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  • Chuck Schumer Fast Facts | CNN

    Chuck Schumer Fast Facts | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Chuck Schumer, the US Senate majority leader and Democratic senator from New York.

    Birth date: November 23, 1950

    Birth place: Brooklyn, New York

    Birth name: Charles Ellis Schumer

    Father: Abe Schumer, exterminator

    Mother: Selma (Rosen) Schumer

    Marriage: Iris Weinshall (1980-present)

    Children: Jessica, Alison

    Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1971; Harvard Law School, J.D., 1974

    Religion: Jewish

    He was valedictorian at James Madison High School in Brooklyn and received a perfect 1600 score on the SAT test. He edited his high school newspaper, and at one point considered pursuing a career in chemistry. His parents encouraged him to go to medical school, but he opted for law school instead.

    He funded his Harvard education by selling class rings while in school.

    For more than three decades, Schumer shared an aging row house in Washington with Congressional colleagues, including Dick Durbin and George Miller. He lived in the row house during the week and returned to his family home in Brooklyn on weekends.

    Writer/actress Amy Schumer is his second cousin, once removed.

    1975-1980 – New York state assemblyman.

    1981-1999 – US representative from New York 9th District (formerly 10th District and 16th District).

    1987-1988 – Sponsors the Fair Credit and Charge Card Disclosure Act, which requires credit card companies to list detailed information about fees and interest rates when soliciting new customers. The credit card disclosures are nicknamed “Schumer Boxes.”

    1993-1994 – Sponsors the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which requires background checks and a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases. Sponsors the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, meant to prevent the government from interfering with an individual’s right to express his or her faith. Also, cosponsors the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a measure that provides funding to expand police departments, increases prison capacity and allows judges to impose longer sentences for violent crimes. The crime bill includes an assault weapons ban, prohibiting the sale of certain types of military-style semi-automatic rifles for 10 years.

    1998 – Wins election to US Senate.

    2004 – Wins reelection to the US Senate.

    2004 – Leads an unsuccessful push to renew the assault weapons ban.

    2005-2008 – Chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

    2007-2008 – Introduces the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act, requiring registered sex offenders to give law enforcement their email addresses and social media accounts so their online activity can be tracked.

    2007-2010 – Chairs and vice chairs the US Senate’s Joint Economic Committee.

    2009 – Cosponsors the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, broadening the definition of hate crimes to include acts of violence against individuals based on their actual or perceived gender, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity.

    2009-present – Serves on the US Senate Committee on Rules and Administration.

    2010 – Wins reelection to US Senate.

    2011-present – Chairman of the US Senate’s Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

    2013 – Works on immigration reform as a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight.” The group’s bill, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, passes the Senate. The House, however, declines to vote on the package, which creates a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

    August 3, 2015 – Holds a joint press conference with his cousin, actress and comedian Amy Schumer, to announce gun control legislation promoting stricter state background check laws. The press conference takes place 11 days after a deadly mass shooting at a screening of Schumer’s comedy, “Trainwreck,” in Louisiana. Schumer’s bill, the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2016, stalls in the Senate.

    August 6, 2015 – Expresses his opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran in a statement. He says that he is concerned about a 24-day delay for inspectors to access facilities and other limitations on inspections.

    November 8, 2016 – Wins reelection to the US Senate.

    November 16, 2016 – Senate Democrats choose Schumer to succeed Harry Reid as leader in the chamber.

    January 3, 2017 – On his first day as Senate minority leader, Schumer tells CNN that Senate Democrats plan to hold President-elect Donald Trump accountable but will also work with him if he supports legislation that is true to the Democratic Party’s principles.

    March 2, 2017 – Schumer calls on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign in the wake of a report that Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the US during the presidential campaign, contradicting his testimony during his Senate confirmation hearing. Sessions does not resign but recuses himself from involvement in the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

    September 6, 2017 – Schumer meets with Trump and other congressional leaders in the Oval Office. During the meeting, Trump agrees to endorse a plan to attach hurricane relief money to a three-month extension of the debt ceiling that was proposed by Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

    January 19, 2018 – Schumer meets with Trump at the White House to discuss a deal that could avert a looming government shutdown. Schumer offers to increase military spending and fully fund border security measures in exchange for a pledge to protect beneficiaries of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). Trump ultimately rejects the deal. The failed negotiations lead to a brief shutdown that White House officials label the “Schumer Shutdown.”

    June 27, 2018 – Schumer introduces a bill, the Marijuana Freedom and Opportunity Act, that would decriminalize and regulate marijuana at the federal level.

    November 11, 2018 – Schumer says that Democrats may combine a must-pass spending bill with a measure protecting the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation into Russian election meddling.

    November 10, 2020 – Schumer is reelected as a Senate party leader.

    January 20, 2021-present – Senate majority leader.

    July 14, 2021 – Schumer and a group of other Senate Democrats introduce draft legislation that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level by striking it from the federal controlled substances list.

    November 8, 2022 – Wins reelection to the US Senate.

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  • Mideast crisis will test whether Biden can make experience an asset | CNN Politics

    Mideast crisis will test whether Biden can make experience an asset | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The escalating confrontation between Israel and Hamas is offering President Joe Biden a crucial opportunity to begin flipping the script on one of his most glaring vulnerabilities in the 2024 presidential race.

    For months, polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe Biden’s advanced age has diminished his capacity to handle the responsibilities of the presidency. But many Democrats believe that Biden’s widely praised response to the Mideast crisis could provide him a pivot point to argue that his age is an asset because it has equipped him with the experience to navigate such a complex challenge.

    “As you project forward, we are going to be able to argue that Joe Biden’s age has been central to his success because in a time of Covid, insurrection, Russian invasion of Ukraine, now challenges in the Middle East, we have the most experienced man ever as president,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. “Perhaps having the most experienced person ever to go into the Oval Office was a blessing for the country. I think we are going to be able to make that argument forcefully.”

    Biden unquestionably faces a steep climb to ameliorate the concern that he’s too old for the job. Political strategists in both parties agree that those public perceptions are largely rooted in reactions to his physical appearance – particularly the stiffness of his walk and softness of his voice – and thus may be difficult to reverse with arguments about his performance. In a CNN poll released last month, about three-fourths of adults said Biden did not have “the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president” and nearly as many said he does not inspire confidence. Even about half of Democrats said Biden lacked enough stamina and sharpness and did not inspire confidence, with a preponderant majority of Democrats younger than 45 expressing those critical views.

    But the crisis in Israel shows the path Biden will probably need to follow if there’s any chance for him to transmute doubts about his age into confidence in his experience. Though critics on the left and right in American politics have raised objections, Biden’s response to the Hamas attack has drawn praise as both resolute and measured from a broad range of leaders across the ideological spectrum in both the US and Israel.

    “Biden is in his element here where relationships matter and his team is experienced (meaning operationally effective) and thoughtful (meaning can see forests as well as trees),” James Steinberg, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and deputy secretary of state under former President Barack Obama, wrote in an email.

    Similarly, David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel for then-President Donald Trump, declared late last week, on Fox News Channel no less, that “The Biden administration over the past 12-13 days has been great.”

    These responses underscore the fundamental political paradox about Biden’s age, and the experience that derives from it. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that his age is increasing anxiety among Democrats about his capacity to serve as an effective candidate for the presidency in 2024; on the other, his experience is increasing Democratic faith in his capacity to serve as an effective president now.

    While more Democrats have been openly pining for another, younger alternative to replace Biden as the party’s nominee next year, many party leaders argued that there was no one from the Democrats’ large 2020 field of presidential candidates, or even among the rising crop of governors and senators discussed as potential successors, that they would trust more at this moment than Biden.

    “No one – not a one,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats. “That is genuinely the case. And I get people’s uneasiness about him both because he’s old and he has low poll numbers. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t the best person for the job.”

    Familiarity with an issue is no guarantee of success: Biden took office with a long-standing determination to end the American deployment in Afghanistan but still executed a chaotic withdrawal. But in responding to global challenges, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, is drawing on half a century of dealing with issues and players around the world; even George H.W. Bush, the last president who arrived in office with an extensive foreign policy pedigree, had only about two decades of previous high-level exposure to world events.

    This latest crisis has offered more evidence that Biden is more proficient at the aspects of the presidency that unfold offstage than those that occur in public. It’s probably not a coincidence that the private aspects of the presidency are the ones where experience is the greatest asset, while the public elements of the job are those where age may be the greatest burden.

    Biden’s speeches about Ukraine, and especially his impassioned denunciations of the Hamas attack over the past two weeks, have drawn much stronger reviews than most of his addresses on domestic issues. (Bret Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist often critical of Biden, wrote that his first speech after the attack “deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric.”) In Biden’s nationally televised address about Israel and Ukraine on Thursday, he drew on a long tradition of presidents from both parties who presented American international engagement as the key to world stability, even quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call during World War II for the US to serve as the “arsenal of democracy.”

    But even when Biden was younger, delivering galvanizing speeches was never his greatest strength. No one ever confused him with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama as a communicator and his performance as president hasn’t changed that verdict. Instead, Biden has been at his best when working with other leaders, at home and abroad, out of the public eye.

    Biden, for instance, passed more consequential legislation than almost anyone expected during his first two years, but he did not do so by rallying public sentiment or barnstorming the country. Rather, in quiet meetings, he helped to orchestrate a surprisingly effective legislative minuet that produced bipartisan agreements on infrastructure and promoting semiconductor manufacturing before culminating in a stunning agreement with holdout Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass an expansive package of clean energy and health care initiatives with Democrat votes alone.

    “He’s showed a degree of political dexterity in managing the coalition that would have been very challenging for anyone else,” said Rosenberg. “His years of actually legislating, where he learned how to bring people together and hash stuff out, was really important in keeping the Democratic family together.”

    To the degree Biden has succeeded in international affairs, it has largely been with the same formula of working offstage with other leaders, many of whom he’s known for years, around issues that he has also worked on for years. In the most dramatic example, that sort of private negotiation and collaboration has produced a surprisingly broad and durable international coalition of nations supporting Ukraine against Russia.

    Biden’s effort to manage this latest Mideast crisis is centered on his attempts through private diplomacy to support Israel in its determination to disable Hamas, while minimizing the risk of a wider war and maintaining the possibility of diplomatic agreements after the fighting (including, most importantly, a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia meant to counter Iranian influence). Administration officials believe that the strong support that Biden has expressed for Israel, not only after the latest attack, but through his long career, has provided him with a credibility among the Israeli public that will increase his leverage to influence, and perhaps restrain, the decisions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    The president “wisely from the very moment of this horror show expressed unfettered solidarity with Israel and that allowed him to then go to Israel and behind closed doors continue the conversation, which I’m sure Secretary [Antony] Blinken started,” said one former senior national security official in the Biden administration, who asked to be anonymous while discussing the situation. That credibility, the former official said, allowed Biden to ask hard questions of the Israelis such as “‘Ok, you are going to send in ground troops and then what? We did shock and awe [in the second Iraq war] and then we found ourselves trapped without a plan. What are you doing? What’s the outcome? Who is going to control Gaza when you’re done whatever you are doing? At least stop and think about this.’”

    In all these ways, the Israel confrontation offers Biden an opportunity to highlight the aspects of the presidency for which he is arguably best suited. In the crisis’ first days, former President Trump also provided Biden exactly the sort of personal contrast Democrats want to create when Trump initially responded to the tragic Hamas attack by airing personal grievances against Netanyahu and criticizing the Israeli response to the attack. For some Democrats, Trump’s off-key response crystallized the contrast they want to present next year to voters: “Biden is quiet competence and Trump is chaos and it’s a real choice,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, a liberal group that funds organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color.

