Tag: us capitol insurrection

Trump offers a dark vision voters have already rejected as he launches his 2024 campaign | CNN Politics

CNN
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It’s American carnage, round three.

Ex-President Donald Trump on Tuesday dragged Americans back into his dystopian worldview of a failing nation scarred by crime-ridden cities turned into “cesspools of blood,” and swamped by immigrants. He added a scary new twist at a time of global tensions, claiming the country was on the verge of tumbling into nuclear war.

Launching his bid for a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, Trump conversely painted his own turbulent single term, which ended in his attempt to destroy democracy and a mismanaged pandemic, as a “golden age” of prosperity and American global dominance.

The new Trump – for the 2024 campaign – is the same as the old Trump.

He pounded out a message of American decline, highlighted raging inflation and slammed President Joe Biden as aged, weak, and disrespected by US enemies, while highlighting his own chummy ties with global dictators, like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who seek to weaken American power.

When the 76-year-old former property tycoon, reality star and commander in chief promised a new “quest to save our country,” he encapsulated the challenges that his new campaign poses for his own party and the rest of the United States.

To begin with, in the gold-leafed ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump steered clear of the election denialism that helped doom multiple Republican nominees in the midterm elections and that has inspired skepticism of his viability among GOP lawmakers in Washington.

But as usual, his self-discipline didn’t hold, as he descended further into his personal obsessions the longer he went on, portraying himself as a “victim,” raising new suspicion about the US election system and slamming ongoing criminal probes against him as politicized and deeply unfair. The speech lacked the riotous nature and energy of his campaign rallies. But Trump’s material was a familiar rhetorical cocktail of grievance certain to enthuse his base supporters.

However, it may have come across to many of the swing voters in the states that he lost in 2020 as authoritarian demagoguery. Many of those voters deserted Republicans yet again last week, as the party failed to win back the Senate and as it still waits to confirm it will win only a slim majority in the House. Many GOP lawmakers squarely blame the lack of a red wave on Trump – for foisting extreme, election-denying candidates on the party in key states. That’s why there is increasing interest in potential alternative candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who roared to reelection last week, and has recently proved, unlike Trump, that he can build a broad coalition with Trump-style policies but without the chaos epitomized by the 45th president.

And yet by launching his campaign so early – before the 2022 election is even finalized – the ex-president is seeking to freeze the GOP field. And there is so far no evidence that his devoted supporters will desert him.

What could be the opening acts of a new election clash between Trump and Biden unfolded over multiple time zones. As Trump was speaking, the current president – who confounded historic expectations of a midterm election drubbing – was at another beach resort, in Bali, Indonesia.

Biden spent the moments leading up to Trump’s speech huddled with other world leaders seeking a united response to a possibly alarming escalation in the war in Ukraine after an explosion on the territory of NATO ally Poland. There was some irony to the fact that Biden was leading the same Western alliance at a moment of peril that Trump frequently had undermined while in office. (Biden said after a day of rising global tensions that first indications were that the missile that fell onto a Polish farm, killing two people, did not originate in Russia.)

Epitomizing the gulf between a president’s duties and the frivolity of the campaign trail, Biden, when asked if he had a comment on Trump’s launch, replied: “No, not really.”

Trump referred briefly to the FBI search of his home at Mar-a-Lago for his hoard of highly classified documents and subpoenas sent to his family members. It was a reminder that his campaign raises the extraordinary scenario of a candidate for president running for a new term while facing multiple criminal investigations and the possibility of indictment by the Justice Department. Trump, who has not been charged with a crime, is being investigated over the classified documents, the run-up to the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and in Georgia over his attempt to steal Biden’s win in the crucial swing state in 2020.

Trump has already claimed that he is being persecuted because Biden wants to stop him from becoming president again – an accusation likely to be embraced by his millions of supporters. Thus, the clash between his campaign and various investigations into his conduct promises to inflict even more damage on political and legal institutions that he kept under continuous assault as president.

One thing noticeably missing from Trump’s speech was acknowledgment of his unprecedented attempt to interrupt 250 years of peaceful transfers of power between presidents. But the Capitol insurrection is an indelible stain that is sure to haunt his campaign. CNN has exclusively reported that top DOJ officials have considered whether a special counsel would be needed during the Trump campaign to avoid potential political conflicts of interest.

Trump is trying to pull off a historic feat accomplished by only one previous president – Grover Cleveland, who became the only commander in chief to serve nonconsecutive terms after he won a return to the White House in 1892.

A Trump victory in 2024 would represent a stunning rebound given that he is the only president to have been impeached twice – once for trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating Biden, and secondly for inciting the mob attack on the Capitol, one of the most flagrant assaults ever on US democracy.

A return to the Oval Office for Trump would stun the world. His record of disdaining US allies and coddling dictators such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un fractured decades of US foreign policy and made the United States – long a force for stability in the world – into one of its most erratic powers.

Trump left office in disgrace in 2021, after the assault on the Capitol, not even bothering to attend the inauguration of his successor and insisting ever since that the election was corrupt – despite no evidence and against the findings of multiple courts and his own Justice Department.

Ever since, the ex-president has made his lies about the 2020 election the centerpiece of a political movement that still has millions of followers – as was seen with the primary victories of some of his handpicked candidates in this year’s midterm elections.

But many Trump-backed candidates failed to win competitive general elections. And Trump’s 2024 campaign will test whether there are Republicans who, while they may be drawn in by Trump’s bulldozing style and populist, nationalist instincts, will tire of the drama and chaos that surround him. It will also pose a question of whether a new generation of Republicans, who have tapped into his political base and the “America first” principles of Trumpism – like DeSantis, for example – are ready to challenge the movement’s still wildly popular founder.

Trump was already rejected by a broad general election audience once – he lost by more than 7 million votes in 2020. The same pattern appeared to exert itself as the GOP fell short of expectations in the midterms, which ironically will give Trump-aligned lawmakers strong leverage in what’s likely to be a narrow House Republican majority.

And even if he secures the nomination again, it’s an open question whether he’ll be able to recreate his 2016 winning coalition after alienating moderate and suburban voters or whether a combination of motivated base voters and previously disaffected Republicans returning to the fold will be able to make up the difference.

Trump’s first term between 2017 and 2021 was one of the most tumultuous periods in American political history.

He shattered the traditions and restraints of his office, subjecting political institutions – designed by the Founders to guard against exactly his brand of autocratic egotism – to their ultimate test.

The 45th president’s reputation was also stained by his negligent denial and mismanagement of a once-in-100-years pandemic. He skipped over his failed leadership in the emergency during his speech on Tuesday night.

Trump’s flouting of science and public health guidelines came back to haunt him as he contracted Covid-19 in the fall of 2020. He survived a serious bout with the help of experimental drugs before theatrically ripping off his mask in a White House photo op when he returned from the hospital.

One important aspect of his pandemic strategy was a success, however. An early White House bet to invest big in vaccine development by private firms and scientists, under the title of Operation Warp Speed, put the US in better position than many other industrialized nations.

The coronavirus destroyed the roaring economy Trump had hoped to ride to reelection, leaving as his most important achievement the shaping of a conservative Supreme Court majority, which has already dramatically altered American society with its overturning of Roe v. Wade and could last a generation.

But history will most remember him for his two impeachments, both following abuses of power designed to manipulate the free and fair elections that are at the root of America’s democratic system in order to prolong his tenure in office. 

The House select committee investigating the insurrection has uncovered damning evidence in Trump’s inner circle about his behavior in the run-up to January 6 and during the insurrection. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, for instance, testified that chief of staff Mark Meadows said Trump thought Vice President Mike Pence deserved the calls for him to be hanged by insurrectionists. There was also evidence of Trump’s vicious pressure on local officials and election workers in states such as Georgia.

Yet there remain questions about whether the committee will be able to hold accountable a man who has always dodged responsibility in a wild and whirling life in business, reality television and politics.

Even if the committee advises the Justice Department that prosecuting Trump is merited, it’s unknown whether the evidence it has collected would be sufficient to secure a conviction. And Attorney General Merrick Garland would be faced with a massive dilemma given the extraordinary implications of bringing criminal charges against an active presidential candidate.

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November 15, 2022
Pence: ‘I think we’ll have better choices in the future’ than Trump | CNN Politics

CNN
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Former Vice President Mike Pence said in a newly released interview clip that he and his family are giving “prayerful consideration” to whether he should run for president in 2024 and that the US will have “better choices in the future” than former President Donald Trump.

Asked by ABC News’ David Muir if he believes he can defeat Trump, who is expected to announce a 2024 campaign for the White House on Tuesday, Pence replied: “Well, that would be for others to say, and it’d be for us to decide whether or not we’d want to test that.”

And asked whether he believes his former boss should serve again as president, Pence said: “I think that’s up to the American people. But I think we’ll have better choices in the future. People in this country actually get along pretty well once you get out of politics. And I think they want to see their national leaders start to reflect that same, that same compassion and generosity of spirit. And I think, so in the days ahead, I think there will be better choices.”

“And for me and my family, we will be reflecting about what our role is in that,” he added.

The former vice president has been coy about his plans for 2024, but he has long been viewed as a potential aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination. Any formally declared bid, though, would almost certainly face strong opposition from Trump, whose supporters he would need in a primary fight.

When pressed by Muir as to why Trump didn’t take action sooner to stop the violence at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Pence said he “can’t account for what the president was doing” that day, and told ABC that he never heard from Trump or the White House on January 6.

The former vice president, who was at the Capitol on January 6 as the violence unfolded, said he “felt no fear. I was filled with indignation about what I saw.”

Pence, echoing an excerpt of his book published last week in The Wall Street Journal, described how he disagreed with his Secret Service lead agent, who initially wanted the vice president to leave the Capitol building. As a compromise, Pence was taken to the loading dock, which he was told was more secure, but found the motorcade positioned to leave the Capitol.

“They were walking us for the motorcade with the doors on our Suburban open on either side. And I saw that they had positioned vehicles on the ramp. And I just turned to my Secret Service lead and said, ‘I’m not getting in that car’ … I just assumed that if we got in the car and close those 200-pound doors that not my team in the loading dock, but that somebody maybe back at Secret Service headquarters would simply give the driver an order to go,” Pence recalled.

“I just didn’t want those rioters to see the vice president’s motorcade speeding away from Capitol Hill. I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction,” he added.

Pence is set to participate in a CNN town hall on Wednesday, the day after the release of his forthcoming autobiography “So Help Me God.” The town hall, moderated by CNN Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper, will take place in New York City and is scheduled for 9 p.m. ET.

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November 15, 2022
Trump sues January 6 committee seeking to block subpoena for his testimony and documents | CNN Politics

CNN
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Former President Donald Trump has sued the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, as a way to challenge its subpoena for documents and his testimony, according to filings in a federal court in Florida.

Trump is challenging both the legitimacy of the committee – which multiple courts have upheld – and is claiming he should be immune from testimony about the time he was president.

Trump’s lawyers say they’ve communicated with the House over the past week and a half as the subpoena deadlines neared, offering to consider answering written questions while expressing “concerns and objections” about the bulk of the document requests.

