administration coincided with a measurable increase in hate crimes, incited in no small part by the man himself.)

    From the January/February 2024 issue: The Proud Boys love a winner

    But at this point, even an electoral defeat for Trump might not significantly diminish the toll that politics is taking on the collective American psyche. “In such a polarized society, everyone is always living with a lot of hate and fear and suspicion,” Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist at MIT who thinks a good deal about tribalism, told me. The winner of the presidential election “may change who bears the burden every four or eight years, but not the burden itself.”

    Of course, fractured attention, heightened anxiety, and moral cynicism may come to seem like picayune problems if Trump wins and some 250 years of constitutional norms and rules unravel before our eyes, or we’re in a nuclear war with China, or the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is frog-marched off to court for treason.

    “You get Trump once, it’s a misfortune,” Masha Gessen, the author of Surviving Autocracy, told me. “You get him twice, it’s normal. It’s what this country is.”

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Psychic Toll.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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    Jennifer Senior

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  • Trump reacts to Georgia indictment for first time on camera: ‘I have four of them now’ | CNN Politics

    Trump reacts to Georgia indictment for first time on camera: ‘I have four of them now’ | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump on Thursday reacted for the first time on camera to the Georgia indictment that accuses him of being the head of a “criminal enterprise” to overturn the 2020 election, dismissing the criminal charges as a “witch hunt” and a “horrible thing for the country.”

    “I have four of them now, if you look. I mean, this is not even possible,” Trump said on Fox Business. “Four, over the next, last couple of months. And frankly, it discredits everything. And they’re all very similar in the sense that they’re, there’s no basis for them.”

    The former president also called on members of his party “to be tough,” saying that “the Republicans are great in many ways, but they don’t fight as hard for this stuff. And they have to get a lot tougher. And if they don’t they’re not going to have much of a Republican Party.”

    After the 41-count Georgia indictment was unsealed Monday, Trump railed against the state charges on social media and announced plans to hold a “news conference” regarding his baseless claims of election fraud.

    Thursday evening, however, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the event was “no longer necessary” because his legal team would present the evidence to support his claims in court.

    In a post, Trump said, “Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment by a publicity & campaign finance seeking D.A., who sadly presides over a record breaking Murder & Violent Crime area, Atlanta. Therefore, the News Conference is no longer necessary!”

    Earlier Thursday, multiple sources familiar with the planning told CNN that the “news conference” was unlikely to go forward in any substantive capacity, if it were to happen at all.

    Trump had informed a few of his advisers about the press event he announced for Monday at 11 a.m. at his Bedminster golf club. In the days since that post, Trump has been advised against holding one and cautioned that it could complicate his ongoing legal issues, one person told CNN.

    Trump has made false claims about election fraud for nearly three years without proof. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have both reiterated the election there was not “stolen.”

    The former president’s comments about holding a “news conference” caught several members of his team off guard as his legal team focused on the details of his required surrender at a jailhouse in Georgia by next Friday. Liz Harrington, an aide to Trump, had prepared a report but it remains to be seen whether that document will still be released next week.

    Harrington has been a serial promoter of lies about the 2020 election, as CNN has reported.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • DeSantis suspends Orlando-area state attorney in second sacking of democratically elected prosecutor | CNN Politics

    DeSantis suspends Orlando-area state attorney in second sacking of democratically elected prosecutor | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced the suspension of the Orlando-area state attorney, the second time he has removed a democratically elected prosecutor whose politics did not align with his conservative views.

    DeSantis said he was removing Monique Worrell of Florida’s 9th Judicial Circuit for “neglect of duty and incompetence” and accused her of pursuing lenient sentences and declining to prosecute certain charges.

    “Prosecutors have a duty to faithfully enforce the law. One’s political agenda cannot trump this solemn duty. Refusing to faithfully enforce the laws of Florida puts our communities in danger and victimizes innocent Floridians,” DeSantis said.

    The criticisms echo ones raised last year when DeSantis contentiously removed another Democratic state attorney, Tampa’s elected prosecutor Andrew Warren. Democrats accused DeSantis, at the time, of abusing his power for political gain. A federal judge reviewing Warren’s suspension raised questions about the political motivations behind the maneuver, noting DeSantis’ office had calculated the dollar amount of free media generated by his actions.

    But the move earned DeSantis glowing coverage from conservative outlets and the episode became a staple of the governor’s political speeches in the lead up to the launch of a White House bid.

    Now, with his presidential campaign struggling to gain traction, DeSantis has once again used his vast executive authority in a way that has already brought the national spotlight on him. By the time DeSantis stepped to the lectern in Tallahassee’s capitol building to deliver the news, Fox News had published a story on his latest maneuver.

    DeSantis was joined at the news conference by two local sheriffs – neither of which serves a county that overlaps with Worrell’s jurisdiction. They used their time at the microphone to heap praise on the governor as a law and order leader.

    “This governor has always put the victims, always put the law-abiding citizens ahead of the criminals. Always. And that’s exactly what he’s done here today,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.

    Worrell, who said she was informed of her suspension Wednesday morning by phone, vowed to fight back against her removal, calling it a “political hit job” orchestrated to benefit the Republican’s presidential campaign.

    “I am a duly elected state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit,” Worrell said at a news conference outside the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando. “And nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.”

    Worrell said she is considering legal action, but also acknowledged the long odds.

    On Thursday, she told CNN’s John Berman on “Anderson Cooper 360” that she will also run for the office again in 2024.

    “I have filed for reelection, and I plan to continue to run and rewin my seat by the will of the voters the way democracy works in this country. And be the duly elected state attorney once again,” Worrell said.

    The governor and local law enforcement, she told Berman, have been “pushing false narratives” about her role in the legal system.

    “It’s really important to be clear the criminal legal system is a collaborative system. It doesn’t only rest on the shoulders of the state attorney,” Worrell said. “There is a judiciary. There is law enforcement. There is a defense bar. And these are the components of the criminal legal system. Any decisions that had been made by attorneys in my office have been ratified by the judiciary.”

    The Florida constitution allows a governor to remove an elected official for “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, habitual drunkenness, incompetence, or permanent inability to perform official duties.” No previous Florida executive has interpreted that power as broadly as DeSantis. The state Senate can reinstate Worrell, but the chamber is controlled by Republicans closely aligned with DeSantis and have rarely stood in his way.

    Warren’s attempts at reinstatement have failed. A federal judge ruled DeSantis had acted unconstitutionally in suspending Warren, writing that there was “not a hint of misconduct by Mr. Warren” in the trial record, but he ultimately dismissed the case saying he did not have the power to intervene on a state matter. The state Supreme Court tossed Warren’s lawsuit in state court earlier this summer.

    As a candidate, DeSantis has made reigning in government overreach a top priority, a promise that his critics say is in conflict with how he has led during episodes such as Wednesday. DeSantis has repeatedly blasted President Joe Biden for what he says is the “weaponization” of the US Department of Justice and has accused state and federal prosecutors of pursuing a political agenda in targeting former President Donald Trump.

    According to her biography – which as of Wednesday morning was still posted on her office’s website – Worrell worked as a public defender in the Orlando area and later as a clinical law professor at the University of Florida College of Law.

    In 2020, Worrell won a contested Democratic primary to become the party’s nominee for state attorney serving Orange and Osceola counties. She was elected that fall with 66% of the vote in a deeply blue part of the state.

    “​Monique was elected to bring reform to a criminal legal system that is fundamentally flawed, in order to achieve equity and to move our system towards justice,” her bio said.

    Worrell replaced Aramis Ayala, another reform prosecutor whose approach conflicted with the state’s Republican leadership. When Ayala announced she would not pursue capital punishment in any cases, then-Gov. Rick Scott moved death penalty cases to another state attorney though he did not suspend her from office.

    DeSantis began to publicly lay the groundwork for Worrell’s ouster in February, when a teenage gunman in Orlando was accused of shooting and killing a 9-year-old girl, a journalist and a 38-year-old woman. DeSantis accused Worrell of failing to keep the gunman behind bars for a previous charge.

    “I know the state attorney in Orlando thinks that you don’t prosecute people, and that’s the way that somehow you have better communities. That does not work,” DeSantis said at the time.

    At Wednesday’s news conference, DeSantis and others pointed to heinous crimes from the past year allegedly committed by people with previous charges.

    In suspending Worrell, DeSantis cited a “pattern or practice” to avoid mandatory sentences for gun crimes and minimum mandatory sentences for drug trafficking offenses. DeSantis also said Worrell had allowed juveniles to avoid “serious charges and incarceration” and had avoided “valid and applicable” sentencing enhancements or limiting charges for child pornography.

    On Wednesday, Worrell disputed characterizations made by the Florida governor that her office was too lenient on criminals, insisting that crime is down under her watch. DeSantis never reached out to express concerns with her operation, she said.

    Florida Democratic Party chairwoman Nikki Fried called Worrell’s ouster a “political hit job” that “threatens democracy” and demanded her immediate reinstatement.

    “Ron’s presidential campaign has been a disaster of epic proportions, but attacking law and order in service of his culture wars isn’t the solution to his problems,” Fried said.

    DeSantis replaced Worrell with Andrew Bain, who has served as a judge on the 9th Judicial Circuit.

    DeSantis left the news conference without taking questions from reporters.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • McConnell says he’s ‘fine’ after freezing during news conference | CNN Politics

    McConnell says he’s ‘fine’ after freezing during news conference | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that he’s “fine,” after freezing during a news conference on Wednesday.

    McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, stopped speaking in the middle of remarks at his regularly scheduled weekly news conference on Capitol Hill. After a 30-second pause, his colleagues crowded around to see if he was OK and asked him how he felt. GOP Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming was seen gripping McConnell’s arm and whispered to him, “Hey Mitch, anything else you want to say? Or should we just go back to your office? Do you want to say anything else to the press?”

    He said nothing, and was led away from the press conference and towards his office by an aide. He returned to the news conference a few minutes later.

    McConnell, asked by CNN what happened and if it is related to his fall earlier this year, said “No, I’m fine,” and then moved on to other reporters.

    A McConnell aide said that the senator “felt light headed and stepped away for a moment.”

    “He came back to handle Q and A, which as everyone observed was sharp,” the aide said.

    McConnell, 81, has faced questions over his health after suffering a concussion and broken ribs from a fall he endured earlier this year. He was hospitalized and forced to go to rehab for several weeks before returning to the Senate in the spring.

    McConnell, who is up for reelection in 2026, has repeatedly declined to say if he will run for another term or try to run for GOP leader again in the next Congress, which begins in 2025. While he told CNN last fall he would definitely finish out his term, in an interview in May – after he suffered the concussion – he didn’t want to engage.

    “I thought this was not an interview about my future,” he said when asked if he would serve out his term or run for leader again. “I thought it was an interview about the 2024 Senate elections.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Biden and McCarthy to discuss debt ceiling Monday as staff-level talks resume | CNN Politics

    Biden and McCarthy to discuss debt ceiling Monday as staff-level talks resume | CNN Politics

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    Hiroshima, Japan
    CNN
     — 

    Staff-level discussions over the debt ceiling and budget between the White House and congressional Republican will resume Sunday evening after President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy spoke by phone in the afternoon, according to a White House official.

    Biden and McCarthy will meet later on Monday, the official added.

    McCarthy said the phone call with Biden, who was aboard Air Force One returning to Washington from Japan, was “productive.”

    In an 18-minute gaggle with reporters at the US Capitol, the California Republican said that while the timing of the meeting was still being worked out, it was likely to be Monday afternoon. It is not expected to include other congressional leaders.

    McCarthy’s more optimistic tone comes after the president had issued a stark warning earlier Sunday that congressional Republicans could use a national default to damage him politically and acknowledged that time had run out to use potential unilateral actions to raise the federal borrowing limit, as the deadline to reach an agreement neared.

    Characterizing GOP proposals as “extreme” and warning they couldn’t gain sufficient support in Congress, Biden said he wasn’t able to promise fellow world leaders gathered in Hiroshima, Japan, for Group of Seven talks that the US would not default.

    “I can’t guarantee that they will not force a default by doing something outrageous,” he said at a news conference before he left for Washington.

    Biden’s remarks were the latest indication that talks between the White House and congressional Republicans remained far apart.

    Republicans have been seeking spending cuts in the federal budget in exchange for their support to raise the nation’s borrowing limit. On Sunday, Biden acknowledged “significant” disagreement with Republicans in some areas, insisting that while he’s willing to cut spending, tax “revenue is not off the table” as part of the deal.

    McCarthy, in an interview Sunday with Fox News, disagreed with that characterization, saying Biden previously told him that tax increases were “off the table” and that he wouldn’t agree to them.

    “He’s now bringing something to the table that everyone said was off the table,” the California Republican said. “It seems as though he wants to fault more than he wants a deal.”

    At his news conference, Biden said that much of what Republicans have proposed “is simply, quite frankly, unacceptable.”

    “It’s time for Republicans to accept that there’s no bipartisan deal to be made solely, solely on their partisan terms. … They have to move, as well,” the president said.

    Pressed on whether he would be to blame for a default scenario, Biden said that based on what he’s offered, he should be blameless but conceded that “no one will be blameless” as he suggested some of his political rivals could be encouraging a default to sabotage his reelection efforts.

    “I think there are some MAGA Republicans in the House who know the damage it would do to the economy, and because I am president, and a president is responsible for everything, Biden would take the blame and that’s the one way to make sure Biden’s not reelected,” he said.

    McCarthy, in turn, blamed what he called the “socialist wing of the Democratic Party” for driving Biden’s goals in the negotiations.

    “The president keeps changing positions every time Bernie Sanders has a press conference. He gets reactive and he shifts,” the speaker said as he arrived at the US Capitol in Washington on Sunday.

    Meanwhile, Biden’s top national security aide told CNN that the stalled debt ceiling and budget negotiations have not undercut American leadership abroad or undermined the G7 summit as it came to a close Sunday.

    “When you look at the totality of the last three days, it’s actually a reflection of and an exclamation point on the way in which President Biden has led on the world stage. People understand democracies, and they understand that there are moments in domestic politics when you have got to look at the home front,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    Biden in his news conference addressed the possibility of using the 14th Amendment to continue US government borrowing in the absence of a deal, suggesting he has the power but not the time to utilize the unilateral action.

    “I think we have the authority. The question is, could it be done and invoked in time that it could not – would not be appealed?” Biden asked, calling the question of whether an appeal could be solved before the default deadline “unresolved.”

    Pressed by CNN’s Phil Mattingly to clarify whether he thought he could invoke the 14th Amendment as a serious and tangible option, the president made clear that maneuver would not be successful given the short window remaining.

    “We have not come up with unilateral action that could succeed in a matter of two weeks or three weeks. That’s the issue. So it’s up to lawmakers. But my hope and intention is to resolve this problem,” he said.

    Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said Sunday a potential invocation of the 14th Amendment would be a “dodge.”

    “The president needs to show leadership. ‘OK, House Republicans, American people, you’re concerned about spending, I will meet you there. As opposed to finding a dodge that tries to work its way around,” Cassidy said.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reiterated Sunday in an interview with NBC News that June 1 was a “hard deadline” for the US to raise the debt ceiling or risk defaulting on its obligations.

    But Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, said there may be some leeway.

    “The June 1st date was probably, according to Secretary Yellen, the earliest possible date,” the Pennsylvania Republican told CBS News, adding that “we do have enough cash flow” to “pay the interest on our debt.”

    “We’re going start to see the state tax revenues come in the second week of June, so I think we’re OK on that,” Fitzpatrick said.

    Biden had originally planned to stop in Australia and Papua New Guinea after the G7 summit in Hiroshima, but he canceled those portions of the trip amid the debt ceiling talks.