    Ancona said Biden’s performance since the Hamas attack points to the case Democrats should be preparing to make to voters in 2024. “He’s been a workhorse not a show pony, but that’s something we can talk about,” she said. “You can show a picture of a president working quietly behind the scenes, you can tell a story of how he has your best interests at heart. It is what it is: he’s, what, 80? You can’t get around that. But I do think he has shown he has the capacity and strength and tenacity to do this job. He’s been doing it. So why shouldn’t he get a chance to keep doing it?”

    Likewise, Rosenberg argues, “In my view you can’t separate his age from his successes as president. He’s been successful because of his age and experience not in spite of it, and we have to rethink that completely.”

    Other Democrats, though, aren’t sure that Biden can neutralize concerns about his age by making a case for the benefits of his experience. One Democratic pollster familiar with thinking in the Biden campaign, who asked for anonymity while discussing the 2024 landscape, said that highlighting Biden’s experience would only produce limited value for him so long as most voters are dissatisfied with conditions in the country. “The problem with the experience side is that people feel bad,” the pollster said. “If people felt like his accomplishments improved things for them, they wouldn’t care about his age. … The problem with the age vs. experience [argument] is that experience has to produce results for them, but experience isn’t producing results.”

    William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and long-time Democratic strategist, sees another limit to the experience argument. Like most Democrats, Galston believes that Biden’s response to the crisis has, in fact, demonstrated the value of his long track record on international issues. “This is where all of his instincts, honed by decades of experience, come into play,” Galston said. “He knows which people to call when; he knows whom to send where. As was the case in [Ukraine], this is the sort of episode where Biden is at his best.”

    The problem, Galston argues, is that voters can see the value of Biden’s experience in dealing with world events today and still worry he could not effectively handle the presidency for another term. “It’s not a logical contradiction,” Galston said, for voters to believe that “‘Yes, over the first four years of his presidency, his experience proved its value, and he had enough energy and focus to be able to draw on it when he needed it’ and at the same time say, ‘I am very worried that over the next four years, in the tension between the advantages of experience and disadvantages of age, that balance is going to shift against him.’”

    To assuage concerns about his capacity, Biden will need not only to “tell” voters about the value of his experience but to “show” them his vigor through a rigorous campaign schedule, Galston said. “The experience argument is necessary, but not sufficient,” Galston maintains. “In addition to that argument, assuming it can be made well and convincingly, I think he is going to have to show through his conduct of the campaign that he’s up for another four years.”

    Biden’s trips into active war zones in Ukraine and Israel have provided dramatic images that his campaign is already using to make that case. As Galston suggests, the president will surely need to prove the point again repeatedly in 2024.

    But most analysts agree that what the president most needs to demonstrate in the months ahead is not energy, but results. His supporters have reason for optimism that Biden’s carefully calibrated response to the Israel-Hamas hostilities will allow them to present him as a reassuring source of stability in an unstable world – in stark contrast to the unpredictability and chaos that Trump, his most likely 2024 opponent, perpetually generates. But Biden’s management of this volatile conflict will help him make that argument only if its outcome, in fact, promotes greater stability in the Middle East. If nothing else, Biden’s long experience has surely taught him how difficult stability will be to achieve in a region once again teetering on the edge of explosion.

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  • McCarthy will not run for speaker again after House votes to oust him | CNN Politics

    McCarthy will not run for speaker again after House votes to oust him | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Kevin McCarthy will not run for speaker again after the House ousted him from the top leadership post in a historic vote on Tuesday, a move that threatens to plunge House Republicans into even further chaos and turmoil.

    The House will now need to elect a new speaker. There is no clear alternative to McCarthy who would have the support needed to win the gavel, but the race for a potential successor is already underway.

    The vote to oust McCarthy and his decision not to run for the speakership again marks a major escalation in tensions for a House GOP conference that has been mired in infighting – and it comes just days after McCarthy successfully engineered a last-minute bipartisan effort to avert a government shutdown. No House speaker has ever before been ousted through the passage of a resolution to remove them.

    “I don’t regret standing up for choosing governing over grievance. It is my responsibility. It is my job. I do not regret negotiating. Our government is designed to find compromise,” McCarthy said at a wide-ranging press conference Tuesday evening.

    Dozens of his staffers were in the room listening with many emotional and hugging each other.

    McCarthy told CNN’s Manu Raju he “might” endorse a successor and did not say whether he would remain in Congress. “I’ll look at that,” he said when asked.

    McCarthy also unloaded on his critics. Asked by Raju if there’s anything he would have done differently with regard to the eight House Republicans who voted to oust him, McCarthy joked, “Yeah, a lot of them I helped get elected so I probably should have picked someone else.”

    A number of House Republicans are said to be considering jumping into the race for speaker. It’s a scramble as House Republicans do not have a plan nor are they unified behind a candidate.

    House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who has been the No. 2 Republican, has started reaching out to members about a potential speakership bid, according to a source familiar.

    Immediately following the vote, GOP Rep. Patrick McHenry, a top McCarthy ally, was named interim speaker and the House went into recess as Republicans scrambled to find a path forward. The House is expected to stay out of session for the rest of the week, and Republicans are expected to hold a speaker candidate forum in a week.

    The effort to oust the speaker was led by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz and comes as a bloc of hardline conservatives continued to rebel against McCarthy, voting against key priorities of GOP leadership and repeatedly throwing up roadblocks to the speaker’s agenda.

    The vote was 216 to 210 with eight Republicans voting to remove McCarthy from the speakership. The Republicans voting to oust McCarthy as speaker were: Gaetz, Eli Crane and Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ken Buck of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Bob Good of Virginia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Matt Rosendale of Montana.

    A number of House Republicans reacted with shock and frustration following the vote.

    McCarthy ally and House Rules Chairman Tom Cole said, “Nobody knows what’s going happen next, including all the people that voted to vacate (they) have no earthly idea what, they have no plan. They have no alternative at this point. So it’s just simply a vote for chaos.”

    House Democrats signaled ahead of the vote that they would not bail out McCarthy.

    There is a significant amount of distrust and anger from House Democrats toward McCarthy, however, over his actions as speaker and the House GOP agenda.

    Rep. Matt Gaetz speaks to reporters after a House Republican caucus meeting at the Capitol on Tuesday in Washington, DC.

    House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a letter to his caucus that leadership planned to vote in support of removing McCarthy ahead of the final vote.

    “It is now the responsibility of the GOP members to end the House Republican Civil War. Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair,” he wrote.

    Prior to the final vote, the House failed to table – or block – the effort to oust McCarthy by a vote of 208 to 218 with 11 Republicans voting against the motion to table. The GOP no votes were Gaetz, Crane, Biggs, Buck, Rosendale, Good, Mace, Burchett, Cory Mills of Florida, Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Warren Davidson of Ohio.

    McCarthy also told his members he will not cut a deal with Democrats, sources said.

    Gaetz was directly pressed by his colleagues during a Tuesday party meeting for his grand plan, and who would replace McCarthy if he was ousted, sources said. Gaetz stood up and responded that there would need to be a new speaker’s election that plays out but didn’t name anyone he had in mind for the job.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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  • Dianne Feinstein, longest-serving female US senator in history, dies at 90 | CNN Politics

    Dianne Feinstein, longest-serving female US senator in history, dies at 90 | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Dianne Feinstein, whose three decades in the Senate made her the longest-serving female US senator in history, has died following months of declining health. She was 90.

    Feinstein’s death, confirmed to CNN by a source familiar, will hand California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom the power to appoint a lawmaker to serve out the rest of Feinstein’s term, keeping the Democratic majority in the chamber through early January 2025. In March 2021, Newsom publicly said he had a list of “multiple” replacements and pledged to appoint a Black woman if Feinstein, a Democrat, were to retire.

    News of Feinstein’s death also comes as federal funding is set to expire, as Congress is at an impasse as to how to avoid a government shutdown, though Senate Democrats still retain a majority without her.

    Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco, was a leading figure in California politics for decades and became a national face of the Democratic Party following her first election to the US Senate in 1992. She broke a series of glass ceilings throughout her political career and her influence was felt strongly in some of Capitol Hill’s most consequential works in recent history, including the since-lapsed federal assault weapons ban in 1994 and the 2014 CIA torture report. She also was a longtime force on the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees.

    In her later years, Feinstein’s health was the subject of increasing scrutiny and speculation, and the California Democrat was prominent among aging lawmakers whose decisions to remain in office drew scrutiny, especially in an age of narrow party margins in Congress.

    A hospitalization for shingles in February led to an extended absence from the Senate – stirring complaints from Democrats, as Feinstein’s time away slowed the confirmation of Democratic-appointed judicial nominees – and when she returned to Capitol Hill three months later, it was revealed that she had suffered multiple complications during her recovery, including Ramsay Hunt syndrome and encephalitis. A fall in August briefly sent her to the hospital.

    Feinstein, who was the Senate’s oldest member at the time of her death, also faced questions about her mental acuity and ability to lead. She dismissed the concerns, saying, “The real question is whether I’m still an effective representative for 40 million Californians, and the record shows that I am.”

    But heavy speculation that Feinstein would retire instead of seek reelection in 2024 led several Democrats to announce their candidacies for her seat – even before she announced her plans. In February, she confirmed that she would not run for reelection, telling CNN, “The time has come.”

    Feinstein was fondly remembered by her colleagues on Friday.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that he will address Feinstein’s death on the Senate floor later Friday morning, calling it a “very, very sad day for all of us.” North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called her a “trailblazer” and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said “she was always a lady but she never backed down from a cause that she thought was worth fighting for.”

    “We lost one of the great ones,” Durbin said.

    San Francisco native and leader

    Feinstein was born in San Francisco in 1933 and graduated from Stanford University in 1955. After serving as a San Francisco County supervisor, Feinstein became the city’s mayor in 1978 in the wake of the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician from California to be elected to office.

    Feinstein rarely talked about the day when Moscone and Milk were shot but she opened up about the tragic events in a 2017 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.

    Feinstein was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors then, and assassin Dan White had been a friend and colleague of hers.

    “The door to the office opened, and he came in, and I said, ‘Dan?’ ”

    “I heard the doors slam, I heard the shots, I smelled the cordite,” Feinstein recalled.

    It was Feinstein who announced the double assassination to the public. She was later sworn in as the first female mayor of San Francisco.

    Her political career was marked by a series of historic firsts.

    By that time she became mayor in 1978, she had already broken one glass ceiling, becoming the first female chair of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

    California’s first woman sent to the US Senate racked up many other firsts in Washington. Among those: She was the first woman to sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the first female chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, and the first female chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

    Feinstein also served on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and held the title of ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2017 to 2021. In November 2022, she was poised to become president pro tempore of the Senate – third in line to the presidency – but declined to pursue the position, citing her husband’s recent death.

    Feinstein reflected on her experience as a woman in politics in her 2017 interview with Bash, saying, “Look, being a woman in our society even today is difficult,” and noting, “I know it in the political area.” She would later note in a statement the week she became the longest-serving woman in US history, “We went from two women senators when I ran for office in 1992 to 24 today – and I know that number will keep climbing.”

    “It has been a great pleasure to watch more and more women walk the halls of the Senate,” Feinstein said in November 2022.

    Led efforts on gun control and torture program investigations

    Though she was a proud native of one of the most famously liberal cities in the country, Feinstein earned a reputation over the years in the Senate as someone eager to work across the aisle with Republicans, and at times sparked pushback and criticism from progressives.

    “I truly believe that there is a center in the political spectrum that is the best place to run something when you have a very diverse community. America is diverse; we are not all one people. We are many different colors, religions, backgrounds, education levels, all of it,” she told CNN in 2017.