“The Subpoena’s request for testimony and documents from President Trump is an unwarranted intrusion upon the institution of the Presidency because there are other sources of the requested information, including the thousand-plus witnesses the Committee has contacted and one million documents that the Committee has collected,” his attorneys argue in the suit. “The Committee also may obtain abundant government records relevant to its inquiry. Because of this obvious availability to obtain testimony and documents from other readily available sources, the Subpoena is invalid.”

A spokesperson for the January 6 committee declined to comment.

Trump said the House’s demands, if he met them, would violate privilege protections around the executive branch, including revealing conversations he had with Justice Department officials and members of Congress about the 2020 election and “pending governmental business.”

He also argued to the court that he shouldn’t have to reveal inner workings about his 2020 presidential campaign, “including his political beliefs, strategy, and fundraising. President Trump did not check his constitutional rights at the Oval Office door. Because the Committee’s Subpoena to President Trump infringes upon his First Amendment rights it is invalid.”

Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, said in a statement in part that “long-held precedent and practice maintain that separation of powers prohibits Congress from compelling a President to testify before it.”

The lawsuit veers the Trump subpoena fight toward a likely dead-end for the House select committee.

Trump’s back-and-forth with the House followed by the lawsuit will make it much harder for the committee to enforce the subpoena – and the dispute essentially will be unresolvable before the current Congress expires in January.

The lawsuit also raises some protections around the presidency that have never fully been tested by appeals courts, and Trump brought the lawsuit in a court that, unlike DC, hasn’t weighed in on his standoffs with House Democrats over the past several years.

Trump provided to the court his team’s recent letters with the committee, which show that the House panel tried to zero in last week on obtaining records of his electronic communication on personal phones, via text or on other apps from January 6, 2021. The House also said it sought to identify every telephone and other communication device Trump used from Election Day until he left the presidency, according to the letters.

In one letter on November 4, the original date of the document-turnover deadline, the House committee accused Trump’s team of trying to delay.

“Given the timing and nature of your letter – without any acknowledgment that Mr. Trump will ultimately comply with the subpoena – your approach on his behalf appears to be a delay tactic,” wrote Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee.

Since Trump’s team replied on November 9 that he wouldn’t testify and found no records to turn over related to personal communications, the House hasn’t respond substantively, the court papers said.

But Trump’s legal team responded to the House this week that Trump “voluntarily directed a reasonable search for documents in his possession” that could fit those two categories. The search found nothing, his lawyers said.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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November 11, 2022
Prosecutors use Oath Keepers leader’s own words against him in heated cross-examination | CNN Politics

CNN
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In a tense, head-to-head exchange with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, prosecutors used Rhodes’ own words from texts, speeches and interviews to suggest to the jury that the militia leader misled them when he testified he was unaware of other members’ activities on January 6, 2021, and was appalled by the violence that day.

Rhodes is the first of the five defendants charged with seditious conspiracy in federal court in Washington, DC, to testify.

In his two-day testimony, Rhodes told the jury that he wasn’t involved in the specifics of planning for January 6, and that he had no knowledge of plans for the so-called quick reaction force that the group set up in Virginia to quickly move weapons into Washington, as prosecutors have alleged.

Prosecutor Kathryn Rakoczy, however, showed the jury Signal messages in which Rhodes told other members that “We WILL have a QRF” on January 6 because “this situation calls for it” and was part of group messages where members shared photographs of routes the QRF could use to enter the city.

“The buck stopped with you in this operation,” Rakoczy said to Rhodes, reading the leader’s messages aloud.

“I’m responsible for everything everyone else did?” Rhodes responded.

“You’re in charge, right?” Rakoczy said.

“Not if they do something off mission,” he shot back.

“That’s convenient,” Rakoczy said, smiling.

The militia leader also told prosecutors that he “hoped to avoid” conflict and was only concerned about a civil war breaking out after Joe Biden became president – leading to a chiding question from Rakoczy about how “the civil war will be on [January] 21st and not on the sixth?”

“I don’t condone the violence that happened” on January 6, Rhodes testified. “Anyone who did assault a police officer that day should be prosecuted for it.”

Rakoczy pointed to statements Rhodes made in a secretly recorded conversation in the days after January 6 where he said he wished the Oath Keepers had brought rifles to the Capitol that day.

“If he’s not going to do the right thing, and he’s just going to let himself be removed illegally, then we should have brought rifles,” Rhodes said in the recording prosecutors again played for the jury.

“We could have fixed it right then and there,” Rhodes said of the Capitol attack, according to the recording. “I’d hang f**king Pelosi from the lamppost.”

After playing the recording, Rakoczy asked Rhodes, “That’s what you said four days after the assault at the Capitol, right?”

“Yeah, after a couple drinks and I was pissed off,” Rhodes testified.

Rhodes and the other four defendants have pleaded not guilty to the seditious conspiracy charges.

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November 7, 2022
‘I never thought it would be Paul’: Nancy Pelosi reveals how she first heard her husband had been attacked | CNN Politics

Editor’s Note: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s interview will air on “Anderson Cooper 360” at 8 p.m. ET.

CNN
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revealed how she got the news that her husband, Paul, had been attacked, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she was “very scared” when there was a knock on the door from Capitol Police.

Pelosi said in her first sit-down interview since the attack that she had been asleep in Washington, DC, after getting in the night before from San Francisco when her doorbell rang early in the morning. “I look up, I see it’s 5 [a.m. ET], they must be at the wrong apartment,” she told Cooper after he asked where she was when she got the news.

Pelosi went on to say that the doorbell rang again and then she heard “bang, bang, bang, bang, bang on the door.”

“So I run to the door, and I’m very scared,” Pelosi said, describing what unfolded. “I see the Capitol Police and they say, ‘We have to come in to talk to you.’”

Pelosi described how her thoughts went immediately to her children and her grandchildren.

“And I’m thinking my children, my grandchildren. I never thought it would be Paul because, you know, I knew he wouldn’t be out and about, shall we say. And so they came in. At that time, we didn’t even know where he was,” she said.

The violent attack on Paul Pelosi has raised fresh concerns over threats of political violence driven by partisan animosity and increasingly hostile political rhetoric – and highlighted the potential vulnerability of lawmakers and their families in the current political climate.

Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco by a male assailant at the end of last month, authorities have said. The assailant who attacked him was searching for the speaker of the House, according to court documents.

David DePape is charged with six counts relating to the attack, including attempted murder, burglary, assault, false imprisonment and threatening the family member of a public official. He has pleaded not guilty to all state charges.

Following the attack, Paul Pelosi had surgery “to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Nancy Pelosi, said in an earlier statement. He was released from the hospital last week.

Nancy Pelosi also indicated that the attack on her husband will factor into her decision about her own political future after the midterm elections.

Pelosi, one of the most powerful figures in national Democratic politics, has earned a reputation as a formidable leader to House Democrats who exerts significant influence on her caucus. But speculation is intensifying in Washington over what Pelosi’s next move will be, and whether she would decide to retire, if Republicans win back the majority.

During Monday’s interview, Cooper asked Pelosi if she would confirm that she has made a decision, one way or another, about what she would do, noting that there has “been a lot of discussion about whether you’d retire if Democrats lose the House.”

The speaker said the “decision will be affected about what happened the last week or two,” prompting Cooper to ask, “Will your decision be impacted by the attack in any way?”

“Yes,” Pelosi said.

“It will?” Cooper asked.

“Yes,” Pelosi said again.

This story has been updated with additional developments Monday.

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November 7, 2022
Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries | CNN Politics

CNN
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Democrats close their midterm election campaign Monday facing the nightmare scenario they always feared – with Republicans staging a gleeful referendum on Joe Biden’s struggling presidency and failure to tame inflation.

Hopes that Democrats could use the Supreme Court’s overturning of the right to an abortion and a flurry of legislative wins to stave off the classic midterm election rout of a party in power are now a memory. Biden faces a dark political environment because of the 40-year-high in the cost of living – and his hopes of a swift rebound next year are clouded by growing fears of a recession.

On the eve of the election, Democrats risk losing control of the House of Representatives and Republicans are increasingly hopeful of a Senate majority that would leave Biden under siege as he begins his reelection bid and with ex-President Donald Trump apparently set to announce his own campaign for a White House return within days.

It’s too early for postmortems. Forty million Americans have already voted. And the uncertainty baked into modern polling means no one can be sure a red wave is coming. Democrats could still cling onto the Senate even if the House falls.

But the way each side is talking on election eve, and the swathe of blue territory – from New York to Washington state – that Democrats are defending offer a clear picture of GOP momentum.

A nation split down the middle politically, which is united only by a sense of dissatisfaction with its trajectory, is getting into a habit of repeatedly using elections to punish the party with the most power.

That means Democrats are most exposed this time.

If the president’s party takes a drubbing, there will be much Democratic finger-pointing over Biden’s messaging strategy on inflation – a pernicious force that has punched holes in millions of family budgets.

Just as in last year’s losing off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia, which the president won by 10 points in 2020, Democrats are closing the campaign warning about democracy and Trump’s influence while Republicans believe they are addressing the issue voters care about most.

“Here’s where the Democrats are: they’re inflation deniers, they are crime deniers, they’re education deniers,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic consultant, said on the same show that her party had misjudged the mood of the electorate.

“I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think that we are – we did not listen to voters in this election. And I think we’re going to have a bad night,” Rosen told CNN’s Dana Bash.

“And this conversation is not going to have much impact on Tuesday, but I hope it has an impact going forward, because when voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them. Stop talking about democracy being at stake.”

Rosen is not the only key figure on the left uneasy with the midterm strategy. Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, urged the White House to do more to stress economic concerns in recent weeks even while acknowledging the crisis of democracy and the importance of abortion rights. In retrospect, it appears Democrats were slow to recognize that a favorable period over the summer, spurred by falling gasoline prices and a hot streak for the president in passing legislation, wouldn’t last long enough to compensate for a ruinous political environment caused by the economy.

In effect, Biden’s stress on the threat to US political institutions posed by Trump essentially asks voters to prioritize the historic foundation of America’s political system over their own more immediate economic fears.

It’s a message that resonates strongly in Washington, DC, where the scars of the US Capitol insurrection are keenly felt. And it is undeniably important because the survival of the world’s most important democracy is at stake. After all, Trump incited an insurrection that tried to thwart the unbroken tradition of peaceful transfers of power between presidents.

But outside the Beltway bubble of politicians and journalists, democracy feels like a far more distant, esoteric concept than the daily struggle to feed a family and to be able to afford to commute to work. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, the return to normality after the Covid-19 nightmare that Biden promised remains elusive to many as the economic after effects of the once-in-a century health emergency linger.

The impossibility of the political environment for Democrats was laid bare in a CNN/SSRS poll released last week. Some 51% of likely voters said the economy was the key issue in determining their vote. Only 15% named abortion – a finding that explains how the election battleground has tilted toward the GOP. Among voters for whom the economy is their top concern, 71% plan to vote Republican in their House district. And 75% of voters think the economy is already in a recession, meaning that Biden’s efforts to stress undeniably strong economic areas – including the strikingly low unemployment rate – are likely to fall on deaf ears.

