(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers about potentially contaminated food, lipstick and other products from Family Dollar stores in six southern states following a major rodent infestation at one of its distribution centers.
Live rodents, dead rodents in “various stages of decay,” rodent feces and urine, “evidence of gnawing, nesting and rodent odors,” dead birds and bird droppings were found inside a Family Dollar distribution center in Arkansas during an inspection January, according to the FDA.
More than 1,100 dead rodents were recovered from the Arkansas distribution center following a fumigation around that time, according to the agency. There is evidence this has been a persisting issue at the facility for far longer, the FDA said.
A review of the company’s internal records showed more than 2,300 rodents were collected between March 29 and Sept. 17, 2021, according to the FDA.
“No one should be subjected to products stored in the kind of unacceptable conditions that we found in this Family Dollar distribution facility. These conditions appear to be violations of federal law that could put families’ health at risk,” Associate Commissioner for Regulatory Affairs, Judith McMeekin, said in a statement.
Rodent contamination may cause salmonella and infectious diseases, which may pose the greatest risk to infants, children, pregnant women, the elderly and immunocompromised people, the FDA said.
The FDA said products that originated from the distribution center were sold in over 400 Family Dollar stores in six states: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.
The products include “human foods (including dietary supplements (vitamin, herbal and mineral supplements), cosmetics (skin care products, baby oils, lipsticks, shampoos, baby wipes), animal foods (kibble, pet treats, wild bird seed), medical devices (feminine hygiene products, surgical masks, contact lens cleaning solutions, bandages, nasal care products) and over-the-counter (OTC) medications (pain medications, eye drops, dental products, antacids, other medications for both adults and children).”
Consumers are urged to not use any of these products if they were purchased after Jan. 1, 2021, and to contact the company regarding impacted products.
The FDA said it is working with Family Dollar to create a recall list and a website for more information.
(PARIS) — ABC News has learned that disgraced modeling agent and Jeffrey Epstein associate Jean Luc Brunel died by suicide in his prison cell Saturday night in Paris.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed to ABC News that Brunel was found dead in his prison cell around 1:00 a.m. local time at La Sante Prison.
Jean Luc Brunel’s lawyers tell ABC News Brunel hung himself.
The prosecutor’s office declined to confirm those details of Brunel’s death.
In December 2020, Brunel was charged with rape of minors over the age of 15 and sexual harassment — a crime in France.
In a statement on their client’s death which was in French and sent to and translated by ABC News, Brunel’s lawyers said: “[Brunel’s] distress (despair) was the one of a 75-year-old man who was destroyed by the judicial-media lynching and we should question it. Our client firmly asserted he never abused any women. He made multiple efforts to prove it.”
“His decision was not led by a feeling of guilt but by a deep feeling of injustice,” Brunel’s attorneys Mathias Chichportich, Marianne Abgrall and Christophe Ingrain added.
A delegate from the Force Ouvriere Union for France’s Penitentiaries, Erwan Saoudi, further confirmed Brunel’s death.
Saoudi said the prison’s procedure are that prison guard conduct five check on prisoners every night. Saoudi said while there was no closed-circuit TV inside Brunel’s cell — video in prison corridors proves that prison guards did not miss any of these checks.
Saoudi said Brunel died by suicide just after the guard round [of checks] “which shows the strong will of Jean-Luc Brunel to kill himself.” Saoudi added that Brunel was not on suicide watch.
Brunel was initially arrested in Charles De Gaulle Airport in December 2020. According to Paris prosecutors, Brunel was initially held in a probe into the rape of minors and trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation in association with their probe into possible crimes committed by Epstein. Days later, Brunel was charged with rape of minors over the age of 15 and sexual harassment. Brunel maintained he was innocent.
In January 2021, Virginia Giuffre flew to Paris to provide testimony at a closed-door hearing on Brunel’s detention.
Giuffre, in the same court filing in 2014 in which she first accused Prince Andrew of sexually assaulting her, claimed to have been trafficked by Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell to Brunel.
“The suicide of Jean Luc Brunel, who abused me and countless girls and young women, ends another chapter. I am disappointed that I was not able to face him in a final trial and hold him accountable for his actions, but gratified that I was able to face him in person last year in Paris, to keep him in prison,” Virginia Giuffre said in a statement issued though her lawyer, Sigrid McCawley.