    On Saturday, Rep. Dusty Johnson, a McCarthy ally and chair of the centrist Main Street Caucus, confirmed that the White House had made an offer seeking to cap future spending at current levels, which Johnson called “unreasonable.”

    “The paper that the White House provided was a major step backward. And it undermined all the progress that was made Wednesday and Thursday. … It has endangered negotiations,” the South Dakota Republican said.

    On Sunday, McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol that GOP Reps. Garrett Graves of Louisiana and Patrick McHenry of North Carolina would begin conversations again with White House staff “so we can walk them through literally what we’ve been talking about.”

    Before news broke of the talks resuming, McHenry told CNN that he was “not at all” optimistic a deal could come together.

    “I’ve been pessimistic for a while, and something needs to change,” he said Sunday morning.

    Graves said both sides had “made a lot of progress in understanding one another’s positions, in understanding red lines” and that the negotiators were closer than when they had started.

    He said there were still discussions to be had over ancillary topics such as work requirements and permitting reform, but “the numbers are the baseline.”

    “The speaker has been very clear: A red line is spending less money, and unless and until we’re there, the rest of it is really irrelevant,” the Louisiana Republican said.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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  • Man shot 9 times by South Carolina deputies files lawsuit alleging ‘reckless’ use of deadly force during wellness check | CNN

    Man shot 9 times by South Carolina deputies files lawsuit alleging ‘reckless’ use of deadly force during wellness check | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A South Carolina man, who survived being shot nine times by York County sheriff’s deputies responding to a “wellness check” call about him being suicidal two years ago, claims in a recent lawsuit that he was talking with his mother in his pickup truck when officers approached them “like cowboys from a John Wayne movie.”

    Trevor Mullinax and his mother, Tammy Beason, allege that deputies immediately drew their weapons and used deadly force without trying to deescalate the situation and are suing York County and the sheriff’s department for gross negligence, among other claims.

    The lawsuit, filed Friday and obtained by CNN, claims, “Sheriff’s deputies were grossly negligent, willful, wanton, careless, and reckless in their use of deadly force towards Plaintiff Mullinax and Plaintiff Beason, the same causing irreparable and permanent physical, mental, and emotional injury to Plaintiffs.”

    Mullinax was charged with pointing and presenting a weapon – by the State Law Enforcement Division in relation to their investigation of the shooting. That charge is still pending.

    However, attorneys for Mullinax said that while he was “lawfully in possession of a hunting shotgun” inside the truck, “at no point prior to, during, or after Sheriff’s deputies began shooting did Plaintiff Mullinax raise, point, or otherwise move with a weapon in such a fashion as would authorized Sheriff’s deputies to use deadly force.”

    In several dash and body camera videos viewed by CNN, there is no mention of seeing a gun before deputies begin firing their weapons at Mullinax’s truck. However, body camera footage shows deputies after the shooting discussing seeing a “shotgun or rifle.” A deputy can be heard saying he found a weapon in the truck.

    CNN obtained bodycam footage showing deputies with their guns drawn, surrounding the pickup truck, and demanding to see Mullinax’s hands before firing. The video also shows Beason standing beside the truck, speaking with her son through the driver’s side window. Attorneys for the family say officers fired nearly 50 shots at close range as he suffered a mental health crisis, claiming their client was contemplating suicide. Beason can be heard screaming and crying as she’s put into handcuffs by deputies. Attorneys for the family also accuse deputies of failing to render immediate medical aid to Mullinax.

    The lawsuit notes that a shocked Beason “dove backward” to avoid the bullets that hit the vehicle.

    Two years after the May 7, 2021, incident, both mother and son are suing for undetermined damages.

    Justin Bamberg, an attorney for Mullinax, said during a news conference on Tuesday that Mullinax had been hit several times by bullets, including directly in the back of his head.

    “Almost 50 shots fired at somebody who was in need of help. A citizen who was in need of help,” said Bamberg.

    Mullinax, who was present at the news conference, acknowledged that the shooting was triggered by a mental health crisis.

    “I can tell you that it’s hard to believe in the police when they destroyed everything I believe in that day,” Tammy Beason said during the news conference. “It’s taken me a very long time to recover from that. I’m still recovering.”

    According to a recording of the 911 call, a friend of Mullinax had called emergency services with another friend on a three-way call to report Mullinax was having a mental health crisis and was potentially suicidal.

    “We’re just trying to get our buddy some help,” the friend said. They told the dispatcher that they suspected the crisis was, in part, sparked by Mullinax’s belief there was a burglary warrant out for his arrest due to an incident the previous night.

    The 911 caller explained to the dispatcher that Mullinax’s mother was out with him, and that their friend “had locked himself in his truck with a knife – and I say that because I don’t want him to hop out and get shot, I don’t know if that’s his plan.” The friends provided cell phone numbers for Mullinax and his mother so law enforcement could contact them.

    However, the complaint alleges that the 911 dispatcher did not provide the responding deputies with the cellphone numbers she was given for Mullinax or his mother.

    The filing said that when deputies arrived on scene, they found Mullinax’s grandfather at the house. Body camera video obtained by CNN shows the grandfather directing deputies to where he thought Mullinax could have been parked.

    The 911 dispatcher relayed information to deputies about Mullinax being suicidal and the warrant, but deputies who arrived at the home seemed focused on the outstanding warrant based on comments recorded on body camera videos.

    “He’s got to go to jail,” a deputy said to Mullinax’s grandfather.

    As they approach the truck in the distance, a deputy can be heard in one dash camera video observing out loud that there is “somebody standing right beside” the truck and that Mullinax can be seen inside.

    Body camera video shows deputies arriving, shouting “hands up” and “hands, hands” before opening fire on the truck, with Beason still standing there, all in less than 10 seconds time.

    Tammy Beason, Mullinax's mother, on May 9, 2023.

    Mullinax was life flighted to a hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina, for his injuries. Dashcam video shows it appears at least 14 minutes went by before aid for Mullinax was provided by emergency services. He was handcuffed and removed from the pickup truck after the shooting.

    Deputies handcuffed Beason immediately after the shooting. She can be seen on body camera video hysterically crying while begging to see her son.

    “I was trying to get him to go in, and he was talking to me finally. He was talking to me. Why did y’all come? I could have done this peacefully. I could have done this peacefully,” sobbed Beason to a deputy, who captured the interaction on his body camera.

    In a news conference on Wednesday, York County Sheriff Kevin Tolson said his agency had not been served with a lawsuit and that he felt “forced” to address the claims.

    “I feel forced to address this suit out of what I consider to be the proper venue and that’s the court,” Tolson said. “I’ve never held a press conference about litigation, litigation that I haven’t even been served with yet.”

    Tolson said that Mullinax had active arrest warrants through the York Police Department for a violent felony and malicious injury to personal property. Sheriff’s deputies’ claim that Mullinax pulled and pointed a weapon at them when they arrived following a request for a wellness check for Mullinax. He said all four deputies fired their weapons at Mullinax

    “Four deputies approached an individual wanted for a violent felony who was armed with a knife and experiencing mental distress. As those deputies approached, this individual pulled a shotgun. Fearing for their safety, these deputies discharged their weapons at the individual,” said Tolson, who also claimed that Mullinax’s mother corroborated the deputies’ claims that her son grabbed a weapon when law enforcement arrived on scene.

    An image taken from video released by the York County Sheriff's Office shows the scene moments before officers opened fire on Mullinax's truck with him inside and his mother, seen in red, standing beside it on May 7, 2021.

    In response to that claim from the sheriff, attorneys for Mullinax and Beason told CNN “on the day of the shooting, Tammy Beason did tell SLED investigators that Trevor grabbed the shotgun but did so when he saw deputies driving down Highway 324, not as officers pulled right up to the front of his truck.”

    Tolson also said the SLED investigation shows upon arriving at the hospital after being by deputies, Mullinax told medical personnel that he wanted to kill himself but then “decided to have the police do it.”

    Tolson denounced criticism against police officers for their handling of situations “that should not be the responsibility of law enforcement” and said more mental health resources are needed.

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  • A Texas family fought for weeks to regain custody of their newborn. Experts say the case shows how Black parents are criminalized. | CNN

    A Texas family fought for weeks to regain custody of their newborn. Experts say the case shows how Black parents are criminalized. | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A Black Texas couple has been reunited with their newborn daughter after authorities removed the baby and placed her in foster care last month citing a doctor’s concerns about how they were treating a jaundice diagnosis.

    Rodney and Temecia Jackson of DeSoto, Texas, regained custody of their daughter, Mila, on April 20 following a nearly month-long battle with the state’s Child Protective Services, according to The Afiya Center, a reproductive justice advocacy group.

    A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Family Protective Services, which includes CPS, confirmed to CNN that the office had recommended a dismissal of the case to an assistant district attorney. Mila’s release was granted on Thursday, according to a court filing.

    The Jacksons had been pleading for Mila’s return in videos posted to social media, and news conferences as reproductive justice activists protested and rallied behind the family.

    The removal, the Jacksons say, was sparked by their decision to let their midwife treat Mila’s jaundice instead of taking her to the hospital for care as their doctor had recommended. Temecia Jackson said during a news conference earlier this month that she gave birth to Mila at home on March 21 with the help of a midwife and wanted that same trusted midwife to provide medical care for her baby. But Mila’s pediatrician disagreed with this decision and ultimately contacted CPS, Temecia Jackson said.

    “We’ve been treated like criminals,” Rodney Jackson said during the news conference. “This is a nightmare that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

    Reproductive justice advocates say Mila’s removal is just the latest example of the criminalization of Black parents, who lose their children to the child welfare system at disproportionate rates. In the US in 2018, Black children made up 23% of youth in foster care, but only 14% of the nation’s child population, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Additionally, one study found that between 2003-2014, 53% of Black children were the subjects of child welfare investigations by the time they reached age 18.

    Marsha Jones, executive director of The Afiya Center – a Dallas, Texas, based non-profit that advocates for Black women and girls – said there is a systemic problem with the child welfare system that unfairly targets Black parents. In many cases, Black families have their first experiences with the criminal justice system in family court, Jones said.

    “It’s almost unspoken and unseen because there is just this thought that Black women are not good parents and that we are criminalized because of poverty,” Jones told CNN. “This is not new.”

    Jones said the center stepped in last month to support the Jackson family and put pressure on public officials to return Mila home. She believes this played a role in reuniting the family last week.

    “There’s no reason this baby should have been removed from her home,” Jones told CNN. “This family was not being heard. The Black midwife wasn’t being heard.”

    Rodney and Temecia Jackson could not be reached for comment.

    In a letter to CPS obtained by CNN affiliate WFAA, the family’s pediatrician, Dr. Anand Bhatt, who is with the Baylor Scott & White healthcare system, wrote that while the Jacksons “are very loving and they care dearly” about Mila, “their distrust for medical care and guidance has led them to make a decision for the baby to refuse a simple treatment that can prevent brain damage.”

    “I authorized the support of CPS to help get this baby the care that was medically necessary and needed,” the letter continued.

    CBS News, which obtained a copy of the affidavit filed by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, reported that Bhatt reached out to a DFPS investigator on March 25 and indicated that Mila’s bililrubin test showed levels of 21.7 milligrams.

    A bilirubin test can screen for jaundice and other conditions. That level was “cause for a lot of concern,” Bhatt told the investigator, according to CBS News, and could lead to brain damage, he said, “because the bilirubin can cross the blood brain barrier.”

    Bhatt said he reserved a bed for Mila at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas and asked the Jacksons to take her there or he would call police for a welfare check, according to court documents obtained by CBS News. WFAA reported that Bhatt wanted Mila to receive phototherapy – a common treatment for jaundice.

    But court documents, according to CBS News, say Rodney Jackson told Bhatt he and Temecia Jackson planned to treat their baby “naturally” and didn’t believe in “modern medicine.”

    The midwife, Cheryl Edinbyrd, told CBS News the family had ordered a blanket and goggles to provide light therapy to treat Mila’s jaundice.

    When the Jacksons didn’t show up at the hospital, a CPS investigator and police went to the Jackson’s home at 4 a.m. on March 25 but Rodney Jackson declined to speak with them, according to court documents obtained by CBS News. An hour later, authorities returned with an ambulance and fire truck and Rodney Jackson still denied them entry.

    Authorities returned to the home on March 30 with a warrant and arrested Rodney Jackson on charges of preventing the execution of a civil process, according to CBS News. Police entered the home and took Mila from Temecia Jackson. According to CBS News, the Jacksons’ other two children were not removed.

    Temecia Jackson said in a press conference that when she asked to see the affidavit, she noticed it had the name of a different mother on it.

    “Instantly I felt like they had stolen my baby as I had had a home birth and they were trying to say that my baby belonged to this other woman,” Temecia Jackson.

    Marissa Gonzales, a spokesperson from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said in an email to CNN that her department was given an incorrect name for the initial affidavit. The mistake, she said, was corrected in the case filings.

    Gonzales declined an interview with CNN to discuss the case further, citing “state confidentiality restrictions.”

    “It is always the goal of DFPS to safely reunite children with their parents,” Gonzales also said. “The decision about when that happens rests with the judge who ordered the removal.”

    CNN’s request to interview Bhatt was also denied by Baylor Scott & White.

    “In respect of patient privacy, it is inappropriate to provide comment on this matter,” the health system said in an emailed statement. “We do abide by reporting requirements set forth in the Texas Family Code and any other applicable laws.”

    Advocates say the racial bias of professionals such as teachers, doctors and social workers has created inequity in the child welfare system.

    Dorothy Roberts, a law professor and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said decisions to report neglect and abuse are largely shaped by racist stereotypes of Black families.

    The child welfare system, she said, needs to consider the trauma inflicted on children when they are separated from their families.

    “We have to ask whether there is a better way of addressing children’s medical needs instead of the system we have now where doctors are reporting suspicions, which we know is highly biased, and investigating families, which we know is very traumatic,” said Roberts, author of “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” “Hospitals should not be places of fear for parents.”

    Roberts said there is also a longstanding cultural conflict between the healthcare system and midwives who are often devalued. Black midwives provided care for mothers for hundreds of years, delivering the babies of enslaved women and even slave owners’ wives. But as medicine became more professionalized in the late 1800s, male doctors wanted to take control of childbirth, with some suggesting midwives were unfit, according to a report by Vox.

    Monica Simpson, executive director of Sistersong, a reproductive justice organization advocating for women of color, said many Black women are choosing midwives because they have lost trust in doctors and hospitals.

    Much of that is driven by the harrowing statistics: Black women are 2.6 times likelier to die of pregnancy-related complications than White women, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

    Black infants also die at more than twice the rate of White infants, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Simpson said the child welfare system is broken. She said racism has played a part in the continued criminalization and separation of Black families.

    “There’s been this narrative that Black women can’t parent their children properly,” Simpson said. “We have been battling these narratives for decades. The way that Black women are criminalized around their motherhood, it’s horrible.”

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  • Alabama investigators say they’ll give update today on Sweet 16 birthday party shooting that killed 4 | CNN

    Alabama investigators say they’ll give update today on Sweet 16 birthday party shooting that killed 4 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Authorities investigating the weekend shooting that killed four people and left dozens of others injured at a teen’s birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, are expected to hold a news conference Wednesday about the case that’s left the small community grappling with grief and confusion for days.

    Details about what will be covered in the news conference, scheduled for 10 a.m. CT, weren’t immediately available. It will come four days after Saturday night’s attack, in which authorities have yet to name any suspects or provide a possible motive.

