(NEW YORK) — Multiple military reviews have found a cargo-plane crew acted appropriately and broke no rules in the course of a deadly incident during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, the Air Force announced Monday.
On Aug. 16, an Air Force C-17 landed at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport bringing equipment to assist in the evacuation of civilians when it was swarmed by hundreds of Afghans who had breached the airport perimeter, military officials said.
“Faced with a rapidly deteriorating security situation around the aircraft, the C-17 crew decided to depart the airfield as quickly as possible,” an Air Force statement said a day later.
Harrowing video of the scene showed a large crowd surround the moving aircraft — with some clinging on as it took off and some falling through the air.
Upon landing at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, human remains were found in the wheel well of the plane. The aircraft was temporarily impounded to give time for it to be inspected and for the remains to be recovered.
Among the dead, local authorities said, was teenage soccer player Zaki Anwari. The General Directorate of Physical Education and Sports said in a statement on Facebook at the time that he had fallen to his death.
“He was kind and patient, but like so many of our young people he saw the arrival of the Taliban as the end of his dreams and sports opportunities,” an agency spokesman told The New York Times then.
On Monday, the Air Force announced that reviews by the staff judge advocate offices of U.S. Central Command and Air Mobility Command had agreed the crew “was in compliance with applicable rules of engagement specific to the event and the overall law of armed conflict.”
The crew’s operational leadership also reviewed the mission and found that it had “acted appropriately and exercised sound judgment” by getting the plane airborne as quickly as possible, given the situation, according to Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek.
“The aircrew’s airmanship and quick thinking ensured the safety of the crew and their aircraft,” she said.
Stefanek also acknowledged the Afghans who died.
“This was a tragic event and our hearts go out to the families of the deceased,” she said.
(WASHINGTON) — In late April, after a year and a half of former President Donald Trump and his associates pushing false claims of election fraud, a few hundred attendees gathered at a golf resort in Williamsburg, Virginia, for an “Election Integrity Summit” organized by Trump allies who were at the forefront of his effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Inside a ballroom at the Kingsmill Resort, Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer who played a key role in the former president’s efforts to hold onto power, took the microphone and urged summit attendees to recruit and create election “task forces” in their communities ahead of the upcoming midterms to avoid a repeat of the last presidential election.
“Imagine if we had had local task forces in these counties? What if we had citizens like you in 2020, overseeing this?” Mitchell said at the private summit, which ABC News attended by purchasing a ticket.
“We could have stopped it,” Mitchell told the crowd. “That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing here tonight.”
‘Task forces’ around the country
The Virginia event is one of the latest in a blitz of summits being held in swing states across the country, led by Mitchell and organized by the “Election Integrity Network,” a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing nonprofit organization that is spearheaded by Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who is a senior partner, and Mitchell, who serves as a senior fellow.
The series of summits comes after Trump, who continues to spread false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, made donations amounting to $1 million from his political action committee’s war chest to CPI — one of his largest donations in the current election cycle. Despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud, many Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s assertions that the election was “stolen” and “rigged” — with 71% of Republicans agreeing with the former president’s claims that he was the rightful winner, according to a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Meadows, amid the Jan. 6 House committee’s ongoing investigation into the Capitol insurrection, has emerged as a key figure who at times acted as a mediator for Trump as he worked to overturn Biden’s win leading up to the Jan. 6 attack. Mitchell made headlines when she was one of the pro-Trump lawyers on the phone call in which the former president demanded of Georgia election officials that they “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s win, which sparked an ongoing investigation.
Now, months out from the 2022 midterms and with an eye on the 2024 presidential election, the group led by Meadows and Mitchell is working to put in place so-called “election integrity task forces” around the country. Their multi-day summits feature recruiting and training sessions for poll watchers and election officers, as well as panels hosted by Mitchell and others speaking on topics ranging from “The Left’s Plans to Corrupt the 2022 Election” to “Voting Systems and Machines” and “Building the Election Integrity Infrastructure.”
So far this year the group has held half a dozen summits in swing states including Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia, according to the group’s website. In June the group will host summits in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Tickets start at $30, and influential conservative groups including Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots Action have already participated in previous summits.
Meadows himself was announced to appear as the keynote speaker for summits in Georgia and Arizona, and was listed to speak on “What Happened in 2020 and What We Must Do to Protect Future Elections in Arizona,” according to a schedule posted by the group online. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke at a Florida summit hosted by CPI earlier this year, according to social media posts.