Brunel had denied Giuffre’s allegations.
ABC News’ James Hill contributed to this report.
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or worried about a friend or loved one, help is available. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 [TALK] for free, confidential emotional support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can also reach the Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or the Crisis Text Line by texting “START” to 741741.
(NEW YORK) — It’s been two months since New York City opened the first-ever overdose prevention center (OPC) in the United States, and public health experts said the clinic is already saving lives.
OPCs are a form of harm reduction, which is a set of strategies to minimize the negative effects and consequences linked to drug use, and “keeping people who use drugs alive and as healthy as possible,” according to the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
In this case, OPCs are place where people can use drugs in a setting with nurses or other clinical staff members present and who can help avert fatal overdoses.
As of Feb. 8, the center has served nearly 700 New Yorkers and intervened in 134 overdoses, according to OnPoint NYC, which staffs the site.
Critics said OPCs are places that allow people to use drugs without attempting to help them get clean and that state and local governments are forced to pay for materials including crack pipes and meth pipes to feed people’s addictions.
But anti-drug war advocates and other experts said these centers are vital in reducing opioid deaths, destigmatizing drug misuse and connecting people to resources for their substance abuse — all in a safe environment.
“We are now creating safe spaces for people to use that are not — they’re no longer feeling criminalized,” Emily Kaltenbach, the senior director of criminal legal & policing reform at the Drug Policy Alliance, a non-profit seeking to reduce the harms of drug use, told ABC News. “People can come and feel safe to use. They’re no longer using in alleys or by themselves.”
She said OPCs prevent drug users from other harmful behaviors that could increase their risk of death, such as taking contaminated drugs or injecting with dirty or shared syringes. Staff can also administer naloxone, a medication to reverse overdoses.
“In these centers, there’s immediate access to life-saving, overdose prevention interventions there,” Kaltenbach said. “People are not sharing syringes, for example. So, the prevention of the spread of diseases by reducing HIV and hepatitis C is huge.”
OPCs also traditionally have connections to services such as mental health therapy, drug treatment programs and housing.
“This is a step forward in making, in really treating drug use as a health issue and not as a criminal issue,” Kaltenbach added.
It comes as the nation hit its most sobering milestone in the ongoing opioid epidemic.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses between May 2020 and April 2021.
This means roughly 1,923 people died of drug overdoses every week.
Of the total deaths, about 75,000 were due to opioids, including oxycodone and hydrocodone, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — most of which is trafficked into the U.S. through China — according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The problem is widespread across the United States, including in New York City, according to Dr. Dave Chokshi, commissioner of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene:
“In the year 2020, over 2,000 New Yorkers died of an overdose,” he told ABC News. “That means every four hours, a New Yorker died of an overdose and the total number is more than deaths due to homicides, suicides and motor vehicle crashes combined. So this is a five-alarm fire in public health.”
There are currently two sites in the city, one each in the Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem and Washington Heights, and are staffed by OnPoint NYC, which merged from non-profits New York Harm Reduction Educators and Washington Heights Corner Project.
“We are humanizing and giving hope to people that far too often society sees as disposable and defines them by their mistakes,” Sam Rivers, Executive Director of OnPoint NYC, told ABC News in a statement.
OPCs are not without their critics, which argue the centers enable drug users, who will just die of overdoses in other settings.
Dr. David Murray, co-director for the Center for Substance Abuse Policy Research at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., said illicit drug users will take drugs “beyond the facility borders.”
“Not uncommonly, drug users inject multiple times a day, and … the consumption site simply becomes one more place in which to consume drugs, providing for only a fraction of an addict’s aggregate exposure,” he wrote in a column for the Hudson Institute in August 2020.
But Kaltenbach and others say OPCs reduce the amount and frequency that people use drugs and reduce public disorder and public injection while increasing public safety.
At Insite Supervised Injection Site, the first overdose prevention facility in North America, which began operating in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 2003, one study found that the fatal overdose rate in the area around the site fell by 35% after it opened.
Additionally, the programs help increase entry into substance use disorder treatment programs, according to Kallenach. Another study found that more than half of users at Insite entered addiction treatment within two years.
There are currently 120 OPCs operating in ten countries around the world, and the Drug Policy Alliance says there has not been a single overdose fatality at any OPC.