    A biography from Feinstein’s Senate office states that her notable achievements include “the enactment of the federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, a law that prohibited the sale, manufacture and import of military-style assault weapons” (the ban has since lapsed), and the influential 2014 torture report, a comprehensive “six-year review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program,” which brought to light for the first time many details from the George W. Bush-era program.

    Feinstein’s high-profile Senate career made its mark on pop culture when she was portrayed by actress Annette Bening in the 2019 film “The Report,” which tackled the subject of the CIA’s use of torture after the Sept. 11 attacks and the effort to make those practices public.

    In November 2020, Feinstein announced that she would step down from the top Democratic spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee the following year in the wake of sharp criticism from liberal activists over her handling of the hearings for then-President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

    While Democratic senators could not block Barrett’s nomination in the Republican-led Senate on their own, liberal activists were angry when Feinstein undermined Democrats’ relentless attempt to portray the process as illegitimate when she praised then-Judiciary Chairman and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham’s leadership of it.

    Feinstein said at the time that she would continue to serve as a senior Democrat on the Judiciary, Intelligence, Appropriations, and Rules and Administration panels, working on priorities like gun safety, criminal justice and immigration.

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  • Takeaways from President Biden’s first impeachment hearing by House Oversight panel | CNN Politics

    Takeaways from President Biden’s first impeachment hearing by House Oversight panel | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    House Republicans kicked off their first impeachment inquiry hearing Thursday laying out the allegations they will pursue against President Joe Biden, though their expert witnesses acknowledged Republicans don’t yet have the evidence to prove the accusation they’re leveling.

    Thursday’s hearing in the House Oversight Committee didn’t include witnesses who could speak directly to Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealing at the center of the inquiry, but the hearing offered Republicans the chance to show some of the evidence they’ve uncovered to date.

    None of that evidence has shown Joe Biden received any financial benefit from his son’s business dealings, but Republicans said at Thursday’s hearing what they’ve found so far has given them the justification to launch their impeachment inquiry.

    Democrats responded by accusing Republicans of doing Donald Trump’s bidding and raising his and his family’s various foreign dealings themselves, as well as Trump’s attempts to get Ukraine to investigate in 2019 the same allegations now being raised in the impeachment inquiry.

    Here’s takeaways from Thursday’s first impeachment inquiry hearing:

    While Republicans leveled accusations of corruption against Joe Biden over his son’s business dealings, the GOP expert witnesses who testified Thursday were not ready to go that far.

    Forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky, one of the GOP witnesses, undercut Republicans’ main narrative by saying there wasn’t enough evidence yet for him to conclude that there was “corruption” by the Bidens.

    “I am not here today to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud or wrongdoing,” Dubinsky said. “More information needs to be gathered before I can make such an assessment.”

    He said there was a “smokescreen” surrounding Hunter Biden’s finances, including complex overseas shell companies, which he said raise questions for a fraud expert about possible “illicit” activities.

    Conservative law professor Jonathan Turley also said that the House does not yet have evidence to support articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, but argued that House Republicans were justified in opening an impeachment inquiry.

    “I want to emphasize what it is that we’re here today for. This is a question of an impeachment inquiry. It is not a vote on articles of impeachment,” Turley said. “In fact, I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment. That is something that an inquiry has to establish. But I also do believe that the House has passed the threshold for an impeachment inquiry into the conduct of President Biden.”

    Turley said that Biden’s false statements about his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s business endeavors, as well as the unproven allegations that Biden may have benefited from his son’s business deals, were reason for the House to move forward with the impeachment inquiry. (CNN has previously reported that Joe Biden’s unequivocal denials of any business-related contact with his son have been undercut over time, including by evidence uncovered by House Republicans.)

    Turley, a George Washington University Law School professor, has repeatedly backed up Republican arguments on key legal matters in recent years, including his opposition to Trump’s first and second impeachments.

    Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, pushed Turley further on his comments, asking whether he would vote “no” today on impeachment.

    “On this evidence, certainly,” Turley said. “At the moment, these are allegations. There is some credible evidence there that is the basis of the allegations.”

    Witnesses are sworn in before the House Oversight Committee on September 28, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

    House Republicans opened their first impeachment hearing Thursday with a series of lofty claims against the president, as they try to connect him to his son’s “corrupt” business dealings overseas.

    House Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer claimed the GOP probes have “uncovered a mountain of evidence revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain,” even though he hasn’t put forward any concrete evidence backing up that massive allegation.

    Two other Republican committee chairs further pressed their case, including by citing some of the newly released Internal Revenue Service documents, which two IRS whistleblowers claim show how the Justice Department intervened in the Hunter Biden criminal probe to protect the Biden family. However, many of their examples of alleged wrongdoing occurred during the Trump administration before Joe Biden took office.

    Ahead of the hearing, the Republican chairs released a formal framework laying out the scope of their probe, saying it “will span the time of Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency to the present, including his time out of office.”

    The document outlines specific lines of inquiry, including whether Biden engaged in “corruption, bribery, and influence peddling” – none of which Republicans have proved yet.

    The memo included four questions the Republicans are seeking to answer related to whether Biden took any action related to payments his family received or if the president obstructed the investigations into Hunter Biden.

    House Oversight Committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Jamie Raskin speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on September 28, 2023.

    At the close of the hearing Thursday, Comer announced that he was issuing subpoenas for the bank records of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and brother, James Biden.

    The subpoenas will be for Hunter and James Biden’s personal and business bank records, a source familiar with the subpoenas confirmed.

    The subpoenas are not a surprise, as Comer has been signaling his intention to issue the subpoenas for the personal bank records. They show where Republicans will head next in their investigation as they continue to seek evidence to substantiate their unproven allegations about the president.

    Some inside the GOP expressed frustration to CNN in real time with how the House GOP’s first impeachment inquiry hearing is playing out, as the Republican witnesses directly undercut the GOP’s own narrative and admit there is no evidence that Biden has committed impeachable offenses.

    “You want witnesses that make your case. Picking witnesses that refute House Republicans arguments for impeachment is mind blowing,” one senior GOP aide told CNN. “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

    One GOP lawmaker also expressed some disappointment with their performance thus far, telling CNN: “I wish we had more outbursts.”

    The bar for Thursday’s hearing was set low: Republicans admitted they would not reveal any new evidence, but were hoping to at least make the public case for why their impeachment inquiry is warranted, especially as some of their own members remain skeptical of the push.

    But some Republicans are not even paying attention, as Congress is on the brink of a shutdown – a point Democrats hammered during the hearing.

    “I haven’t watched or listened to a moment of it,” said another GOP lawmaker. There’s a shutdown looming.”

    Rep Jim Jordan delivers remarks during the House Oversight Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on September 28, 2023 in Washington, DC.

    Democrats repeatedly pointed out that the Republican allegations about foreign payments were tied to money that went mostly Hunter Biden – but not the to the president.

    “The majority sits completely empty handed with no evidence of any presidential wrongdoing, no smoking gun, no gun, no smoke,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight committee.

    Raskin’s staff brought in the 12,000 pages of bank records the committee has received so far, as Raskin said, “not a single page shows a dime going to President Joe Biden.”

    Raskin also had a laptop open displaying a countdown clock for when the government shuts down in a little more than two days – another point Democrats used to bash Republicans for focusing on impeachment and failing to pass bills to fund the government. The Democrats passed the laptop around to each lawmaker as they had their five minutes to question the witnesses.

    Their arguments also previewed how Democrats intend to play defense for the White House as Republicans move forward on their impeachment inquiry.

    The Democrats needled Republicans for not holding a vote on an impeachment inquiry – one Democrat asked Turley whether he would recommend a vote, which Turley said he would.

    Rep. Jamie Raskin speaks on the Democratic side of the aisle, as the House Oversight Committee begins an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

    House Democrats’ 2019 impeachment of Trump was sparked by Trump’s attempts to push Ukraine to investigate allegations involving Biden and his son’s position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company – some of the same allegations now being probed by the House GOP.

    That led Democrats Thursday to push for testimony from Rudy Giuliani, who as Trump’s personal lawyer sought to dig up dirt on Biden in Ukraine in 2019.

    Twice, the Democrats forced the Oversight Committee to vote on Democratic motions to subpoena Giuliani, votes that served as stunts to try to hammer home their argument that Giuliani tried and failed to corroborate the same allegations at the heart of the Biden impeachment inquiry.

    “I ask the question: Where in the world is Rudy Giuliani?” said Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, one of the Democrats who forced the procedural vote. “That’s how we got here, ladies and gentlemen. And this committee is afraid to bring him before us and put him on the record. Shame! And the question was raised. What does this have to do with it? It has everything to do with it.”

    In addition to Giuliani, Raskin sought testimony from Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani’s who was indicted in 2019. Parnas subsequently cooperated with the Democratic impeachment inquiry, including providing a statement from a top official at Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company, stating, “No one from Burisma had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him.”

    Several Democrats also raised Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who worked in the White House, receiving $2 billion from Saudi Arabia through a company he formed after leaving the White House.

    The Democrats charged that Kushner’s actions were far worse than Hunter Biden’s, because Kushner worked in government, while Biden’s son did not.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Schumer declines to call on Menendez to step down | CNN Politics

    Schumer declines to call on Menendez to step down | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday declined join a growing group of Democrats who are calling on indicted Sen. Bob Menendez to resign his seat, though he did say the New Jersey Democrat’s actions fell “way, way below the standard” of the office.

    “Like you, I was just deeply disappointed, disturbed when I read the indictment,” Schumer said at a news conference on Capitol Hill. “Look, I’ve known Sen. Menendez a very long time. And it was truly, truly upsetting.”

    At least 30 of the members of the Democratic caucus, including members of Schumer’s leadership team have called on Menendez to resign. According to CNN’s count on Wednesday, 21 Democrats and independents who caucus with the Democrats have not called on Menendez to resign, including Schumer and Menendez himself. Three of those who have not called on Menendez to resign sit on the Senate Ethics Committee and therefore will not comment on any issue that may come before their panel.

    “For senators, there’s a much, much higher standard,” Schumer added. “And clearly, when you read the indictment, Sen. Menendez fell way way below that standard. Tomorrow, he will address the Democratic caucus, and we’ll see what happens after that.”

    Menendez is expected to address the Senate Democratic caucus at a closed-door meeting on Thursday, according to Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Mark Warner of Virginia.

    On Wednesday, Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, pleaded not guilty to all corruption-related charges.

    Menendez has been charged with three counts for allegedly taking bribes to use his political power and connections to help the government of Egypt obtain military aid as well as pressure a state prosecutor investigating New Jersey businessmen and attempt to influence the federal prosecution of a co-defendant.

    Co-defendants Jose Uribe and Fred Daibe, entered not guilty pleas as well. A fifth co-defendant, Wael Hana, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.

    Menendez has said he will not step down. In a public statement Monday, he accused those who “rushed to judgment” of doing so for “political expediency.”

    “I recognize this will be the biggest fight yet,” Menendez said, referencing the legal battle ahead. “But as I have stated throughout this whole process, I firmly believe that when all the facts are presented, not only will I be exonerated, but I still will be New Jersey’s senior senator.”

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  • Why some of Biden’s problems may be overblown at this time | CNN Politics

    Why some of Biden’s problems may be overblown at this time | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. He’s under an impeachment inquiry, his son was indicted in Delaware, inflation seems to be tilting back up, the United Auto Workers went on strike after Biden said they wouldn’t, and the chattering class is talking about him not running for reelection.

    Some of these factors explain why my colleague Zach Wolf wrote that “Biden’s two worst weaknesses were exposed” this past week, and it’s also why I’ve written about the president’s difficulties heading into next year.