Neither Meadows nor Mitchell responded to a request for comment from ABC News. Officials with Trump’s Save America PAC also did not respond to a request for comment.
Inside the summit
The Virginia summit attended by ABC News in late April began with a two-hour “Poll Watcher & Election Officer Training Workshop” led by Clara Belle Wheeler from the conservative group Virginia Fair Elections.
“It takes an army,” Wheeler told the group gathered for the first session of the summit, urging attendees to become poll watchers or election officers ahead of the midterms, and then walking attendees through the process of how to register to volunteer.
Wheeler pointed to the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, won by Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, as a proof of concept heading into 2022.
“We made such an impact in the 2021 election that every major news outlet across the country talked about the army of poll watchers in Virginia,” Wheeler said.
Following the training session, attendees were moved into a ballroom to watch the 42-minute film from Citizens United president and close Trump ally David Bossie called “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” which claims that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg swung the 2020 election through the $419 million he donated to support voter turnout and education efforts. Attendees gave the screening a standing ovation, after which Citizens United’s JT Mastranadi took questions from the crowd.
Gowri Ramachandran, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a bipartisan public policy institute, warned that the efforts by CPI to recruit poll workers and election officers could be dangerous given the rhetoric used and the emphasis placed on false claims about the last election.
“It’s not healthy to recruit folks to either be poll workers or poll watchers with such an extreme hostile level of suspicion towards both election workers and their fellow citizens and their fellow voters,” Ramachandran told ABC News. “Especially because there is no reason to think that there was something that needed to be stopped in 2020. That’s a lie that the election was rigged. So telling people that becoming a poll worker or poll watcher is a way to stop something that that didn’t even happen in the past is just not a healthy way to bring people into the process.”
Ramachandran said that while it’s good that people are engaged in the process and have an interest in how elections are run, “it’s not good to, without context, without understanding, have a bunch of people who’ve been fed a diet of lies for the last year and a half about elections, have them go out and do this sort of [work] without context.”
Mitchell moderated multiple panels during the Virginia summit, including one titled, “The Left’s Plans to Corrupt the 2022 Election with Our Tax Dollars and How to Protect the Vulnerable Votes from Leftwing Vote Manipulators.”
According to a schedule obtained by ABC News, the Virginia summit also included panels featuring Tea Party Patriots cofounder Jenny Beth Martin and former Trump adviser Mike Roman, who pushed unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud after the 2020 election.
‘Control the local apparatus’
Beyond its own marketing, the summit series has received broad promotion from pro-Trump channels, including extensive promotion on Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s popular “War Room” podcast.
Bannon featured multiple guests from the summits, including Mitchell, in the lead-up to the Virginia summit, which he encouraged viewers to attend.
During a “War Room” appearance days before the Virginia event, Mitchell described the program as “arming people to fight back against the radical left,” saying her goal was to “keep them from stealing it ever again.”
“Are these active workshops where they actually understand how to take over and grab hold of and control the local apparatus in their local elections?” Bannon asked Mitchell.
“Absolutely,” Mitchell said. “That’s absolutely what we’re doing.”
(NEW YORK) — Philadelphia resident Latanya Byrd’s 27-year-old niece Samara Banks and three of Banks’ sons were struck and killed by a speeding driver in 2013. They were crossing Roosevelt Boulevard, a 12-lane road that passes through some of the city’s most diverse and lowest-income neighborhoods.
“It was just so devastating,” Byrd told ABC News. “We lost two generations in one swoop. I mean, just an instant snap of the finger.”
As the local population has swelled, Byrd said outdated transportation infrastructure — grass paths instead of pavements, dangerously short pedestrian signal cycles, overcrowded bus stops, to name a few — can partially explain why this road is one of America’s deadliest.
Byrd’s story exemplifies a larger trend of racial disparities and inequity in traffic fatalities, as reported by the Governors Highway Safety Association and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year.
And a new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine last week reveals that these disparities may be even wider than initially estimated, especially for “vulnerable” modes of travel such as walking and cycling.
Previous estimates were derived by calculating national traffic fatality counts by race and ethnicity across travel modes, sometimes adjusting for the population of each racial and ethnic group.