    The party, held at a downtown venue in celebration of Alexis Dowdell’s 16th birthday, was in full swing when gunfire erupted there, witnesses said. Her 18-year-old brother, Philstavious Dowdell, was killed, as were Marsiah Emmanuel Collins, 19; Shaunkivia “Keke” Nicole Smith, 17; and Corbin Dahmontrey Holston, 23, the Tallapoosa County coroner said.

    Thirty-two other people were injured, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency has said, without specifying their ages or whether they all were shot.

    The FBI, US marshals, a prosecutor’s office and local police will be among those joining the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency at Wednesday’s news conference, the state agency said.

    Investigators have been following up on “strong leads” in the shooting, Dadeville Police Chief Jonathan Floyd told CNN earlier this week.

    As of Monday, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency still was processing evidence and interviewing witnesses, it said.

    Several shell casings used in handguns were collected at the scene, the agency said. No high-powered rifle ammunition was recovered, it added.

    After days without significant answers from authorities, Alexis and Phil’s mother, LaTonya Allen – who was shot twice in the attack – has been anxiously awaiting news.

    “I just want justice for my baby and all the other kids that were involved,” Allen told CNN on Monday. She later added, “They took away a piece of my heart, and I know the other mothers and fathers feel the same way.”

    The attack was one of more than 160 mass shootings that have taken place so far this year in the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Like CNN, the nonprofit defines mass shootings as those in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter.

    Alexis had been planning her party for months, she told CNN, and began feeling “butterflies in my stomach” the day of the party.

    When she went to sit on her brother’s bed to tell him she was nervous, Alexis said, he assured her that he would make sure she had fun.

    Just hours later, Alexis and her friends were enjoying the music of the party’s DJ when gunfire erupted inside the venue, she said. Neither she or her mother recall hearing an altercation before the shooting.

    “All I remember is my brother grabbing me and pushing me down to the ground,” where she fell into a puddle of blood, she said.

    People embrace each other during a vigil in Dadeville on Sunday, the day after the shooting

    After Alexis and her mother ran from the building, they returned to see the bodies of the injured and dying scattered across the dimly lit dance floor, they said. As the room’s lights were flicked on, the family was horrified to see Phil’s body soaked in blood.

    The teen recalls running to Phil and pleading with him to stay alive. “He was trying to say something to her,” Allen said.

    “You’re going to make it. You’re strong,” Alexis told her 18-year-old brother as his consciousness wavered. She begged: “Don’t give up on me.”

    By the time first responders arrived on the scene, Phil was dead, Alexis said.

    “It’s a nightmare that I don’t wish on any parent – to go in and to see my baby laying there in a pile of blood,” Allen said. “That was the worst thing that I could experience in my life.”

    Earlier in the evening, Allen said she heard a rumor that someone in the party may have been armed. She said she made a stern announcement over the speaker: “If anyone in here has a gun, then you need to leave because we’re here to celebrate Alexis’ Sweet 16.”

    She and other chaperones scoured the crowd for anyone carrying a firearm, but didn’t see one, the mother said.

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  • Trump shadow looms large over House GOP policy retreat | CNN Politics

    Trump shadow looms large over House GOP policy retreat | CNN Politics

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    Orlando, Florida
    CNN
     — 

    House Republicans had hoped to use their annual retreat to get on the same page about upcoming policy battles and devise a strategy to preserve their fragile majority.

    Instead, they find themselves playing defense for former President Donald Trump.

    While most Republicans had hoped to steer clear of any presidential politics – despite being in Florida, home to two major potential GOP rivals in 2024 – Trump’s announcement over the weekend that he expects to be imminently arrested has put him back in the center of the conversation and forced Republicans to publicly rally to his side. Even some GOP lawmakers who have called for the party to move on from Trump have lined up to offer their full-throated defense of the ex-president, attacking the Manhattan District Attorney’s office that is investigating Trump as a political witch hunt.

    Speaker Kevin McCarthy, echoing calls from inside his conference, has instructed GOP-led committees to investigate whether the Manhattan DA used federal funds to probe a payment made by Trump’s then-personal attorney Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 presidential election.

    McCarthy said Sunday that he already talked to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, about an investigation into the matter, and hinted that there could be more developments on that front soon.

    “Remember, we also have a select committee on the weaponization of government, this applies directly to that. I think you’ll see actions from them,” McCarthy told reporters at a news conference kicking off their three-day policy retreat.

    But Republicans weren’t in complete lockstep with Trump. McCarthy carefully broke with Trump’s calls to protest and “take our nation back” if he is arrested, which has sparked concerns of political violence reminiscent of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

    “I don’t think people should protest this, no,” McCarthy said. But he added: “You may misinterpret when President Trump talks … he is not talking in a harmful way, and nobody should. Nobody should harm one another … We want calmness.”

    Firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, however, offered a different take.

    “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with calling for protests,” she told reporters after the news conference on Sunday. “Americans have the right to assemble and the right to protest. And that’s an important constitutional right. And he doesn’t have to say ‘peaceful’ for it to mean peaceful. Of course he means peaceful.”

    The latest Trump drama is once again threatening to divide the GOP and overshadow their carefully-laid messaging plans – a familiar predicament for Republicans who served in Congress while Trump was in office and spent years being forced to answer for his regular controversies. Republican leaders who had hoped to focus on their legislative agenda during the first news conference of their policy retreat instead fielded numerous questions from reporters about Trump and the Manhattan DA’s investigation.

    Asked whether he thinks it would be appropriate for Trump to run for president if he is ultimately convicted, McCarthy said: “He has a constitutional right to run.”

    Multiple Republican lawmakers – including House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik – have endorsed Trump, while at least two of his staunch supporters have thrown their weight behind other candidates in the race: South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman is backing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas is supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    Most GOP lawmakers, however, have been reluctant to pick sides just yet, waiting to see how the field develops. Even McCarthy, who credited his speakership to Trump, has yet to make his preference known.

    “I could endorse in the primary, but I haven’t endorsed,” he told reporters on Friday. When pressed on if he will do so, he again repeated: “I could endorse but I haven’t.”

    Aside from a potentially bruising GOP primary contest, House Republicans have other major internal battles on the horizon. They are about to dive into some of the most complicated and divisive policy fights of their razor-thin majority, including lifting the nation’s borrowing limit, funding the government, reauthorizing federal food stamp programs and deciding whether to continue aid for Ukraine.

    Part of their goal during their annual retreat is to just get the conference in sync ahead of these looming debates.

    “The value of something like this is, can we keep the era of good feelings going within the Republican conference?” said Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, who chairs the centrist-leaning Main Street Caucus. “This is gonna be a nice opportunity for us to just get in the same room, have a couple hundred of us breathe the same air, and remind ourselves that we have more in common than we have apart.”

    While the GOP has notched a handful of victories since taking over the House, including a resolution to overturn a DC crime bill, most of their bills have been messaging endeavors thus far. And even measures that were thought to be low-hanging fruit, like a border security plan, have proved more challenging than expected in their slim majority.

    House Republicans know their biggest challenges lie ahead.

    “The question is really going to be as we get into phase two,” GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who co-leads a bipartisan caucus with Democrats, told CNN. “The real test is going to be the must-pass pieces of legislation.”

    The GOP’s investigations on a wide array of subjects, including Hunter Biden’s business deals and the treatment of January 6 defendants, have caused some consternation among the party’s moderates. And some were also skeptical about the need for a congressional response to a potential Trump indictment.

    “I’m going to wait until I hear more facts and read the indictment itself,” Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who represents a district President Joe Biden won, told CNN. “I have faith in our legal system. If these charges are political bogus stuff, and they may be, it will become clear enough soon.”

    GOP leaders are nonetheless expressing confidence in their ability to stay united.

    “House Republicans are working as a team,” House GOP Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota said at the Orlando news conference. “Because that’s what the American people elected us to do.”

    Bacon framed the stakes of the legislative fights with Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to come by saying, “We need to be the governing party that voters trust. This will determine 2024 results. This means we can’t cave to Biden’s and Schumer’s demands, but we can’t refuse to find consensus and make agreements on must pass legislation.”

    GOP Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who told CNN he is willing to shut down the government if conservatives do not get what they are calling for pertaining to the debt ceiling, reflected on how House Republicans could learn from their Democratic counterparts in presenting a unified front.

    “They’re better than us at the carrot and the stick. If they get in line, they get the carrot. If they don’t, they get the stick. They all tout the unity thing. Maybe that’s one of our weaknesses,” he told CNN.

    The must-pass pieces of legislation expose not only the fault lines of a slim majority, but also underscore the hurdles House Republicans face in cementing their transition from a nay-saying minority to a governing majority.

    “Campaigning is for dividing. Governing is for uniting,” GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas told CNN, adding that sentiment must extend beyond House Republicans to Biden and Senate Democrats.

    “I’d say in general, not everybody comes up here to be serious legislators. A lot of people come up here for fame and fortune. I spent 20 years in the military. I’m focused on being a serious legislator,” he added.

    Fitzpatrick told CNN, “It’s definitely an adjustment,” when describing the House Republicans’ transition from minority to majority, particularly for those members who have not served in the majority before. But Fitzpatrick pointed to the fact that the messaging bills that Republicans have brought to the floor so far have passed almost unanimously.

    Some of the House GOP’s biggest hurdles will come in trying to write a budget blueprint, which they hope will kick off negotiations over the raising debt ceiling, where Republicans are demanding steep spending cuts.

    Further complicating the GOP’s goal to balance the budget and claw back federal spending, Republican leaders – egged on by Trump – have vowed not to touch Social Security and Medicare.

    Norman acknowledged how difficult it is going to be to coalesce around a framework that the entire conference can agree on. Before leaving Washington, the far-right House Freedom Caucus laid out their own hardline spending demands in the debt ceiling fight.

    “I don’t expect to get 218 on the first blush. What we present, there’s gonna be some gnashing of teeth,” he told CNN. “Every dollar up here has an advocate.”

    Burchett told CNN he stands behind the proposals being pushed by the Freedom Caucus.

    “It seems like every time the conservatives are the only ones that compromise. And we are just going to have to say no compromise,” he told CNN, adding he is willing to shut down the government on this issue. “I did it under Trump, and I’ll sure as heck do it under Biden.”

    McCarthy said he thought it was “productive” for his members to outline “ideas” for the budget, and dismissed the idea that anyone was drawing red lines.

    Asked about Biden’s insistence that House Republicans show them their budget before negotiations can continue, McCarthy replied, “Why do we have to have a budget out to talk about the debt ceiling? We’re not passing the budget, we’re doing a debt ceiling.”

    He added that he has told the president, “We’re not going to raise taxes, and we’re not going to pass a clean debt ceiling, but everything else is up for negotiation.”

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  • Woman missing more than 30 years and thought to be dead found living in Puerto Rico nursing home | CNN

    Woman missing more than 30 years and thought to be dead found living in Puerto Rico nursing home | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A Pennsylvania woman who disappeared more than 30 years ago and was believed to be dead by her family was recently found living in a nursing home in Puerto Rico, her family and police said at a news conference Thursday.

    Patricia Kopta, 83, was last seen in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1992, according to a missing person flier posted by the Pennsylvania Emergency Response Center.

    Her husband, Bob Kopta, reported her missing a few months later in the fall. At the time, he advised authorities that it wasn’t uncommon for his wife to “drop out of sight for short periods,” according to the flier.

    “I come home one night and she’s gone, and nobody knew where she was at,” Kopta said at the news conference with Ross Township Police.

    Police said they were first informed about the discovery of the missing woman when an agent from the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) and a social worker from Puerto Rico contacted them last year saying that they believed Patricia was living in an adult care home in Puerto Rico.

    “What they reported to us was that she came into their care in 1999, when she was found in need in the streets of Puerto Rico,” Ross Township Deputy Chief Brian Kohlhepp said.

    INTERPOL and the social worker said Patricia was found wandering the streets and through the years she had “refused to ever discuss her private life or where she came from,” Kohlhepp said.

    In her advanced age, Patricia started revealing nuggets that would eventually spur those around her to contact Ross police, Kohlhepp said.

    When she was in Pittsburgh, Patricia was a “well-known street preacher,” according to the missing person flier. She would approach strangers, telling them she had visions of the Virgin Mary and that the world was coming to an end, the flier said.

    Police said her disappearance wasn’t overtly suspicious because they “knew she had a mental health history and she had made statements to other family individuals that she was leaving, that she was concerned that she was going to be placed into a care facility here,” Kohlhepp said. Kohlhepp said police knew she had likely left of her own volition.

    Her husband said that his wife had talked about wanting to go to Puerto Rico to live in a tropical environment.

    “I even advertised in the paper down in Puerto Rico looking for her,” Kopta said at the news conference, adding that he spent a lot of money over the years searching for her.

    Patricia and Bob were married for 20 years before she went missing, Kohlhepp told CNN. He added that Patricia had no known family or connections in Puerto Rico.

    Police determined the woman was in fact Patricia through a nine-month-long process in which they compared DNA samples provided by her sister, Gloria Smith, and her nephew.

    “We really thought she was dead all those years,” Smith said at the news conference.

    Even before DNA testing was completed, the family knew it was Patricia as soon as they saw her photo, Kohlhepp said.

    Smith said that she has called the adult care home in Puerto Rico several times but has been unable to hold a conversation with her sister because she has dementia.

    “We didn’t expect it. It was a very big shock to see – to know that she’s still alive,” her sister said. “You know, we’re so happy and I hope I can get down to see her.”

    CNN has not been able to directly contact the woman’s family.

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  • Texas and Michigan officials say they didn’t know water, soil from Ohio train wreck would be transported into their jurisdictions | CNN

    Texas and Michigan officials say they didn’t know water, soil from Ohio train wreck would be transported into their jurisdictions | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Officials in Texas and Michigan are complaining they didn’t receive any warning that contaminated water and soil from the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, would be shipped into their jurisdictions for disposal.

    About 2 million gallons of firefighting water from the train derailment site are expected to be disposed in Harris County, Texas, with about half a million gallons already there, according to the county’s chief executive.

    “It’s a very real problem, we were told yesterday the materials were coming only to learn today they’ve been here for a week,” Judge Lina Hidalgo said Thursday.

    Contaminated soil from the derailment site is being taken to the US Ecology Wayne Disposal in Belleville, Michigan, US Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan said Friday.

    “We were not given a heads up on this reported action,” Dingell said in a news release on Friday. “Our priority is to always keep the people we represent safe.”

    Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said 4,832 cubic yards of soil have been removed from the ground in East Palestine and about six truckloads were on the way to Michigan.

    The complaints widen the controversy caused by the February 3 train derailment that left residents complaining about feeling sick after hazardous chemicals seeped into the air, water and soil.

    A National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report found that one of the train’s cars carrying plastic pellets was heated by a hot axle that sparked the initial fire, according to Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the safety board.

    Residents worry rashes and headaches may be tied to chemicals from train crash

    As the temperature of the bearing got hotter, the train passed by two wayside defect detectors that did not trigger an audible alarm message because the heat threshold was not met at that point, Homendy explained. A third detector eventually picked up the high temperature, but it was already too late by then.

    “This was 100% preventable. … There is no accident,” Homendy said during a news conference Thursday.

    Residents in East Palestine frustrated by lack of answers

    In a news conference Thursday, Hidalgo expressed frustration that she first learned about the expected water shipments Wednesday from the news media – not from a government agency or Texas Molecular, the company hired to dispose of the water.

    Hidalgo said Texas Molecular told her office Thursday that half a million gallons of the water was already in the county and the shipments began arriving around last Wednesday.

    She added that although there’s no legal requirement for her office to be notified, “it doesn’t quite seem right.”

    Texas Molecular is receiving the water from trucks, but it’s unclear if trucks are used for the entire trip, Hidalgo said. The company told her office they’re receiving about 30 trucks of water a day, she said.

