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(WASHINGTON) — Following a holiday weekend with at least 12 mass shootings across the country, President Joe Biden met with New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the White House on Tuesday morning, as families in Uvalde, Texas, prepared tiny caskets for the first funerals this week.

Biden told reporters he would meet with lawmakers on the issue of guns, but he didn’t say when that would happen or provide more details, according to the print pool reporter covering Biden’s Oval Office meeting with New Zealand’s prime minister.

Responding to a question about whether he’d meet with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell about guns, Biden replied, “I will meet with the Congress on guns, I promise you,” according to the print reporter.

Shortly before, inside the Oval Office, Biden praised Ardern’s leadership on a range of issues and said, “We need your guidance.”

“There’s an expression by an Irish poet, it’s ‘too long a suffering that makes us stone to the heart.’ Well, there’s an awful lot of suffering,” Biden told Ardern. “I’ve gotten to more mass shooting aftermaths than I think any president in American history, unfortunately…And so much of it, much of it, is preventable, and the devastation is amazing.”

The two leaders were set to discuss combatting terrorism and radicalization to violence, the climate crisis, and the Indo-Pacific economy, according to the White House, but Ardern’s appearance in the wake of the elementary school massacre offered a side-by-side picture of two Western nations with starkly different responses to gun violence.

After a gunman murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, and streamed it on Facebook as it happened, Ardern led a dramatic push to restrict firearms in New Zealand within weeks of the attack. Less than a month after the attack, all but one of 120 Kiwi lawmakers voted to permanently ban military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles.

“Can I bring the sincere condolences from the people of Aldi and New Zealand for what you have experienced and Texas and New York, and it’s been devastating to see the impact on those communities,” Ardern said, also raising a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, this month where ten Black people were killed in a grocery store.

“Our experience, of course, in this regard, is our own but if there’s anything that we can share that would be of any value, we are here to share it,” she added.

In the U.S., meanwhile, gun control legislation has remained stalled for decades as Senate Republicans have used, or threatened to use, the filibuster to block such legislation. A small group of bipartisan senators — including Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., John Cornyn, R-Texas, Tom Tillis, R-N.C., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., are meeting by Zoom Tuesday afternoon on gun reform talks, multiple sources told ABC News, as advocates and everyday Americans alike demand action in the wake of the latest violence.

Asked last week about New Zealand’s decision to ban most semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles in 2019, Ardern explained to CBS host Stephen Colbert how the country introduced a system to buy back guns from civilians and destroy them.

“I can only speak to our experience in New Zealand, but you know when I watch from afar and see events such as those today I think of them not as a politician, I see them just as a mother and I’m so sorry for what has happened here,” Ardern said.

“Then I think about what happened to us and all I can reflect is — we are a very pragmatic people. When we saw something like that happen everyone said ‘never again,’ so then it was incumbent on us as politicians to respond to that,” she continued. “Now, we have legitimate needs for guns in our country for things like pest control and to protect our biodiversity, but you don’t need a military-style, semi-automatic weapon to do that. So we got rid of them.”

After Biden told protesters in Uvalde on Sunday “we will” when they demanded the U.S. “do something,” it’s unclear if the president will get more involved on the issue since largely punting action to Congress. Biden has suggested assault weapons be banned and that lawmakers revisit the 1994 law but said in Texas, “I can’t outlaw a weapon. I can’t change the background checks.”

Tuesday also marks the first White House visit of a leader from New Zealand since 2014.

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(WASHINGTON) — A Democrat-linked lawyer charged by Special Counsel John Durham with lying to the FBI in 2016 was found not guilty a federal jury in Washington on Tuesday following a nearly two-week trial that served as the first in-court test of Durham’s more than three-year investigation into the Russia probe.

Michael Sussmann was charged by Durham last year for allegedly bringing forward a tip to a senior FBI official in September 2016 about a potential connection between computer servers for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s company and Russia’s Alfa bank — and lying about who he was representing at the time.

“While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case,” Durham said in a statement.