“But that assumes that everyone of all races and ethnicities cycle, walk or drive the same number of miles, and that we find is not true,” Matthew Raifman, a Boston University School of Public Health doctoral candidate who co-authored the new study, told ABC News.
Using 2017 national traffic fatality and household travel data, Raifman and co-author Ernani Choma, a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, analyzed the travel activity of different racial and ethnic groups by the additional variables of travel mode, distance traveled, time of day and urbanicity.
They found that when examining only car drivers or passengers, the traffic fatality rate per mile traveled was 1.8 times higher for Black Americans than white Americans.
That rate increases to 2.2 times and 4.5 times when considering only pedestrians and cyclists, respectively.
The rates for Hispanic Americans follow similar, though less severe, patterns. Asian Americans had the lowest fatality rates across all modes of travel.
During the nighttime, racial and ethnic disparities in traffic deaths were exacerbated.
Byrd partially attributed these disparities to systemic underinvestment in protected walking and cycling infrastructure in working class neighborhoods, which are disproportionately communities of color — while most road repairs occur elsewhere.
“It can be the same road that’s getting fixed every year, and it’s nowhere near as bad as the roads in the lower-income section of the city,” she said.
The fact that Black and Hispanic Americans die at higher rates due to traffic accidents yet bike and walk fewer miles in aggregate is a problem in itself, Choma told ABC News.
“It might indicate that, for example, Black Americans or Hispanic Americans are less able to cycle, they don’t have access to transportation in that way,” he said. “Maybe it’s less bike lanes. Maybe they don’t even bike because they feel unsafe.”
Raifman said their analysis could also indicate racial inequity in the medical service chain — emergency response times, quality of care, access to health insurance and pre-existing conditions.
“Traffic fatalities don’t necessarily occur at the point of the collision,” he said. “Some people die in a hospital or an emergency room or en route to an emergency room.”
Choma added that without safe access to bike lanes and pedestrian crossings, Black and Hispanic Americans also lose out on the health benefits that come from physical activity, as well as the environmental benefits like reducing air pollution.
Byrd co-founded the advocacy group Families for Safe Streets Greater Philadelphia to confront the “epidemic” of traffic violence. She successfully lobbied for automated speed cameras, which were placed at eight intersections on Roosevelt Boulevard in June 2020.
The U.S. Department of Transportation created the Safe Streets and Roads for All program in May to allocate federal transportation funding to cities and local governments. President Joe Biden also recently signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, providing $550 billion in spending on roads, bridges, transit and more.
With more complete data on specific streets, walking and cycling activity levels, as well as other social costs of traffic crashes, like injuries and property damage, Raifman and Choma said they hope future research will spur local policymakers to address the root of racial disparities in traffic deaths.
“We have these two big challenges. We have structural racism, and we have traffic fatalities, and they’re related. They’re interlinked,” Raifman said. “Instead of just investing in reducing traffic fatalities, why not do it in a way that’s also addressing the systemic, structural racism challenges in our society?”
(NEW YORK) — Kathleen Buhle was married to Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, for over two decades and raised three daughters with him before their divorce five years ago.
Now, Buhle has penned a memoir, If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction and Healing, sharing the first glimpse into her experience in their 24-year marriage.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Amy Robach, Buhle opens up what it was like to watch her husband disappear into drug and alcohol addiction.
“I think with addiction especially, there’s so much shame surrounding it that it becomes something that we don’t talk about,” Buhle told Robach in an interview airing Tuesday on Good Morning America.
Tune into Good Morning America on Tuesday, June 14, between 7 and 9 a.m. EST, to watch Amy Robach’s full interview with Kathleen Buhle.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — After nearly two hours on Monday, Chairman Bennie Thompson gaveled out the House Jan. 6 committee’s second hearing this month to publicly unveil the findings of an 11-month-long investigation which found, the committee said, that former President Donald Trump was at the center of a “multistep conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election.”
Monday’s hearing used firsthand accounts from Trump’s inner circle — including his daughter, son-in-law, former campaign manager and former attorney general — to focus on how he pushed the “big lie” of a stolen 2020 race to millions of supporters even though almost all of his advisers — except, most notably, Rudy Giuliani — told him that he had lost to Joe Biden.
The committee said Trump went on to fundraise $250 million off of his baseless claim, which committee members cast as key in compelling people to storm the Capitol in the deadly insurrection last year.