    But while Biden clearly has problems – no president with an approval rating hovering around 40% is in good shape – some of his issues appear to be overblown at this time. Here are three reasons why:

    A Washington Post op-ed by columnist David Ignatius that called on Biden not to run for reelection got a lot of play this past week.

    Putting aside whether Biden should or shouldn’t run, the fact is that he is running. A lot of people will point to polls (like those from CNN) showing that a majority of Democrats don’t think the party should renominate him.

    But these surveys only tell you so much. They’re matching Biden against himself and not anyone else. When asked in the CNN poll to name a preferred alternative to Biden, only a little more than 10% wanted someone else and could name a specific person.

    When matched up against the announced Democratic opposition (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson), Biden is crushing it. He’s over 70%, on average, in recent polling.

    Moreover, Biden’s job approval rating with Democrats hovers around 80%. That is well above the level at which past incumbents have faced strong primary challenges. Those challenges (such as when Ted Kennedy challenged incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980) came at a time when the president had an approval rating in the 50s or 60s among his own party members.

    It is worth analyzing whether the fact that a lot of Democrats don’t think Biden should be renominated masks a larger problem he could face in a general election.

    But Biden’s pulling in more than 90% of Democrats in Fox News and Quinnipiac University general election polling released this past week. In both polls, his share slightly exceeded former President Donald Trump’s among Republicans (though within the margin of error).

    The fact is Biden’s got problems, but worrying about renomination is not one of them.

    From a political point of view, Biden’s connections to his son Hunter have caused the president nothing but heartache. Most voters think Biden did something inappropriate related to his son’s business dealings.

    So, it might naturally follow that House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into the president’s ties to his son’s foreign business deals would be harmful to his political future.

    About 40% of voters, on average, think Joe Biden did something illegal. Most voters don’t.

    Some Republicans are no doubt hoping that Biden’s own troubles will make their likely nominee (Trump), who is under four indictments, look less bad by comparison. A majority of voters, however, think that Trump committed a crime.

    The public doesn’t see the Biden and Trump cases the same way.

    A Wall Street Journal poll from the end of August found that a majority of Americans (52%) did not want Biden to be impeached.

    Republicans will have to prove their case in the court of public opinion.

    It’s conceivable that Republicans will overshoot the mark like they have in the past. The impeachment inquiry into Bill Clinton in 1998 preceded one of the best performances by a president’s party in a midterm election. Clinton’s Democratic Party picked up seats in the House, which has happened three times for the president’s party in midterms over the last century.

    To see how impeachment could turn things upside down for the GOP this cycle, consider independent voters. While the vast majority of independents disapprove of the job Biden is doing as president (64%) in our latest CNN poll, only 39% think he did something illegal.

    An election about a potentially unpopular impeachment would be better for Biden than one about an issue that really hurts him (such as voters seeing him as too old).

    Stop me if you heard this one before: Biden is the president heading into an election, voters are unhappy with the state of the economy, and his party does much better in the elections than a lot of people thought.

    That’s what happened in the 2022 midterms.

    The inflation rate is lower now than it was then, but it’s on the uptick. Voters, both now and then, overwhelmingly disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy. They even say the economy matters more than any other issue, like they did in 2022.

    What none of this data takes into account is that Americans almost always call the economy the top issue, according to Gallup.

    Believe it or not, fewer Americans say the economy is the top problem facing the country now (31%) than they have in either the median (40%) or average (45%) presidential election since 1988.

    If you think about recent presidential elections in which the economy was the big issue (1992, 2008 and 2012), the state of the economy dominated the headlines.

    But as mentioned above, right now, there are a lot of other things going on in the country, as was also the case during the 2022 midterms.

    It’s not as if the economy is helping Biden. I’m just not sure it’s hurting him.

    After all, there’s a reason why Democrats have consistently outperformed the 2020 presidential baseline in special elections this year.

    If things were really that bad for Biden and the Democrats, they’d most likely be losing elections all over the country. That simply isn’t happening at this point.

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  • Biden’s two worst weaknesses were exposed this week | CNN Politics

    Biden’s two worst weaknesses were exposed this week | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    Two major threats to President Joe Biden’s reelection – his son Hunter’s legal problems and the widely held perception the 80-year-old is too old for reelection – are both causing him major pain this week.

    Hunter Biden was indicted on federal gun charges in Delaware on Thursday, accused of lying about his past drug abuse and violating a gun law when he bought a handgun in 2018, before his father’s presidential campaign. The weapon was later abandoned behind a grocery store by Hallie Biden, the wife of Hunter’s late brother, Beau. Hallie and Hunter were having an affair at the time.

    Read an annotated version of the indictment.

    That sad and sordid family drama of addiction could land the president’s son in prison, although separate investigations on tax evasion and foreign business dealings have not yet led to charges from the Delaware US attorney David Weiss, who was elevated earlier this year to special counsel to guarantee independence from the US Department of Justice.

    While Weiss has found no basis to criminally charge Hunter Biden over his foreign business dealings and no direct connection has been drawn between the son’s business interests and the father’s policy positions, House Republicans plan to dig deep as they look for more evidence during an official impeachment inquiry authorized by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this week.

    The impeachment may never occur, and the years of investigation may not have exposed any wrongdoing by President Biden – but the inquiry will certainly keep Hunter Biden top of mind for voters who may wonder why the president would let his family operate like this.

    Any Democrats who dismiss the effort might recall that McCarthy bragged in 2015 that the exhaustive House investigations focused on Hillary Clinton wounded her politically. At the time, he was talking about investigations into the death of a US ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of state. The effort by today’s GOP to tie Biden to his son could have a similar effect.

    Even if there is nothing to tie President Biden to the millions of dollars Hunter Biden and other family members made from interests in China, Ukraine and elsewhere, most Americans are not convinced.

    Well more than half the country, 61%, thinks Biden had some involvement in his son’s business dealings while serving as vice president, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in late August, before the gun-related indictment was handed down but after a previous plea deal fell apart. Most of those people who think the president was involved back then also think the actions were illegal.

    What’s not clear is whether the Hunter Biden issues will be a motivating factor outside the group of voters who already dislike the president. His low job approval rating and concerns about the economy could ultimately be more damaging in an election.

    The public’s perception of his relationship with his son is not even the most concerning element for Biden in the poll. That would be his age.

    “Biden’s age isn’t just a Fox News trope; it’s been the subject of dinner-table conversations across America this summer,” the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote this week in calling for Biden to step aside ASAP to give someone else a shot at winning the 2024 election.

    Just about a quarter of Americans in CNN’s poll said Biden has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively, far from a ringing endorsement of a president who brought policy wins back from a trip to Asia last week but left the impression he was confused at a press conference.

    Romney calls on Trump and Biden to ‘stand aside’ for younger candidates

    Only a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters in the poll said they think Biden should be the Democrats’ candidate in 2024. Two-thirds want a different candidate, although almost nobody knows who.

    Ignatius had enough of the president’s respect earlier this summer to get an invite to Biden’s state dinner for the Indian prime minister in June. Hunter Biden also attended.

    Ignatius is among the people who effusively say Biden has been a very good president, both “successful” and “effective.”

    “What I admire most about President Biden is that in a polarized nation, he has governed from the center out, as he promised in his victory speech,” Ignatius wrote, adding plaudits for Biden’s domestic accomplishments and foreign policy leadership.

    But Ignatius fears another pairing of Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris “risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.”

    Among Democratic voters, the most-cited concerns with Biden are his age and the need for someone younger.

    The vast majority of the Democrats interested in a Biden alternative picked “just someone besides Joe Biden.” One of the most-supported specific alternatives, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is older than Biden.

    The lack of confidence in Harris to take up the mantle was evident when CNN’s Anderson Cooper talked Wednesday night to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is running for reelection to Congress but stepped away from her leadership position.

    Cooper asked Pelosi if Harris was the best running mate for Biden.

    “He thinks so and that’s what matters,” Pelosi said, although she did commend Harris for being “politically astute.”

    kamala harris nancy pelosi split

    Anderson Cooper asks Nancy Pelosi twice if she thinks Harris is best running mate for Biden

    Pelosi promised that Democrats are behind Biden, and she does think he’s the best candidate to beat Trump.

    “He has great experience and wisdom,” Pelosi said.

    CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere writes that the Biden campaign is plotting a long-game strategy and that aides blame the media for “what they view as validating concerns about Biden’s age and about Republican claims of Hunter Biden’s corruption by covering those concerns, despite what they argue is a lack of evidence.”

    They are banking, he writes, on a data-focused emphasis on key states to turn the moveable voters away from Trump.

    He lost badly in Iowa and New Hampshire in the 2020 primary, for instance, before riding a wave of support from moderates in southern states to a dramatic upset of multiple younger candidates and those with more committed followings.

    Biden emerged from a crowded pack four years ago. There’s little indication it would make sense for him to open the primary up, as Ignatius suggests, to some of those same people today.

    Ultimately, there is an open question over what this election will be about.

    If it’s about a referendum on an aging president whose fitness worries voters and who allowed his son to make millions in circumstances that raise suspicions even without evidence of wrongdoing, Biden will struggle.

    That said, one of the few things voters might like less is a person who tried to overturn an election.

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  • Rhode Island and Utah hold special election primaries for House seats | CNN Politics

    Rhode Island and Utah hold special election primaries for House seats | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Rhode Island and Utah voters are choosing party nominees for US House seats on Tuesday with the two states each holding a special primary election.

    In Rhode Island, a crowded Democratic field will be narrowed down to one in the race to succeed Democrat David Cicilline in the state’s 1st Congressional District. Cicilline resigned in May to lead the Rhode Island Foundation.

    In Utah, Republicans will decide their nominee in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, which GOP Rep. Chris Stewart is expected to vacate on September 15. Stewart announced in June that he would be departing Congress, citing his wife’s health concerns.

    Both seats are not expected to change party hands in November, given the partisan leans of each district, so the outcome of Tuesday’s primaries will be critical to determining who their next members of Congress will be.

    Rhode Island’s general election is set for November 7, while the general election in Utah will take place on November 21.

    Rhode Island

    Rhode Island’s 1st District covers the eastern part of the state, including East and North Providence, Pawtucket and Portsmouth. Eleven Democrats are vying for the chance to succeed Cicilline.

    The district is a Democratic stronghold – Cicilline won a seventh term by 28 points last fall, and President Joe Biden would have carried the district by a similar margin in 2020 under its present lines. A Republican hasn’t held the seat since 1995.

    Former state Rep. Aaron Regunberg has raised the most funds of the Democrats currently in the race, bringing in $630,000 through August 16. Former White House official Gabe Amo and Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos trailed with $604,000 and $579,000, respectively.

    Regunberg is running on a progressive platform, focused on issues such as fighting climate change and housing insecurity. He has the backing of multiple prominent progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, and the endorsement of the campaign arm of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He has faced criticism over support he’s received from a super PAC primarily funded by his father-in-law. After an unsuccessful bid for Rhode Island lieutenant governor in 2018, he earned a law degree from Harvard and worked as a judicial law clerk.

    Amo, the son of Ghanaian and Liberian immigrants, has worked in both the Obama and Biden administrations. He has received endorsements from high-profile Democrats such as former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who represented the 1st District for eight terms before Cicilline, and former White House chief of staff Ron Klain. He also has the backing of the campaign arm of the Congressional Black Caucus and Democrats Serve, which supports candidates with public service backgrounds.

    Amo, a former deputy director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has made preventing gun violence a top priority, noting that during his White House tenure, he “was often the first call to a mayor following a mass shooting.”

    Matos, who emigrated to the US from the Dominican Republic at the age of 20, could make history as the first Afro-Latina in Congress. She has the backing of the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and EMILY’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights.