Through multiple days of witness testimony and evidence exhibits displayed in the D.C. district court, Durham’s prosecutors sought to convince the jury that Sussmann brought the info to then-FBI general counsel James Baker as part of Sussmann’s work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and a technology company executive who had worked on assembling the data.

“He knew that if he told Mr. Baker that he was there on behalf of the Clinton campaign, the chances of the FBI investigating would be diminished,” assistant special counsel Jon Algor said Friday in closing arguments.

They alleged that Sussmann set up the meeting with the hope of generating an “October surprise,” to leak that the FBI was investigating a potentially suspicious tie between Trump’s campaign and Russia at a time when Russia was carrying out its hack-and-dump campaign against the Democrats.

While Sussmann’s attorneys acknowledged that he was at the time representing Clinton’s campaign and a tech executive named Rodney Joffe in handling the allegations, they claimed Sussmann’s intention in setting up the meeting with Baker was to alert the FBI to what he believed was concerning information and notify them that major news outlets were also pursuing it as a story.

In their closing argument Friday, Sussmann’s attorney Sean Berkowitz accused Durham’s team of pushing baseless “political conspiracy theories” through their prosecution of Sussmann, who he said brought forth the information to Baker in genuine good faith.

As a result of Sussmann’s meeting with Baker, according to his attorneys, the FBI was able to convince the New York Times to hold off on reporting the Alfa Bank allegations while investigators evaluated the data — which they quickly determined showed nothing nefarious. When the Times did eventually report on the Alfa Bank matter, it was part of a pre-election piece with the headline, ‘Investigating Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link To Russia.’

“The meeting … is the exact opposite of what the Clinton campaign would have wanted,” Sussmann’s attorney Michael Bosworth said last week.

The two-week trial featured testimony from a host of current and former law enforcement officials as well as former key figures in Clinton’s campaign.

While the charge leveled against Sussmann was narrow, in the months since his indictment Durham used the case to bring forward other evidence that prosecutors suggested showed a broader conspiracy, alleging Clinton’s campaign and other political operatives sought to gin up and spread false accusations to smear Trump and use the nation’s law enforcement agencies as political tools.

But Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign’s former general counsel, and Robby Mook, the campaign’s manager, testified there was no discussion in the highest levels of the campaign about ordering or authorizing anyone to bring the Alfa Bank allegations directly to the FBI.

While Mook acknowledged that Clinton herself at one point signed off on disseminating the unverified allegations to the press so journalists could “vet” and report them out, he sought to throw cold water on the that the campaign believed it would have benefited from getting the FBI involved.

“Going to the FBI does not seem like an effective way to get information out to the public,” Mook said.

Mook said that after Clinton authorized sending the Alfa Bank data out to journalists, a press official — not Sussmann — was tasked with pushing it out to reporters. A report on the allegations was later published by Slate days before the election, though it made no mention of the FBI’s investigation into the data.

Sussmann’s attorneys also focused their strategy around undercutting testimony from the government’s star witness, Baker, who said under questioning from the special counsel’s office last week that he was “100% confident” that Sussmann told him in their Sep. 19 meeting he was not there on behalf of a particular client.

That testimony, Sussmann’s attorneys noted, directly conflicted with past statements Baker had made in interviews under oath with congressional investigators and the DOJ’s inspector general — where he either said that he believed Sussmann was there on behalf of unnamed cybersecurity experts or didn’t remember if Sussmann had mentioned representing clients one way or another.

But prosecutors also entered evidence this week showing that Sussmann had billed several flash drives he purchased days before the meeting to the Clinton campaign — two of which Durham says Sussmann provided to Baker in their meeting that included the unverified data purporting to show a connection between Trump and Alfa bank.

Additionally, they flagged multiple hours of time entries Sussmann had billed to the Clinton Campaign and the tech executive Rodney Joffe leading up to and after the meeting with Baker, where he wrote he was working on ‘confidential’ issues that Durham says was in reference to the Trump-Alfa bank allegations.