It’s too simple to say that Biden has ignored the impact of inflation, or doesn’t understand the pain it’s bringing to the country.

The premise of his domestic presidency and his entire political career has been based on restoring the balance of the economy and restoring a measure of security to working and middle class Americans. His legislative successes could bring down the cost of health care for seniors and create a diversified green economy that shields Americans from future high energy prices amid global turmoil. But the benefits from such measures will take years to arrive. And millions of voters are hurting now and haven’t heard a viable plan from the president to quickly ease prices in the short-term.

There is no guarantee that plans by Republicans to extend Trump-era tax cuts and mandate new energy drilling would have much impact on the inflation crisis either. And divided government would likely mean a stalemate between two dueling economic visions. But the election has turned into a vehicle for voters to stress their frustration, with no imminent hope that things will get better soon.

Biden has resorted to highlighting bright spots of the economy – claiming to have reignited manufacturing, high job creation and a robust effort to compete with China. He’s now warning that Republicans would gut Social Security and Medicare on which many Americans rely in retirement.

And in practice, there is not much a president can do to quickly lower inflation on their own. The Federal Reserve is in the lead and the central bank’s strategy of rising interest rates could trigger a recession that could further haunt Biden’s presidency.

Inflation and high gas prices are also a global issue and have been worsened by factors beyond Biden’s control, including the war in Ukraine and supply chain issues brought on by the pandemic. At the same time, however, economists are debating the wisdom of Biden’s high-spending bills that sent billions of dollars into an overheating economy. And the White House’s repeated downplaying of the soaring cost of living as “transitory” badly misjudged the situation and was another thing that battered Biden’s credibility – on top of the confidence some voters lost in him during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

The Republican Party also got exactly what it wanted as Trump has delayed his expected campaign announcement until after the midterms, depriving Biden of the opportunity to shape this election as a direct clash with an insurrectionist predecessor whom he beat in 2020 and who remains broadly unpopular. Such a confrontation might have enabled the president to dampen the impact of his own low approval ratings and win over voters who still disdain the twice-impeached former president.

Ironically, Biden’s struggles in framing a believable economic message could bring about the very crisis of democracy that he is warning about.

Any incoming GOP majority would be dominated by pro-Trump radicals. Prospective committee chairs have already signaled they will do their best to deflect from Trump’s culpability on the January 6, 2021, insurrection and go after the Justice Department as it presses on with several criminal investigations into the ex-President’s conduct. And Tuesday’s election could usher in scores of election deniers in state offices who could end up controlling the 2024 presidential election in some key battlegrounds. GOP dominance of state legislatures could further curtail voting rights.

High inflation has also always been a toxic force that brews political extremism and tempts some voters to be drawn to demagogues and radicals whose political creed is based on stoking resentment and stigmatizing outsiders.

If Democrats do lose big on Tuesday night, Trump will be a beneficiary.

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November 7, 2022
Cheney endorses another Democratic congresswoman, saying Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger is ‘dedicated to serving this country’ | CNN Politics

Washington
CNN
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Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney endorsed Virginia Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger on Saturday, weighing in on another highly competitive House race in the final days of the midterm election campaign.

Spanberger, a former CIA officer who was among the class of national security Democrats first elected in 2018, is locked in a tough contest with Republican challenger Yesli Vega to represent Virginia’s 7th Congressional District.

“I’m honored to endorse Abigail Spanberger. I have worked closely with her in Congress, and I know that she is dedicated to working across the aisle to find solutions. We don’t agree on every policy, but I am absolutely certain that Abigail is dedicated to serving this country and her constituents and defending our Constitution,” Cheney said in a statement.

“Abigail’s opponent is promoting conspiracy theories, denying election outcomes she disagrees with, and defending the indefensible,” she continued.

The move is Cheney’s latest endorsement of a member of her opposing party. The Wyoming Republican campaigned for Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin on Tuesday and endorsed her last week saying, “While Elissa and I have our policy disagreements, at a time when our nation is facing threats at home and abroad, we need serious, responsible, substantive members like Elissa in Congress.”

Spanberger has campaigned on issues like infrastructure and lowering prescription drug costs, while her opponent, Vega, has said she will work to keep the Biden administration in check if elected.

Virginia’s 7th District House race is rated as “tilt Democratic” by Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales.

CNN has reached out to Spanberger’s campaign for comment on the endorsement.

Cheney is leaving Congress at the end of her current term after losing the Republican primary for her at-large Wyoming seat in August. Her continued criticism of former President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol was seen as a key factor in her defeat.

Cheney said last month that she would not remain a Republican if Trump is the GOP nominee for president in 2024.

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November 5, 2022
House January 6 committee gives Trump more time to turn over subpoenaed documents | CNN Politics

CNN
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The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, released a statement Friday outlining a new deadline for former President Donald Trump to turn over documents it subpoenaed.

“We have informed the former President’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for deposition testimony starting on November 14th,” the committee said in the statement.

The panel subpoenaed Trump last month seeking a wide array of documents by 10 a.m. Friday and for Trump to sit for an interview under oath beginning on November 14 and “continuing on subsequent days as necessary.”

The committee also said it “received correspondence from the former President and his counsel in connection with the Select Committee’s subpoena” but did not provide additional information.

CNN has reached out to Trump and his attorneys for comment.

Lawyers for Trump had accepted service of the subpoena from the committee as of October 26, according to sources familiar with the matter. Trump has criticized the committee but not said whether he would comply with the subpoena.

On the day the subpoena was announced, Trump’s attorney David Warrington said in a statement the committee was “flouting norms and appropriate and customary process” by publicly releasing the subpoena and that his legal team would “respond as appropriate to this unprecedented action.”

The Trump lawyers tapped to deal with the committee’s subpoena demands have been coordinating with other members of the former president’s legal team while determining how to proceed, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Despite operating as two separate teams, the lawyers who are focused on addressing the committee’s subpoena are consulting with attorneys representing Trump in the Justice Department’s criminal probe related to January 6, the source said, noting there are areas of potential overlap between the two separate legal matters.

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice chairwoman of the committee, previously said the committee was “in discussions” with Trump’s attorneys about testifying under oath in the probe. But it remains unclear whether those discussions will lead to him sitting for a deposition.

A letter from the committee that accompanied the subpoena summarized what the panel presented in a series of hearings to demonstrate why it believes Trump “personally orchestrated and oversaw” the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In the subpoena, the committee demanded Trump turn over any communications sent or received during from Election Day on November 3, 2020, to Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021, with more than a dozen of his close allies who have emerged as key players in the broader plan to overturn the 2020 election.

It also asked Trump to turn over all records of phone calls, text messages or communications with any members of Congress from December 18, 2020, to January 6, 2021; all of his communications on January 6 specifically, and any communications or efforts to contact other witnesses in the committee’s investigation.

The broad document request even asked for all documents and communications relating or referring “in any way” to members of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, or other extremist groups from September 1, 2020, to the present. The panel’s document request spans 19 different categories.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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November 4, 2022
Exclusive: DOJ mulling potential special counsel if Trump runs in 2024 | CNN Politics

Washington
CNN
—

As Donald Trump inches closer to launching another presidential run after the midterm election, Justice Department officials have discussed whether a Trump candidacy would create the need for a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations related to the former president, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

The Justice Department is also staffing up its investigations with experienced prosecutors so it’s ready for any decisions after the midterms, including the potential unprecedented move of indicting a former president.

In the weeks leading up to the election, the Justice Department has observed the traditional quiet period of not making any overt moves that may have political consequences. But behind the scenes, investigators have remained busy, using aggressive grand jury subpoenas and secret court battles to compel testimony from witnesses in both the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at his Palm Beach home.

Now federal investigators are planning for a burst of post-election activity in Trump-related investigations. That includes the prospect of indictments of Trump’s associates – moves that could be made more complicated if Trump declares a run for the presidency.

“They can crank up charges on almost anybody if they wanted to,” said one defense attorney working on January 6-related matters, who added defense lawyers have “have no idea” who ultimately will be charged.

“This is the scary thing,” the attorney said.

Trump and his associates also face legal exposure in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State and expects to wrap her probe by the end of the year.

Indicting an active candidate for the White House would surely spark a political firestorm. And while no decision has been made about whether a special counsel might be needed in the future, DOJ officials have debated whether doing so could insulate the Justice Department from accusations that Joe Biden’s administration is targeting his chief political rival, people familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Special counsels, of course, are hardly immune from political attacks. Both former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe came under withering criticism from their opponents.

The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

The Justice Department has brought in a brain trust for high-level advice on the Trump investigations, according to people familiar with the moves.

Top Justice officials have looked to an old guard of former Southern District of New York prosecutors, bringing into the investigations Kansas City-based federal prosecutor and national security expert David Raskin, as well as David Rody, a prosecutor-turned-defense lawyer who previously specialized in gang and conspiracy cases and has worked extensively with government cooperators.

Rody, whose involvement has not been previously reported, left a lucrative partnership at the prestigious corporate defense firm Sidley Austin in recent weeks to become a senior counsel at DOJ in the criminal division in Washington, according to his LinkedIn profile and sources familiar with the move.

The team at the DC US Attorney’s Office handling the day-to-day work of the January 6 investigations is also growing – even while the office’s sedition cases against right-wing extremists go to trial.

A handful of other prosecutors have joined the January 6 investigations team, including a high-ranking fraud and public corruption prosecutor who has moved out of a supervisor position and onto the team, and a prosecutor with years of experience in criminal appellate work now involved in some of the grand jury activity.

Taken together, the reorganization of prosecutors indicates a serious and snowballing investigation into Trump and his closest circles.

The decision of whether to charge Trump or his associates will ultimately fall to Attorney General Merrick Garland, whom President Joe Biden picked for the job because his tenure as a judge provided some distance from partisan politics, after Senate Republicans blocked his Supreme Court nomination in 2016.

Several former prosecutors believe the facts exist for a potentially chargeable case. But Garland will have to navigate the politically perilous and historic decision of how to approach the potential indictment of a former President.

In March, Garland avoided answering a CNN question about the prospect of a special counsel for Trump-related investigations, but said that the Justice Department does “not shy away from cases that are controversial or sensitive or political.”

“What we will avoid and what we must avoid is any partisan element of our decision making about cases,” Garland said. “That is what I’m intent on ensuring that the Department decisions are made on the merits, and that they’re made on the facts and the law, and they’re not based on any kind of partisan considerations.”

Garland’s tough decisions go beyond Trump. The long-running investigation of Hunter Biden, son of the president, is nearing conclusion, people briefed on the matter say. Also waiting in the wings: a final decision on the investigation of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, after prosecutors recommended against charges.

It likely won’t take long after the midterms for focus to shift to the 2024 presidential race. That could incentivize top DOJ officials to make crucial charging decisions as quickly as possible, including whether to bring charges against Trump himself or other top political activists, other sources familiar with the Justice Department’s inner workings say.

“They’re not going to charge before they’re ready to charge,” one former Justice Department official with some insight into the thinking around the investigations said. “But there will be added pressure to get through the review” of cases earlier than the typical five-year window DOJ has to bring charges.