“We will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost an election and knew he lost an election and, as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy — an attack on the American people by trying to rob you of your voice in our democracy,” Thompson said at Monday’s hearing. “And in doing so, lit the fuse that led to horrific violence on Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, sent by Donald Trump to stop the transfer of power.”
In live and taped testimony, both former Trump administration officials and GOP state election officials recounted telling his White House and his campaign that there was no widespread fraud — but to no avail.
“[Trump] betrayed the trust of the American people. He ignored the will of the voters. He lied to his supporters and the country. And he tried to remain in office after the people had voted him out and the courts upheld the will of the people,” Thompson said in his opening statement.
This was the hearing’s central theme: Trump knew his extraordinary efforts to undercut the 2020 election had no merit, but he kept pushing well beyond the limits of normal challenges to the results. Trump, for his part, continues to call the investigation politically motivated and says he did nothing wrong.
Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, outlined on Monday how Trump was urged by some aides not to declare victory on election night and was informed that “many more” Democratic voters would vote by mail, meaning their votes would be coming in more slowly and the results were not yet final — but Trump “rejected the advice of his campaign experts on election night, and instead followed the course recommended by an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani,” Cheney said.
Here are some other key takeaways from the hearing.
Trump’s inner circle repeatedly told him claims were false
Using taped testimony from at least 10 individuals, the committee showed how Trump’s closest advisers repeatedly told their boss in the weeks after the election that there was no evidence of widespread fraud, illustrating — according to the committee’s presentation — how Trump knew the truth but ignored it.
At the top of the hearing, the committee played a video compilation of witnesses describing the scene at the White House on election night in 2020 after Fox News called Arizona for Biden — including interviews with Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien (who had to unexpectedly back out of testifying live on Monday after his wife went into labor), as well as Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Ivanka Trump told the committee in previously taped video that she didn’t have a “firm view” of what her dad should have said the night of the election, while his campaign spokesman Jason Miller told investigators that a “definitely intoxicated” Giuliani was pushing for Trump to declare victory. (Giuliani has repeatedly dismissed claims that he has a drinking problem or that alcohol adversely affects his behavior.)
“Effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying we won it,” Miller said in taped testimony of what happened on election night, “and essentially that anyone who didn’t agree to that was being weak.”
Asked during his own pre-recorded testimony if he ever shared his view of Giuliani with the president, and what he told Trump, Kushner recalled telling him, “Basically, not the approach I would take if I were you.”
Asked how Trump reacted, Kushner recalled the president saying, “I have confidence in Rudy.”
In other notable testimony, Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann reiterated that the Trump-backed conspiracy about Dominion voting machines in the weeks after the election was not persuasive. “I never saw any evidence whatsoever to sustain those allegations,” he said after Cheney characterized the allegations as “far-flung conspiracies with deceased Venezuelan communists allegedly pulling the strings.”
But Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr offered some of the most striking testimony on Monday, appearing to revel in the chance to tell his side in taped testimony — though publicly he has walked a fine line: broadly supporting the president while calling out his specific election fraud claims as false.
Barr offers his view of Trump’s thinking
According to video excerpts of Barr’s testimony to the committee that were played Monday, he described a meeting with Trump in late November where he told Trump the president’s allegations of election wrongdoing weren’t holding up. Barr spoke bluntly to House investigators, calling Trump’s statements “bogus and silly,” “idiotic,” “disturbing” and “complete nonsense,” among other characterizations in his testimony.
“I said,” Barr recalled, “the Department [of Justice] doesn’t take sides in elections, and the department is not an extension of your legal team. And our role is to investigate fraud, and we’ll look at something if it’s specific, credible and could’ve affected the outcome of the election. And we’re doing that, and they’re just not meritorious. They’re not panning out.” (As Barr noted, he told DOJ attorneys in the days after the 2020 election to probe possible fraud — an unusual move that Biden’s team at the time argued was meant to undercut his victory.)
After his late-November 2020 meeting, Barr said, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows told him that Trump “was becoming more realistic” and Kushner said, ‘We’re working on this.” But Trump did not back down.
The committee then played video of Barr recalling a December meeting with Trump, with Barr recalling that “the president was as mad as I’ve ever seen him, and he was trying to control himself.”
“Trump said, ‘You didn’t have to say this, you must’ve said this because you hate Trump,'” Barr remembered, going on to say he was concerned for Trump’s state of mind.
“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said he was thinking. “There was never an indication in interest in what the actual facts were.”