“If an opponent had brought this information, [the FBI] would want to know more about it,” Algor said. “They would question the credibility of the source and whether the FBI was being used — being played by politics.”

In the three years since Durham was initially assigned to look into the origins of the Russia investigation, he has secured one guilty plea of a former lawyer with the FBI who admitted to doctoring an email that was used to support a surveillance application that targeted a former Trump campaign aide.

The only other indictment brought by Durham outside of Sussmann was against Igor Danchenko, a lead analyst who contributed to the now-infamous Steele Dossier, who was charged last year with five counts of lying to the FBI about who his sources were for claims in the dossier. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to all counts and his case is set for trial in Virginia in the fall.

The FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was not launched as a result of the Alfa Bank allegations or the Steele Dossier, and neither eventually factored into findings released by special counsel Robert Mueller following his two-year investigation. While Mueller’s probe found numerous instances of contacts between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to Russia’s government, he determined evidence didn’t support charging any individuals of engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Russia.

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(WASHINGTON) — Bipartisan talks about passing a new federal gun law continued through Memorial Day weekend despite members of Congress being out of session in a weeklong recess that also set a deadline for a possible breakthrough, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said on Monday.

In a tweet, the lead Democrat on the negotiations wrote that he and others in his party have discussed with some Republican Senate colleagues throughout the holiday weekend details of possible bill intended to address gun violence.

The Senate left Washington on Thursday, with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., indicating a short turnaround for the compromise legislation — members would vote upon a June 6 return to the chamber.

“In between parades, I’ve been on the phone today w Republican and Democratic Senators trying to find the common denominator on a gun violence bill,” Murphy wrote on Twitter on Monday. “Senator Schumer has given us just over a week to find a compromise. This time, failure cannot be an option.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has blessed the negotiations, tasking Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn to take the lead for the GOP in the talks. Murphy has said that in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings over the past few weeks, “many more” Republicans appear willing to discuss gun reform than in the past.

While the issue remains intensely divisive in Congress — where conservatives have opposed major legislative efforts regarding guns — Cornyn echoed Murphy on Monday in saying that, at the least, the talks were ongoing.

“We’re already having those discussions in person and on the phone. Look forward to meeting on Tuesday through a Zoom call to try to see if we can agree on a basic framework about how we go forward,” he said.

Murphy told ABC News’ This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl on Sunday that the negotiations were “serious” and already circling some specifics, including so-called “red flag” laws that would allow the removal of firearms from people with a history of threatening or dangerous behavior.

“We have continued to work throughout the weekend. I was in touch with Sen. Cornyn and Sen. [Pat] Toomey, other Republicans and Democrats yesterday,” said Murphy, who represents the community that includes Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of a 2012 mass shooting.

“Inside this room we’re talking about ‘red flag’ laws, we’re talking about strengthening, expanding the background check system, if not universal background checks. We’re talking about safe storage,” Murphy said, noting that school safety measures and mental health resources were also discussed.

There has been talk about the “profile” of mass shooters, Murphy said — in particular the pattern of many of the perpetrators to be young men between 18 and 21 years old.

“Right now we’re having a discussion inside this room about the profile of the current mass shooter … That is a profile that does not allow you to buy a handgun but does allow you to buy an assault rifle. And so there are discussions happening in these rooms about how they recognize this profile and maybe make it a little bit harder for those individuals to quickly get their hands on weapons,” Murphy said.

“I don’t yet know exactly what’s possible, whether the votes are there to raise the age, but we’re having a discussion about what we do about that specific profile,” he said. “And it’s an encouraging conversation.”

Murphy, elected to the Senate in 2012, drew new attention in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting last week that left 19 students and two teachers dead. One of Congress’ most outspoken voices for gun control, Murphy again urged action including from Republicans, many of whom contend the laws are misplaced or violate the Second Amendment.

On This Week, Murphy reiterated his concern with the lack of federal legislation on the issue in the near-decade since Sandy Hook — a period that has also been stained by a slew of other high-profile mass shootings.