Matters could also be complicated by the situation in Georgia, where Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election there. Willis has said she’s aiming for a special grand jury to wrap up its investigative work by the end of the year.

Willis has observed her own version of a quiet period around the midterm election and is seeking to bring witnesses before the grand jury in the coming weeks. Sources previously told CNN indictments could come as soon as December.

Key Trump allies, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are among witnesses that have tried to fight off subpoenas in the state probe into efforts to interfere with the Georgia 2020 election.

How those disputes resolve in Georgia – including whether courts force testimony – could improve DOJ’s ability to gather information, just as the House Select Committee’s January 6 investigation added to DOJ’s investigative leads from inside the Trump White House.

The months leading up to the election have provided little respite from the political and legal activity around the investigations. The DC US Attorney’s Office–which is still shouldering the bulk of the January 6 investigations–has dealt with burnout in its ranks, as prosecutors are taking to trial or securing guilty pleas from more than 800 rioters who were on the grounds of the Capitol and still look to charge hundreds more.

Trump has also foiled the DOJ’s efforts to keep things quiet in the weeks leading up to the election, leading to a steady barrage of headlines related to the investigation.

Trump’s legal team successfully put in place a complicated court-directed process for sorting through thousands of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, to determine whether they’re privileged and off limits to investigators. But the Justice Department and intelligence community have had access for weeks to about 100 records marked as classified that Trump had kept in Florida.

The outcome of the intelligence review of those documents may determine if criminal charges will be filed, according to one source familiar with the Justice Department’s approach.

Yet in both investigations, under-seal court activity never subsided, with the Justice Department trying to force at least five witnesses around Trump to secretly provide more information in their grand jury investigations in Washington, DC, CNN has previously reported.

On Tuesday a federal judge ordered Trump adviser Kash Patel to testify before a grand jury investigating the handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

Judge Beryl Howell of the DC District Court granted Patel immunity from prosecution on any information he provides to the investigation— another significant step that moves the Justice Department closer to potentially charging the case.

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November 3, 2022
Biden’s plea for democracy is a strong election-closing argument for a different election | CNN Politics

CNN
—

Joe Biden’s eloquent defense of democracy was a message Americans needed to hear. But it was not the one voters most want now from their president – that relief is at hand from the soaring cost of living.

Biden’s speech Wednesday, delivered blocks from the US Capitol that was ransacked by ex-President Donald Trump’s mob on January 6, 2021, was a strong election-closing argument. But for an election other than the one taking place next week.

That’s not to say that the warning was misplaced. The fact that Biden felt the need to say, “We can’t take democracy for granted any longer,” underscores the grave threat posed to America’s core values by political violence and election denialism. If a president does not safeguard this historic legacy, who will? The chaos and violence Trump incited after the 2020 election show what unfolds when a president chooses to try to destroy democracy for personal gain.

Biden’s speech was deeply personal, reflecting his own view of the mission handed him by history. It was also highly political given that the midterm elections, which feature scores of pro-Trump candidates spouting his stolen election nonsense, are only five days away. And it came days after the latest shocking example of political violence – the attack on the 82-year-old husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And since Biden launched his 2020 campaign as a quest to save America’s soul from what he sees as the aspiring autocracy of Trump, it was a statement of a mission unaccomplished – as well as a potential opening volley of a possible 2024 showdown for the White House between the 45th and 46th presidents.

“You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies, as it always does, with the people,” Biden told voters.

Elections should be about more than one thing. Voters can walk and chew gum at the same time. But the harsh truth is this: In Washington, where just a glimpse of the towering Capitol dome reminds politicians and their media chroniclers of the January 6 horror, the threat to democracy feels visceral.

But in the heartlands of Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Arizona and cities everywhere, the gut check issue is less the somewhat abstract and age-old concept of self-government. It’s the more basic one of feeding a family. This is an election more about the cost of a cart full of groceries or the price of a gallon of gasoline than America’s founding truths.

As Scottsdale, Arizona, retiree Patricia Strong told CNN’s Tami Luhby: “The price of everything was better during Trump,” adding, “We were looking forward to retirement because everything was good.”

Declining stock markets have hurt retirement accounts and Americans with credit card debt took another blow Wednesday when the Federal Reserve raised its short-term borrowing rate by another 0.75%. There are fears the Fed’s strategy could pitch the economy into recession and ruin one of the best aspects of the Biden economy – the low unemployment rate.

Biden’s argument is implicitly that while inflation will fall, and economic damage can be repaired, the current election – and its legions of anti-democratic Republican candidates – could cause political wreckage that is beyond mending.

But it’s a tough case to make in such a doom-laden political environment for Democrats. The millions of Republicans who believe Trump’s falsehoods about the last election don’t listen to Biden and his call for national unity anyway. His low approval ratings don’t help. And in a new CNN/SSRS survey published on Wednesday, for instance, 51% of Americans said inflation and the economy was most driving their vote in the midterms. Abortion – the issue Democrats hoped would save them next Tuesday after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer – was the only other concern in double figures, polling at 15% of likely voters. And voting rights and election integrity – the focus of the president’s speech on Wednesday night – polled at only 9%.

But Biden effectively asked voters to make a concern well down the list of their priorities the decisive factor when they cast their ballots.

“This year, I hope you’ll make the future of our democracy an important part of your decision to vote, and how you vote,” he said. “Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?” he added, at the end of a campaign in which several GOP nominees have not guaranteed they would accept voters’ will.

In places where Biden is unpopular, Democrats in tight races have made an explicit point about distancing themselves from the national party.

“You know, the national Democratic Party has never been really good at strategic political decisions. So you know, it is not a surprise here, and thank God that I have enough experience that I’ve built this campaign not needing them and we really don’t want them at this point. We’re gonna do this thing with all the grassroots people we have here,” Rep. Tim Ryan, who is in a tight race for US Senate in Ohio against J.D. Vance, told “CNN This Morning” on Thursday.

It’s not that Biden hasn’t been also talking about high prices. His pitch is that the billions of dollars of spending in his domestic agenda will lower the cost of health care, lift up working families and create millions of jobs. That may be the case, but things that could happen in the future can’t ease the pain being felt now.

While Biden may be talking at cross purposes with the electorate on these issues, they are linked, in a fateful way, that he did not mention in his speech at Union Station on Wednesday evening. The president’s failure – whether it is all his fault or not – to quell inflation and the worries of a nation already demoralized by a once-in-a-century pandemic created the electoral conditions that look likely to restore Trumpism to power, in the form of a volatile, extreme GOP majority in the House of Representatives at least, with the Senate still on a knife’s edge.

Throughout history, inflation has often been a pernicious political force that breeds desperation in an electorate and seeds extremism as a potential response. That’s why politicians fear it so acutely and why it is so curious that the Biden White House initially didn’t take the surge of prices that seriously, repeatedly insisting that this was a “transitory” problem caused by Covid-19.

The president also renewed his call for national unity that he delivered in his inaugural address in front of a still violence-scarred Capitol in 2021. He explained that American democracy was primarily under attack because “the defeated former president of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election.”

“He has abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution. And he’s made the Big Lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party – a minority of that party,” Biden said, being careful not to insult every GOP voter as he did when referring to “semi-fascism” earlier this year.

The president also argued that Trump’s threat was far broader now than it was in the 2020 election. “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America: for governor, Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit – who will not commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re running in,” the president warned.

Biden also hinted at a lack of understanding of Trump’s MAGA supporters, who have embraced his anti-democratic, populist, nationalist appeal to mainly White voters, which grew out of a backlash to the first Black presidency of Barack Obama. The 44th president has been making his own searing defenses of democracy and repudiation of Trump on the midterm election campaign trail in recent days.

“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said. The president is right – the essence of democracy depends on the loser in an election accepting the verdict of the people. This is why Trump’s behavior was so noxious in 2020 since his refusal to admit defeat did not just ruin one election. It tore at the fundamental principle of the political system that made America great two-and-a-half centuries before Trump’s political career and caused damage that will long outlast the shockwaves of one administration.

But the essence of the Trump message exists in direct contradiction to Biden’s logic. Such voters can only love their country when their party wins because they see the Democrats that they lose to as the antipathy of their vision of America itself. These dueling understandings of what America actually means are at the core of the current, great political struggle that will not just play out next Tuesday, but in the 2024 election and beyond.

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November 3, 2022
Paul Pelosi attack unleashes partisan finger-pointing and sows fresh fears of political violence | CNN Politics

CNN
—

America’s toxic politics quickly turned the brutal attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband into the latest vicious partisan fight – even before the full facts are known.

Police have yet to ascribe a motive to the attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, after a man broke into the couple’s home in San Francisco. They have said the alleged assailant was intentional about going to the house, and he shouted out, “Where is Nancy?” CNN has reported.

Eight days before critical midterm elections, the intense political reaction had already outraced the investigation even before the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of California on Monday filed charges of attempted kidnapping of a US official and assault against the suspect in the case, David DePape, 42.

Republicans, while condemning the violence, are denying they have any culpability in fostering a poisoned political environment. Some even used it to pivot to new attempts to sow doubt on the integrity of US elections.

In another sign of an ugly time, Pelosi’s misfortune is already the subject of outrageous conspiracies – amplified for a time by the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, in a possible sign of how the social network could develop under his leadership. Ex-President Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., also pushed false claims about the attack that were in deeply poor taste.

Reports confirmed by CNN that the suspect posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about Covid-19 vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection renewed the debate about how much responsibility political leaders have to temper inflammatory rhetoric in order to avoid triggering violence.

The suspect in the case has not been arraigned, but Democrats, including President Joe Biden, are warning that the attack on the Pelosi is just the latest inevitable consequence of a GOP overtaken by its extreme fringe.

“What makes us think that one party can talk about ‘stolen elections,’ ‘Covid being a hoax,’ ‘this is all a bunch of lies,’ and it not affect people who may not be so well balanced?” Biden said on Friday.

“What makes us think that it’s not going to corrode the political climate?”

This was a question even before the Paul Pelosi attack given that many Republican candidates have tried to energize their base by putting Trump’s false claims about a stolen election in 2020 at the center of their midterm election campaigns.

Trump, who’s still the de facto leader of the GOP, has yet to fully condemn the attack on Paul Pelosi. In an interview on Spanish-language Americano Media on Monday, the ex-President called the attack “a terrible thing” and then quickly connected it to Republican criticisms of rising crime in US cities.

But dozens of Republicans – from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Vice President Mike Pence and GOP House conference chair Elise Stefanik – have offered stronger condemnations.

At the same time, top Republicans on Sunday dodged on whether their side especially had fostered a dangerous political climate after embracing election falsehoods and blamed both sides equally for political turmoil.

The gulf between the two parties in the aftermath of the attack underscored the nation’s internal political estrangement ahead of next week’s election. It suggested Republicans are unwilling to get crosswise with their voters by being more critical of the extremism pulsating through the GOP base. And political shock waves of the incident also showed how Democrats are keen to link rising threats against lawmakers and their families with Trump’s political movement as raging inflation threatens to deal them a heavy defeat at the ballot box.

Yet the aftermath of the assault represents more than just another fault line between Republicans and Democrats and points to something more than rote arguments of equivalence between rival politicians.