Barr also mentioned — and laughed at — the movie “2,000 Mules,” a conspiracy-laden film by conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza that Trump has encouraged supporters to watch.
“I felt that before the election, it was possible to talk sense to the president. And while you sometimes had to engage in, you know, a big wrestling match with him, that it was possible to keep things on track. But I felt that after the election he didn’t seem to be listening,” Barr told the committee. “And I didn’t think it was — you know — that I was inclined not to stay around if he wasn’t listening to advice from me or the Cabinet secretaries.”
Committee establishes ‘Team Normal’ versus Team Rudy
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., helping guide Monday’s hearing for the committee, outlined two competing camps in the Trump team in the days and weeks following the 2020 presidential race.
Lofgren said one side was helmed by Stepien, who was then Trump’s campaign manager, and the other was organized around Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, longtime Trump confidant and one of his personal attorneys.
In his pre-taped testimony, Stepien told the committee that Trump’s growing unhappiness after Election Day “paved the way” for Giuliani, attorney Sidney Powell and others to become more influential. Giuliani and Powell took the lead in spreading false claims about fraud and litigating the issue in court.
“We called them my team and Rudy’s team,” Stepien said. “I didn’t mind being categorized as ‘Team Normal’ as reporters started to do at that point in time.”
Stepien added that he didn’t think what was happening after the election was “honest or professional,” so he stepped away. Herschmann, the former Trump White House lawyer, described the arguments being made by the Giuliani camp as “nuts.”
Stepien and Jason Miller, another top campaign adviser, both testified that Giuliani was the one pressuring Trump to claim victory on election night, when the vote tally was nowhere near complete.
Miller claimed Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” when he made that suggestion.
$250 million fundraised off fraudulent claims of fraud
The committee also outlined, according to their investigation, how little of the $250 million raised by Trump for his court battles after the 2020 race actually went to his post-election defense, with Lofgren calling the “big lie” a “big rip-off.”
“The Trump campaign used these false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts. But the Trump campaign didn’t use the money for that,” Lofgren said in her opening statement.
A senior investigative counsel to the committee, Amanda Wick, said in a video played at the end of Monday’s hearing that the committee found the “Official Election Defense Trump” to which Trump repeatedly asked people to contribute money did not, in fact, exist. The committee played excerpts of testimony from two Trump campaign officials appearing to confirm this.
Wick said the campaign sent millions of emails asking supporters to donate, sometimes as many as 25 emails per day.
“As the select committee has demonstrated, the Trump campaign knew these claims of voter fraud were false yet they continued to barrage small-dollar donors with emails,” Wick said.
When asked if it was “fair” to say the fund was another “marketing tactic,” former Trump campaign digital director Gary Colby said “yes.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars went into Save America, Trump’s political action committee formed after the 2020 election. The group has given money to Mark Meadows’s charitable foundation, the American First Policy institute, Trump hotel properties and more, according to the Jan. 6 committee.
Cheney previews next hearing
The panel will publicly reconvene on Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET to hold its third televised hearing this month.
While the committee focused Monday on Trump’s actions on Election Day and immediately after, Cheney said the coming days would pan out to his broader planning for Jan. 6.
That will include Trump’s plan to “corrupt” the Department of Justice,” she said, as well as his conversations with attorney John Eastman “to pressure the vice president, state legislatures, state officials and others to overturn the election.”
Cheney then aired a clip teasing a conversation that Herschmann, the White House lawyer at the time, said he had with Eastman.
“I said to him, ‘Are you out of your f—— mind? I said I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: orderly transition,” Herschmann said in the video.
ABC News’ Benjamin Siegel contributed to this report.
(DUNCANVILLE, Texas) — Police shot and killed a suspect Monday morning after he entered an athletic complex where summer camp was taking place in Duncanville, Texas, allegedly armed with a handgun, authorities said.
No children were harmed after camp staffers ushered them to safety when the man entered the building.
Police shot and killed the suspect at the Duncanville Fieldhouse within minutes of arriving at the scene, Duncanville Mayor Barry Gordon said, according to ABC Dallas affiliate WFAA.
“Our officers did not hesitate,” Gordon said. “They did what they were trained to do and saved lives.”
Families of kids wounded in Uvalde school shooting sue suspected gunman’s estate
A camp counselor confronted the suspected gunman in the lobby of the indoor sports and fitness center.