“No one is claiming that they are a silver bullet for all of what we’re seeing with respect to the overdose crisis or the broader set of issues surrounding drug use,” Chokshi said. “For that, it involves investments like the ones that we have made in New York City around lowering barriers to accessing treatment … investing in syringe service programs so that people have access, not just to safe and clean supplies, but also all of the wraparound services, whether it’s housing or job placement, or food and medical care, basic human needs, that are provided in those programs.”
(NEW YORK) — Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ recent battle with what he considers the “woke agenda” is pushing Florida further to the ideological right and helping position him as a possible contender for president, pitting him against none other than Donald Trump.
As DeSantis’ popularity rises among Republicans, DeSantis has been closely mirroring the former president’s language. In December, when he announced that battle, DeSantis called critical race theory “state-sanctioned racism” and termed related training “indoctrination.”
Nearly a year before, Trump had slammed the teaching of the origins of slavery in America as “twisted” and a form of brainwashing.
DeSantis is arguably setting himself up to be the most “MAGA”-friendly governor in the Republican pack, a safe position for a potential GOP presidential candidate.
In a recent CNN poll, DeSantis is the only possible Trump-alternative candidate who netted more than 20% approval from respondents.
Over the past several months, DeSantis has mounted a series of conservative legislative proposals, many of which bolster talking points inspired by Trump, with bills that restrict access to abortions, limit classroom discussion about sexual orientation, enable parents to sue schools based on curriculum and eliminate a majority Black voting district with an atypical and aggressive self-submitted redistricting map.
He is asking law enforcement to root out “election fraud,” echoing the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
And just this week, DeSantis doubled-down on an attempt to take his state’s redistricting into his own hands, submitting a new, even more contentious, Republican-leaning map than his initial proposal in January, which still includes the controversial elimination of a majority Black district in the north of the state.
This move comes after the Florida Supreme Court denied DeSantis’ request to issue an advisory opinion on the constitutionality of that Jacksonville-area district, represented by Black member of Congress, Rep. Al Lawson. The introduction of a second map puts DeSantis at odds with members of his own party in the statehouse, who ignored DeSantis’ initial controversial map in favor of their own version.
While veteran Florida-based political analyst Susan MacManus, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, says many other DeSantis watchers feel it’s “surely unknown” the degree in which DeSantis may be shaping himself to be a viable Trump replacement given the potential volatility in the news cycle between now and 2024, she says it’s clear that DeSantis has political foresight unique to the average incumbent candidate running for reelection. In the Florida governor, Macmanus says, she can “see someone who is able to look at the bigger picture a little bit further down than just tomorrow.”
McManus adds that other Republicans — especially those outside of Florida — see DeSantis as a rising star and lightning-rod. “Everyone wants him at their annual fundraising dinners,” she said.
Last summer, DeSantis blitzed through a series out-of-state at fundraisers in California, Nevada, and through the Northeast, a lucrative guest of honor guaranteed to rake in extra cash to GOP coffers beyond the Sunshine State.
Hesitant to say that DeSantis is “designing himself” to be the Trump-alternative, MacManus hears Republicans groups have a sort of love affair with DeSantis, and believe he brings something to the table Trump may not.
“Here’s the comment — always: ‘He’s better than Trump. I wish he would tone it down just a little bit, but I love his policies so much that I’m willing to hang with him.”
One policy that has gained steam as DeSantis and other conservatives rally against the instruction of critical race theory is aptly titled the “STOP W.O.K.E Act,” otherwise known as the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act.”
The governor is also wading into culture war issues that don’t directly impact Florida, most recently defending podcaster Joe Rogan, who faces major backlash for using a racist slur for Black people in clips now circulating on social media. DeSantis believes Rogan, who has since apologized, should have delivered another more aggressive message to those offended.
“But what I would say is don’t give an inch. Do not apologize. Do not bow to the mob. Stand up and tell them to pound sand; if you do that, there’s really nothing that they’re able to do to you,” DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News. “The only way they have power is if you let them get your goat.”
DeSantis’ response was not a far cry from Trump’s, who urged Rogan to “stop apologizing to the Fake news and Radical Left maniacs.”
“Joe, just go about what you do so well and don’t let them make you look weak and frightened. That’s not you and it never will be!” Trump wrote in a statement.