It took place in a time scarred by the January 6 insurrection, which established that in a festering political atmosphere cultivated and incited by Trump, individuals can be inspired to carry out acts of violence. The overwhelming majority of the ex-President’s supporters have not acted on his false claims of a stolen election. But while leading Republicans are right to argue the political attacks have targeted prominent figures on both sides, only one party features members who are excusing, downplaying, or denying the violence of January 6 and amplifying false claims of a stolen election that have been proven to incite violence.

It was a sign of a worsening political environment that Musk gave credence to a fringe conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack. He tweeted and then deleted a link to an article on a website that purports to be a news outlet, CNN’s Oliver Darcy and Donie O’Sullivan reported. The conspiracy theory was later amplified on Twitter by Trump Jr.

And in another troubling development this weekend that wasn’t linked to the Pelosi case but underscored worrying extremism coming to the surface of American politics, a series of antisemitic messages appeared in public spaces – including a football stadium, a highway overpass and a downtown building in Jacksonville, Florida.

Top Republicans on Sunday condemned the Pelosi attack as a despicable crime, but they tended to see it in isolation from current political tensions, even though the GOP has long demonized the speaker in hard-hitting ad campaigns. Instead, Republicans suggested it’s symptomatic of the rising violent crime they pin on Democrats.

“It’s disgusting. This violence is horrible,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who runs the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that his heart went out to Paul Pelosi and wished him a full recovery. But Scott quickly pivoted to highlight a Republican canvasser whom his fellow Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has said was attacked in Miami for political reasons. (After the incident, Rubio accused the media of not caring about violence when it targets Republicans.)

Scott also tried to move on in the interview to tacitly raise fresh suspicions about the US electoral system in coded language. Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether Republicans should do more to condemn dangerous rhetoric and conspiracy theories, Scott replied: “We have to do everything we can to … make sure people feel comfortable about these elections. We have got to do everything we can to get people comfortable that this election in nine days is going to be free and fair, that people’s votes are all going to be counted fairly.”

The reason why millions of Americans have lost confidence in elections – despite repeated court rulings rejecting Trump’s fraud claims and his own Justice Department’s statement that 2020 lacked major irregularities – is that the ex-President and many GOP allies are still falsely saying the election was stolen.

Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, rejected the idea that the attack on Paul Pelosi was an inevitable consequence of rising Republican rhetorical attacks on Democratic politicians.

“We don’t like this at all across the board. We don’t want to see attacks on any politician from any political background,” McDaniel said on “Fox News Sunday.”

She also claimed that Biden had not condemned a suspect arrested near Brett Kavanaugh’s home who has been charged with attempting to murder the conservative Supreme Court justice. (After the arrest, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Biden believed any threats, violence or attempt to intimidate judges had no place in US society.)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has yet to deliver a full-throated public condemnation of the assault on Paul Pelosi on camera or on his official social media accounts or to release a detailed statement. The California Republican did tell Fox on Sunday he had texted with the speaker to express concern and his hopes for her husband’s full recovery.

“Let me be perfectly clear, violence or threat of violence has no place in our society. What happened to Paul Pelosi is wrong,” he told Fox.

The lack of a more public reaction by McCarthy is notable since he could be speaker himself, if Republicans win the House next week, and would have the responsibility of fulfilling the institutional duties of a role that is sometimes supposed to supersede partisan politics. This will lead to questions of whether he is catering to his fervently pro-Trump conference.

His comments also appear less direct than Speaker Pelosi’s reaction to the shooting of GOP Whip Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice in 2017, which she described as a “despicable and cowardly attack” on Congress itself and said at such times there were “no Democrats or Republicans.” After Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was informed that the deceased suspect in the shooting volunteered on his Democratic presidential campaign, he took to the Senate floor to condemn political violence “in the strongest possible terms.”

The Pelosi attack is also highlighting concerns about the general tone of some Republican advertising, which sometimes features candidates wielding guns.

Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the GOP’s House campaign arm, denied there was anything tonally off about a video he tweeted last week that showed him firing a rifle with the hashtag #FirePelosi.

Emmer said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the tweet was about “Exercising our Second Amendment rights, having fun.”

Another Republican who could have a big role in a future majority is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The pro-Trump Republican said such attacks “shouldn’t happen to Paul Pelosi. It shouldn’t happen to innocent Americans. It shouldn’t happen to me,” claiming she received death threats every day.

In 2021, a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments on Greene’s Facebook page showed she repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019, including Pelosi, before being elected to Congress.

Leading Democrats were quick to make a link between such extremist rhetoric and the rise of violence and intimidation that has seen threats rise against political candidates and even some groups show up to monitor drop boxes in states like Arizona in moves Democrats have criticized as attempts at voter intimidation.

Some of them reacted to reports that the alleged assailant in the Paul Pelosi incident had asked where his wife was, and immediately drew conclusions not yet supported by details released by police. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, for instance, tweeted that a “far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.”

Biden was more temperate but also made the link to far-right wing rhetoric at a fundraising event in Pennsylvania on Friday, referring to the alleged assailants’ demands of “where is Nancy?”

“Every person of good conscience needs to clearly and unambiguously stand up against the violence in our politics regardless what your politics are,” Biden said.

Former President Barack Obama made a wider argument about how the coarsening of political dialogue risked new eruptions of violence – and squarely put the blame on Republicans.

“This habit of saying the worst about other people, demonizing people, that creates a dangerous climate,” the former President said at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Saturday.

“If elected officials don’t do more explicitly to reject this kind of over-the-top crazy rhetoric, if they keep on ignoring it or tacitly supporting it or in some cases encouraging it, if they’re telling supporters, ‘you’ve got to stand outside polling places armed with guns and dressed in tactical gear,’ that’s the kind of thing that ends up getting people hurt.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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October 31, 2022
What we know about the attack on Paul Pelosi | CNN Politics

Washington
CNN
—

The man who is alleged to have attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, could have federal charges filed against him by the US attorney in San Francisco as soon as Monday, two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

The federal charges against David DePape, 42, are expected to include threatening or injuring the family member of a federal official and a charge pertaining to attempted kidnapping, according to a law enforcement official.

Paul Pelosi was interviewed this weekend at the hospital by investigators and was able to provide details of the attack, two law enforcement sources and a source familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Among those conducting the interview were FBI and local law enforcement investigators.

DePape’s alleged motive is not yet known, though police believe DePape was intentional about going into the house, and CNN has reported that he posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about Covid vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The assault has renewed discussions about violent rhetoric directed toward lawmakers, with Democrats calling on Republicans to forcefully condemn extremist language in their camp, as well as concerns about lawmaker safety.

This is what we presently know about the attack.

CNN reported on Sunday that DePape had with him a bag that contained multiple zip ties, among other things, according to two sources who have been briefed on the incident.

In addition to the zip ties, the suspect also had duct tape on him, according to a law enforcement source. The hammer that was used to allegedly assault Pelosi was brought by DePape, according to a law enforcement source and a senior congressional aide briefed on the assault.

Neither source knew of any other weapons found when DePape was detained. CNN has previously reported that DePape allegedly tried to tie up Pelosi.

Police have said that DePape entered the home through a backdoor and it wasn’t clear if he circumvented any security measures.

CNN previously reported that DePape confronted Pelosi and asked where his wife was, shouting, “Where is Nancy?” The speaker was not home at the time of the attack.

Paul Pelosi was able to call 911 at the start of the attack, a law enforcement source and another source familiar with the matter previously said.

San Francisco police entered the home around 2:27 a.m. local time Friday (5:27 a.m. ET) to find Pelosi struggling over a hammer with DePape, according to the city’s police chief. Officers saw DePape “violently assault” Pelosi with the hammer before they tackled him to the ground and arrested him.

The attack, coming in the home stretch of a midterm campaign season in which Nancy Pelosi often has served as the focus of Republican criticism, has renewed concerns about violence directed toward lawmakers, especially in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot.

“What makes us think that one party can talk about ‘stolen elections,’ ‘Covid being a hoax,’ ‘this is all a bunch of lies,’ and it not affect people who may not be so well balanced?” President Joe Biden said on Friday.

“What makes us think that it’s not going to corrode the political climate?”

GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who is set to become House Oversight Committee chairman if the GOP gains control of the House next year, condemned the attack in comments to CNN on Saturday, and said both Republicans and Democrats need to tone down the political rhetoric while admitting that he, too, could improve in that regard.

“It’s very difficult environment out there. You have a lot of people that get so fired up, because of various political causes. It puts many politicians in a dangerous spot,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown on “CNN Newsroom.”

Several prominent Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have condemned the attack, though some others – most notably former President Donald Trump – have remained silent.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who chairs the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday that the attack was “disgusting,” but dodged questions about election conspiracy theories that were shared by the alleged attacker on social media.

Asked by Bash if his party should do more to reject false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection that were shared on social media by DePape, Scott did not directly respond.

And Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the House GOP campaign arm, condemned violence broadly in an interview with CBS on Sunday, but refused to commit to pulling advertisements targeting Nancy Pelosi.

Emmer also wouldn’t commit to taking down a recent tweet, which included a video of him firing a gun that read, “Enjoyed exercising my Second Amendment rights … Let’s #FirePelosi,” telling CBS that he disagreed that the tweet was dangerous.

A CNN investigation into DePape found that he posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about Covid vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Most of the public posts on DePape’s Facebook page were from 2021. In earlier years, DePape also posted long screeds about religion, including claims that “Jesus is the anti christ.” None of the public posts appeared to mention Pelosi.

His stepfather, Gene DePape, said David DePape grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, and left Canada about 20 years ago to pursue a relationship that brought him to California.

People who knew DePape in California described him as an odd character, with one acquaintance, Linda Schneider, a California resident, telling CNN that she had received “really disturbing” emails from DePape in which he sounded like a “megalomaniac and so out of touch with reality.”

She said she stopped communicating with him “because it seemed so dangerous,” adding that she recalled him “using Biblical justification to do harm.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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October 31, 2022
Rick Scott calls attack on Paul Pelosi ‘disgusting’ but dodges questions about election conspiracies shared by alleged assailant | CNN Politics

CNN
—

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who chairs the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, on Sunday called the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, “disgusting” but dodged questions about election conspiracy theories that were shared by the alleged attacker on social media.

“It’s disgusting, this violence is horrible,” Scott said on “State of the Union” in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. “We had a door-knocker in Florida that was attacked. I mean, this stuff has to stop. … And my heart goes out to Paul Pelosi, and I hope he has a full recovery.”

Asked by Bash if Republicans should do more to reject false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection that were shared on social media by Paul Pelosi’s alleged assailant, Scott did not directly respond.

“I think what we have to do is, one, we have to condemn the violence, and then we have to do everything we can to get people – make sure people feel comfortable about these elections,” the senator said.

“I think what’s important is everybody do everything we can to make these elections fair,” he reiterated when Bash asked him again about it.

An intruder, identified by police as David DePape, 42, confronted the 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer early Friday morning at his San Francisco home, shouting, “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” according to a law enforcement source. The assailant attempted to tie Pelosi up “until Nancy got home,” two sources familiar with the situation told CNN.