    Matos’ campaign endured controversy this summer following allegations her campaign had submitted falsified nominating signatures. Hundreds of signatures were thrown out, but her campaign submitted enough valid signatures to make the ballot. The incident is being investigated by the state attorney general. Matos has blamed an outside vendor for submitting the alleged false signatures.

    In another controversy leading up to the primary, businessman Don Carlson, who had loaned his campaign $600,000, ended his bid a little over a week ago following allegations of an inappropriate interaction he had with a college student in 2019. While his name remains on the ballot, the state Board of Elections ordered local boards to post a notice that he’d withdrawn, Chris Hunter, a spokesman for the state board told CNN. Carlson has endorsed state Sen. Sandra Cano, a Colombian immigrant who has made education a top priority in her campaign and has labor support.

    Marine veteran Gerry Leonard Jr., who had the endorsement of the state GOP, will win the party nomination, CNN projected Tuesday evening.

    Utah’s 2nd District covers the western portion of the state, stretching from the Salt Lake City area to St. George. Republicans are heavily favored to hold the seat – Stewart won a sixth term last fall by 26 points, while former President Donald Trump would have carried it under its current lines by 17 points in 2020.

    Three Republicans are looking to succeed Stewart: Former Utah GOP Chairman Bruce Hough, former Stewart aide Celeste Maloy and former state Rep. Becky Edwards.

    Maloy, who has Stewart’s backing, earned her spot on the ballot by winning a nominating convention in July, while Hough and Edwards qualified by collecting sufficient signatures.

    Edwards and Hough, boosted by significant self-funding, both outraised Maloy through August 16.

    Edwards raised $679,000 – $300,000 of which she loaned to her campaign – while Hough raised nearly $539,000, including $334,000 of his own money. Maloy had brought in $307,000 through August 16.

    Maloy, who worked as a counsel in Stewart’s Washington office, has faced questions over her eligibility for the special election primary ballot over voter registration issues. She was marked inactive in the state’s voter database because she did not cast a ballot in 2020 and 2022, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, after she relocated to Virginia to work for Stewart. But the state GOP submitted her name for the ballot, noting that no objections to her candidacy were filed before the convention.

    On the campaign trail, Maloy said she’s been focusing on government overreach. She has proposed defunding federal agencies to eliminate “anything they’re doing that Congress hasn’t authorized.”

    Voters are “worried that these executive branch agencies have too much power, they’re not checked and they’re too involved in our lives,” Maloy told CNN affiliate KUTV in an interview. “And I happen to agree.”

    Maloy’s campaign has received financial support from VIEW PAC, which is dedicated to recruiting and electing Republican women to Congress.

    Hough – the father of professional dancers Julianne and Derek Hough, who rose to fame on “Dancing with the Stars” – is focusing on debt reduction and deficit control, citing his family as one of the reasons why he’s running.

    “With 22 grandkids, 10 kids and a $32 trillion (US) debt, I’m very anxious about their future and about the future of all Americans and all Utahns,” Hough told ABC4 in a video posted in June. “It’s time that we actually do something about it.”

    Hough, who until recently had been Utah’s Republican national committeeman, has positioned himself as the candidate most supportive of Trump.

    Edwards, meanwhile, challenged GOP Sen. Mike Lee in a primary last year as a moderate opposed to Trump and took 30% of the vote. On the trail, she has touted her experience as a state lawmaker, focusing on priorities such as health care, education and fiscal responsibility.

    Edwards, who backed Biden in 2020, expressed “regret” for that support at a debate in June, saying she had been “extremely disappointed” with his administration, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

    The winner of Tuesday’s GOP primary will face Democratic state Sen. Kathleen Riebe in November. Riebe won her party’s nomination at a June convention.

    This story has been updated with a CNN projection.

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  • Bernie Sanders Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Bernie Sanders Fast Facts | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of US Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont and former 2020 presidential candidate.

    Birth date: September 8, 1941

    Birth place: Brooklyn, New York

    Birth name: Bernard Sanders

    Father: Eli Sanders, paint salesman

    Mother: Dorothy (Glassberg) Sanders

    Marriages: Jane (O’Meara) Sanders (1988-present); Deborah (Shiling) Messing (married and divorced in the 1960s)

    Children: With Susan Mott: Levi; stepchildren with Jane (O’Meara) Sanders: Heather, Carina, David

    Education: Attended Brooklyn College, 1959-1960; University of Chicago, B.A. in political science, 1964

    Religion: Jewish, though he has told the Washington Post he is “not actively involved with organized religion”

    Although independent in the US Senate, Sanders has run as a Democrat in his two bids for the presidential nomination, in 2016 and 2020.

    His father’s family died in the Holocaust.

    During the 1960s, he spent half a year on a kibbutz in Israel.

    Was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League while at the University of Chicago.

    The longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.

    Sanders applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War.

    Nominated for a Grammy Award but did not win.

    August 28, 1963 – Attends the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

    1972, 1976, 1986 – Unsuccessful bids for governor of Vermont.

    1972, 1974 – Unsuccessful bids for the US Senate.

    1981 – Wins the race for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by 10 votes, running as an independent.

    1981-1989 – Mayor of Burlington for four terms.

    1988 – Unsuccessful bid for the US House of Representatives.

    1990 – Wins a seat on the US House of Representatives by about 16% of the vote.

    1991-2007 – Serves eight terms in the US House of Representatives.

    1991 – Co-founds the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

    2006 – Wins a seat on the US Senate with 65% of the vote.

    January 4, 2007-present – Serves in the US Senate.

    December 10, 2010 – Holds a filibuster for more than eight hours against the reinstatement of tax cuts formulated during the administration of President George W. Bush. The speech is published in book form in 2011 as “The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class.”

    2012 – Wins reelection for a second term in the US Senate. Receives 71% of the vote.

    2013-2015 – Serves as chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

    April 30, 2015 – Announces his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in an email to supporters and media.

    May 1, 2015 – Sanders’ campaign raises more than $1.5 million in its first 24 hours.

    January 17, 2016 – Sanders unveils his $1.38 trillion per year “Medicare-for-All” health care plan.

    February 9, 2016 – Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary, claiming victory with 60% of the vote. He’s the first Jewish politician to win a presidential nominating contest.

    July 12, 2016 – Endorses Hillary Clinton for president.

    August 21, 2017 – Sanders pens a commentary article in Fortune magazine outlining his health care proposal “Medicare-for-all.”

    November 28, 2017 – Is nominated, along with actor Mark Ruffalo, for a Grammy in the Spoken Word category for “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.”

    February 26, 2018 – Sanders’ son, Levi Sanders, announces he is running for Congress in New Hampshire. He later loses his bid in the Democratic primary.

    November 6, 2018 – Wins reelection to the US Senate for a third term with more than 67% of the vote.

    January 2, 2019 – The New York Times reports that several women who worked on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign had come forward alleging they had experienced sexual harassment, pay disparities and targeted disrespect by campaign members. Sanders immediately responds to the allegations, claiming that he was not aware of any of the claims and apologizes to “any woman who feels like she was not treated appropriately.”

    February 19, 2019 – Announces that he is running for president during an interview with Vermont Public Radio.

    February 20, 2019 – According to his campaign, Sanders raises nearly $6 million in the first 24 hours following the launch of his 2020 presidential bid.

    March 15, 2019 – Sanders’ presidential campaign staff unionizes, making it the first major party presidential campaign to employ a formally organized workforce.

    August 22, 2019 – Sanders unveils his $16.3 trillion Green New Deal plan.

    October 1, 2019 – After experiencing chest discomfort at a campaign rally, Sanders undergoes treatment to address blockage in an artery. He has two stents successfully inserted.

    October 4, 2019 – The Sanders campaign releases a statement that he has been discharged from the hospital after being treated for a heart attack. “After two and a half days in the hospital, I feel great, and after taking a short time off, I look forward to getting back to work,” Sanders says in the statement.

    February 3, 2020 – The Iowa Democratic caucuses take place, but the process descends into chaos due to poor planning by the state party, a faulty app that was supposed to calculate results and an overwhelmed call center. That uncertainty leads to delayed results and a drawn-out process with both Sanders’ and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaigns raising concerns.

    February 27, 2020 – Sanders’ presidential campaign challenges the results of the Iowa caucuses partial recount just hours after the state’s Democratic Party releases its results. In a complaint sent to the Iowa Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee, the Sanders campaign claims the state party violated its own rules by allowing the Buttigieg campaign to partake in the process because they didn’t meet the proper requirements.

    February 29, 2020 – The Iowa Democratic Party certifies the results from the state’s caucuses, with Sanders coming in second behind Buttigieg and picking up 12 pledged delegates to Buttigieg’s 14. The certification by the party’s State Central Committee includes a 26-14, vote, saying the party violated its rules by complying with the Buttigieg campaign’s partial recanvass and recount requests.

    April 8, 2020 – Announces he is suspending his presidential campaign.

    April 13, 2020 – Endorses former Vice President Joe Biden for president.

    January 28, 2021 – Sanders raises $1.8 million for charity through the sale of merchandise inspired by the viral photo of him and his mittens on Inauguration Day.

    June 20, 2023 – Launches a Senate investigation into working and safety conditions at Amazon warehouses.

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  • Kentucky Republicans seek to nationalize gubernatorial race as state Democrats keep focus local | CNN Politics

    Kentucky Republicans seek to nationalize gubernatorial race as state Democrats keep focus local | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Kentucky Republicans are seeking to tie Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to President Joe Biden as they work to take back the governor’s mansion in November, a strategy that state Democrats have pushed back on with a focus on local issues.

    Biden remains unpopular in the deep red state, and with the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, the Republican gubernatorial nominee and Kentucky’s Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, is in a tight race to lock down the state for the GOP.

    At the historic Fancy Farm picnic in Western Kentucky this weekend, Cameron told a combined crowd of Democrats and Republicans, “Andy Beshear and Joe Biden are liberal elites that have a lot of rules for you, and none for themselves.”

    “The governor has the audacity to lecture Kentuckians on right and wrong when he and Joe Biden can’t even tell the difference between a man and a woman,” he added, to loud boos from the Democratic side.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell similarly tied Kentucky’s governor to the president telling voters, “Biden and Beshear aren’t working for Kentucky. Andy might as well be on the White House payroll.”

    The Beshear campaign, however, has argued the race is not about Biden or national politics. Beshear didn’t mention Biden once in his speech Saturday – focusing instead on how he handled major crises like the Covid-19 pandemic, tornadoes that devastated the state, as well as floods and a mass shooting in which Beshear knew one of the victims.

    “Daniel Cameron will show up for a political rally but not for tornado survivors,” Beshear said at the picnic.

    The dueling messages came as Beshear, Cameron, and candidates for other state offices across Kentucky descended on the town of Fancy Farm for their annual picnic and barbecue this weekend, a tradition that has become a mainstay of state politics.

    The picnic took on particular importance this year as it showcased each side’s messaging posture in a race that carries significant implications for 2024’s elections.

    The Kentucky race will test whether a Democratic incumbent can survive in a deep-red state where his party’s voter registration advantage has been erased in recent years and the political environment is increasingly dominated by national themes.

    Though he has remained popular, Republicans argue that Beshear’s 0.4-percentage-point-victory was the result of an unfavorable political landscape – one that has shifted drastically in recent years.

    One Kentucky GOP voter, Brian Smith, told CNN on Saturday of Beshear: “I think he’s absolutely chasing the National Democratic Party. But when decisions needed to be made about supporting small businesses, about keeping kids in school and keeping churches open, he was on the wrong side of those decisions.”

    Another Cameron supporter came to the picnic in a Biden mask, carrying a sign that read “Beshear’s #1 fan.”