“And while, in the end, I may end up being heartbroken, I am at the table in a more significant way right now with Republicans and Democrats than ever before,” Murphy said. “Certainly, many more Republicans willing to talk right now than were willing to talk after Sandy Hook.”

Murphy pointed to his recent discussions with Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who now represents in Congress the site of another school shooting, in Parkland, where a gunman shot and killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

Following that massacre, then-Gov. Scott signed into law a bill that tightened gun control measures, including raising the minimum age for owning guns from 18 to 21.

“I had a long conversation with Sen. Scott last week,” Murphy said, “and had him tell me the story of how they were able to pass that legislation and get Republicans to support it.”

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(NEW YORK) — Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who represent the state where an 18-year-old gunman carried out one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings last week, are among Congress’ top recipients of contributions from pro-gun donors, campaign finance records show.

Cruz, in particular, has taken in the most money from pro-gun individuals and groups of anyone in the current Congress, amassing $442,000 over the course of his career, according to an analysis of disclosure reports by the nonpartisan campaign finance research group OpenSecrets.

Cornyn ranks third among current U.S. senators and representatives, receiving a total of $340,000 in contributions from pro-gun donors over his career, after Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., who has amassed $396,000, according to the analysis.

Direct contributions from pro-gun individuals and political action committees are limited to a relatively small amount each election cycle, compared to the millions of dollars that super PACs and various other unlimited-spending outside groups are allowed to spend in support of candidates independent of coordination with their campaigns. The National Rifle Association’s various outside spending committees, for example, spent more than $6 million supporting North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr against unsuccessful Democratic challenger Deborah Ross during the 2016 election cycle.

Still, direct contributions — although smaller in size — are an effective illustration of a candidate’s level of support from gun-rights advocates.

“Throughout his career, Sen. Cruz has passionately fought to protect families from criminals and defend Texans’ constitutional rights,” Cruz spokesperson Steve Guest told ABC News.

At the state level, the NRA and NRA Victory Fund have spent a total of $575,000 in local Texas elections since 2015, in both direct contributions to campaigns and independent ad spending in support of candidates, according to an analysis of state campaign disclosure reports by nonpartisan nonprofit Transparency USA, which tracks state-level political disclosures.

Campaign disclosure reports also show that executives of Daniel Defense, the maker of the assault weapon that the accused gunman allegedly used in last week’s shooting, have been major Republican donors over the last few years.

Between 2016 and 2020, the company’s president and CEO, Marvin Daniel, and his wife and COO, Cindy Daniel, together gave a total of $300,000 to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars more to numerous other Republican campaigns and committees over the years, according to disclosure filings.

The two are also regular donors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation PAC, together giving the group a total of $20,000 so far in the 2022 election cycle.

In addition, on Jan. 6, 2021, the company made a $100,000 donation to the Gun Owners Action Fund super PAC, which was launched shortly after the 2020 election to provide an 11th-hour boost to then-Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the Georgia Senate runoffs that month.

However, the super PAC’s treasurer, Nancy Watkins, told ABC News that the PAC refunded Daniel Defense’s $100,000 contribution “at the request of the donor” on May 10, 2022, and that the refund will be disclosed in July’s quarterly disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission, which covers April through June.

Watkins did not disclose why the donation was returned more than a year after it was made. Since the Georgia runoffs, the group has been largely dormant, according to its disclosure reports — not receiving significant donations or participating in political activities.

Representatives for Daniel Defense did not return ABC News’ request for comment.

In addition to Daniel Defense’s contribution, the Gun Owners Action Fund received donations from other gun manufacturers, including $100,000 from Sig Sauer in December 2020, and $10,000 from Luth-AR the following month. However the $100,000 donation from Sig Sauer was refunded in April, after the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint alleging the donation violated campaign finance law that prohibits federal contractors from making federal political contributions.

The super PAC was also heavily funded by ESAPAC, another super PAC that itself is funded by top GOP donors like the Ricketts family, Charles Schwab and Ken Griffith.