The alleged assailant had posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about Covid vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6 attack, and an acquaintance told CNN that he seemed “out of touch with reality.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the House GOP campaign arm, condemned violence broadly in an interview with CBS on Sunday.

“There’s no place for violence period in our society. Physical violence or violence against someone’s property,” Emmer, who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee, said when asked about political violence. “The incident in San Francisco, tragic as it is, I think we need some more information about it. But we should all be feeling for Paul Pelosi and his family. Hopefully, there’ll be a 100% recovery.”

But Emmer refused to commit to pulling advertisements targeting Nancy Pelosi. Nor would he commit to taking down a recent tweet, which included a video of him firing a gun and read, “Enjoyed exercising my Second Amendment rights … Let’s #FirePelosi,” telling CBS that he disagreed that the tweet was dangerous.

“I never saw anyone after Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter trying to equate Democrat rhetoric with those actions. Please don’t do that,” Emmer said.

On Sunday, Bash asked Scott if his successor as Florida governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, should attend an upcoming rally in South Florida headlined by former President Donald Trump. The rally will feature Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who, like DeSantis, is also up for reelection next month, but not DeSantis, amid reports that the relationship between Trump and the governor has grown distant ahead of a possible presidential showdown in 2024.

“That’s a choice everybody makes. I mean, I know President Trump is trying to make sure we get a majority back in the Senate,” Scott said.

Scott, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, also predicted the GOP will control “52-plus” Senate seats after the midterm elections.

“Herschel Walker will win Georgia. We’re going to keep all 21 of ours. (Mehmet) Oz is going to win against Fetterman in Pennsylvania. And Adam Laxalt will win in Nevada,” he said, while also expressing optimism about GOP chances in Arizona and New Hampshire and noting that Republicans “have got shots” in Washington state, Colorado and Connecticut.

“This is our year,” Scott said.

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October 30, 2022
Facebook became Meta one year ago. Its metaverse dream feels as far away as ever | CNN Business

CNN Business
—

Even by Facebook’s standards, 2021 was a rough year.

A series of damning reports based on leaks from a whistleblower raised uncomfortable questions about Facebook’s impact on society; the company continued reeling from concerns about the use of its platform to organize the January 6 Capitol riot; and privacy changes from Apple threatened its core advertising business. Meanwhile, young users were flocking to TikTok.

At a virtual reality event on October 28, 2021, CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to turn the page. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta and go all in on building a future version of the internet called the “metaverse,” proving to all in the process that the company he launched in 2004 was more than just a social media business.

One year and billions of dollars later, the so-called metaverse still feels years away, if it ever manifests at all. And the company formerly known as Facebook remains very much a social media business — one that is facing more financial pressure than when it announced the change.

Meta’s Quest 2 consumer virtual-reality headset, released two years ago, is popular in its category but remains a niche product overall. Its newest headset, the much pricier $1,500 Quest Pro, is intended for enterprise customers and likely won’t move the needle with everyday consumers. And Meta’s flagship social VR app Horizon Worlds can feel like a ghost town (albeit a ghost town with laser tag).

While some brands have since made measured bets on the metaverse, including by hiring “chief metaverse officers,” it’s not clear whether consumers actually want to work or play in it, or even know what the hard-to-define term means. The metaverse refers, generally, to a sort of virtual world that people can walk around in, as well as the idea of making the internet more ubiquitous and interconnected.

Meanwhile, Meta’s core business is contracting as it confronts growing competition from TikTok and an advertising industry in retreat amid looming recession fears. The company this week reported its second-ever quarterly drop in revenue and saw profit cut in half from the prior year. It’s selling more ads but making less money on them, and user growth on its social media platforms is slowing. After hitting a $1 trillion market cap for the first time last summer, it’s now worth about a quarter of that, or less than Home Depot.

“The business is not growing in 2022,” said Gil Luria, technology strategist at D.A. Davidson. “There is expectation that it will grow going forward, but that expectation may prove to be optimistic.”

A bet that looked bold a year ago now looks borderline unhinged. Meta lost $9.4 billion in the first nine months of 2022 on its metaverse efforts and expects losses from the unit to “grow significantly year-over-year” in 2023. This has prompted even some of Meta’s supporters to urge it to rethink its strategy shift, and possibly slow it down. (It also prompted a tearful Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money,” to apologize to viewers for trusting Meta’s management team and recommending that investors buy the stock.)

“People are confused by what the metaverse even means. If the company were investing $1-2B per year into this project, then that confusion might not even be a problem. You would simply do R&D quietly and investors would focus on the core business,” Brad Gerstner, CEO of Altimeter Capital, a shareholder in Meta, wrote in an open letter to Zuckerberg this week. He urged Meta to “cap its metaverse investments to no more than $5B per year with more discrete targets and measures of success.”

The current pace of spending, he added, “is super-sized and terrifying, even by Silicon Valley standards.”

Meta did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Though the name change was just announced a year ago, the shift from Facebook to Meta has been years in the making. Zuckerberg has said in the past that it’s a long-term bet for the company — not an overnight transformation. It began with Facebook’s 2014 purchase of Oculus VR, and in the years since, the company has rolled out a series of headsets that are increasingly capable, affordable and portable.

Meta’s latest headset, the Quest Pro, is its first effort at combining the immersiveness of VR with the real world. It can display text and fine details in VR, track your eyes and facial features to give you a sense of connection with other people in virtual spaces, and show you a view of the world around you in color while letting you interact with digital objects — all nods toward Meta’s goal of attracting more business users.

It’s a far cry from the Oculus Rift headset available in 2016: That cost $599, but users also had to connect it to a powerful PC and use it with a sensor camera on a stand that tracked the headset. At first, that headset didn’t even come with tracked hand controllers; it initially shipped to customers with an Xbox controller and a small handheld remote.

Although the headsets have improved dramatically, VR and AR are still nascent technologies searching for purpose and popularity. The VR headset market is still tiny compared to, say, an established gadget market like console video games. ABI Research expects 11.1 million VR headsets will ship out this year, about 70% of which it predicts will be Quest 2 headsets. That’s a drop from its estimate of 14.5 million headsets in 2021, of which Quest 2 headsets made up 85% of the total.

There’s potential for these products, some technology experts say, including in the workplace, but in the near term its adoption by everyday users remains uncertain at best.

“I’m not sure this is going to translate to end-user consumers any time soon,” said David Lindlbauer, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who leads the school’s Augmented Perception Lab. (Meta is sponsoring Lindlbauer’s research into developing advanced user interfaces for AR and VR.)

For Zuckerberg, and Meta, that creates a unique challenge.

Zuckerberg successfully pivoted Facebook’s operations once before from desktop to mobile devices shortly after taking the company public, a move that helped supercharge its advertising business and ensure its dominance for much of the next decade. But smartphones were already ubiquitous at that time; if anything Facebook was a bit late.

Now, the company is trying to spearhead a new technology and hoping consumers will follow its lead.

Meta has positioned the shift as a sort of existential imperative for the company. After Apple’s app tracking changes hurt Meta’s ability to target ads to its users, the company doesn’t want to rely on any outside hardware or app store in the future.

But there’s a big difference between looking at a computer or smartphone display and wearing a headset. While Lindlbauer can imagine using a headset for perhaps an hour a day, alternating between immersive views in VR and digital imagery that mixes with the physical world, “I think we haven’t hit the sweet spot yet of something I want to wear all day,” he said.

Meta is also facing an enormous challenge when it comes to showing off VR content that users like the looks of and want to use repeatedly. According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, internal documents show Horizon Worlds has fewer than 200,000 active monthly users, a rounding error for a company with 3.7 billion monthly active users across its various services. (A Meta spokesperson told the Journal that it’s “easy to be a cynic about the metaverse” but Meta thinks it is “the future of computing.”)

“They’re starting with this idea that they want to build one big space like Horizon Worlds in which everybody’s just going to show up and start building stuff,” said Avi Bar-Zeev, founder of AR and VR consultancy RealityPrime and a former employee at Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, where he worked on the HoloLens VR headset. “There’s no virtual world that was ever successful building a canvas that people would just come and start painting.”

Zuckerberg has personally received intense criticism for the way Meta envisions work and play interactions in virtual spaces after posting on Facebook an image of his blocky, cartoon-like avatar in Horizon Worlds — an image he later admitted was “pretty basic.”

“As far as the quick-twitch, give-me-more public is concerned, the progress seen so far is a letdown,” said Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University. “Meta is suffering tremendous ridicule in social media and in the overall public zeitgeist.”

The Quest Pro’s face-tracking capabilities can help make avatars’ facial expressions look more realistic: Initially, users can access this tracking in Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms, Meta said, as well as in several developers’ apps such as Painting VR and DJ app Tribe XR.

But even with facial tracking, what users see when they pop in to Horizon Worlds — blocky, human-like avatars that exist only from the torso up, floating around a virtual plaza — will for now continue to contrast sharply with the image Zuckerberg portrayed during Meta’s Connect event on October 11 of his own full-body avatar.

In the meantime, investors appear to be getting fed up with the investments in the metaverse at a time when the future of its core business is also deeply uncertain.

“I think kind of summing up how investors are feeling right now is that there are just too many experimental bets versus proven bets on the core,” Jeffries analyst Brent Thill said on Meta’s earnings call this week.

Zuckerberg, for his part, is defending the strategy shift. “I’d say that there’s a difference between something being experimental and not knowing how good it’s going to end up being,” he responded. Separately, he added: “I think people are going to look back decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here.”

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October 30, 2022
What we know and still don’t know about the attack on Paul Pelosi | CNN Politics

Washington
CNN
—

The man who is alleged to have attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in the couple’s San Francisco home on Friday is expected to be charged with multiple felonies Monday, according San Francisco law enforcement officials. He is expected to be arraigned on Tuesday.

“We are coordinating closely with federal and local law enforcement partners on this investigation. We will bring forward multiple felony charges on Monday and expect [suspect David DePape] to be arraigned on Tuesday. DePape will be held accountable for his heinous crimes,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins tweeted Friday evening.

Here’s a look at what we know – and still don’t know – about the attack:

An intruder, identified by police as David DePape, 42, confronted the 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer early Friday morning, shouting, “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” according to a law enforcement source. The assailant attempted to tie Pelosi up “until Nancy got home,” two sources familiar with the situation told CNN.

Pelosi called 911 when he encountered the threatening man and left the line open so a dispatcher could hear his conversation with DePape, speaking surreptitiously but making it clear that he needed help, according to a law enforcement source.

San Francisco police entered the home around 2:27 a.m. local time Friday (5:27 a.m. ET) to find Pelosi struggling over a hammer with a man, who has since been identified as DePape, according to the city’s police chief. Officers saw DePape “violently assault” Pelosi with the hammer before they tackled him to the ground and arrested him.

“It is really thanks to Mr. Pelosi having the ability to make that call, and truly the attention and the instincts of that dispatcher to realize that something was wrong in that situation and to make the police call a priority so they got there within two minutes to respond to this situation,” Jenkins told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Friday.

Police said the DePape entered through a back door and it wasn’t clear if he circumvented any security measures.

Pelosi was taken to a hospital after the attack and underwent a “successful surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement early Friday evening. He is expected to make a full recovery.