Upon hearing the gunshots in the lobby, staff members moved the kids to a safe area and locked the doors, preventing the suspected gunman from getting inside, Duncanville Assistant Police Chief Matthew Stogner, said.
“[He] did fire one round inside the classroom where there were children inside,” Stogner said. “Fortunately, no one was injured.”
Stogner praised the police officers for quickly dealing with the situation and utilizing their active shooter training.
The incident comes weeks after 19 kids and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Uvalde law enforcement has been heavily criticized for their handling of the May 24 shooting, which included waiting for more than an hour to confront the suspected gunman while students were inside.
(WASHINGTON) — As the House Jan. 6 committee’s latest hearings ramp up, they overlap with a set of primary races on Tuesday featuring a slate of Donald Trump-endorsed candidates who support the same “big lie” about the 2020 election that investigators say fueled last year’s insurrection at the Capitol.
The first primary held during the much-watched investigation into last year’s pro-Trump rioting will feature races for Senate, House and gubernatorial seats in Nevada, South Carolina, North Dakota and Maine. Texas will hold a special election for its 34th Congressional District seat.
Many of the races in Nevada include candidates that support the former president’s evidence-free claims that the 2020 election was stolen, while two House candidates in South Carolina who were critical of Trump’s role in Jan. 6 or supportive of his impeachment afterward are now up for competitive races against targeted, Trump-endorsed opponents.
The leading candidate in the Nevada GOP Senate primary is the state’s former Attorney General Adam Laxalt, a fervent supporter of Trump. In 2020, he chaired Trump’s reelection campaign in the state and supported Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Laxalt hails from a political dynasty. His grandfather Paul Laxalt served as a senator for Nevada and his father, Pete Domenici, was New Mexico’s longest-serving senator.
Some of the issues Laxalt is running on include stronger southern border policies, protecting the Second Amendment and changing how elections are conducted — echoing many other conservatives running at the local level who, like Trump, baselessly claim that there is widespread election fraud that needs to be addressed.
Laxalt has not only secured an endorsement from Trump but from other 2024 presidential hopefuls, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.
But Laxalt still faces some competition in the primary as Sam Brown, a veteran and businessman, has been rising in the polls. In addition, there is frustration with voters in the silver state who believe Laxalt is too close to the Republican establishment.
While serving in Afghanistan as an Army infantry lieutenant, Brown was wounded by a roadside bomb attack and was sent to Texas to recover from his severe burn injuries.
If Brown does pull off a win on Tuesday, it would be a political upset.
Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto does not face any serious challengers in her primary, but it’s the general election that will test the support she has within Nevada as voters grow frustrated with the first-termer over economic challenges in a tourist-driven state hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent fallout, including rising inflation.
Meanwhile, in the primary races for the House, although it’s expected that all three of Nevada’s incumbent Democrats will survive, the general election may give them all cause for worry. Their seats have been rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report.
Most in danger is Rep. Dina Titus, who said she got “f—–” by the state legislature on how they drew her district.
As for Nevada’s gubernatorial race, all eyes will be on the GOP primary, where Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo is leading the very crowded field. Lombardo — who has plenty of name recognition around the state’s most populated area, Las Vegas — has received an endorsement from Trump.
Nevada’s governor race later this year could potentially be a referendum on incumbent Democrat Steve Sisolak, who has had a somewhat difficult first term. Sisolak had to navigate the onset of COVID, which caused Nevada’s tourism-based economy to suffer.
Meanwhile, the GOP primary for secretary of state is drawing attention to Jim Marchant, the leading GOP candidate in the race who has falsely claimed that Trump won the 2020 election. Marchant’s candidacy is an example of a national trend involving supporters of the “big lie” who are running for offices like secretary of state in order to influence how elections are conducted.
If Marchant wins his primary, he will most likely face off against Cisco Aguilar in November.
On Tuesday in South Carolina, incumbent Republican Reps. Nancy Mace and Tim Rice are the two main objects of Trump’s rage after having denounced him in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack.
They’re now up against Trump-endorsed opponents for races the former president has called “two of the most critical primary elections in the country.”
Mace, the freshman congresswoman who just days into her term condemned Trump’s claims about his election being stolen, is being challenged by cybersecurity analyst and former state Rep. Katie Arrington, whom Trump called a “true Republican.”