    Texas Molecular said Friday that all shipments, so far, have come by truck for the entire trip.

    “Texas Molecular neither transports nor selects the mode of transportation for the water,” Jimmy Bracher, vice president of Sales for VLS Environmental Solutions, which owns Texas Molecular, told CNN in a statement Friday evening.

    “The company that generates the waste will determine/select who ships the wastewater and they must be DOT and EPA approved transporters,” Bracher said.

    On Thursday, Texas Molecular told CNN it has been hired to dispose of potentially dangerous water from the Ohio train derailment. The company said they are experts with more than four decades of experience in managing water safely.

    Hidalgo’s office is seeking information about the disposal, including the chemical composition of the firefighting water, the precautions that are being taken, and why Harris County was the chosen site, she said.

    “There’s nothing right now to tell me – to tell us – there’s going to be an accident in transport, that this is being done in such a way that is not compatible with the well, that there’s a nefarious reason why the water is coming here and not to a closer site,” Hidalgo said. “But it is our job to do basic due diligence on that information.”

    More than 1.7 million gallons of contaminated liquid has been removed from the immediate site of the derailment, according to a Thursday news release from the Ohio Emergency Management Agency. Of this, more than 1.1 million gallons of “contaminated liquid” from East Palestine has so far been transported off-site, with the majority going to Texas Molecular and the rest going to a facility in Vickery, Ohio.

    CNN has asked the Ohio agency the location of the remaining 581,500 gallons which has been “removed” but not “hauled off-site” and has yet to receive a response.

    Wayne County, Michigan, officials have been in contact with officials with a variety of federal and state agencies, along with the train company involved in the derailment since learning of the transportation of the contaminated materials, Wayne County Executive Warren C. Evans said in a news conference on Friday evening. Evans said the county did not receive a call from anyone that this was happening.

    The

    Professor: Independent expert needed in toxic spill response

    “Doing it in a way that doesn’t let citizens of Wayne County know that it’s coming just looks nefarious to me,” Evans said.

    Officials are not aware if this move was done “maliciously or not” but says there are “disconnects,” Evans said.

    “We learned about it via the grapevine and then saw Governor DeWine announced it on his site,” Dingell said in a news conference.

    Five trucks have been transported to the area so far, 99% with contaminated water and 1% with contaminated soil, according to Dingell. The truck containing soil could have been transported to the area as early mid-week, Dingell added.

    The transportation of the materials to the facility in Michigan has been paused and another site is likely to be found, Dingell and Evans said.

    CNN has reached out to the EPA and Norfolk Southern, the company that owns the derailed train, for comment.

    The 149-car train operated by Norfolk Southern had three employees on board: a locomotive engineer, a conductor and a trainee who were all in the head end of the locomotive, Homendy told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday.

    So far, the investigation found the crew did not do anything wrong prior to the derailment, though the crash was “100% preventable,” she said.

    The next phase of the investigation will examine the train’s wheelset and bearing as well as the damage from the derailment, the NTSB report noted. The agency will also focus on the designs of tank cars and railcars, along with maintenance procedures and practices.

    Investigators will also review the train operator’s use of wayside defect detectors and the company’s railcar inspection practices. More specifically, determining what caused the wheel bearing failure will be key to the investigation, Homendy said.

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  • A pregnant mom crossed the Rio Grande decades ago to give her unborn child a better life. Now her daughter is becoming a member of Congress | CNN Politics

    A pregnant mom crossed the Rio Grande decades ago to give her unborn child a better life. Now her daughter is becoming a member of Congress | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Delia Ramirez walks toward the microphone determined to make her message heard.

    “It is time – it is past time that we deliver on the promise that we have made to our Dreamers,” she says.

    On a crisp morning in early December, Ramirez is standing steps away from the US Capitol, with its white dome gleaming against the blue sky behind her. This is a rallying cry we’ve heard here time and again – but Ramirez hopes when she says it, the words will carry even more weight. This isn’t merely a talking point from her campaign platform.

    “This,” the Illinois lawmaker says, “is very personal for me.”

    It’s personal because if Congress doesn’t act, Ramirez’s husband could be among hundreds of thousands of people facing possible deportation. And it’s personal because Ramirez herself is about to become a member of Congress.

    She’s called this news conference, flanked by several of her fellow incoming freshmen lawmakers and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, to push for members of Congress to pass several key pieces of legislation while Democrats still control the US House. Among them: the DREAM Act, which would give a possible pathway to citizenship to some 2 million undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

    “I am the wife of a DACA recipient. I am the daughter of Guatemalan working immigrants. I know firsthand the challenges and constant fear our families live every single day,” Ramirez tells reporters. “We have to end this.”

    That’s far easier said than done, as decades of debate over immigration reform on Capitol Hill clearly show.

    But Ramirez says no matter how many obstacles pop up in her path, she’ll keep pushing.

    As constant and controversial as conversations around immigration in Washington have become, many lawmakers weighing in don’t have direct personal connections to the issues they’re debating.

    Ramirez, 39, has lived them her entire life.

    Her mom was pregnant with her when she crossed the Rio Grande – a detail Ramirez made a point to include in a candidate bio on her campaign website, which notes that her mom went on to work “multiple low-wage jobs to give her children a fighting chance to escape poverty.”

    Ramirez says over the years some of her political opponents have tried to use details like this from her background against her, accusing her of being in favor of open borders and speaking dismissively about her family during debates. But Ramirez sees her family’s story as a strength that’s helped her connect with voters and better understand the issues that matter to her constituents.

    “I didn’t have to shy away from the fact that I’m working class and my husband’s a DACA recipient, that I’m worried about how I’m going to pay for housing. That is the reality of so many people,” she says. “And I want men and women, young and old, to see me and think, ‘That was my m’hija, That was my daughter.’ Or…’I’m an intern somewhere and I don’t feel seen. But if she could do it, so can I.’”

    Ramirez says the story of her mom’s journey from Guatemala to the United States infused her childhood in Chicago, where Ramirez was born.

    According to the story Ramirez grew up hearing, when her mom crossed the Rio Grande, strong currents nearly swept her away. She’d hidden her pregnancy from others on the journey, but in that moment she called out in desperation, “Help! Help! Save me! Save my daughter!” A man did, Ramirez says, but after that day, her mom never saw him again.

    As she struggled with depression as a teenager, Ramirez says her mom would frequently invoke this part of her past, saying, “I nearly died so that you could be born. Now I have to fight to keep you alive.”

    That struggling teen, Ramirez says, would never have imagined that she’d run a homeless shelter and other successful nonprofits, go on to become a state lawmaker and one day be on the cusp of entering US Congress.

    “But that is the journey, right?” Ramirez says. “Maybe not the Congress part as often as it should be, but the journey of so many people and so many children of immigrants who contribute and do so much for this country.”

    How does her family’s journey shape her view of what’s unfolding now at the border?

    “I am clear that anyone willing to risk dying, starving or even being raped in the long journey through desert, cold and tunnels is crossing because they feel like there is no other solution to their situation. Their migration is the only way they see themselves and loved ones surviving deep poverty and, in some cases, persecution,” Ramirez says.

    “My mother wouldn’t have risked my life or hers had it not been the only option she saw for her unborn child to have a chance at a life and childhood better than hers.”

    As Ramirez shares these and other details from her past with CNN in the Longworth House Office Building one evening in early December, an aide steps in with her phone in hand.

    “It’s time,” he tells her.

    Ramirez is still an Illinois state legislator for a few more weeks, and she needs to vote on a measure that might not pass if she doesn’t.

    She holds the phone in one hand and looks into the camera.

    “Representative Ramirez votes yes,” she says, then hands the phone back to her aide.

    “Done,” she says with a triumphant smile.

    It’s the latest in numerous bills Ramirez has helped pass since her 2018 election to the Illinois General Assembly.

    In that way alone, she knows it will be an adjustment to work as a lawmaker in Washington, where partisan fights often get in the way of passing laws.

    She still remembers the first state bill she sponsored that passed in March 2019 – a measure to expand homelessness prevention programming, a top concern for Ramirez, who previously directed a homeless shelter.

    “It was a very emotional moment,” she says. And the first thing she did after the bill passed, she says, was call her mom and share the news.

    Ramirez in a portrait from her campaign website.

    “I said, ‘Mom, in three months I was able to do more (to prevent homelessness) than I had done in almost 15 years,’” Ramirez recalls.

    Her mom responded that she was proud but reminded Ramirez that her work wasn’t finished.

    “Go hang up, and do more,” she said, according to Ramirez. “And don’t forget where you come from.”

    It’s with that mantra in mind, and with memories of growing up as the daughter of immigrants who worked multiple jobs to support their family in Chicago, that Ramirez is heading to Washington.

    Both her parents are US citizens now, but Ramirez says they’re still struggling to make ends meet.

    “I am the daughter of a woman who at 61 has given so much to this country and is a minimum-wage worker that can’t afford health care, so she’s on Medicaid, and diabetic,” Ramirez says. “I am the daughter of a man who spent 30 years working in an industrial bakery, a union busting company, and the day he retired, he got a frozen pie. He didn’t get a retirement pension and he struggled with Medicare supplemental, covering the cost.”

    Ramirez’s newly redrawn Illinois congressional district is nearly 50% Latino and heavily Democratic, spanning from Chicago’s Northwest side into the suburbs, according to CNN affiliate WLS. She won more than 66% of the vote in the general election, defeating Republican mortgage company executive Justin Burau.

    After Ramirez’s election, her background landed her on many lists of firsts. She will be the first Latina elected to Congress from the Midwest.

    She’s also helped set another record as part of the largest number of Latinos ever in the House of Representatives.

    There’s another notable detail about her background that Ramirez has pointed to regularly in interviews since her election: She has a “mixed-status family.”

    More than 22 million people in the United States live in mixed-status families, according to immigrant advocacy group fwd.us, meaning at least one family member is an undocumented immigrant and others are US citizens, green card holders or other lawful temporary immigrants. But it’s rare to hear a member of Congress use the term to describe themselves.

    Because of her family’s experience, Ramirez knows many of the people who supported her candidacy see her as a voice who will speak out for them, and for so many immigrants who are in the shadows and rarely heard.

    Ramirez married Boris Hernandez in October 2020. They met earlier that year in what she describes as “one of those pandemic loves.”

    Delia Ramirez, left, with her husband, Boris Hernandez, center, and Ramirez's mother.

    She’s best friends with his cousin. Hernandez is originally from the same town in Guatemala as her parents. He came to the United States when he was 14. And for years, like hundreds of thousands of other people, he’s relied on the Obama-era program known as DACA, short for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which granted certain young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children work permits and protection from deportation.

    On her campaign website and social media feeds, Ramirez has shared photos of Hernandez. And she’s invoked her husband’s story in recent speeches and conversations with constituents.

    Hernandez often stood by her side at campaign events. He occasionally took photos, too (he’s a photographer, in addition to also having worked in nonprofits and early childhood development). He accompanied Ramirez as she voted on Election Day, even though he couldn’t cast a ballot.

    Ramirez acknowledges that she’s privileged compared to many loved ones of DACA recipients. She’s a US citizen, and because of that, Hernandez has a pathway to citizenship no matter what Congress decides. But still, she says, they could end up in a precarious position.

    If a federal judge’s ruling ends DACA – something many immigrant rights advocates warn is likely to happen in the next year – and her husband’s paperwork to adjust his immigration status is pending, Ramirez knows she could have a lot more to worry about in addition to her busy schedule as a first-term congresswoman.

    “I’m going to be fighting to keep my husband here,” she says, “and I’m a member of Congress. …. What happens to the other 2 million (undocumented immigrants that the DREAM Act would protect)? What happens to his brother? What happens to my best friend from high school? What happens to all of them who have no pathway, who don’t have a citizen husband or wife or partner?”

    Ramirez says that question keeps her up at night.

    Standing beside Ramirez outside the Capitol on that morning in December, Congressman-elect Robert Garcia of California praises her for bringing the group of freshmen lawmakers together even before they’ve taken office.

    “She’s been leading on issues of immigration, on DACA for Dreamers, to ensure that our country’s taking care of those who really need our help,” Garcia says.

    Helping Dreamers isn’t the only topic on the agenda during this December news conference; Ramirez and the others are also pushing for extensions to the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, and more funding for early childhood education programs.

    In her interview with CNN, Ramirez said her plans to fight for policies that help immigrants extend beyond immigration reform. One key issue she wants to work on while in office: housing, an area that she says is critically important to immigrant families and working-class families in general.

    Ramirez ascends a staircase at the US Capitol on November 18, 2022.

    The progressive policies she champions, she says, would benefit immigrants and US citizens alike. “It’s an ‘and,’” she says, “not an ‘or.’”

    Ramirez’s voice cracks with emotion as the news conference ends and she makes her closing argument.

    “It is time to deliver for our Dreamers,” she says. “It is time for Boris Hernandez to finally have a pathway to citizenship.”

    Ramirez says she feels overwhelmed by gratitude that her constituents have given her this chance to represent them, and a strong sense of urgency to deliver the results she knows so many people desperately need.

    Weeks later, the 117th Congress adjourned without taking most of the steps Ramirez and her fellow incoming freshmen had been pushing for.

    And with the balance of power shifting, she knows the battles to come will be even tougher. But for Ramirez, the words she proudly proclaimed in that first news conference outside the Capitol still hold true. She and other new members of the House Progressive Caucus have only just begun to make their voices heard.

    “We’re rooted,” she says, “and we are ready to help with this fight. … Let’s get to work.”

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  • Inside the White House’s months of prep-work for a GOP investigative onslaught | CNN Politics

    Inside the White House’s months of prep-work for a GOP investigative onslaught | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    More than four months before voters handed Republicans control of the House of Representatives, top White House and Department of Homeland Security officials huddled in the Roosevelt Room to prepare for that very scenario.  

    The department and its secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, had emerged as top targets of Republican ire over the Biden administration’s border security policies – ire that is certain to fuel aggressive congressional investigations with Republicans projected to narrowly reclaim the House majority and the subpoena power that comes with it.  

    Sitting around the large conference table in the Roosevelt Room, White House lawyers probed senior DHS officials about their preparations for the wide-ranging Republican oversight they had begun to anticipate, including Republicans’ stated plans to impeach Mayorkas, two sources familiar with the meeting said.  

    Convened by Richard Sauber, a veteran white-collar attorney hired in May to oversee the administration’s response to congressional oversight, the meeting was one of several the White House has held since the summer with lawyers from across the administration – including the Defense Department, State Department and Justice Department.

    The point, people familiar with the effort said, has been to ensure agencies are ready for the coming investigative onslaught  and to coordinate an administration-wide approach. 

    While President Joe Biden and Democrats campaigned to preserve their congressional majorities, a small team of attorneys, communications strategists and legislative specialists have spent the past few months holed up in Washington preparing for the alternative, two administration officials said.  

    The preparations, largely run out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House, are among the earliest and most comprehensive by any administration ahead of a midterm election and highlight how far-reaching and aggressive Republican investigations are expected to be.

    Along with Sauber, this spring the White House hired veteran Democratic communications aide Ian Sams as spokesman for the White House counsel’s office. Top Biden adviser Anita Dunn returned to the White House in the spring, in part to oversee the administration’s preparations for a GOP-controlled Congress.

    The Justice Department is also bracing for investigations, bringing in well-known government transparency attorney Austin Evers to help respond to legislative oversight. Evers is the founder of the group American Oversight and served as its executive director until this year, and previously handled the oversight response at the State Department.