Earlier this month, DeSantis pushed back against calls to denounce a neo-Nazi protest in Orlando — reminiscent of Trump’s divisive “both sides” remark regarding the 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
Despite their parallel messaging, Trump and DeSantis’s bonds seem to be unraveling somewhat. In January, Trump appeared to call DeSantis “gutless” in a veiled criticism of politicians who have dodged disclosing whether or not they received the coronavirus booster. DeSantis, only a few weeks prior, declined to specify to Fox News if he indeed receive his latest jab. Following Trump’s “gutless” remark, DeSantis told conservative podcasters that he regrets not being “much louder” in opposition to early coronavirus lockdowns under the Trump administration.
Democrats have no hesitation taking swipes at DeSantis’ continued lurch to the right.
Rep. Charlie Crist, a Democrat looking to unseat DeSantis, said he was “deeply disappointed” in the incumbent.
“Gov. DeSantis continues to stoke the most divisive elements in our society, from his failure to condemn the Nazis to his promotion of a disgusting racial slur. Florida deserves better,” Crist said in an emailed statement.
And the national arm of the Democratic party knocked DeSantis’ recent politics as a “shameless ploy.”
“Ron DeSantis’s shameless ploys to cater to the far-right extreme would be laughable if they weren’t costing Floridians their lives and livelihoods. While DeSantis focuses on playing politics and trying to book his next Fox News interview, President Biden and Democrats are stepping up to do the job he can’t, or won’t, do,” Ammar Moussa, Democratic National Committee rapid response director, told ABC News.
“What is happening is our governor is competing with the governor of Texas over who will be the heir apparent to Donald Trump,” Florida House Democratic Whip Ramon Alexander told the Washington Post as DeSantis unveiled “STOP W.O.K.E.” “It’s all about who can go to the farthest extremes of the Republican Party.”
(NEW YORK) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning of a rise in eating and tic disorders among teenage girls during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Echoing prior research, the proportion of emergency department visits with eating disorders doubled among adolescent girls; those for tic disorders approximately tripled during the pandemic. Tic disorders are characterized by repeated twitches, movements or sounds that people do involuntarily.
“The results of the report are unsurprising,” said Dr. Neha Chaudhary, child psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and chief medical officer at BeMe Health. “This is quite in line with what I’m seeing in my clinical practice and what I’m hearing from teens directly. Many teens with preexisting conditions like depression or anxiety noted worsening of their symptoms since the pandemic, while others without previously diagnosed conditions noted having symptoms for the first time.”
In their report, the CDC researchers said eating disorders can be triggered by pandemic-related stress, such as lack of structure and daily routine. But they said the increased visits for tic disorders was “atypical” because tic disorders usually start earlier in childhood, and more typically among males.
Researchers have suggested that exposure to severe tics on social media might be associated with the increased tic disorder visits among teenage girls, calling them “TikTok Tics.” These types of tic disorders have distinct features from Tourette syndrome, which is a tic disorder often diagnosed in younger children. In addition, tic disorders can be triggered by stress.
In 2021, several major pediatric health organizations announced a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. In the past 10 years, there has been a rise in child and adolescent mental health issues, and by 2018, suicide was the second-leading cause of death for youth ages 10 to 24. These issues have worsened in the context of pandemic-related stressors, which have disrupted safety and stability of families and daily living structure.
LGBTQ children are even more at-risk of suicide, according to Elizabeth Thompson, CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association.
“The sky rocketing increase in numbers (50 and 70% over previous time periods) reported by the CDC relative to children’s visits to the emergency room during COVID for self harm or suicidality due to increasing mental health issues, including eating disorders, mirrors what we have seen as we analyzed our Helpline data,” Thompson said in a statement.
“Teens everywhere have been hit harder than most groups by the stress of the pandemic,” said Chaudhary. “It’s no wonder that their mental health has been declining when their usual supports — like structure, routine and peer connections — have been ripped out from under them for the past two years.”
In a second report released Friday, the CDC found a drop in overall emergency department visits for any reason in the past two years. Experts caution the lower rate of emergency department visits could be because people were afraid to visit medical centers during the pandemic.
But despite the overall drop, there was a rise in emergency department visits for specific reasons, such as self-harm, firearm injuries, drug poisonings and mental health conditions such as eating disorders, particularly in teenage girls.