    But Jeremy Edge, a Beshear supporter, told CNN, “I think they’re trying to make Andy out as some sort of radical, which is a mess because he is a straight arrow kind of dude, and the negative stuff, it’s kind of gross.”

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  • Trump heads to South Carolina after a week filled with his legal drama | CNN Politics

    Trump heads to South Carolina after a week filled with his legal drama | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump is set to visit South Carolina on Saturday, wrapping up a week that has been defined by his historic third indictment.

    Trump’s Saturday trip to the early-primary state – he’ll visit Columbia, South Carolina, for the state GOP’s Silver Elephant Dinner – follows a Friday night stop in Alabama. The two were his first campaign events after his arraignment Thursday in Washington,DC, in special prosecutor Jack Smith’s investigation into his efforts to remain in the White House despite losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

    In Montgomery on Friday night, Trump conflated his actions in seeking to overturn the 2020 election with those of Democrats, including Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Stacey Abrams after the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, in the wake of their losses. He said he faces “bogus charges.”

    He also said if he is elected in 2024, he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden’s family.

    “When they indicted their political opponent and they did that, I said, well, now the gloves are off,” Trump said of Biden. “The Republicans better get tough, and they better get smart, because most of them look like a bunch of weak jerks right now. … You have to fight fire with fire. You can’t allow this to go on.”

    Trump’s campaign on Friday went on the attack against the prosecutors who have brought cases against or are investigating the former president. It released a video attacking those prosecutors one day after Trump was arrested and arraigned for a third time.

    The video attacks Smith, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, dubbing the group the “Fraud Squad.”

    “Meet the cast of unscrupulous accomplices he’s assembled to get Trump,” the narrator says in the video of Biden.

    The video also uses footage of Biden falling off his bike and tripping up the stairs to Air Force One.

    Lashing out over the costs of defending himself and his allies in myriad legal battles, Trump also called for the Supreme Court to “intercede.”

    “CRAZY! My political opponent has hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits, including D.A., A.G., and others, which require massive amounts of my time & money to adjudicate,” Trump complained on Truth Social. “Resources that would have gone into Ads and Rallies, will now have to be spent fighting these Radical Left Thugs in numerous courts throughout the Country. I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede.”

    His campaign has used the legal proceedings as a fundraising tool, hauling in small-dollar donations.

    “Trump is in THE AIR!” his campaign said in an email to supporters Thursday. “Before he arrives at the courthouse for his hearing, can 10,000 pro-Trump patriots sign on to defend him & end the witch hunt?”

    A handful of GOP presidential candidates, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Texas Rep. Will Hurd and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, have criticized Trump’s actions.

    Hurd, on Fox News on Thursday, said that Trump’s court appearance was the “third time in four months in courts. It’s unacceptable, we didn’t have to be here.”

    Former Vice President Mike Pence’s campaign is selling T-shirts and hats branded with the phrase “Too Honest,” referencing a phrase Trump allegedly uttered to Pence when he refused to go along with the then-president’s request to reject electoral votes and change the outcome of the 2020 election.

    According to the federal indictment, in one conversation on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence he was “too honest” when the then-vice president said that he lacked the authority to change the results.

    After Trump was indicted earlier this week, Pence said that “anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president” and added that Trump “was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers who kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear.”

    However, much of the Republican field has so far refused to take aim at Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which are at the heart of the federal charges he faces in Washington.

    Trump’s top-polling rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, on Friday said he would pardon Trump if he is elected in 2024. He also defended the former president, arguing that the laws federal prosecutors say Trump broke were “never intended to apply to this type of situation.”

    The Florida governor, who was campaigning in Iowa, told reporters his candidacy for president would be focused on the future and starting to heal “divisions in this country.”

    DeSantis indicated that he would pardon Trump if he were convicted, echoing comments he recently made on “Outkick” with Clay Travis.

    “I’ve said for many weeks now, I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the country to have a former president – that’s almost 80 years old – go to prison. Just like Nixon or Ford pardoned Nixon, you know, sometimes you got to put this stuff behind you,” he said.

    DeSantis’ comments underscored the reality that most of Trump’s 2024 GOP rivals see little to gain by angering a base that is still largely supportive of the former president.

    South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Friday criticized the Justice Department for the “weaponization of their power” in his first on-camera reaction to the third indictment and arraignment of Trump.

    Scott told reporters following an immigration roundtable event in Yuma, Arizona, he believes DOJ spends “a lot of time hunting Republicans” while protecting Democrats, specifically referencing the president’s son Hunter Biden.

    “My perspective is that the DOJ continues to weaponize their power against political opponents. It seems like they spend a lot of time protecting Hunter Biden and Democrats and a lot of time hunting Republicans,” Scott said.

    The most recent polls show that Trump remains the clear front-runner in the 2024 GOP primary. A poll of likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa from The New York Times/Siena College released Friday showed Trump with 44% support, compared to DeSantis’ 20% and Scott’s 9%, with no other candidate topping 5%.

    His lead is even wider nationally. Trump holds the support of 54% of likely GOP primary voters, a New York Times/Siena College poll released earlier this week found, while DeSantis has 17% support and no other candidate exceeds 3%.

    Just 17% of likely Republican primary voters think that Trump has “committed any serious federal crimes,” and only 10% more say that although they don’t think he committed a serious crime, he “did something wrong in his handling of classified documents.” Three-quarters (75%) say that after the 2020 elections, Trump “was just exercising his right to contest the election,” while only 19% believe he “went so far that he threatened American democracy.” And 71% say that regarding the investigations Trump is facing, Republicans “need to stand behind Trump.”

    The Republican base could be at odds with the broader electorate: Two-thirds of Americans (65%) say that the charges Trump faces over efforts to overturn the 2020 elections are serious, according to a new poll from ABC News and Ipsos conducted after Trump’s latest indictment.

    There are broad partisan gaps in views of the seriousness of the new charges, with 91% of Democrats calling them serious along with 67% of independents, though just 38% of Republicans agree. The gap between Democrats and Republicans widens to 65 points when looking at those who call the charges “very serious” (84% of Democrats feel that way vs. 19% of Republicans; 53% of independents say the same).

    While many of Trump’s rivals are carefully avoiding direct confrontation with the former president, Trump is taking direct aim at DeSantis.

    Top Trump advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita sent an open memo on Thursday attacking DeSantis’ efforts to reboot his campaign.

    “DeSantis’s campaign is marred by idiocy,” the memo reads, as it touts Trump’s lead in polls over his GOP rivals.

    The memo compared DeSantis’ campaign to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 bid and argued both campaigns overspent and didn’t fundraise enough. The late McCain and Trump had a bitter feud for years.

    “John McCain did not spend the opening week of his reboot explaining why his staff produced a video with Nazi imagery, and defending his comments that slavery provided ‘some benefit’ to enslaved Americans – while attacking black Republicans publicly in the process,” the memo reads, referencing several recent missteps DeSantis and his campaign have made.

    Developments on Capitol Hill also underscored that most of the GOP has not abandoned Trump.

    North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a member of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Republican leadership team, on Thursday called on Congress to scrutinize the federal investigation into Trump’s actions.

    Tillis said in a statement that the new indictment carries “a heavy burden” to show that “criminal conduct actually occurred.”

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  • Latest wave of migrants at US-Mexico border puts Biden under renewed pressure | CNN Politics

    Latest wave of migrants at US-Mexico border puts Biden under renewed pressure | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A new surge of migrants at the US-Mexico border has placed immense pressure on federal resources and tested President Joe Biden’s border policies only months after going into place, prompting fresh criticism from Republicans and concern within the administration over a politically delicate issue.

    Biden has been plagued by issues on the border since his first months in office when the US faced a surge of unaccompanied migrant children that caught officials flatfooted. Over the last two years, his administration has continued to face fierce pushback from Republicans – and at times, Democrats – over his immigration policies.

    That complicated political landscape was put into sharp focus this week when administration officials were forced to contend with images of migrants crossing into the US in large groups, while also heralding a major move that will make hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans already in the US eligible to work, addressing a major sticking point with allies in New York.

    But the new wave of newcomers – many of whom are from Venezuela – paints a grim outlook for the fall as Biden ramps up his reelection campaign and Republicans continue to hammer the administration over its handling of the border.

    On Thursday, Biden blasted Republicans in Congress during remarks at the 46th Annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Gala in Washington, DC, saying they “continue to undermine our border security” by blocking bipartisan efforts to pass immigration reform.

    “We need our colleagues to act – for decades, immigration reform has been bipartisan in this country,” he said.

    “Unfortunately, MAGA Republicans in Congress spent four years gutting the immigration system under my predecessor,” he added.

    In the absence of immigration reform, the administration has put in place a patchwork of policies to try to stem the flow of migrants journeying to the US southern border amid unprecedented mass migration in the western hemisphere.

    Earlier this year, the administration rolled out new and additional avenues for migrants to enter the US legally, like a mobile app, to keep people from crossing unlawfully. They have also stood up centers in the hemisphere to allow migrants to apply to come to the US.

    But desperation and disinformation from smugglers have prompted migrants to cross anyway. Homeland Security officials are monitoring the situation and while they gave no clear explanation for what prompted the latest surge, they cited poor economies, authoritarian regimes and the climate crisis as forces driving migration.

    This week, US Border Patrol apprehended more than 8,000 migrants daily, according to two Homeland Security officials. That’s up from around 3,500 daily border arrests after the Covid-era border restriction known as Title 42 expired in May and triggered more severe consequences for people who crossed the border illegally.

    The Department of Homeland Security has ramped up capacity in border facilities to accommodate the growing number of migrants, as well as continued to conduct deportation flights of migrants deemed ineligible to stay in the United States. US officials are also coordinating with Mexico to try to drive down crossings.

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is set to travel to the border on Saturday, going to McAllen, Texas, for a meeting with President Xiomara Castro of Honduras.

    The Department of Defense, for its part, is sending 800 new active-duty personnel to the US-Mexico border, in addition to the 2,500 National Guard members already in place, to provide support to federal authorities.

    The arrival of migrants at the US southern border also affects inner cities, where asylum seekers usually reside as they go through their immigration proceedings, expanding the scope of the issue for the Biden administration.

    The administration addressed a major concern among Democrats this week by making more than 472,000 Venezuelans already in the US eligible for Temporary Protected Status, which provides deportation protections and allows them to work in the US. Democratic allies had urged the White House to speed up the ability for Venezuelans to obtain work authorization so they wouldn’t have to rely on social services.

    “As a result of this decision, immigrants will be temporarily allowed to work, fill needed jobs and support their families while awaiting an asylum determination. The decision will also substantially reduce the cost to New York taxpayers with respect to the sheltering of asylum-seekers,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom are New York Democrats, in a statement.

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  • Does the US prosecute more Republicans or Democrats? Here’s some data | CNN Politics

    Does the US prosecute more Republicans or Democrats? Here’s some data | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez was indicted Friday for the second time in 10 years on bribery and corruption charges.

    In this new case, federal authorities allege he and his wife accepted a luxury Mercedes, envelopes full of cash and multiple bars of gold in exchange for influence and favors. It’s wild. Read CNN’s report.

    Menendez denies the allegations, and he has a track record of beating bribery charges. The last time the government took him to court, a jury deadlocked, a judge acquitted him of some charges and the government finally dropped that separate set of bribery charges. Menendez was able to win reelection.

    He’s up for reelection again next year, and Democrats badly need to keep his New Jersey seat if they have any hope of maintaining control of the Senate.

    The case, if nothing else, is a serious complication to former President Donald Trump’s often-repeated claim that he is the subject of a partisan “witch hunt.”

    An unusually feisty Attorney General Merrick Garland rejected any such claim during testimony on Capitol Hill this week.