     The White House is preparing to hire additional lawyers and other staff to beef up its oversight response team in the next two months, before the new Congress convenes in January, administration officials said. The hires will bolster Sauber’s current team of about 10 lawyers, a source familiar with the matter said.

    In piecing together GOP targets and strategy, the team has paid close attention to Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky, the two Republicans who are likely to lead much of the investigations under a GOP-controlled House and have spent months telegraphing their intentions in TV interviews and oversight letters.   

    Jim Jordan and James Comer.

    Their opening salvo came Thursday, when Comer and Jordan hosted a joint news conference to preview the various investigations into President Joe Biden’s family.  

    “In the 118th Congress, this committee will evaluate the status of Joe Biden’s relationship with his family’s foreign partners and whether he is a president who is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars and influence” said Comer, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee. “I want to be clear: This is an investigation of Joe Biden, and that’s where the committee will focus in this next Congress.”

    Comer, flanked by Jordan and other Republicans on the Oversight Committee, said Republicans have made connections between the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and the president whom they believe requires further investigation. 

    The White House accused Comer of pursuing “long-debunked conspiracy theories.”

    Even though the Republican majority is poised to be much thinner than expected – with a likely margin of just a couple seats – all indications are that House Republicans are poised to push ahead with a wide-ranging set of investigations into all corners of the Biden administration, including the messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Covid-19 vaccine mandates and the Justice Department’s handling of the various investigations related to Donald Trump. 

    Republicans are also intent on investigating the president’s family, particularly his son, Hunter Biden. 

    With little chance of passing much legislation in a deadlocked Congress, investigations are shaping up to be the focal point of how a House Republican majority wields its power.  

    “You’re gonna have a bunch of chairmen who are totally on their own, doing whatever the hell they want without regard for what the national political implications are,” said Brendan Buck, a former top adviser to House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said he believes GOP leader Kevin McCarthy will have “very little leash” to rein in those investigative pursuits.  

    House Republicans have already sent over 500 letters to the administration requesting that they preserve documents, key committees have hired new legal counsels to help with investigations, and leadership has hosted classes for staffers on how to best use the oversight tools at their disposal.

    Meanwhile, McCarthy’s office has been working with likely committee chairs over the last several months to delegate who is going to be investigating what, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

    “It’s like a clearing house,” the source said. 

    But the GOP’s push for aggressive investigations could run into resistance from the moderate wing of the GOP, who want to use their newfound majority to address key legislative priorities – not just pummel Hunter Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci. While McCarthy has vowed to conduct rigorous oversight, he will have to strike a delicate balance between the demands of the competing factions in his party.

    White House officials believe Republicans are bound to overstep and that their investigative overreach will backfire with the American public. In the meantime, they are prepared to push back forcefully, believing that many proposed investigations are based on conspiracy theories and politically motivated charges.

    “President Biden is not going to let these political attacks distract him from focusing on Americans’ priorities, and we hope congressional Republicans will join us in tackling them instead of wasting time and resources on political revenge,” Sams, the spokesman for the White House counsel’s office, said in a statement to CNN. 

    The House’s expected razor-thin majority is likely to make it more difficult to take steps like impeaching members of Biden’s Cabinet – or even the president himself. But that doesn’t mean, sources told CNN, they’re not going to try, particularly when it comes to the border and Mayorkas.  

    Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, on Capitol Hill on May 04, 2022.

    On Tuesday, the House Homeland Security Committee provided a preview of what is to come. Over the course of a marathon four-hour hearing, Republican lawmakers grilled Mayorkas over the influx of migrants at the southern border, the number of people who evade Border Patrol capture, and encounters with people on the border who are on the terror watch list. 

    Throughout, Mayorkas stood his ground, maintaining that the border is “secure” and batting down criticism that it’s “open” as Republicans have claimed. 

    At one point, Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana foreshadowed more testimony next year, telling Mayorkas: “We look forward to seeing you in January.”  

    Mayorkas, officials said, remains undeterred by the threats of impeachment and intends to stay at the helm of the department, a point he reiterated Tuesday. Still, one person close to Mayorkas told CNN that the DHS chief is “nervous” about impending GOP investigations and the potential of being continually hauled before Congress by hostile Republican committee chairs. 

    “Don’t let the bastards win,” one US official familiar with Mayorkas’ thinking said when asked to sum up the DHS chief’s attitude toward potential GOP investigations on border issues and impeachment.   

    “We will respond to legitimate inquiries,” the official said. “We’re not going to feed into what might wind up as kabuki theater.”  

    DHS already responds to hundreds of congressional inquiries per month, according to a Homeland Security official, who added the department has been preparing for months for any potential increase in congressional activity. The department is also ready to “aggressively respond to attempts to mischaracterize the strong record” of the DHS work force, as well as “politically motivated attempts to attack the secretary,” the official said.

    DHS officials considered hiring outside legal counsel to prepare for the potential onslaught of Republican scrutiny but ultimately chose not to, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.   Ricki Seidman, a senior counselor to Mayorkas and former senior Justice Department official, has been involved in DHS’s preparation for the GOP oversight, the source added.

     Another Homeland Security official said that the Border Patrol along with Customs and Border Protection “are going to take the most heat.” 

    The most politically charged investigations next year are poised to be those into the president’s son Hunter Biden.  

    Top Republicans have largely been more than happy for Comer to take on the leading role of investigating Hunter Biden, multiple sources said.  Jordan does not plan to be intimately involved in the Hunter Biden probe but will provide public support for Comer, including appearing with him at the upcoming press conference.  

    “We’re going to lay out what we have thus far on Hunter Biden, and the crimes we believe he has committed,” Comer told CNN earlier this month just before the election. “And then we’re going to be very clear and say what we are investigating, and who we’re gonna ask to meet with us for transcribed interviews.”

    Hunter Biden has denied wrongdoing in his business activities.

    Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, attends a ceremony at the White House on Thursday, July 7, 2022.

    Behind the scenes though, Jordan and other soon-to-be powerful Republican lawmakers – including likely chairman of House Intelligence Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio – have sought to distance their committees from the Hunter Biden investigation in favor of other investigative pursuits they deem to be “more serious,” the sources said. 

    The handling of Republican investigations related to Hunter Biden will fall to Hunter Biden’s own attorneys, while Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, will handle related matters related to Joe Biden’s personal capacity that do not touch on his official duties. Bauer, who is married to Dunn, and White House attorneys have already met to divvy up workflow over potential lines of inquiries to ensure there are clear lanes of responsibility between investigations that touch on Joe Biden’s official role as president and vice president and his personal life. 

    Another key point of interest is likely to be the administration’s handling of the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which led to the death of 13 Marines and nearly 200 Afghans when a bomb exploded at the Kabul airport.  

    At the State Department, a small group of officials has already begun planning for the coming investigations into Afghanistan, officials said. While that group will work with Sauber’s team at the White House, State Department officials expect to take the lead in handling GOP inquiries into Afghanistan.     

    The department has not hired new people to work on these efforts, but certain officials who are already at the department expect to spend a lot more of their time responding to the congressional inquiries, officials said.  

    The Republican investigation into the withdrawal is likely to be led by Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs committee. McCaul and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have historically had a good relationship, which State Department officials are hoping will be an important factor.

    US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021

    Administration officials said they plan to take McCaul’s inquiry seriously because they expect he will demonstrate a seriousness of purpose, instead of making bombastic demands like some other Republicans. And House Republican aides said they plan to explore the administration’s willingness to work with them before issuing subpoenas.

    “If they’ll meet us in the middle by giving us some documents instead of all documents, or agreeing to turn over certain individuals but not all of the individuals for interviews, then that’s a start,” said one of the GOP aides familiar with the plans. “But if they just want to be completely obstructive and say no to every single request, then you’ll see subpoenas fairly soon.”

    The department concluded its own review of the withdrawal in March, but the findings of that report have not been shared publicly, officials said. While it was expected to be put out earlier this year, State Department officials said the White House is making that determination, and they are unsure of where that decision stands. House Republicans want to see that report.

    At the Pentagon, officials are bracing for the possibility of public grilling at televised hearings on everything from Afghanistan to views about “wokeness” in the force and the discharging of troops who refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine. 

    “We know it’s coming,” one administration official said. 

     Both Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose term expires at the end of September 2023, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who appears determined to stay until the end of the Biden administration, have faced sharp criticism from congressional Republicans and know the coming months may be a rough political ride, officials said.    

    Milley has been a particular target for Republicans for his well-known efforts to keep the final weeks of the Trump presidency from careening into a national security crisis. 

    Both Milley and Austin have pushed back forcefully on GOP accusations that the military is “woke,” a topic that’s likely to become a focal point for some Republicans in the coming months.

    “This is going to be a Congress under Republican control like no other,” said Rafi Prober, a congressional investigations specialist with the law firm Akin Gump who previously worked in the Obama administration.    

    Aaron Cutler, the head of the Washington government investigations group at law firm Hogan Lovells and a former Republican congressional leadership staffer, said the partisan investigations serve to “feed the base red meat.”

    But Cutler said he has heard from conservatives that the tepid result for Republicans in the midterm elections may translate to less “silliness in politics,” he said. “The American people are pushing back, and saying we want government to work.”   

    That is exactly the calculation the White House and congressional Democrats are making. A senior House Democratic source said that aggressive attacks on Biden’s son could backfire, adding that congressional Democrats were gearing up to defend the president by calling out “lies and hypocrisy.”

    Still, with the GOP investigations in mind, a team of White House lawyers has in recent weeks and months advised senior White House staff on how “not to be seen as influencing politically sensitive missions at (departments and agencies),” a source familiar with the matter told CNN.  

    Asked at his press conference last week about the prospect of GOP investigations, including into his son, Biden said: “I think the American people will look at all of that for what it is. It’s just almost comedy. … Look, I can’t control what they’re going to do.”

    This story has been updated with comments from Rep. Comer on Thursday.

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  • 2 Black comedians file lawsuit over police jet bridge stops at Atlanta airport | CNN

    2 Black comedians file lawsuit over police jet bridge stops at Atlanta airport | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Police officers stopped Eric André as he boarded a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles in April 2021 and, a few months earlier, the same thing happened to another Black comedian in the same place, a lawsuit alleges.

    André and fellow comedian Clayton English filed the lawsuit claiming the stops were the result of racial profiling.

    “Police officers came out of nowhere in like, almost like an ambush style and started, singled me out. I was the only person of color on the jet bridge at the time,” André said in a news conference Tuesday.

    “They singled me out. They asked me if I was selling drugs, transporting drugs, what kind of drugs I have on me,” he said.

    A lawsuit filed Tuesday by André and English alleges that this stop was part of an anti-drug trafficking program carried out by the Clayton County Police Department in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that unfairly targets Black fliers.

    “It was clearly racial profiling. The experience was humiliating and dehumanizing, degrading, I had all the other passengers squeezing by me on this claustrophobic jet bridge gawking at me like I was a perpetrator,” André said.

    Police stopped English on a flight, also to Los Angeles, in October 2020.

    CNN has reached out to both the police department and the Atlanta Department of Aviation for comment.

    “I was almost on the plane when, in the jet bridge two officers popped out, showed their badges and started asking questions whether I had illegal drugs like cocaine, and I feel cornered in a jet bridge and I felt the need to comply,” English said in the news conference.

    After the incident involving André, Clayton County police denied any wrongdoing, CNN affiliate WSB-TV reported.

    The station published this statement released then by the police:

    “On April 21, 2021, the Clayton County Police Department made a consensual encounter with a male traveler, later identified as Eric Andre, as he was preparing to fly to California from the Atlanta Airport. Mr. Andre chose to speak with investigators during the initial encounter. During the encounter, Mr. Andre voluntarily provided the investigators information as to his travel plans.

    “Mr. Andre also voluntarily consented to a search of his luggage but the investigators chose not to do so. Investigators identified that there was no reason to continue a conversation and therefore terminated the encounter. Mr. Andre boarded the plane without being detained and continued on his travels. The Drug Enforcement Administration and the Atlanta Police Department did not assist in this consensual encounter.”

    The lawsuit claims that the Clayton County Police Department describes the “jet bridge interdiction program” as “consensual encounters” carried out at “random,” but argues that in a post-9/11 flying atmosphere, encounters with law enforcement in airports are unlikely to be seen as anything but required.

    The two name multiple members of the Clayton County Police Department in their lawsuit and allege that the department carries out these stops and searches in a way that targets Black passengers. The filing cites Clayton County Police Department records showing 56% of passengers (or 378 individuals whose races are listed) stopped in this manner are Black.

    “The Clayton County Police Department, along, sometimes, with the county district attorney’s office has been conducting interdiction of passengers on jet bridges as they’re getting on their airplanes to ask them about whether they have drugs on them,” Barry Friedman, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in the news conference.

    “It’s not a very successful interdiction program,” Friedman said. Clayton County Police Department records show that out of 402 jet bridge stops from August 2020 to April 2021, only three seizures were made, according to the lawsuit,.

    “They’ve come up with very little drugs, but they’ve taken a lot of cash off of passengers,” Friedman said. The lawsuit filing calls the jet bridge program “financially lucrative.”

    “Over the 8-month period in question, the program seized $1,036,890.35 in cash and money orders via 25 civil asset forfeitures,” the filing reads.

    Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to seize property they allege is connected to a crime. Organizations like the ACLU have criticized it as a legal way for police to steal from civilians, as obtaining one’s property after it’s been seized is notoriously difficult.

    “Yet, of the 25 passengers who had cash seized, 24 were allowed to continue on their travels, often on the same flight, and only two were ever charged with any related crime.”

    “The Clayton County Police Department has described this program as a drug interdiction program. For what we’re able to see by simply looking at the open records information that we’ve received, it seems to be a distinctly unsuccessful drug interdiction program, if that’s what it is,” Richard Deane, another member of the plaintiff’s legal team, said in the news conference.

    “What appears to be happening is that this is organized largely in order to seize money from people, on the hope that they’re not going to thereafter make the claim for those funds,” he said.

    André called the experience “traumatizing.”

    “When two cops stop you, you don’t feel like you have the right to leave, especially when they start interrogating you about drugs. The whole experience was traumatizing. I felt belittled,” he said. “I want to use my resources and my platform to bring national attention to this incident so that it stops.”

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  • A juvenile suspect is in custody after a shooting leaves 5 dead, at least 2 wounded in Raleigh, North Carolina, police say | CNN

    A juvenile suspect is in custody after a shooting leaves 5 dead, at least 2 wounded in Raleigh, North Carolina, police say | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A 15-year-old suspect is in custody after five people were killed and at least two others wounded in a mass shooting Thursday in Raleigh that North Carolina’s governor called a “moment of unspeakable agony.”

    A handgun and long gun were recovered after the shooting, during which the suspect wore camouflage and carried a camouflage backpack, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation.

    One of the victims killed was an off-duty Raleigh police officer, Gabriel Torres, 29, who was on his way to work, authorities said.

    The mass shooting came one day after two police officers were killed and another seriously wounded while responding to a call of a domestic disturbance in Bristol, Connecticut.

    “Enough,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Friday. “We’ve grieved and prayed with too many families who have had to bear the terrible burden of these mass shootings.”

    The President added, “We must pass an assault weapons ban. The American people support this commonsense action to get weapons of war off our streets.”

    Officials offered few details about what happened in the quiet, middle-class Raleigh neighborhood but said the crime scene extended over two miles on streets and a popular greenway. It ended after a long standoff during which the shooter was critically wounded.

    The other fatalities were identified as Nicole Conners, 52; Sue Karnatz, 49; Mary Marshal 35; and James Roger Thompson, 16.

    A police officer who was injured has been released from a hospital and another victim, Marcille Lynn Gardner, 59, is in critical condition, according to Raleigh Police Chief Estella D. Patterson.