“Some teens have shared that during times of great uncertainty, they find themselves changing their eating patterns as an unsuccessful attempt to regain a sense of control,” said Chaudhary. “They often realize that it’s happening, but find it difficult to stop without additional support.”
Eating disorders affect 9% of the U.S. population, and will affect close to 30 million Americans in their lifetime, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.
Parents, siblings and friends should be aware of signs of eating disorders, which can include restricting food intake as well as routinely binge-eating and/or purging.
“I commend the teens who are reaching out to professionals for help, even via ED visits,” said Chaudhary. “I hope to see more proactive supports in places for teens so that they can get help with their mental health conditions before it becomes an emergency.”
If you think you or someone you know has an eating disorder, call ANAD’s helpline at 1 (888)-375-7767, for free emotional support and referrals for resources. If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or worried about a friend or loved one help is available. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 [TALK] — for free confidential emotional support 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Even if it feels like it — you are not alone.
ABC News’ Cristina Corujo contributed to this report.
Aiya Aboubakr is an internal medicine resident at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center, and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit. Sony Salzman is the coordinating producer of the Medical Unit.
(WASHINGTON) — Former Vice President Mike Pence has defended the Republican National Committee censure of GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, arguing that the resolution referring to Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse” was misconstrued.
During the Q&A portion of an appearance Thursday evening with Stanford University students, Pence asserted that he believes the committee’s reference to “citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse” referred to “a whole range of people that have been set upon” by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election.
“I just don’t know too many people around the country, including my friends at the RNC and the chairman of the Republican National Committee who have any different views than it was a tragic day,” Pence said. He also added that “the people that ransacked the Capitol were wrong should be held to account in the law.”
Pence also touched on how he and former President Donald Trump may never see “eye to eye” on what happened on Jan. 6, but also how he was proud of the work he and Trump accomplished together.
“I knew what my duty was and I kept my oath even though it hurt,” Pence said. “But I will always be proud of the record that President Donald Trump and I created for the American people and I’m determined to continue to lead our nation to freedom.”
Pence’s remarks come a few weeks after he rebuked Trump for his false claims that Pence had the power to overturn the election in his role counting the electoral votes from the November election before Congress.
“There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress that I possessed unilateral authority to reject Electoral College votes. And I heard this week that former President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election,'” Pence said in a speech to a local chapter of the Federalist Society in Florida.
“President Trump is wrong. … I had no right to overturn the election,” he said. “The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. And frankly there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
Pence made those remarks just hours after the RNC passed its resolution.
Pence’s event was organized by the university’s College Republicans and marked Pence’s first major public event since declaring that Trump was “wrong” about Pence’s power to overturn the election results.
The event was titled “How to Save America from the Woke Left,” and Pence discussed multiple topics, including the Trump’s administration record, the pandemic, and more.
Pence’s speech at Stanford was one of many recent lectures he has given while traveling and speaking at different universities across the country. He has made previous stops at the University of Iowa and Texas A&M.
ABC News’ Brittany Shepherd contributed to this report
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge has rejected an effort by former President Donald Trump to dismiss a series of lawsuits brought against him by Democratic lawmakers and U.S. Capitol Police officers seeking to hold him liable for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — “This is not a bluff,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Friday about the potential for a Russian invasion of Ukraine in an exclusive interview with ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz.
“He has a number of options available to him and he could attack in short order,” Austin told Raddatz in an interview conducted in Powidz, Poland, where Austin had come to visit American and Polish troops.
Raddatz’s full interview with Austin airs Sunday on a special edition of “This Week” from Lviv, Ukraine.
“This is not a bluff?” Raddatz asked Austin about the potential for a Russian invasion.
“I don’t believe it’s a bluff,” Austin replied.
“I think it’s … I think he’s assembled the right kind — the kinds of things that you would need to conduct a successful invasion,” he added.
Tensions over the potential for a Russian invasion in Ukraine have increased as American officials have repeatedly said that a Russian invasion could occur “any day.”
Russia’s defense ministry claimed this week that it had begun withdrawing tank units and other forces from the area at the conclusion of exercises that had been cited as the reason for the massive troop buildup around Ukraine.