“I am trying to communicate to my colleagues in Congress that rhetoric has real consequences.” Mace said on ABC News Live on Jan. 6, 2021.
“And in fact, when I came up for this weekend with my children for my swearing in, I actually put them on the first plane home on Monday morning because I was worried about what might happen today because of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing,” she said then.
Mace, running in the state’s 1st District seat, is endorsed by former Trump ambassador and two-term South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Tuesday’s primary may put Haley — a rumored 2024 presidential hopeful — to the test against Trump.
A third candidate on the ballot, Lynz Piper-Loomis, makes a runoff in this race more possible if no candidate receives 50% of the vote.
In South Carolina’s 7th Congressional District, state Rep. Russell Fry has earned the endorsement of Trump against five term Rep. Rice, who has consistently defended his post-Jan. 6 impeachment vote and condemnation of Trump’s role in the insurrection.
Rice’s break with Trump is notable as his district has displayed staunch support for the former president: It voted for Trump by a 19-point margin in 2020.
The special election for Texas’ 34th District seat has been a study in the kinds of races national Democrats and Republicans may deem as winnable — all in a contest to serve just six months in an area carved up by redistricting anyway.
Voters there will head to the polls for a third time this election season to cast a ballot for a short-term representative; this race is separate from the one being decided in November’s general election contest.
The messy electoral timeline was caused by former Rep. Filemon Vela’s decision to resign in March in order to work in the private sector after the Democratic lawmaker already announced he would not seek reelection the year before.
The situation creates a sped-up political calendar for candidates already in the running, while also offering Republicans the opportunity to flex their growing popularity in the heavily Latino area. Meanwhile, national GOP groups appear to be going all-in on the possibility of upending Democrats’ head start ahead of the general election and are pouring money into the race.
National Democrats have largely steered clear of the special election, while Republicans have poured money into the race — just last month spending more than $1 million.
“A Democrat will represent TX-34 in January,” Monica Robinson, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement to the Texas Tribune. “If Republicans spend money on a seat that is out of their reach in November, great.”
(WASHINGTON) — Now that a tentative deal on trying to curb gun violence has been reached in the Senate, negotiators are working to make the proposal a reality — and fast.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the lead Republican on the gun talks, said Monday he would like to see lawmakers finish the bill’s legislative text sometime this week ahead of what Democrats have said would be a quick vote on the finalized bill.
“My hope is that we can complete that job in the next few days, hopefully by the end of the week, so that the bill will be available for all senators — indeed all the world — to read,” Cornyn said on Monday in a lengthy floor speech.
Such a timeframe would set up a possible vote on the Senate floor next week.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., vowed Monday to hold a vote “quickly” once the legislative text was finalized, but acknowledged there was still more that needed to be done before a bill reached the floor. The framework of the agreement has 10 Republicans in support — enough to avoid the threat of a GOP filibuster that has stymied past gun laws. But Republican aides told ABC News the bipartisan deal was on the principles and not the details, which are still being worked out.
“Make no mistake about it, we have a lot of work left to do before we actually pass a bill. But yesterday’s announcement was a positive and necessary step in the right direction,” Schumer said.
A group of 20 senators — 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans — announced on Sunday they had reached a broad agreement after working for weeks following the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 young children and two teachers dead.
The outline of the deal includes funding for mental health and school safety; incentives for states and localities to pass “red flag” laws to take away guns from those deemed a danger to themselves or others; and strengthening the federal background check system, especially for potential gun owners under the age of 21 and for people convicted of domestic violence — closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole.”
Cornyn emphasized Monday that the proposed reforms would not add any more restrictions upon “law-abiding gun owners” but said he believed they will “save lives.”
“This is not an easy debate,” Cornyn said. “It’s emotional. It can be divisive. But it is also very important that we act.”
The agreement doesn’t include everything Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have called for in the wake of the latest onslaught of mass shootings across the U.S. This weekend alone there were at least 10 such killings.
In a nationwide address earlier this month, Biden urged Congress to ban assault-style weapons — which were previously outlawed in the 1990s and early 2000s — and high-capacity magazines, repeal immunity for gun manufacturers and more.
“We spent hours with hundreds of family members who were broken, whose lives will never be the same,” Biden said then. “They had one message for all of us: Do something.”
ABC News White House correspondent Karen Travers asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday if the tentative gun deal delivered on what those parents said they wanted.