    “My heart is heavy, because we don’t have answers as to why this tragedy occurred,” Patterson said.

    Karnatz’s husband, Tom, called her a loving wife and mother to three sons – ages 10, 13 and 14.

    “We will miss her greatly,” he said in a statement to CNN.

    In a Facebook tribute, he wrote Friday: “We had plans together for growing old. Always together. Now those plans are laid to waste.”

    Christine Hines said she was having yard work done at her home Thursday afternoon when the gunfire erupted. Sirens blared. An officer yelled at her to get back in the house when she went to close the patio door, she said.

    “I want to leave the area and then I have to consider that there’s really no perfect place,” Hines said. “And this is as close as I have seen, but I’m not sure if I want to stay.”

    Hines recalled seeing Sue Karnatz earlier Thursday. They walked their dogs about the same time each day on opposite sides of the street because the pets don’t get along. Knowing her neighbor is gone, Hines said, feels like her heart had been pierced.

    Of the teen suspect, Hines lamented: “Life hasn’t even begun for him.”

    Another resident, who stood with her 15-year-old daughter and asked not to be identified, said police cars, ambulances and fire trucks were descending when a neighbor approached.

    “She had seen a ghost,” the resident said. “She comes towards us, and I’m, like, what happened, and she said, ‘I just witnessed my neighbor being shot in the driveway.’ She was completely in shock.”

    An officer in an unmarked car told them there was an active shooter. They locked themselves in a bedroom, the resident said.

    “I started crying,” her daughter recalled.

    On Friday morning, the teen was crying again.

    “Imagining what people are going through,” she said. “And the fact that it was so close to us. It could have been us.”

    Knightdale High School principal Keith Richardson said in a statement that Thompson was a junior at the school. “It is an unexpected loss and we are saddened by it,” said Richardson, adding that counseling and crisis services were available for students and staff.

    Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, who joined police and city officials at a news conference Friday, called the rampage an “infuriating and tragic act of gun violence.”

    “It was a complex mission, in a short amount of time, to stop the shooter,” said Cooper, praising the police response.

    “We’re sad. We’re angry and we want to know the answers to all the questions,” Cooper added. “Those questions will be answered. Some today and more over time. But I think we all know the core truth: No neighborhood, no parent, no child, no grandparent, no one should feel this fear in their communities.”

    Raleigh police spokesperson Lt. Jason Borneo identified the suspected shooter as a White juvenile male, and police have not released any other details about him.

    The suspect was moved to a hospital after being taken into custody, CNN affiliate WRAL-TV reported. Officials did not say the extent of the suspect’s injuries. CNN has reached out to the hospital for further information.

    The shooting began just after 5 p.m. in the neighborhood of Hedingham near the Neuse River Greenway, officials said. A manhunt ensued as authorities worked to apprehend the suspect.

    Police “contained” the suspect around 8 p.m. inside a residence in the area, Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin told reporters Thursday.

    Helicopter footage from WRAL-TV showed more than a dozen emergency vehicles lined up on a road through a wooded area.

    A woman who was at the Hedingham Golf Club driving range said an “unending stream of police” drove by the area.

    “A golf pro came out to tell us to shelter inside or leave ASAP,” she told CNN. “They were very calm, but I could tell something was wrong, so we left right away.”

    The suspect was taken into custody before 9:40 p.m. Thursday, police said.

    Baldwin, joined at the news conference Thursday by other officials including Cooper, expressed her frustration at the heart-wrenching gun violence that infiltrated her city.

    “Today has been a very difficult day in our city. We pray that something like this will never happen here. It did,” Baldwin said.

    The mayor emphasized the widespread of gun violence must be stopped. “We have work to do, but there are too many victims,” she said.

    “We have to wake up. I don’t want other mayors standing here at the podium, with their hearts breaking because people in their community died today, needlessly and tragically.”

    There have been at least 531 mass shootings – including Thursday’s in Raleigh – in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The organization, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.

    Cooper echoed the mayor’s sentiments and called for prayers for the victims and the community.

    “Tonight, terror has reached our doorstep. The nightmare of every community has come to Raleigh,” Cooper said. “This is a senseless, horrific and infuriating act of violence that has been committed.”

    Both Cooper and Baldwin praised the multi-agency response to the shooting, with Cooper saying law enforcement officers ran to “an active shooter who was ready to kill people.”

    Law enforcement is anguished by the killings, including that of a fellow officer, Borneo said.

    “For the Raleigh Police Department, every officer is a brother or sister, so when we lose one of our own, it is a tragic, heartbreaking day for all of us,” Borneo said.

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  • British PM Liz Truss fires finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng | CNN

    British PM Liz Truss fires finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng | CNN

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    Britain’s Prime Minister Liz Truss speaks during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons in London, Engalnd, on October 12.

    (Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/AP)

    Spare a thought for British Conservative members of parliament. 

    The governing party of the United Kingdom thought they had it bad with scandal-stricken Boris Johnson wrecking their poll numbers and turning what was once called the natural party of government into an exploding clown car. 

    But having spent an enormous amount of energy removing a reluctant Johnson from office this summer, exhausted MPs say his replacement, Liz Truss – just 37 days into the job – seems hellbent on making the bad situation worse. 

    After her mini-budget – which proposed unfunded tax cuts, huge government borrowing and let energy companies off from a windfall tax – sent the pound tumbling and caused all manner of wider economic chaos, they are faced with the grim reality of having a leader they deem to be more damaging than Johnson but will be even harder to replace. 

    “Even if you think she’s awful, we can’t replace her this soon,” a former cabinet minister and Truss supporter tells CNN. “I am not optimistic about the future, but we need to try and ride this out and learn from the mistakes.” 

    The mistakes in question were, most MPs agree, terrible communications from the government and trying to do too many things too fast, without being adequately funded.

    “They committed to huge spending, rightly, to help people with energy bills, then immediately started talking about tax cuts,” a senior Conservative says. As a result, they are not “even getting credit for spending a load of money. When you announce policy like this you have to roll the pitch like mad. Why didn’t they roll the pitch?” 

    Truss may be forced into a U-turn on Friday and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, is battling to save his job.

    Read more about the dire mood in the Conservative Party here.

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  • Has Trumpism Run Out of Steam?

    Has Trumpism Run Out of Steam?

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    JAY, Maine—Services at the New Life Baptist Church had just wrapped up, and in the parking lot outside its tiny chapel, Paul LePage was standing behind me with his arm wrapped around my head. He held a cellphone inches from my face, as if he were filming an extreme close-up. The former and perhaps future governor of Maine had insisted on reenacting an incident that had occurred a few weeks earlier, when he’d threatened “to deck” a Democratic operative tracking his campaign. “If you come into my space,” LePage had warned the young man, “you’re going down.”

    I had asked LePage about the flap because it represented exactly the kind of uncivil confrontation for which the pugnacious Republican has become known. For more than a year, he had studiously been trying to avoid such encounters—and had largely succeeded. LePage, who as governor once challenged a Democratic legislator to a duel, famously bragged that he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump.” After two tumultuous terms, he left office four years ago with an approval rating of just 39 percent. Now 73, LePage is attempting a comeback, bidding to oust the Democrat who replaced him, Janet Mills. With Trump eyeing a revival of his own in 2024, the gubernatorial race this fall could serve as a test of Maine voters’ appetite for the return of a Trumpian leader after four years of somewhat calmer Democratic governance.

    A changed man LePage is not. But he is trying at least to sand down his rough edges, perhaps recognizing that the bombastic style he pioneered is no longer a winning formula in a state that shifted left in 2018 and decisively rejected Trump two years later. The governor who labeled people of color as “the enemy” of the nation’s whitest state has joined the parade of candidates denouncing the vitriol and even occasional violence that have infected American politics. “There’s an awful lot of hate in the hearts of many people, and it’s sad,” LePage told the parishioners inside the church, during a service on the 21st anniversary of 9/11. “We have to pray it away,” he said. “We have to come together as one nation.” Quoting Abraham Lincoln’s warning that a house divided cannot stand, LePage bemoaned the deep fissures between Republicans and Democrats. “It’s becoming vile and horrible.”

    Was LePage trying to present a kinder, gentler version of himself this election? I asked the ex-governor that exact question outside the church. “No,” he replied. “What I’m saying is life is a journey. And along the way you learn and you get better, and hope that every day, the rest of my life, I’m a better man.”

    An admirable sentiment. But did LePage think that during his time in office he had contributed to the hate he now recognizes in this country? He replied in a way that suggested he had some practice answering this query. “Am I perfect? No,” LePage said. “Did I make mistakes? Yes. Did I defend my family? Yes. Will I continue to defend my family? Yes.”

    LePage likes to respond to inquiries with questions of his own. When asked about his critics’ pointing out how often he had promised to change his ways only to fall back into confrontations and insults, he responded by asking if I had seen such a lapse during this campaign. I replied that personally I had not. But of course, there was that pesky matter of the run-in with the Democratic operative. Clearly, LePage did not count that as one of his mistakes.

    “He came into my personal space,” LePage said. “Let me show you what he did.” Before I knew it, the former governor had swung around me and begun the demonstration he hoped would exonerate him. Once he had shown me his quick version of events, LePage returned to where he had been standing for our interview. “If somebody attacks me,” he said, wagging a finger, “I will defend myself.”

    When I checked the video of LePage’s brief confrontation with the Democratic operative, the interaction looked nothing like the former governor’s reenactment. The operative had approached LePage as the two men were stepping over a puddle after a parade (LePage was holding a Tim Hortons doughnut), but the closest the man came to LePage appeared to be a couple of feet, not inches. Yet the reason Democrats were so keen on broadcasting the incident as widely as possible—and why LePage was so intent on defending his reaction—was that the whole thing seemed so familiar, so very LePage.

    Long before Trump shocked (and, in many cases, enthralled) voters on the campaign trail and upended Washington with his unfiltered, impulsive, often downright mean governing style, LePage had been doing the same in Maine. When in 2016 LePage described himself as Trump before Trump, “he was 100 percent correct,” says Roger Katz, a former GOP state legislator in Maine who backed LePage’s first gubernatorial run in 2010 but is now endorsing Mills. “The same kinds of insulting behavior and lack of respect for people is how he governed.”

    Read: The governor who forgot how to veto a bill

    LePage’s blatantly racist comments about Hispanic immigrants and Black people often made national headlines, but the many stories about his impulsive governing and frequent tirades have become local legends in Maine. Almost everyone I spoke with who had worked with the governor had a tale to share. Katz recalled the time that, in a fit of rage at lawmakers, LePage vetoed every single bill at the end of a legislative session, including those that he himself had proposed. Jeff McCabe, a Democrat who served as majority leader of the Maine House of Representatives, told me about how LePage had abruptly ordered a state prison closed in the middle of a dispute with lawmakers, resulting in the hasty transfer of inmates during the dark of night. “People woke up and thought there had been a prison break,” McCabe said.

    Drew Gattine, now the chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, was serving in the state legislature in 2016 when he criticized LePage for comments in which the governor claimed that virtually all of the drug dealers arrested in Maine were “Black and Hispanic people.” In response, LePage left Gattine a voicemail in which he called him “a little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker.” The governor went on: “I want you to record this and make it public, because I am after you.” LePage later apologized to Gattine, but not before he told reporters that he wished it was “1825,” so the two men could duel. “I would not put my gun in the air,” LePage said at the time. “I guarantee you, I would not be [Alexander] Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt.”

    Protesters upset with then-Governor Paul LePage hold a rally outside the governor’s mansion in Augusta, Maine, on August 30, 2016. (Yoon Byun / The New York Times / Redux)

    When I asked 63-year-old Joanne Glidden, an amateur motorcyclist with the United Bikers of Maine, what she liked most about LePage, she replied with a wide grin, “He reminds me of Trump!” As with Trump, LePage’s combativeness and lack of a public filter endeared him to many Republican and independent voters, who form the base of his current support. Glidden was among a dozen or so people who lingered at a fairgrounds in Windsor, Maine, after LePage had spoken to the biker group. “He spoke his mind, and I liked that,” Dan Adams, a 57-year-old crane operator, told me. “He don’t pull no punches.” The owner of a day-care center, Penny Nava, 56, told me she didn’t want to see LePage change his approach. “You need to be who you are,” she said. “You let that go, and you lose yourself.”

    Maine is not as deeply blue a state as the most recent presidential election might suggest. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s three-point margin of victory in Maine came closer than all but one other state (Nevada) to matching her slim advantage in the national popular vote. The state backed Biden by nine points in 2020, but Maine voters split their ballots and reelected Republican Senator Susan Collins by nearly the same margin, shocking Democrats who had spent nearly $100 million to defeat her. In both years, Trump won an electoral vote by carrying Maine’s rural Second Congressional District, where LePage yard signs have become ubiquitous.

    Unlike Trump, LePage grew up in poverty, not wealth and privilege. The eldest of 18 children, he ran away from home to escape an abusive, alcoholic father and was homeless for a time, working odd jobs to survive. He eventually graduated from college, started a business, and then worked for many years as the general manager of a discount chain store before launching his career in politics. LePage ran for governor after two terms as mayor of Waterville, a Democratic-leaning city that is home to Colby College.

    He won each of his two gubernatorial races in three-way contests that allowed him to capitalize on a divided opposition. In neither election did he capture a majority of the vote, winning with just 37.6 percent in 2010 and 48.2 percent in 2014. He spent eight years governing conservatively, reducing taxes and fighting for lower spending. After Maine voters approved a referendum to expand Medicaid, LePage blocked its implementation. His elections galvanized the movement in Maine toward ranked-choice voting, as advocates argued that the system would favor more-moderate candidates and would ensure that the winner ultimately secured votes from at least 50 percent of the electorate. Maine became the first state to adopt ranked-choice balloting and used the system in 2018 and 2020. But in a twist, a judge ruled that the system could go forward only in federal elections—for president and Congress—and not in state races. So it will not be in place for the Mills-LePage matchup this fall, although the lack of a serious independent candidate likely means that the change will have little effect.

    Read: Maine’s fitful experiment with a new way of voting

    Mills has held a small but consistent lead in the limited public polling so far, and Democrats expect the race to be close. They worry that the passage of time will have caused voters to forget what they disliked about LePage’s leadership style, so they’ve taken it upon themselves to remind them about his most memorable outbursts and dispute assertions that he’s changed. The strategy could be a preview of a national campaign against Trump should he run again in 2024. Across the country, this fall’s ballots feature plenty of Trump allies, acolytes, and would-be clones, most notably the gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. But Maine voters had already experienced eight years of Trump-style chaos before they turned in the other direction, and now they face the unique question of whether they want to go back. LePage “has never lost an election,” Mark Brewer, a political-science professor at the University of Maine, told me. “So betting against him historically has been a losing bet.”

    Picture of Donald Trump shaking hands with Paul LePage being introduced at a rally in Merrill Auditorium on Thursday, August 4, 2016.
    Donald Trump shakes hands with Maine Governor Paul LePage as he is introduced at a rally in Merrill Auditorium on Thursday, August 4, 2016. (Derek Davis / Portland Press Herald / Getty)

    If LePage is a stand-in for Trump this November, Janet Mills is a Biden-esque figure in Maine. At 74, she hails from a prominent political family and has served in public office with only a few years’ interruption since the ’70s. Mills’s parents were friends of the longtime Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and one of her brothers twice ran for governor as a Republican. After decades as a prosecutor and state legislator, Mills won election as Maine’s attorney general in 2008 and again in 2012. From that perch, she battled frequently with LePage, who at one point sued her for refusing to represent his administration when it sided with then-President Trump over his executive order restricting travel from Muslim-majority countries. (The state supreme court ruled in favor of Mills.)