But U.S. officials have rejected those claims, saying instead that Russia has continued to flow more troops into the border area while it was claiming a troop withdrawal was taking place.
“He’s got things like medical tents and nurses — you … would never have seen that if you were going to be withdrawing your troops?” Raddatz asked Austin.
“Exactly. If they were redeploying to garrison, we wouldn’t be seeing the kinds of things in terms of, not only combat power, but also logistical support, medical support, combat aviation that we’ve seen in the region,” Austin responded.
On Friday, the American representative to the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe reported to that organization that the U.S. assesses that Russia has “probably” amassed between a force numbering between 169,000 and 190,000 near Ukraine’s borders, a total that includes Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.
The number of Russian separatists forces has not previously been included in estimates of Russian troop levels provided by American officials.
(WASHINGTON) — The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) confirmed on Friday that some of the Trump White House documents recently recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort were marked classified, and that the agency had referred the matter to the Justice Department.
In a letter sent Friday to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, National Archives officials said that among the 15 boxes of records retrieved last month from former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort were “items marked as classified national security information within the boxes.”
As a result, the National Archives staff “has been in communication with the Department of Justice,” David Ferriero, the national archivist, wrote in the letter.
Among those items that were not preserved, NARA said, were records related to social media accounts.
“NARA has identified certain social media records that were not captured and preserved by the Trump Administration,” Ferriero wrote.
Trump White House staff also “conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts,” according to the letter.
The National Archives said that they it has already “obtained or is in the process of obtaining some of those records.”
(WASHINGTON) — In his quest to keep Republicans united and become House speaker, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has supported and given money to many of the Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump last year — with one exception.
In an interview with The Federalist, McCarthy officially endorsed Rep. Liz Cheney’s primary opponent, Harriet Hageman, in her upcoming August primary after hard-right House GOP members pushed him to expel her from the GOP conference.
“After spending time with Harriet, it is readily apparent she will always listen and prioritize the needs of her local communities and is focused on tackling our nation’s biggest problems,” McCarthy, R-Calif., told The Federalist. “I look forward to serving with Harriet for years to come.”
Hageman welcomed McCarthy’s endorsement, releasing a statement saying that she’s “very grateful for Leader McCarthy’s strong support,” and pledges that when she’s Wyoming’s member of Congress, she’ll stand up for the state and do the job she was sent to do.
Hageman continued saying that Cheney, R-Wyo., “has completely lost the ability to do her job of representing Wyoming as [their] only member of the House of Representatives.”
Following McCarthy’s endorsement of Hageman, a Cheney’s spokesperson said in a statement, “Wow. She must really be desperate.”
Party leaders rarely get involved in primaries, especially when it’s an incumbent from their own party seeking reelection.
The endorsement from McCarthy comes as one of the latest attacks on Cheney as she faces a tough reelection year. It was only a few weeks ago the Republican National Committee voted to censure Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for their roles on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Before that, Cheney was censured by her own state party and voted out of her role as the number three Republican in the House.
“There’s a reason why Liz Cheney is no longer in leadership and has very low poll rating in Wyoming,” McCarthy recently told reporters.
On Friday, Rep. Elise Stefanik, who replaced Cheney on the House Republican’s leadership team, announced her endorsement of Hageman.
Stefanik said Cheney has “abandoned her constituents to become a Far-Left Pelosi puppet” and “sadly belongs in an MSNBC or CNN news chair, not in Congress representing Wyoming—a state that voted for President Trump by over forty points.”
Last September, Hageman has also received support from Trump, who is part of the larger effort to get Cheney elected out of office.
Even though Hageman has received endorsements from major players in the Republican party, she still lags behind Cheney in fundraising. Cheney raised a total of $7.2 million in 2021, breaking her own fundraising record. Moreover, as the 2022 election year ramps up, Hageman’s cash on hand is just $381,000 compared to Cheney’s $4.7 million war chest, according to filings.
The effort to get Cheney out of federal office is at the national and state levels. There’s a push from state lawmakers in Wyoming to pass SF0097 which would end same-day party affiliation change on a primary day.
This could make it more difficult for Democrats and independents who might want to vote for Cheney in the primary. If enacted, voters would need to change their party affiliation three months before the Wyoming primary, scheduled for Aug. 16.
ABC News’ Soorin Kim and Alisa Wiersema contributed to this report