    Watch Garland’s response to GOP accusations

    “Our job is not to do what is politically convenient,” he said. “Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress or from anyone else about who or what to criminally investigate.”

    The prosecution, again, of Menendez, which is a major headache for Democrats, could help prove this point. So should the prosecution of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, in a gun case that is rarely brought as a standalone charge.

    But it is worth looking at the recent history of Department of Justice prosecutions of lawmakers. Is one party targeted more than another?

    Here’s a look at active and recent federal cases against federal lawmakers and governors. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but it is what I could find going back to 2000 in CNN’s coverage and from other news outlets.

    There is one against a Republican, Rep. George Santos of New York, and one against a Democrat, Menendez.

    There is also a non-prosecution to mention. Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican, was informed this year by the DOJ that he would not be charged in a long-running sex trafficking probe.

    These are federal cases against current or former federal lawmakers. I was able to find nine targeting Republicans and eight targeting Democrats.

    Former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, a Republican from Nebraska – Found guilty in 2022 of three felonies in a case that centered on campaign contributions.

    Former Rep. TJ Cox, a Democrat from California – Still awaiting trial after his 2022 indictment, including for fraudulent campaign contributions.

    Former Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California – Sentenced to 11 months in prison for misusing campaign funds, but later pardoned by Trump.

    Former Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican from New York – Sentenced to 26 months in prison for insider trading, but later pardoned by Trump.

    Former Rep. Corrine Brown, a Democrat from Florida – Served more than two years for setting up a false charity.

    Former Rep. Steve Stockman, a Republican from Texas – Sentenced to 10 years in prison for multiple felonies including fraud and money laundering, but pardoned by Trump after serving part of his sentence.

    Former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from New York – Sentenced to 21 months in prison for sexting with a minor.

    Former Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Democrat from Pennsylvania – Sentenced to 10 years in prison for racketeering, fraud and money laundering.

    Former Rep. Michael Grimm, a Republican from New York – Pleaded guilty and sentenced to eight months in prison for tax evasion. Attempted to run again for Congress.

    Former Rep. Rick Renzi, a Republican from Arizona – Sentenced to three years for corruption. Pardoned by Trump after he served time.

    Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey – Acquitted by a judge and other charges dismissed after a jury deadlocked in a bribery case.


    Former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a Democrat from Illinois – Sentenced to 30 months in prison for misusing campaign funds.

    Former Sen. Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska – Conviction by jury for lying on ethics forms was later set aside over allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

    Former Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat from Louisiana – Sentenced to 13 years for corruption and soliciting bribes. There was video of him taking $100,000 from an African official. Served multiple years in prison, but many of the charges were later vacated by a judge based on a US Supreme Court decision.

    Former Rep. Bob Ney, a Republican from Ohio – Sentenced to 30 months after a guilty plea for corruption tied to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

    Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a Republican from California – Sentenced to eight years in prison after a guilty plea for bribery. Later pardoned by Trump.

    Former Rep. James Traficant, a Democrat from Ohio – Sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption after defending himself during trial. Was later expelled from the House.

    Two Republican governors and two Democratic governors have been convicted in federal courts in recent decades:

    Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was convicted for bribery and corruption. But the US Supreme Court changed the rules in corruption and bribery cases when it threw out the case against McDonnell.

    Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, was convicted for trying to sell his power to appoint a replacement to Barack Obama’s Senate seat. His sentence was later commuted by Trump.

    Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat, was convicted by a jury of bribery and corruption and was sentenced to more than six years in prison.

    Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, was convicted on corruption charges after an FBI sting.

    Did we miss a federal lawmaker convicted or charged? Let me know at zachary.wolf@cnn.com.

    Local prosecutions – like the state or local cases against former Rep. Trey Radel, the Republican from Florida, for cocaine possession in Washington, DC, or former Sen. Larry Craig, the Republican from Idaho, for lewd behavior in the Minneapolis airport – don’t really fit here since they were not conducted by the Department of Justice.

    Some notable recent DOJ prosecutions have focused on Democrats at the state level, like Andrew Gillum, the Democrat and former Tallahassee, Florida, mayor who ran for governor and lost to Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2018. Gillum was recently acquitted of lying to the FBI.

    Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, also a Democrat, was sentenced to three years in prison after she pleaded guilty to charges related to a scheme in which local nonprofit organizations bought her self-published children’s book.

    Trump likes to argue he’s the subject of a conspiratorial “witch hunt” engineered by a deep state.

    Why, he will often say, was Hillary Clinton not prosecuted for her email server while he is being prosecuted for mishandling classified material?

    This forgets the history of the 2016 election, which Clinton has said she lost because of then-FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the investigation of her emails. Comey did not charge her before the election but did criticize her, and then, 11 days before Election Day, he said the investigation had been reopened.

    These whataboutisms can go on and on without changing anyone’s mind.
    This story has been updated to include additional details.

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

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

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • ‘They are going off the Richter scale, both sides’: Manchin flirts with becoming an independent | CNN Politics

    ‘They are going off the Richter scale, both sides’: Manchin flirts with becoming an independent | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Joe Manchin, the moderate West Virginia Democrat who has yet to decide whether to run for reelection next year or mount a long-shot third party bid for the White House, said Thursday that he’s “thinking seriously” about becoming an independent.

    Manchin has long flirted with the idea of leaving the Democratic Party, something he reiterated on Hoppy Kercheval’s radio show on Thursday, saying he’s “absolutely” considering it.

    If Manchin became an independent and caucused with Democrats, the chamber would still have a 51-49 Democratic majority. If he decided not to caucus with Democrats, he would lose his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, so he’s unlikely to go that route.

    “I would think very seriously about that. I’ve been thinking about that for quite some time,” he said when asked if he’d become an independent. “I haven’t made any decisions whatsoever on any of my political direction. I want to make sure that my voice is truly an independent voice.”

    In the interview, Manchin tried to portray both parties as beholden to their most extreme voices, while also suggesting there could be room for a third party presidential candidate if President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are the only two choices.

    “They are going off the Richter scale, both sides, so I’m – Hoppy, I just can’t, I can’t accept either party, to be honest with you, right now,” he said.

    Manchin added: “I’m thinking seriously, what’s the best – for me, I have to have peace of mind, basically. The brand has become so bad, the ‘D’ brand and ‘R’ brand. In West Virginia, the ‘D’ brand, because it’s national brand. It’s not the Democrats in West Virginia, it’s the Democrats in Washington or the Washington policies of the Democrats.”

    See why Dems are worried about this potential third-party candidate

    If Manchin announces that he is running for reelection in 2024, he’ll will have a difficult road in a state that Trump resoundingly carried twice.

    Manchin, who appeared at an event for the third party group “No Labels” last month, also pushed back on the idea that a third party candidate would help Trump’s chances of taking back the White House. “I don’t see that favoring either side because you just can’t tell how this is going to break,” he said.

    He added, “If we can create a movement, a party that people understand, we could have a voice, we can make a big, big splash, and maybe bring the traditional parties of the Democrat, Republican Party (to) what they used to be, back to what they should be today.”

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  • Bob Menendez remains defiant amid bribery charges and calls to resign | CNN Politics

    Bob Menendez remains defiant amid bribery charges and calls to resign | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey remained defiant on Monday after being indicted on bribery charges at the end of last week, saying he believes he will be exonerated as he responded to some of the specific charges and evidence outlined by prosecutors.

    Menendez’s comments come amid a flurry of calls for his resignation – including from his own party and from his Senate colleagues. On Monday, Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Peter Welch of Vermont became the latest Democrats in the chamber call on Menendez to step down, joining Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman.

    In a statement delivered to reporters, Menendez offered some of his first public defense against some of the evidence discovered by investigators during their search of his home, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, which he argued he had on hand for emergencies and described as an “old-fashioned” habit derived from his family’s experience in Cuba.

    “For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account, which I have kept for emergencies, and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba,” said Menendez. “Now this may seem old fashioned, but these were monies drawn from my personal savings account based on the income that I have lawfully derived over those 30 years.”

    According to the indictment, searches of Menendez’s home and safe deposit box that federal agents conducted in 2022 turned up nearly $500,000 in cash, including in envelopes inside jackets emblazoned with Menendez’s name. Prosecutors say some of the envelopes had the fingerprints or DNA of one of the business contacts from whom the senator is accused of taking bribes.

    Menendez has been charged with three alleged crimes, including being on the receiving end of a bribery conspiracy. The conspiracy counts also charge his wife and three people described as New Jersey associates and businessmen.

    The group is accused of coordinating to use Menendez’s power as a US senator to benefit them personally and to benefit Egypt.

    On Monday, Menendez defended his record as it relates to Egypt, saying, “If you look at my actions related to Egypt during the period described in this indictment, and throughout my whole career, my record is clear and consistent in holding Egypt accountable for its unjust detention of American citizens and others, its human rights abuses, its deepening relationship with Russia, and efforts that have eroded the independence of the nation’s judiciary, among a myriad of concerns.”

    Menendez has been called upon to resign by a growing list of prominent Democrats – including the New Jersey governor and six members of the state’s congressional delegation. Rep. Andy Kim announced Saturday plans to challenge Menendez in the Democratic primary next year should Menendez run again for his US Senate seat.

    And on Monday, Brown and Welch joined Fetterman to become the second and third Senate Democrats to call for Menendez to step down.

    “Senator Menendez has broken the public trust and should resign from the U.S. Senate,” said Brown, who is running for reelection next year.

    Welch said in a statement later in the day that “the shocking and specific allegations against Senator Menendez have wholly compromised his capacity to be that effective Senator,” adding: “I encourage Senator Menendez to resign.”

    Fetterman, who first called for Menendez’s resignation over the weekend, will return $5,000 in donations his campaign received from Menendez’s political action committee, according to the Pennsylvania Democrat’s office.

    The New Jersey senator has denied wrongdoing and pushed back on calls to resign.

    On Monday, Menendez accused those who “rushed to judgment” of doing so for “political expediency.”

    “I recognize this will be the biggest fight yet,” Menendez said, referencing the legal battle ahead. “But as I have stated throughout this whole process, I firmly believe that when all the facts are presented, not only will I be exonerated, but I still will be New Jersey’s senior senator.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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

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


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

    David Weiss, left, and Hunter Biden

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Garland appoints special counsel to Hunter Biden case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Abortion politics take center stage after Biden campaign capitalizes on GOP debate rift | CNN Politics

    Abortion politics take center stage after Biden campaign capitalizes on GOP debate rift | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    More than a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican candidates remain split over how to move forward on abortion, a political liability Democrats are eager to exploit regardless of who becomes the Republican nominee.

    The GOP divide was laid bare on the debate stage this week, as candidates backed a 15-week abortion ban, deferred to the states or tried to split the difference. President Joe Biden’s campaign responded immediately in a new digital ad, painting the field’s top contenders as extreme on the issue – and signaling what the Democratic campaign is likely to focus on in the coming year.

    When it comes to the future of abortion access, Republican candidates are facing pressure on all sides.

    GOP-led state legislatures have passed a wave of complete or near-total abortion bans that go beyond what most Americans support. Voters have supported abortion rights ballot initiatives and candidates in several key elections over the last year. And anti-abortion and evangelical groups are demanding presidential candidates go on the offensive and get as specific as possible.

    “The debate reflected the many different views among Republicans regarding abortion policy: not only what the policy ought to be, but what level of government ought to be making the decisions,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “There’s no real consensus at this point.”

    Biden’s reelection campaign has also homed in on remarks GOP candidates made on abortion during the debate. In talking points sent out to surrogates Wednesday night, the campaign claimed Republicans “spent two hours shouting over each other on … who has the best plan to ban abortion nationwide,” CNN reported Thursday.