    Mills became Maine’s first woman governor after earning 51 percent of the vote in 2018—a higher share than LePage won in either of his victories. She acted immediately to implement the voter-approved Medicaid expansion and has increased spending on education, on infrastructure, and in the fight against climate change. Like Biden, she has occasionally worked with Republicans, most recently drawing bipartisan support to send $850 relief checks to citizens as a way to reduce the effects of inflation. Mills has also occasionally tangled with progressives, vetoing some bills passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature.

    Mostly, Mills seems to have lowered the temperature of state politics. She’s warm and unassuming; when I saw her greeting patrons at a small farmers’ market, she drew little attention to herself and seemed to blend in with the crowd. On a recent Saturday morning, Mills spoke briefly to mark the tenth anniversary of the opening of a local grain mill. She read her remarks off an iPhone while a dancing toddler competed for the audience’s attention nearby.

    If Democrats find fault with Mills, it’s that she is perhaps too low-key. “I don’t think she’s brought in a lot of people,” Nancy Baxter, a 65-year-old health administrator for the federal government, told me at the market. “I don’t see her having excited the state as much as we’d hoped.”

    I met Mills outside the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, where the governor had worked for many years as a lawyer before entering politics. During a 30-minute interview, she touted her administration’s handling of and emergence from the pandemic. Like its neighbors in New England, Maine has a relatively high vaccination rate and low death rate, especially considering its population is one of the oldest in the country. Mills boasted about the state’s migration rate, which she said was the country’s seventh highest. “We’re turning the corner, and people are coming here,” she said. “We’ve become branded as a safe and welcoming state, and I like that.”

    Mills brushed off LePage’s frequent attacks on her. “I can’t judge who he is today, but the people of Maine know who he was before,” she said. Mills sounded a bit like a candidate who believes she’s ahead in the polls. She noted that LePage had appeared in the state with Trump during the height of the pandemic, in 2020, when the former president called her “a dictator.” “I thought, This is ridiculous,” Mills recalled, dismissively. “For the better part of my career, I’ve listened to weak men talk tough. Loud men talk tough to hide their weaknesses.”

    Trump hasn’t come to Maine to campaign for LePage this year. During my swing through the state, the Trump-before-Trump himself was a tough man to find.

    He’s running a decidedly low-profile statewide race—“a stealth campaign,” as Mills described it to me—having apparently determined that the easiest way to stay on his best behavior is to steer clear of situations that would test his discipline. After formally launching his gubernatorial campaign a year ago, LePage has held virtually no large rallies and given few press conferences or interviews (aside from appearances on conservative radio stations). Maine’s political press corps is not large, and LePage frequently evades reporters by publicizing his appearances only after they’ve occurred, usually by posting photos to his Twitter or Facebook pages.

    Read: The plot against Paul LePage

    LePage’s campaign ignored me entirely. My many calls and emails went unreturned, and when I stopped by his campaign headquarters early on a Friday afternoon after Labor Day, no one was there. (“Don’t take it personally,” Katz, the former GOP lawmaker and LePage critic, assured me, noting that LePage “had a terrible relationship with the press” when he was governor.) When I showed up at a local GOP fundraiser that Democrats said LePage would be addressing, the organizers told me he had never been on the schedule. They directed me instead to the charity event that the United Bikers of Maine was holding about an hour away. LePage had indeed spoken to the group, but he was long gone by the time I got there.

    I finally found the former governor on the morning of September 11 in the rural town of Jay, about 30 miles northwest of Augusta, the state capital. The New Life Baptist Church is the size of a modest, one-story house, and LePage arrived with his wife, Ann; a campaign aide; and a trio of local Republican legislators. He had befriended the church’s pastor, Chris Grimbilas, during his second term as governor, and the two have stayed in close touch in the years since. Grimbilas told the approximately 30 parishioners gathered in the sanctuary that LePage was not there “to campaign,” although LePage sounded very much like a candidate on the stump during his brief remarks from the pulpit. The theme of the Sunday service was to honor first responders, and LePage began by comparing the state’s firing last year of police officers and firefighters who refused COVID-19 vaccinations to the horrors of 9/11. “It was the most vicious of attacks on first responders I’ve seen since the World Trade Center,” he said, pledging to reinstate those who lost their jobs in January if he becomes governor again.

    LePage’s sparse public schedule might seem like a questionable campaign strategy, but it could prove effective. As a recent two-term governor, he does not need to introduce himself to voters, and he might be hoping that a midterm backlash against Democrats nationwide will return him to office.

    As for Trump, LePage is happy to have the votes of Mainers who associate him positively with the former president. But he’s not emphasizing the connection. For some voters, the link between the two men seems to be thinner than it was when both were in office. Despite their similar personalities, LePage and Trump had very different upbringings, and they’ve diverged again during their (perhaps temporary) retirements.

    Unlike Trump, LePage left office willingly when his term was up in 2019. He and his wife initially moved to Florida, but he returned to Maine and worked as a bartender at McSeagull’s Restaurant for two summers, in the coastal tourist town of Boothbay Harbor. The gig served as good publicity for both the bar and LePage, who was already talking about challenging Mills for governor. Although he struggled to keep up during busy times, LePage’s fellow bartenders told me he was a good colleague who took direction well. “He needs to keep his mouth shut,” Gigi Frost, 41, told me. But she added: “I really do like him personally.” Frost, an independent, said she hadn’t decided whether to vote for LePage or Mills. Yet she saw LePage as distinct from Trump. “I despise Trump,” she said. “I don’t think LePage is as bad.”

    That assessment matched what I heard from some other Maine voters, including those who hadn’t spent a summer pouring beers with the former governor. Trump is in a whole other category now from LePage. “LePage is better than Trump,” Shirley Emery, a 74-year-old retiree, told me in Windsor. “He’s honest. He’s not a womanizer.”

    LePage seems to be hearing those voices too, and his cautious, buttoned-up strategy suggests that he sees Trumpism waning in the upper reaches of New England. When I asked him whether he still aligned himself with Trump, the former governor clammed up. “I’m running for governor of the state of Maine,” he said, “and I’m not going to talk about national politics.” I tried again. Should Trump run again in 2024? “I’m running for governor of the state of Maine, all right? And that’s it.”

    Perhaps Paul LePage is a transformed man after all. The conservative who ran on unvarnished, tell-it-like-it-is authenticity has finally discovered his filter and learned the coded deflection of the blue-state Republican. Distancing himself from the president he once claimed as a protégé, the straight-talking governor has, in pursuit of one more term in power, almost become a conventional politician.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States.

    Birth date: June 14, 1946

    Birth place: New York, New York

    Birth name: Donald John Trump

    Father: Fred Trump, real estate developer

    Mother: Mary (Macleod) Trump

    Marriages: Melania (Knauss) Trump (January 22, 2005-present); Marla (Maples) Trump (December 1993-June 1999, divorced); Ivana (Zelnicek) Trump (1977-1990, divorced)

    Children: with Melania Trump: Barron, March 20, 2006; with Marla Maples: Tiffany, October 13, 1993; with Ivana Trump: Eric, 1984; Ivanka, October 30, 1981; Donald Jr., December 31, 1977

    Education: Attended Fordham University; University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance, B.S. in Economics, 1968

    As Trump evolved from real estate developer to reality television star, he turned his name into a brand. Licensed Trump products have included board games, steaks, cologne, vodka, furniture and menswear.

    He has portrayed himself in cameo appearances in movies and on television, including “Zoolander,” “Sex and the City” and “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”

    Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was first used by Ronald Reagan while he was running against President Jimmy Carter.

    For details on investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, visit 2016 Presidential Election Investigation Fast Facts.

    1970s – After college, works with his father on apartment complexes in Queens and Brooklyn.

    1973 – Trump and his father are named in a Justice Department lawsuit alleging Trump property managers violated the Fair Housing Act by turning away potential African American tenants. The Trumps deny the company discriminates and file a $100 million countersuit, which is later dismissed. The case is settled in 1975, and the Trumps agree to provide weekly lists of vacancies to Black community organizations.

    1976 – Trump and his father partner with the Hyatt Corporation, purchasing the Commodore Hotel, an aging midtown Manhattan property. The building is revamped and opens four years later as the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The project kickstarts Trump’s career as a Manhattan developer.

    1983-1990 – He builds/purchases multiple properties in New York City, including Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel, and also opens casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, including the Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Plaza. Trump buys the New Jersey Generals football team, part of the United States Football League, which folds after three seasons.

    1985 – Purchases Mar-a-Lago, an oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It is renovated and opens as a private club in 1995.

    1987 – Trump’s first book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” is published, and becomes a bestseller. The Donald J. Trump Foundation is established in order to donate a portion of profits from book sales to charities.

    1990 – Nearly $1 billion in personal debt, Trump reaches an agreement with bankers allowing him to avoid declaring personal bankruptcy.

    1991 – The Trump Taj Mahal files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

    1992 – The Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle casinos file for bankruptcy.

    1996 – Buys out and becomes executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants.

    October 7, 1999 – Tells CNN’s Larry King that he is going to form a presidential exploratory committee and wants to challenge Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination.

    February 14, 2000 – Says that he is abandoning his bid for the presidency, blaming discord within the Reform Party.

    January 2004 – “The Apprentice,” a reality show featuring aspiring entrepreneurs competing for Trump’s approval, premieres on NBC.

    November 21, 2004 – Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    2005 – Establishes Trump University, which offers seminars in real estate investment.

    February 13, 2009 – Announces his resignation from his position as chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Days later, the company files for bankruptcy protection.

    March 17, 2011 – During an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Trump questions whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

    June 16, 2015 – Announces that he is running for president during a speech at Trump Tower. He pledges to implement policies that will boost the economy and says he will get tough on immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people who have lots of problems,” Trump says. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

    June 28, 2015 – Says he’s giving up the TV show “The Apprentice” to run for president.

    June 29, 2015 – NBCUniversal says it is cutting its business ties to Trump and won’t air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants because of “derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants.”

    July 8, 2015 – In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump says he “can’t guarantee” all of his employees have legal status in the United States. This is in response to questions about a Washington Post report about undocumented immigrants working at the Old Post Office construction site in Washington, DC, which Trump is converting into a hotel.

    July 22, 2015 – Trump’s financial disclosure report is made public by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

    August 6, 2015 – During the first 2016 Republican debate, Trump is questioned about a third party candidacy, his attitude towards women and his history of donating money to Democratic politicians. He tells moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News he feels he is being mistreated. The following day, Trump tells CNN’s Don Lemon that Kelly was singling him out for attack, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

    September 11, 2015 – Trump announces he has purchased NBC’s half of the Miss Universe Organization, which organizes the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.

    December 7, 2015 – Trump’s campaign puts out a press release calling for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

    May 26, 2016 – Secures enough delegates to clinch the Republican Party nomination.

    July 16, 2016 – Introduces Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.

    July 19, 2016 – Becomes the Republican Party nominee for president.

    September 13, 2016 – During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says his office is investigating Trump’s charitable foundation “to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.”

    October 1, 2016 – The New York Times reports Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 which could have allowed him to legally skip paying federal income taxes for years. The report is based on a financial document mailed to the newspaper by an anonymous source.

    October 7, 2016 – Unaired footage from 2005 surfaces of Trump talking about trying to have sex with a married woman and being able to grope women. In footage obtained by The Washington Post, Trump is heard off-camera discussing women in vulgar terms during the taping of a segment for “Access Hollywood.” In a taped response, Trump declares, “I said it, I was wrong and I apologize.”

    October 9, 2016 – During the second presidential debate, CNN’s Cooper asks Trump about his descriptions of groping and kissing women without their consent in the “Access Hollywood” footage. Trump denies that he has ever engaged in such behavior and declares the comments were “locker room talk.” After the debate, 11 women step forward to claim that they were sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by the real estate developer. Trump says the stories aren’t true.

    November 8, 2016 – Elected president of the United States. Trump will be the first president who has never held elected office, a top government post or a military rank.

    November 18, 2016 – Trump agrees to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against Trump University. About 6,000 former students are covered by the settlement.

    December 24, 2016 – Trump says he will dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation “to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President.” A spokeswoman for the New York Attorney General’s Office says that the foundation cannot legally close until investigators conclude their probe of the charity.

    January 10, 2017 – CNN reports that intelligence officials briefed Trump on a dossier that contains allegations about his campaign’s ties to Russia and unverified claims about his personal life. The author of the dossier is a former British spy who was hired by a research firm that had been funded by both political parties to conduct opposition research on Trump.

    January 20, 2017 – Takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts during an inauguration ceremony at the Capitol.

    January 23, 2017 – Trump signs an executive action withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration and awaiting congressional approval.

    January 27, 2017 – Trump signs an executive order halting all refugee arrivals for 120 days and banning travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days. Additionally, refugees from Syria are barred indefinitely from entering the United States. The order is challenged in court.

    February 13, 2017 – Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigns amid accusations he lied about his communications with Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later pleads guilty to lying to the FBI.

    May 3, 2017 – FBI Director James Comey confirms that there is an ongoing investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during a hearing on Capitol Hill. Less than a week later, Trump fires Comey, citing a DOJ memo critical of the way he handled the investigation into Clinton’s emails.

    May 2017 – Shortly after Trump fires Comey, the FBI opens an investigation into whether Trump “had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests,” citing former law enforcement officials and others the paper said were familiar with the probe.

    May 17, 2017 – Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is appointed as special counsel to lead the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein makes the appointment because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from investigations into Trump’s campaign.

    May 19, 2017 – Departs on his first foreign trip as president. The nine-day, five-country trip includes stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, a NATO summit in Brussels and a G7 summit in Sicily.

    June 1, 2017 – Trump proclaims that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord but adds that he is open to renegotiating aspects of the environmental agreement, which was signed by 175 countries in 2016.

    July 7, 2017 – Meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in person for the first time, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

    August 8, 2017 – In response to nuclear threats from North Korea, Trump warns that Pyongyang will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Soon after Trump’s comments, North Korea issues a statement saying it is “examining the operational plan” to strike areas around the US territory of Guam.

    August 15, 2017 – After a violent clash between neo-Nazi activists and counterprotesters leaves one dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump holds an impromptu press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower and declares that there were “fine people” on both sides.

    August 25, 2017 – Trump’s first pardon is granted to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt for disregarding a court order in a racial-profiling case. Trump did not consult with lawyers at the Justice Department before announcing his decision.

    September 5, 2017 – The Trump administration announces that it is ending the DACA program, introduced by Obama to protect nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Trump calls on Congress to introduce legislation that will prevent DACA recipients from being deported. Multiple lawsuits are filed opposing the policy in federal courts and judges delay the end of the program, asking the government to submit filings justifying the cancellation of DACA.

    September 19, 2017 – In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump refers to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man” and warns that the United States will “totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend itself or its allies.

    September 24, 2017 – The Trump administration unveils a third version of the travel ban, placing restrictions on travel by certain foreigners from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. (Chad is later removed after meeting security requirements.) One day before the revised ban is set to take effect, it is blocked nationwide by a federal judge in Hawaii. A judge in Maryland issues a similar ruling.

    December 4, 2017 – The Supreme Court rules that the revised travel ban can take effect pending appeals.

    December 6, 2017 – Trump recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announces plans to relocate the US Embassy there.

    January 11, 2018 – During a White House meeting on immigration reform, Trump reportedly refers to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

    January 12, 2018 – The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump allegedly had an affair with a porn star named Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. The newspaper states that Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, arranged a $130,000 payment for a nondisclosure agreement weeks before Election Day in 2016. Trump denies the affair occurred. In March, Clifford sues Trump seeking to be released from the NDA. In response, Trump and his legal team agree outside of court not to sue or otherwise enforce the NDA. The suit is dismissed. A California Superior Court judge orders Trump to pay $44,100 to Clifford, to reimburse her attorneys’ fees in the legal battle surrounding her nondisclosure agreement.