Authorities said Friday that the suspect is in the hospital for minor injuries. DePape was not known to US Capitol Police and was not in any federal databases tracking threats, according to three sources who were briefed on the investigation. But he had posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about Covid-19 vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

US Capitol Police said in a statement Friday that it is assisting the FBI and the San Francisco Police “with a joint investigation” into the break-in.

Law enforcement officials have not provided a motive for the attack, but San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said in a news conference Friday that the attack was “intentional” and “not a random act.”

“It’s wrong. Our elected officials are here to do the business of their cities, their counties, their states and this nation. Their families don’t sign up for this to be harmed and it is wrong,” Scott said.

Nancy Pelosi was not home at the time of the attack but traveled to California on Friday to be with her husband. The security detail for lawmakers, including the speaker, does not protect their spouses when the members of Congress are not with them. Pelosi was able to speak to her husband following the attack and before he was taken into surgery, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The attack sent shock waves through Washington and sparked an outpouring of condolences and condemnation from congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle. It has also underscored fears of political violence directed toward lawmakers in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, as well as other high-profile violent incidents that have targeted lawmakers in recent years.

President Joe Biden described the attack on Paul Pelosi as “despicable” and directly tied the assault to growing strains of right-wing extremism.

“This is despicable. There’s no place in America – there’s too much violence, political violence. Too much hatred. Too much vitriol,” Biden told a fundraising dinner Friday in Philadelphia.

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said in a tweet Friday that he was “horrified and disgusted” by the reports while House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s office said he had reached out to the speaker, a fellow Californian.

Vice President Kamala Harris said the assault was more evidence of “scary stuff” happening in politics around the country.

At a campaign rally Saturday in Baltimore, Harris recalled a time in the US when it was “appreciated that it is the diversity of opinions that will lead us to progress, to smart decisions.”

But now, she said, certain “so-called leaders” were using their positions to advance “preservation of their personal power” and to divide the country. They are “using the bully pulpit in a way that is propagating hate,” the vice president said.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, speaking at the same rally, asked people to pray for Paul Pelosi and reflect on what led to the brutal attack.

“I want you to think upon the environment that has been created in America by some who would bring us down, who would pit one another against one another, who would degrade our Constitution and our declaration and our proposition that ‘all men and women are created equal’” the Maryland Democrat said. “We say, ‘Those truths are self-evident,’ but they are not self-executing. It is up to us to make sure that America survives the hate and division that too many purvey in our country.”

Authorities in San Francisco are appealing to the public to provide tips regarding the attack.

“While an arrest has been made, this remains an open investigation,” the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement.

Anyone with information is asked to call the SFPD Tip Line at 1-415-575-4444.

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October 29, 2022
3 more men found guilty in Whitmer kidnapping plot | CNN Politics

CNN
—

A jury in Michigan has found three men guilty of providing material support for a terrorist act and two other state charges related to the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Paul Bellar, Joseph Morrison and Pete Musico were also convicted of gang membership and felony possession of a firearm. Prosecutors alleged the men “engaged in the planning and training for an operation to attack the state Capitol building and kidnap government officials, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.” Providing material support is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

In August, a federal jury found two men guilty of conspiring to kidnap Whitmer, a Democrat, in 2020.

Adam Fox and Barry Croft face a maximum sentence of life in prison for the kidnapping conspiracy conviction. They were also convicted of one count of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. Their first trial ended in a mistrial.

A sentencing date for the three men has been set for December 15.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

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October 26, 2022
DOJ asks judge to force Trump White House lawyers to testify in Jan. 6 probe | CNN Politics

CNN
—

The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to force the top two lawyers from Donald Trump’s White House counsel’s office to testify about their conversations with the former President, as it tries to break through the privilege firewall Trump has used to avoid scrutiny of his actions on January 6, 2021, according to three people familiar with the investigation.

The move to compel additional testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin just last week is part of a set of secret court proceedings. Trump has been fighting to keep former advisers from testifying before a criminal grand jury about certain conversations, citing executive and attorney-client privileges to keep information confidential or slow down criminal investigators.

But the Justice Department successfully secured answers from top vice presidential advisers Greg Jacob and Marc Short over the past three weeks in significant court victories that could make it more likely the criminal investigation reaches further into Trump’s inner circle.

Jacob’s testimony on October 6, which has not been previously reported, is the first identifiable time when the confidentiality Trump had tried to maintain around the West Wing after the 2020 election has been pierced in the criminal probe following a court battle. A week after Jacob spoke to the grand jury again, Short had his own grand jury appearance date, CNN reported.

All four men previously declined to answer some questions about advice and interactions with Trump when they testified in recent months in the secret criminal probe. Trump lost the court battles related to Jacob and Short before the chief judge of the trial-level US District Court in Washington, DC, last month.

Attorneys for the men whom the DOJ is seeking to compel have declined to comment for this story or haven’t responded to requests. Cipollone and Philbin didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department also declined to comment.

All four men have been willing to be as cooperative as the law demands, leaving Trump’s team to handle the fight over certain details in the investigation, the sources say.

The litigation around Cipollone and Philbin’s testimony may be important for investigators in the long run, given how close the pair was to the Trump leading up to and during the Capitol riot. Prosecutors are likely to aim for the grand jury to hear about their direct conversations with the then-President.

The disputes – conducted under seal in court because they involve grand jury activity – may also spawn several more court fights that will be crucial for prosecutors as they work to bring criminal charges related to Trump’s post-election efforts.

Witnesses the federal grand jury has subpoenaed, such as former White House officials Mark Meadows, Eric Herschmann, Dan Scavino, Stephen Miller and campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn, also could decline to describe their conversations with Trump or advice being given to him after the election, several sources familiar with the investigation say.

Trump and his allies have used claims of confidentiality – both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege – with mixed results in multiple legal quagmires that surround the former President. Those include the January 6 federal criminal investigation, the Mar-a-Lago documents federal criminal investigation, Georgia’s Fulton County investigation of election meddling, and the House select committee probe of January 6 as well. Some of the privilege arguments Trump has raised have never been settled in federal court, and some of the fights could lead to the Supreme Court.

Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich slammed the “weaponized” Justice Department in a statement and referred to the probes surrounding the former President as “witch hunts.”

According to the sources, the Justice Department won a trial-level judge’s order at the end of September that said Jacob and Short must testify in response to certain questions over which Trump’s team had tried to claim presidential and attorney-client confidentiality.

The sealed court case, stemming from the grand jury’s work, had been before the chief judge of the DC District Court, Beryl Howell. Howell refused to put on hold Jacob and Short’s testimony while Trump’s team appealed, a source said.

The Trump team, meanwhile, took several days to respond to their loss before Howell in court. The Justice Department set a quick-turnaround subpoena date for Jacob, leaving him to head into the grand jury under subpoena on October 6, according to several sources.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is still considering legal arguments from Trump’s defense lawyers and the Justice Department over his ability to make executive and attorney-client privilege claims.

How that is resolved – either by the appeals court or even the Supreme Court, if Trump pursues it that far – could have significant consequences for the January 6 criminal investigation, and for multiple witnesses who may be refusing to share some of what they know because of Trump’s privilege claims.

Among a large group of former top Trump officials, Jacob has been one of the most searing voices condemning the then-President’s actions after the election, especially regarding the pressure he and his election attorney, John Eastman, tried to place on then-Vice President Mike Pence to block the congressional certification of the presidential vote.

Jacob has been a harsh critic of Eastman, who is also of interest to prosecutors, dating back to when Eastman tried to convince Pence’s office the vice president alone could override the vote. He told Eastman at the time the right-wing attorney was a “serpent in the ear” of the President, and wrote while Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, “thanks to your bulls**t, we are now under siege.”

Jacob added to a parade of star witnesses at public House select committee hearings this summer, speaking candidly about his disgust with what he witnessed inside the White House complex from his high-ranking position administration.

“There is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person would choose the American President, and then unbroken historical practice for 230 years, that the vice president did not have such an authority,” Jacob testified in July.

But what Jacob and Short knew of Trump’s conversations, they wouldn’t disclose to the House nor to the grand jury until this month.

In a taped House select committee deposition, Cipollone answered many questions about what happened inside the West Wing on January 6 but declined to describe communications between him and Trump.

Cipollone’s and Philbin’s roles as White House lawyers raise complicated legal questions about whether Trump can claim confidentiality over the legal advice they gave him, as well as whether a former president can assert executive privilege to hold off criminal investigators.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly declined to assert executive privilege around January 6 information, essentially leaving the fight for Trump to wage opposite the Justice Department.

While the courts will look at each situation individually, history isn’t on Trump’s side. Federal prosecutors investigating former Presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon were able to overcome attorney-client privilege assertions for White House counsel as well as executive privilege assertions so the grand jury could hear closely guarded information.

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October 26, 2022
Start your week smart: China, Hurricane Roslyn, Boris Johnson, Red Bull, Jan. 6 | CNN

CNN
—

The 2022 midterm elections are now just weeks away, and with control of both chambers of Congress and dozens of governorships, secretaries of state and attorneys general posts on the line, it’s important to know both how and when to vote in your state. To help you plan your vote, CNN has gathered the deadlines for early in-person voting, absentee/mail-in voting and for voter registration in each of the 50 states leading up to Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 8.

Here’s what else you need to know to Start Your Week Smart.

• Chinese leader Xi Jinping has formally stepped into his norm-breaking third term ruling China with an iron grip on power as he revealed a new leadership team today stacked with loyal allies.

• Hurricane Roslyn slammed into Mexico’s Pacific coast as a major Category 3 storm today, bringing dangerous storm surge and flooding to parts of the country, forecasters said.

• Boris Johnson is trying to win enough support to make what would be a stunning comeback as Britain’s prime minister, as senior Conservative politicians declared their support for former finance minister Rishi Sunak. The two men have become the early favorites to replace Liz Truss, who announced her resignation last week.

• Dietrich Mateschitz, the owner and co-founder of the sports drink company Red Bull, has died, the company announced Saturday. He was 78. As well as turning his energy drink into a market leader, the Austrian billionaire also founded one of the most successful Formula One teams in recent history.

• The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol announced on Friday that the panel has officially sent a subpoena to former President Donald Trump as it paints him as the central figure in the multi-step plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Monday

Opening statements are scheduled to begin in the sexual assault trial of disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein in Los Angeles. Weinstein, 70, was convicted of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape charges in New York more than two years ago and sentenced to 23 years in prison. In Los Angeles, Weinstein faces multiple sexual assault charges that he pleaded not guilty to last year.

Diwali, the Hindu celebration known as the “Festival of Lights,” also begins on Monday. New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced last week that Diwali will be a public school holiday starting in 2023.

Tuesday

A Moscow regional court has set October 25 as an appeal date for WNBA star Brittney Griner. Griner was sentenced to nine years of jail time in early August for deliberately smuggling drugs into Russia. She was arrested with less than 1 gram of cannabis oil in her luggage at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport on February 17.