The emergence of new pro-gun PACs like the Gun Owners Action Fund comes as the National Rifle Association, the most high-profile gun rights group in the country, has been wracked by legal battles and threats of bankruptcy.

The NRA, which spent more than $56 million in super PAC and outside money during the 2016 election cycle — including spending more than $30 million to support Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton — has so far spent only $9,600 in outside spending for 2022 midterm candidates, according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of FEC data — a notably low figure even at this early stage in the cycle.

NRA representatives did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden told reporters on Monday he spent more than three and a half hours with survivors and the families of victims of last week’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

Returning to Washington, Biden said the pain he witnessed in Uvalde was “palpable” and “unnecessary” and that he was — and always had been — committed to gun control efforts intended to reduce more violence.

But there was only so much he could do as a president, he said. Major changes would need to be authorized by Congress, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers are again in negotiations over a possible bill despite how divided they remain over guns.

When a reporter asked Biden outside the White House if he felt more motivated to act on legislation now, in the wake of recent shootings such as Uvalde, he said he has been “motivated all along.”

“I’m going to continue to push and we’ll see how this works,” he said.

“I can’t outlaw a weapon. I can’t change the background checks,” he said.

This is where the legislature should act, he said.

For example, he said, “It makes no sense to be able to purchase something that can fire up to 300 rounds.”

He told reporters how as a senator he once spoke with trauma doctors who showed him an X-Ray of the damage a high-caliber weapon can inflict on the body — how “a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in a lung and we could probably get it out, may be able to get it and save the life, [but] a 9 mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”

“The idea of these high-caliber weapon, there’s simply no rational basis for it, in terms of whether this be about self-protection, hunting,” he said.

“The Constitution, the Second Amendment, was never absolute,” Biden said. “You couldn’t buy a canon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons.”

The president spoke with reporters moments after stepping off Marine One one day after his visit to Uvalde, where he told a crowd of demonstrators “we will” as they chanted for him to “do something” about gun violence.

The massacre in Texas was preceded less than two weeks earlier by another mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. Ten Black people were killed in a grocery store in what authorities suspect was a racially motivated attack.

Those back-to-back killings have prompted a group of bipartisan senators — four Republicans and five Democrats — to engage in initial conversations about new gun laws. Democrats need at least some GOP support, though conservatives largely oppose legislating the issue, instead focusing on the so-called “hardening” of school security and other measures.

The group of lawmakers intended to meet via video over the recess to continue hashing out where they stand and where a possible compromise could be brokered.

“We’re getting started to try to figure out if there’s a path to getting to a consensus, and we’ll see where it takes us,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said last week.

The White House, which took a more direct role in previous legislative priorities, has said the president will observe the process as it proceeds. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked repeatedly what the administration saw as its role in pushing for a new law.

“We really, truly leave the mechanics up to Sen. Schumer and Speaker Pelosi,” Jean-Pierre said last week, referring to the Senate majority leader and House speaker. “We are confident that Sen. Schumer will bring this forward. And again, it is time for Congress to act. This is what the president has been calling for since the beginning of his administration.”

Biden, who based his 2020 campaign in part on his record of working across the aisle as a senator, was asked on Monday if he thought Republicans would approach the issue differently this time. He said that he hadn’t spoken to any of them, “but my guess is yes, I think they’re going to take a hard look.”

When he landed in Uvalde on Sunday, he and first lady Jill Biden were greeted by state officials including Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a staunch opponent of the president’s agenda and a proponent of pro-gun laws.

The Bidens’ visit to the Uvalde was focused on meeting with the victims, their families and the first responders to the shooting — not promoting a legislative agenda. The president said Monday at the White House that he “deliberately did not engage in a debate about that with any Republican” during his trip.

He said he would continue to take executive actions regarding firearms and sounded a note of cautious optimism about where the congressional talks may lead.

“I consider Sen. [Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell a rational Republican, and [Sen. John] Cornyn is as well,” he said. “I think there’s a recognition on their part … that we can’t continue like this.”

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