    Biden’s team followed up Friday morning with a digital ad, “These Guys,” highlighting comments former President Donald Trump, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have made on abortion, including a clip of DeSantis on the debate stage. The ad, aimed at women in seven battleground states, is part of a $25 million ad campaign CNN first reported earlier this week.

    The ad also reaffirms Biden’s stance on abortion: that the U.S. should maintain the standard set in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which allowed for abortion up until fetal viability, generally viewed as around 24 weeks.

    “This ad is the first of many that will hold all MAGA Republicans accountable for their extreme, losing positions throughout the cycle, while also highlighting the President’s support for women and their fundamental freedoms,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.

    Polling suggests that Americans support some legal abortion, but with limits. Seventy-three percent of respondents to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released last month said abortion should be allowed during the first six weeks of pregnancy, including 88% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans surveyed. Asked if states should allow abortion at 15 weeks, 51% of those surveyed said yes, including 75% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans.

    Only 27% of those surveyed supported allowing abortion until 24 weeks of pregnancy.

    Democrats are hoping that abortion access will continue to be an issue that helps them with voters heading into 2024. Since last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturned Roe and left abortion access up to individual states, Democrats and abortion rights activists have racked up a number of wins in special elections and ballot initiatives, and the party overperformed in the 2022 midterm elections.

    Trump – whose handpicked nominees lost key Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia – went on to write a January social media post blaming the party’s midterm losses on “the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that insisted on No Exceptions.”

    Tom Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic political targeting firm, said he expects abortion will be an even stronger issue for his party heading into the 2024 election.

    “The evidence that we’re seeing at this point is that abortion rights as a political issue is having an even greater impact than it did last year, which is saying a lot because it had a huge impact on elections in 2022,” he said.

    Bonier cited two causes for abortion’s growing influence. Voters, he said, no longer have to imagine what life would look like after Roe. They’re experiencing it firsthand. At the same time, Republicans have not adopted their message to address the political climate, he said. That dynamic was on display in the ad released by the Biden campaign Friday.

    “It literally speaks for itself as an issue at this point, that Republicans have not moderated, that in some ways they’ve actually got further to the right,” he said.

    Nearly two dozen states have moved to ban or restrict abortion in the wake of Dobbs. Some of the bans have been blocked in court, including the six-week limit DeSantis signed in April. Abortion is currently legal in Florida until 15 weeks of pregnancy.

    Republicans have begun to coalesce around the idea of a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion group, has called on candidates to support the 15-week limit at minimum, with room for states to pass more restrictive measures.

    “A number of GOP officeholders and even presidential aspirants use ‘states’ rights’ as an excuse to tape their mouths shut on abortion,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, wrote in a Thursday Washington Post op-ed with former Trump White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway. “This should not, and will not, stand.”

    Former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and DeSantis all declined to commit to signing a 15-week ban, while former Vice President Mike Pence and Scott did. The latter two criticized their opponents in post-debate interviews. Scott said in a Thursday Fox News interview that it is “a problem for our nation” that some candidates said they would not commit to a 15-week ban, while Pence also took a jab at Trump.

    “Whether it be with Gov. Desantis or Nikki Haley or others onstage, frankly most of the candidates running, including the one that did not show up tonight, are all trying to relegate the question of abortion as a states-only issue,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash on Wednesday.

    Trump has not said whether he would back a 15-week ban and has suggested he would leave it with the states. In May, he criticized the six-week ban DeSantis signed as “too harsh” for the anti-abortion movement but declined to say whether he supported it personally. A month later he told the audience at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference that while there “remains a vital role for the federal government” to play in abortion policy, people want it to be a state-level issue.

    “I believe the greatest progress for pro-life is now being made in the states, where everyone wanted to be,” Trump said. Pence used his remarks at the same conference to call on every GOP candidate to back a 15-week ban as a national standard.

    If a consensus is reached it will likely be whatever the eventual Republican nominee backs, though Ayres would advise candidates to leave the issue to the states — if that’s what they personally believe, he said.

    “Ultimately, a candidate has to look into his or her heart and soul to find a position they’re comfortable with, otherwise, they’ll never be able to articulate it effectively,” he said.

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  • Congress poised for messy September as McCarthy races to avoid government shutdown | CNN Politics

    Congress poised for messy September as McCarthy races to avoid government shutdown | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    GOP hardliners in the House are eager to play a game of chicken over the end-of-the-month deadline to fund federal agencies, seeking to force the White House and Senate to make a choice: Accept a slew of conservative priorities or risk a debilitating government shutdown.

    And caught in the middle, once again, is Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

    In a private conference call last week, McCarthy urged his colleagues to back a short-term spending deal to avoid an October 1 shutdown and instead focus their energy on the larger funding fight later in the fall, sources on the call told CNN. His argument: The year-long spending bills to fund federal agencies would be better suited to enact cuts and policy changes they have demanded, including on hot-button issues like border security and immigration policy.

    And, he argued, if they spend too much time squabbling among themselves, they’ll end up getting jammed by senators in both parties and forced to accept higher spending levels than they’d like.

    “It’s a great place to have a very strong fight and to hold our ground,” McCarthy told his colleagues, according to a person on the call, referring to having an immigration fight on the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security – not on short-term funding legislation that the far-right House Freedom Caucus is pushing to use as a bargaining chip.

    As the Senate returns this week after its August recess, and the House reconvenes next week, the two chambers have little time to resolve major differences over funding the government. The two sides are hundreds of billions of dollars apart after McCarthy backed away from a previous deal he cut with the White House and later agreed to pursue deeper cuts demanded by his right-flank.

    Now, the two sides will have to work together to punt the fight until potentially early December and pass a short-term funding bill – all as Congress faces other key end-of-the-month deadlines, such as an extension of federal aviation programs, and as a potential impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden looms in the House.

    None of it will be that easy.

    The White House and senators from both parties want to tie the short-term funding bill to $24 billion in aid to Ukraine and with another $16 billion in much-needed funds for communities ravaged by a spate of natural disasters. But a contingent of vocal House conservatives are furiously opposed to quickly passing more aid to Ukraine – while GOP sources said McCarthy privately voiced displeasure at the White House for formally unveiling its funding request during the congressional recess and not briefing lawmakers.

    Moreover, to pass legislation in the House by a majority vote, the chamber must first approve a rule – a procedural vote that is typically only supported by the majority party and opposed by the minority party. Yet several hard-right conservatives told CNN they are prepared to take down the rule over the spending bill if their demands aren’t met.

    That would leave McCarthy with a choice: Either side with conservative hardliners and set up a major clash with the White House or cut a deal with Democrats and pass the spending bill by a two-thirds majority, a threshold that would allow them to approve the bill without having to adopt a rule first but could force McCarthy to give more concessions to Democrats.

    But if he works with Democrats to circumvent his far-right, McCarthy risks enraging the very members who have threatened to push for a vote to oust him from the speakership.

    GOP Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, who leads one of the appropriations subcommittees, acknowledged that they’ll need Democratic support for both a short-term spending patch and for any longer-term bills to fund the government – which he said could put McCarthy in a predicament.

    “The challenge for McCarthy, and I’ll be real honest with you, is that if he works with the Democrats, obviously, the Democrats are not going to do it for free. They want something. So, it’s going to be a compromise – one of those really bad words in Washington for some reason,” Simpson told CNN. “Then you’re going to find a resolution introduced on the floor to vacate the chair.”

    One GOP lawmaker acknowledged there have been conversations among conservative hardliners about using a “motion to vacate” – a procedural tool that forces a floor vote to oust the speaker – to gain leverage in the funding fight, if they feel like McCarthy isn’t sticking to his spending promises or gives too much away to Democrats.

    A few on the right, who were furious with McCarthy over his bipartisan debt ceiling deal, briefly floated the idea of triggering a motion to vacate this summer, but then dialed back their threat when it became clear there wasn’t much support for the move.

    McCarthy allies say the hard-liners are playing with fire.

    GOP Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a Nebraska swing district won by Biden, said of the right’s hardline approach to spending: “It’s not realistic.”

    “This theory that you gotta have 100% (of what you want), and if you don’t get 100, you’ll take zero – it’s not that the way it works,” he added. “And it’s not good for the country.”

    Part of the McCarthy strategy to get conservative hardliners on board is to channel their energy on other matters that won’t lead to an end-of-the-month shutdown.

    In recent weeks, McCarthy has tried to use the right’s desire to investigate and impeach Biden as part of his argument against a shutdown, warning that their probes into the administration would have to come to a halt if the government were to shut down.

    Meanwhile, the House will consider its homeland spending bill on the floor the week they return from recess, giving the right a fresh opportunity to offer amendments and shape their party’s border policy — and train their focus away from the must-pass short-term extension.

    Democrats are already trying to pin the blame on any shutdown on the House GOP.

    “When the Senate returns next week, our focus will be on funding the government and preventing House Republican extremists from forcing a government shutdown,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a letter to his colleagues on Friday.

    How McCarthy deals with the immediate spending demands remains to be seen, including whether he’ll agree to pair the short-term spending bill with any aid to Ukraine.

    While Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is a staunch advocate for Ukraine aid, McCarthy has been more circumspect amid loud calls from his right-flank against pouring more money into the war-torn country.

    And as he toured Maui on Saturday, McCarthy acknowledged the need for more disaster relief aid, though it’s unclear if he will separate that package from Ukraine funding — even as the White House and senators in both parties want them to move together.

    Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told CNN that disaster relief and Ukraine “need to be separated.”

    “The president needs to come forward, or the speaker, leadership of the Republican Party, the Democrat Party need to come together to share with the American people what we’re doing, what’s the outcome of this?” Hern said.

    Simpson said of tying Ukraine aid to the short-term spending bill: “That’s a tougher sell. Particularly in our conference.”

    But advocates of more Ukraine aid say that the longer that Congress waits, the more difficult it will be to approve money needed to deter Russian aggression and the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s war.

    “I think we need to get that done because we’re not going to get it done next year, right?” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat. “Once you get truly into the presidential cycle, everything gets that much more difficult.”

    Hard-line conservatives are already threatening to make McCarthy’s calculus more complicated if he cuts a short-term spending deal with Democrats. Several of them are already threatening to oppose any rule if the bill falls short of their demands – a tactic that they have employed this Congress to bring the House to a halt. It would take just five Republicans to take down a rule, assuming all Democrats vote against it as they typically do.

    Rep. Ralph Norman – who serves on the House Rules Committee, where such a procedural step would originate – told CNN he hasn’t made up his mind yet on the rule.

    But the South Carolina Republican said he has concerns about the supplemental request for Ukraine aid, which he said needs to be offset, as well as top-line funding levels for their remaining spending bills.

    “There is no appetite for getting our financial house in order by anyone of either party,” he said.

    Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, another hardliner, also hinted that he may vote against both the short-term spending bill and the rule, but when asked for clarification by CNN, he said: “I’m on a very different decision calculus than this.”

    Gaetz didn’t respond to a follow-up question about what he meant, but later posted on social media a long list of grievances he has with GOP leadership – including on spending issues – and ended his post with: “We are going to have to seize the initiative and make some changes.”

    Some have made their demands directly known to GOP leaders, including Virginia Rep. Bob Good, who said on last week’s conference call that lawmakers shouldn’t fear a potential shutdown, according to a source on the call.

    Other Republicans made clear they want no part of a shutdown – something California Rep. Darrell Issa said is “not constructive.”

    “We will get there,” Issa said of funding the government. “Now if we get there earlier without a shutdown, the American people are better served.”

    When asked how the next few months will shake out, Simpson had some words of warning: “I tell people: buckle up. It’s going to be crazy for September, October, November, December,” Simpson said. “The next four months are going to be wild.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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