In what has become one of the most closely watched Senate contests in the country, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman and Republican candidate Mehmet Oz will face each other in a televised debate in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Fetterman, who had a near-fatal stroke more than five months ago, has faced a number of questions about transparency surrounding his health and recovery. Fetterman’s primary care physician released a medical report earlier this month stating that the candidate is “recovering well from his stroke” and “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.”

Wednesday

Hillary Clinton – former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee for President – turns 75.

Saturday

October 29 is National Cat Day. “Meh,” said cats …

Hear a story of Iranian resistance

In this week’s One Thing podcast, CNN Chief International Investigative Correspondent Nima Elbagir joins us from Northern Iraq, where some Iranian dissidents have fled a brutal crackdown in response to nationwide protests set off by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. We explore if these protests will bring lasting change and hear from one Iranian-Kurdish activist who is now taking up arms across the border. Listen here.

British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation in front of 10 Downing Street in London on Thursday, October 20.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

a drone attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Monday, October 17. A wave of drone attacks pummeled the capital city early Monday as commuters headed to work.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

ended a 15-game losing streak against Alabama. They won 52-49 with a last second 40-yard field goal.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

Mississippi to record lows.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

20th Communist Party Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sunday, October 16. Xi is poised to secure a norm-breaking third term in power.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

as it splashes down off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, on Friday, October 14, with European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines and Jessica Watkins. They are returning after 170 days aboard the International Space Station.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

James Webb Space Telescope. It shows a highly detailed view of the Pillars of Creation, a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars. The area, which lies within the Eagle Nebula about 6,500 light-years from Earth, had previously been captured by the Hubble Telescope in 1995, creating an image deemed “iconic” by space observers.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

found him not liable for battery on allegations he picked up actor Anthony Rapp and briefly laid on top of him in a bed after a party in 1986. Jurors deliberated for about an hour and concluded Rapp did not prove that Spacey “touched a sexual or intimate part” of him.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

warned it could take up to six months for the water to recede in the wake of the country’s “unprecedented” flooding.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

expelled from the United States on Monday, October 17.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

deadly drone attacks.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

See last week in 32 photos.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img”/>

Check out more moving, fascinating and thought-provoking images from the week that was, curated by CNN Photos.

TV and streaming

The season finale of “House of the Dragon,” the “Game of Thrones” prequel that takes place almost 200 years before the events of its predecessor, airs tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO. (HBO, like CNN, is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.)

“Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities” makes its debut on Netflix Tuesday. The new horror anthology promises “eight tales of terror” curated by the Oscar-winning director of “The Shape of Water.”

“The Good Nurse,” starring Oscar winners Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, tells the story of an infamous caregiver implicated in the deaths of hundreds of hospital patients. It begins streaming on Netflix Wednesday.

“All Quiet on the Western Front,” based on the classic World War I novel, arrives on Netflix Friday.

Baseball

Four teams remain in the battle to reach the 2022 World Series, which begins on Friday. Later today, the San Diego Padres face the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. On Saturday, the Phillies beat the Padres to take a 3-1 lead in the series. The Houston Astros, meanwhile, play the New York Yankees tonight in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series. Houston leads that series 3-0.

Take CNN’s weekly news quiz to see how much you remember from the week that was! So far, 66% of fellow quiz fans have gotten eight or more questions right. How will you fare?

Christina Aguilera – Beautiful (2022 Version)

‘Beautiful’

A lot has changed about the world in the last 20 years, but Christina Aguilera still thinks you’re beautiful – despite what social media sometimes tells us. Watch the updated version of her “Beautiful” music video released last week that takes aim at the messages often delivered through social media that have negative effects on our body image and mental health. (Click here to view)

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October 23, 2022
Democrats predict an ‘extremely busy’ lame duck. Here’s what’s on the agenda | CNN Politics

CNN
—

A packed legislative to-do list awaits Congress when it returns to session after the midterms – and Democrats, who currently control both chambers, will face a ticking clock to enact key priorities if Republicans win back the House or manage to flip the Senate in the upcoming elections.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has predicted an “extremely busy” lame duck session – the period of time after the midterms and before a new Congress begins in January.

“We still have much to do and many important bills to consider,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor at the end of September. “Members should be prepared for an extremely, underline extremely, busy agenda in the last two months of this Congress.”

The jam-packed agenda for the lame-duck session includes: Funding the government to avert a shutdown before the end of the calendar year, passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, the annual must-pass legislation that sets the policy agenda and authorizes funding for the Department of Defense, as well as a vote in the Senate to protect same-sex marriage and the potential consideration of other key pieces of legislation.

Democrats are still limited in what they can achieve, however, given their narrow majorities in both chambers. With a 50-50 partisan split in the Senate, Democrats lack the votes to overcome the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold – and do not have the votes to abolish the filibuster. As a result, major priorities for liberal voters – like the passage of legislation protecting access to abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – will still remain out of reach for the party for the foreseeable future.

Government funding is the most pressing priority that lawmakers will confront during the lame duck. The current deadline for the expiration of funding is December 16 after the House and Senate passed an extension to avert a shutdown at the end of September.

Since the funding bill is viewed as must-pass legislation it will likely become a magnet for other priorities that lawmakers may try to tack on to ride along with it. It’s possible that further aid for Ukraine could come up as Ukraine continues to counter Russia’s invasion of the country. While that funding has bipartisan support, some conservatives are balking at the pricey contributions to Ukraine and may scrutinize more closely additional requests from the administration, a dynamic that is dividing Republicans on this key issue.

Democrats also want more funding for pandemic response, but Republicans have pushed back on that request.

One issue that may come up during the government funding effort is money for the Department of Justice investigation into the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

A House Democratic aide told CNN that final fiscal year 2023 funding levels have yet to be determined. Justice Department needs and resources are part of this ongoing conversation, but under the leadership of Rep. Matt Cartwright, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice, science, and related agencies, the House bill included $34 million that would allow DOJ to fund these prosecutions without reducing their efforts in other areas.

House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro told CNN in a statement, “I look forward to working with my colleagues on the House and Senate appropriations committees and passing a final 2023 spending package by the December 16th deadline.”

Meanwhile, the Senate has begun work on the NDAA, and is expected to pass the massive piece of legislation during the lame duck. Consideration of the wide-ranging bill could spark debate and a push for amendments over a variety of topics.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has called for punishing OPEC for its production cut by passing legislation that would hold foreign oil producers accountable for colluding to fix prices – and the senator has said he believes the measure can pass as an amendment to the NDAA. The legislation would clear the way for the Justice Department to sue Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations for antitrust violations.

Senate Democrats will also continue confirming judges to the federal bench nominated by President Joe Biden, a key priority for the party.

A Senate vote to protect same-sex marriage is also on tap for the lame-duck session. In mid-September, the chamber punted on a vote until after the November midterm elections as negotiators asked for more time to lock down support – a move that could make it more likely the bill will ultimately pass the chamber.

The bipartisan group of senators working on the bill said in a statement at the time, “We’ve asked Leader Schumer for additional time and we appreciate he has agreed. We are confident that when our legislation comes to the Senate floor for a vote, we will have the bipartisan support to pass the bill.” The bill would need at least 10 Republican votes to overcome a filibuster.

Schumer has vowed to hold a vote on the bill, but the exact timing has not yet been locked in. Democrats have pushed for the vote after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, sparking fears that the court could take aim at same-sex marriage in the future.

The Senate could take up legislation during the lame duck in response to the January 6, 2021, attack by a mob of pro-Trump supporters attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Over the summer, a bipartisan group of senators reached a deal to make it harder to overturn a certified presidential election. The proposal would still need, however, to be approved by both chambers. Notably, the Senate proposal has the backing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.

“I strongly support the modest changes that our colleagues in the working group have fleshed out after literally months of detailed discussions,” McConnell said at the end of September. “I’ll proudly support the legislation, provided that nothing more than technical changes are made to its current form.”

If the bill passes the Senate, it would also need to clear the House, which in September, passed its own version of legislation to make it harder to overturn a certified presidential election in the future by proposing changes to the Electoral Count Act.

Passing a bill to to restrict lawmakers from trading stocks is a priority for a number of moderate House Democrats – who may continue to push for the issue to be taken up during the lame duck, though whether there will be a vote is still to be determined and other pressing must-pass items like government funding could crowd out the issue. The House did not vote on a proposal prior to the midterm elections.

“It’s a complicated issue, as you can imagine, as a new rule for members they have to follow, and their families as I understand, so I think it deserves careful study to make sure if we do something, we do it right,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told CNN last month.

Meanwhile, it’s not yet clear when exactly the nation will run up against the debt limit and it appears unlikely for now that Congress will act to resolve the issue during the lame-duck session, especially as other must-pass bills compete for floor time. But political battle lines are already being drawn and maneuvering is underway in Washington over the contentious and high-stakes issue.

A group of House Democrats recently sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Schumer calling for legislation to “permanently undo the threat posed by the debt limit” during the post-election lame-duck session. The letter, led by Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle, was signed by several prominent House Democrats, including Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries of New York.

Biden on Friday gave a window into how he’s preparing for a looming political showdown over the debt ceiling, stating unequivocally that he will not relent to Republican lawmakers threatening to send the nation into default if he doesn’t meet their demands, but adding that he doesn’t support efforts from within his own party to abolish the debt limit entirely.

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October 23, 2022
Jan. 6 rioter who brought guns onto US Capitol grounds sentenced to 5 years in jail | CNN Politics

CNN
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A January 6 rioter who carried two loaded handguns onto US Capitol grounds during the insurrection was sentenced to 60 months in jail on Friday after pleading guilty to assaulting an officer that day and unlawfully carrying a firearm.

Mark Mazza, 56, entered the Capitol grounds armed with two handguns, one of which – a revolver called the “Judge” loaded with shotgun shells and hollow point bullets – he lost on the lower west terrace just outside the building.

After losing the gun, Mazza joined the mob in a tunnel leading inside the Capitol, a scene where police were brutally attacked for hours by rioters armed with bats, poles, chemical spray, and the officer’s own weapons.

During the attack, Mazza – still armed with his second pistol, according to prosecutors – took a baton from one officer and used it against him.

“This is our f***ing house!” Mazza yelled after attacking the officer, according to his plea agreement. “We own this house! We want our house! Get out of the citizens of the United States’ way!”

Dressed in a forest green prison jumpsuit, Mazza told Judge James Boasberg on Friday that he “got caught up in the mob mentality that I never anticipated.”

“I’m not quite the monster” the government “painted me as,” Mazza added, saying that he had never intended to fight police that day and left the tunnel as soon as he realized what he was doing was wrong. Mazza also claimed that he assisted other officers outside of the tunnel.

“The tale you have to tell is a familiar one,” Boasberg told Mazza, adding that “it was the decisions people like you made (to) assault the Capitol in what was a true insurrection.”

Boasberg added he was “alarmed” Mazza had brought two firearms with him and that, while Mazza claimed he was only armed because he heard Washington, DC, was the “murder capital,” the mall and Capitol building are not dangerous areas.

Before being sentenced, Mazza again asked for mercy, telling the judge he was still “hoping I’m going to see my parents again.”

Mazza will also have to pay a fine of $2,000 in restitution for damage done to the Capitol.

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October 21, 2022