    March 13, 2018 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and will nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Tillerson’s replacement.

    March 20, 2018 – A New York Supreme Court judge rules that a defamation lawsuit against Trump can move forward, ruling against a July 2017 motion to dismiss filed by Trump’s lawyers. The lawsuit, filed by Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant, is related to sexual assault allegations. In November 2021, attorneys for Zervos announce she is dropping the lawsuit.

    March 23, 2018 – The White House announces that it is adopting a policy, first proposed by Trump via tweet in July 2017, banning most transgender individuals from serving in the military.

    April 9, 2018 – The FBI raids Cohen’s office, home and a hotel room where he’d been staying while his house was renovated. The raid is related to a federal investigation of possible fraud and campaign finance violations.

    April 13, 2018 – Trump authorizes joint military strikes in Syria with the UK and France after reports the government used chemical weapons on civilians in Douma.

    May 7, 2018 – The Trump administration announces a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings. Sessions says that individuals who violate immigration law will be criminally prosecuted and warns that parents could be separated from children.

    May 8, 2018 – Trump announces that the United States is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

    May 31, 2018 – The Trump administration announces it is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from allies Canada, Mexico and the European Union.

    June 8-9, 2018 – Before leaving for the G7 summit in Quebec City, Trump tells reporters that Russia should be reinstated in the group. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 led to Russia’s suspension. After leaving the summit, Trump tweets that he will not endorse the traditional G7 communique issued at the end of the meeting. The President singles out Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for making “false statements” at a news conference.

    June 12, 2018 – Trump meets Kim in person for the first time during a summit in Singapore. They sign a four-point statement that broadly outlines the countries’ commitment to a peace process. The statement contains a pledge by North Korea to “work towards” complete denuclearization but the agreement does not detail how the international community will verify that Kim is ending his nuclear program.

    June 14, 2018 – The New York attorney general sues the Trump Foundation, alleging that the nonprofit run by Trump and his three eldest children violated state and federal charity law.

    June 26, 2018 – The Supreme Court upholds the Trump administration’s travel ban in a 5-4 ruling along party lines.

    July 16, 2018 – During a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump declines to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible. The next day, Trump clarifies his remark, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He says he accepts the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia meddled in the election but adds, “It could be other people also.”

    August 21, 2018 – Cohen pleads guilty to eight federal charges, including two campaign finance violations. In court, he says that he orchestrated payments to silence women “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” On the same day, Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort is convicted on eight counts of federal financial crimes. On December 12, Cohen is sentenced to three years in prison.

    October 2, 2018 – The New York Times details numerous tax avoidance schemes allegedly carried out by Trump and his siblings. In a tweet, Trump dismisses the article as a “very old, boring and often told hit piece.”

    November 20, 2018 – Releases a statement backing Saudi Arabia in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Virginia resident, killed in October at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. Khashoggi was a frequent critic of the Saudi regime. The Saudis initially denied any knowledge of his death, but then later said a group of rogue operators were responsible for his killing. US officials have speculated that such a mission, including the 15 men sent from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to murder him, could not have been carried out without the authorization of Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the statement, Trump writes, “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

    December 18, 2018 – The Donald J. Trump Foundation agrees to dissolve according to a document filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. The agreement allows the New York attorney general’s office to review the recipients of the charity’s assets.

    December 22, 2018 – The longest partial government shutdown in US history begins after Trump demands lawmakers allocate $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall before agreeing to sign a federal funding package.

    January 16, 2019 – After nearly two years of Trump administration officials denying that anyone involved in his campaign colluded with the Russians to help his candidacy, Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, says “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign. I said the President of the United States.”

    January 25, 2019 – The government shutdown ends when Trump signs a short-term spending measure, providing three weeks of stopgap funding while lawmakers work on a border security compromise. The bill does not include any wall funding.

    February 15, 2019 – Trump declares a national emergency to allocate funds to build a wall on the border with Mexico. During the announcement, the President says he expects the declaration to be challenged in court. The same day, Trump signs a border security measure negotiated by Congress, with $1.375 billion set aside for barriers, averting another government shutdown.

    February 18, 2019 – Attorneys general from 16 states file a lawsuit in federal court challenging Trump’s emergency declaration.

    March 22, 2019 – Mueller ends his investigation and delivers his report to Attorney General William Barr. A senior Justice Department official tells CNN that there will be no further indictments.

    March 24, 2019 – Barr releases a letter summarizing the principal conclusions from Mueller’s investigation. According to Barr’s four-page letter, the evidence was not sufficient to establish that members Trump’s campaign tacitly engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the election.

    April 18, 2019 – A redacted version of the Mueller report is released. The first part of the 448-page document details the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team on potential conspiracy crimes and explains their decisions not to charge individuals associated with the campaign. The second part of the report outlines ten episodes involving possible obstruction of justice by the President. According to the report, Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump was rooted in Justice Department guidelines prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. Mueller writes that he would have cleared Trump if the evidence warranted exoneration.

    May 1, 2019 – The New York Times publishes a report that details how Giuliani, in his role as Trump’s personal attorney, is investigating allegations related to former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential Trump opponent in the 2020 presidential race. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings. In 2016, the elder Biden pressured Ukraine to oust a prosecutor who had investigated Burisma for corruption. Giuliani suggests that Biden’s move was motivated by a desire to protect his son from criminal charges. Giuliani’s claims are undermined after Bloomberg reports that the Burisma investigation was “dormant” when Biden pressed the prosecutor to resign.

    June 12, 2019 – Trump says he may be willing to accept information about political rivals from a foreign government during an interview on ABC News, declaring that he’s willing to listen and wouldn’t necessarily call the FBI.

    June 16, 2019 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveils a sign at the proposed site of a Golan Heights settlement to be named Trump Heights.

    June 18, 2019 – Trump holds a rally in Orlando to publicize the formal launch of his reelection campaign.

    June 28, 2019 – During a breakfast meeting at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman reportedly discuss tensions with Iran, trade and human rights.

    June 30, 2019 – Trump becomes the first sitting US president to enter North Korea. He takes 20 steps beyond the border and shakes hands with Kim.

    July 14, 2019 – Via Twitter, Trump tells Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Illhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to their home countries. Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley are natural-born US citizens; Omar was born in Somalia, immigrated to the United States and became a citizen.

    July 16, 2019 – The House votes, 240-187, to condemn the racist language Trump used in his tweets about Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and Pressley.

    July 24, 2019 – Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.

    July 25, 2019 – Trump speaks on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asks Zelensky for a “favor,” encouraging him to speak with Giuliani about investigating Biden. In the days before the call, Trump blocked nearly $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine.

    August 12, 2019 – A whistleblower files a complaint pertaining to Trump’s conduct on the Zelensky call.

    September 11, 2019 – The Trump administration lifts its hold on military aid for Ukraine.

    September 24, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces the beginning of an impeachment inquiry related to the whistleblower complaint.

    September 25, 2019 – The White House releases notes from the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. The readout contains multiple references to Giuliani and Barr. In response, the Justice Department issues a statement that says Barr didn’t know about Trump’s conversation until weeks after the call. Further, the attorney general didn’t talk to the President about having Ukraine investigate the Bidens, according to the Justice Department. On the same day as the notes are released, Trump and Zelensky meet in person for the first time on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. During a joint press conference after the meeting, both men deny that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden in exchange for aid.

    September 26, 2019 – The House releases a declassified version of the whistleblower complaint. According to the complaint, officials at the White House tried to “lock down” records of Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky. The complaint also alleges that Barr played a role in the campaign to convince Zelensky that Biden should be investigated. Trump describes the complaint as “fake news” and “a witch hunt” on Twitter.

    September 27, 2019 – Pompeo is subpoenaed by House committees over his failure to provide documents related to Ukraine. Kurt Volker, US special envoy to Ukraine, resigns. He was named in the whistleblower complaint as one of the State Department officials who helped Giuliani connect with sources in Ukraine.

    October 3, 2019 – Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump says both Ukraine and China should investigate alleged corruption involving Biden and his son. CNN reports that the President had brought up Biden and his family during a June phone call with Xi Jinping. In that call, Trump discussed the political prospects of Biden as well as Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi that he would remain quiet on the matter of Hong Kong protests. Notes documenting the conversation were placed on a highly secured server where the transcript from the Ukraine call was also stored.

    October 6, 2019 – After Trump speaks on the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the White House announces that US troops will move out of northern Syria to make way for a planned Turkish military operation. The move marks a major shift in American foreign policy and effectively gives Turkey the green light to attack US-backed Kurdish forces, a partner in the fight against ISIS.

    October 9, 2019 – Turkey launches a military offensive in northern Syria.

    October 31, 2019 – Trump says via Twitter that he is changing his legal residency from New York to Florida, explaining that he feels he is treated badly by political leaders from the city and state.

    November 7, 2019 – A judge orders Trump to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit against his charity filed by the New York state attorney general. According to the suit, Trump breached his fiduciary duty by allowing his presidential campaign to direct the distribution of donations. In a statement, Trump accuses the attorney general of mischaracterizing the settlement for political purposes.

    November 13, 2019 – Public impeachment hearings begin and Trump meets Erdogan at the White House.

    November 20, 2019 – During a public hearing, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland says he worked with Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine at the “express direction of the President of the United States” and he says “everyone was in the loop.” Sondland recounts several conversations between himself and Trump about Ukraine opening two investigations: one into Burisma and another into conspiracies about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 US election.

    December 10, 2019 – House Democrats unveil two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress.

    December 11, 2019 – Trump signs an executive order to include discrimination against Jewish people as a violation of law in certain cases, with an eye toward fighting antisemitism on college campuses.

    December 13, 2019 – The House Judiciary Committee approves the two articles of impeachment in a party line vote.

    December 18, 2019 – The House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, charging a president with high crimes and misdemeanors for just the third time in American history.

    January 3, 2020 – Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announces that a US airstrike in Iraq has killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.

    January 8, 2020 – Iran fires a number of missiles at two Iraqi bases housing US troops in retaliation for the American strike that killed Soleimani. No US or Iraqi lives are reported lost, but the Pentagon later releases a statement confirming that 109 US service members had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries in the wake of the attack.

    January 24, 2020 – Makes history as the first President to attend the annual March for Life rally in Washington, DC, since it began nearly a half-century ago. Trump reiterates his support for tighter abortion restrictions.

    January 29, 2020 – Trump signs the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement into law, which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement.

    January 31, 2020 – The Trump administration announces an expansion of the travel ban to include six new countries. Immigration restrictions will be imposed on: Nigeria, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar (known as Burma), with exceptions for immigrants who have helped the United States.

    February 5, 2020 – The Senate votes to acquit Trump on two articles of impeachment. Sen. Mitt Romney is the sole Republican to vote to convict on the charge of abuse of power, joining with all Senate Democrats in a 52-48 not guilty vote. On the obstruction of Congress charge, the vote falls along straight party lines, 53-47 for acquittal.

    May 29, 2020 – Trump announces that the United States will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization.

    July 10, 2020 – Trump commutes the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger Stone, who was convicted of crimes that included lying to Congress in part, prosecutors said, to protect the President. The announcement came just days before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia.

    October 2, 2020 – Trump announces that he has tested positive for coronavirus. Later in the day, Trump is transferred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and returns to the White House on October 5.

    November 7, 2020 – Days after the presidential election on November 3, CNN projects Trump loses his bid for reelection to Biden.

    November 25, 2020 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has granted Michael Flynn a “full pardon,” wiping away the guilty plea of the intelligence official for lying to the FBI.

    December 23, 2020 – Announces 26 new pardons, including for Stone, Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles.

    January 6, 2021 – Following Trump’s rally and speech at the White House Ellipse, pro-Trump rioters storm the US Capitol as members of Congress meet to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election. A total of five people die, including a Capitol Police officer the next day.

    January 7-8, 2021 – Instagram and Facebook place a ban on Trump’s account from posting through the remainder of his presidency and perhaps “indefinitely.” Twitter permanently bans Trump from the platform, explaining that “after close review of recent Tweets…and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

    January 13, 2021 – The House votes to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” He is the only president to be impeached twice.

    January 20, 2021 – Trump issues a total of 143 pardons and commutations that include his onetime political strategist, Steve Bannon, a former top fundraiser and two well-known rappers but not himself or his family. He then receives a military-style send-off from Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration morning, before heading home to Florida.

    February 13, 2021 – The US Senate acquits Trump in his second impeachment trial, voting that Trump is not guilty of inciting the deadly January 6 riots at the US Capitol. The vote is 43 not guilty to 57 guilty, short of the 67 guilty votes needed to convict.

    May 5, 2021 – Facebook’s Oversight Board upholds Trump’s suspension from using its platform. The decision also applies to Facebook-owned Instagram.

    June 4, 2021 – Facebook announces Trump will be suspended from its platform until at least January 7th, 2023 – two years from when he was initially suspended.

    July 1, 2021 – New York prosecutors charge the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 felony counts and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 felony counts in connection with an alleged tax scheme stretching back to 2005. Trump himself is not charged. On December 6, 2022, both companies are found guilty on all charges.

    February 14, 2022 – Accounting firm Mazars announces it will no longer act as Trump’s accountant, citing a conflict of interest. In a letter to the Trump Organization chief legal officer, the firm informs the Trump Organization to no longer rely on financial statements ending June 2011 through June 2020.

    May 3, 2022 – The Trump Organization and the Presidential Inaugural Committee agree to pay a total of $750,000 to settle with the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office over allegations they misspent money raised for former President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

    June 9-July 21, 2022 – The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol holds eight hearings, where it hears from witnesses including top ex-Trump officials, election workers, those who took part in the attack and many others. Through live testimony, video depositions, and never-before-seen material, the committee attempts to paint the picture of the former president’s plan to stay in power and the role he played on January 6.

    August 8, 2022 – The FBI executes a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there.

    August 12, 2022 – A federal judge unseals the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The unsealed documents indicate the FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents from its search, including some materials marked as “top secret/SCI” – one of the highest levels of classification, and identify three federal crimes that the Justice Department is looking at as part of its investigation: violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.

    September 21, 2022 – The New York state attorney general files a lawsuit against Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals.

    October 3, 2022 – Trump files a lawsuit against CNN for defamation, seeking $475 million in punitive damages.

    November 15, 2022 – Announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

    November 19, 2022 – Trump’s Twitter account, which was banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, is reinstated after users respond to an online poll posted by Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk.

    December 19, 2022 – The Jan. 6 insurrection committee votes to refer Trump to the Department of Justice on at least four criminal charges. Four days later the panel releases its final report recommending Trump be barred from holding office again.

    February 9, 2023 – Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are restored following a two-year ban in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, a Meta spokesperson confirms to CNN. On March 17, 2023, YouTube restores Trump’s channel.

    March 30, 2023 – A grand jury in New York votes to indict Trump, the first time in American history that a current or former president has faced criminal charges.

    April 4, 2023 – Surrenders and is placed under arrest before pleading not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in Manhattan criminal court. Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election through a hush money scheme with payments made to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump. He has denied the affairs. Hours after his arraignment, Trump rails against the Manhattan district attorney and the indictment during a speech at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago.

    May 9, 2023 – A Manhattan federal jury finds Trump sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996 and awards her $5 million for battery and defamation.

    May 15, 2023 – A report by special counsel John Durham is released. In it he concludes that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The report does not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

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