“What he heard and all of you may have heard from the folks in the community, as well, is to do something,” Jean-Pierre replied. “The president has called on Congress to do something. They are doing something.”
Biden wants to see the gun safety reform bill “on his desk to sign as soon as possible,” Jean-Pierre added.
Cornyn himself admitted the delicacy of delivering on anti-gun violence legislation in such a closely divided Senate.
“Most often we hear people say, ‘Do something.’ Well, they don’t give you a lot of guidance on what that something looks like — and when you begin to dig down into the details, you find out there is not a lot of consensus about what that something should look like,” he said in his speech on Monday.
He said he believed focusing on keeping guns away from “criminals and people with mental health problems” was a winning formula.
“I’m hoping that 10 Republicans supporting the bill is not a ceiling but is the floor,” he said.
If passed, the deal would be the first major piece of gun control legislation to make it through Congress in three decades.
“I urge my colleagues to think of all the lives we can now save by turning this framework into law,” Schumer said on Monday. “Americans have waited long enough for us to take action. Too many lives, too many have been already lost.”
(YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK) — All Yellowstone National Park entrances have been closed in the wake of “unprecedented” rainfall causing “substantial flooding, rockslides and mudslides on roadways,” the National Park Service announced Monday.
Some roads have been washed out and others are covered in mud or rocks, according to the park service. Power has also been knocked out in multiple parts of the park, officials said.
More rain is in the forecast for the next few days, according to park officials, who said they don’t want anyone to get stranded.
The park service didn’t say when Yellowstone would reopen but noted that officials need time to assess the damage and wait for conditions to stabilize. The park service warned that many roads could be shuttered “for an extended period of time.”
“We will not know timing of the park’s reopening until flood waters subside and we’re able to assess the damage throughout the park,” Superintendent Cam Sholly said in a statement. “It is likely that the northern loop will be closed for a substantial amount of time.”
The massive national park spans 2,219,789 acres, mostly in Wyoming but also in neighboring Montana and Idaho. Summer is the park’s busiest tourist season.
(NEW YORK) — Global stocks tumbled and the S&P 500 closed in bear market territory Monday as fears over inflation rattle investors around the world.
The S&P 500 closed down 151 points, or 3.88%, meaning it’s down 21.3% since its high on Jan. 3. The Dow was down 876 points (2.79%) and the Nasdaq dropped 530 points (4.68%).
On Friday, investors were disappointed to learn that inflation is moving in the wrong direction. U.S. consumer prices surged 8.6% year-over-year in May, to a fresh 40-year high, led by higher prices for energy, food and housing. For the first time in history, a gallon of regular gas now costs $5 on average nationwide, according to AAA, and experts predict gas prices could average $6 a gallon by August.
“Any talk that we are at peak inflation has to be tabled at least until prices stop rising,” said David Nelson, chief strategist at Belpointe Asset Management.
The worse-than-expected inflation report has investors raising their bets on more aggressive interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve, possibly as soon as the central bank’s policy-setting meeting this week.
According to the CME FedWatch Tool, there is now about a 25% chance that the Fed will raise short-term interest rates by three-quarters of a point at the end of Wednesday’s policy meeting as the Fed ratchets up its fight against high inflation.
The likelihood of a half point rate hike at the Fed’s September meeting has now jumped to 50%, up from 25% before Friday’s inflation report.
“The debate continues over whether the Fed can slow inflation using its many monetary policy tools without pushing the economy into a recession,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at National Securities, told ABC News. “Raising rates by three-quarters or even one percentage point on Wednesday would send a strong message that this Fed is willing to do what needs to be done to get inflation moving in the right direction.”
Inflation fears have sparked a broad-based selloff on Wall Street that has spread beyond stocks to the bond market and cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency, traded below $24,000, down nearly 14% in just 24 hours.
Despite this year’s rapid stock market selloff, strategists at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs said the market does not fully reflect the risks facing the economy.
“The Equity Risk Premium does not reflect the risks to growth, which are increasing due to margin pressure and weaker demand as the consumer decides to hunker down,” Morgan Stanley strategists, led by Michael Wilson, wrote in a note on Monday.
If the S&P 500 closes Monday’s trading session with a decline of more than 1.3%, the index would be in a bear market, defined as a 20% drop from a recent high. The technology-heavy Nasdaq-100 slipped into a bear market in March.
