Politics

(WASHINGTON) — Tulsi Gabbard, who once ran for president as a Democrat, is taking on a prominent role as part of former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign team.

On Thursday, she will moderate what Trump’s campaign is calling a “town hall” with him when he visits La Crosse in battleground Wisconsin.

Gabbard publicly endorsed Trump on stage in Michigan earlier this week, and joined his presidential transition team along with fellow former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“This administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before,” Gabbard said. “This is one of the main reasons why I’m committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House, where he can, once again, serve us as our commander in chief.”

Trump called Gabbard an “amazing person” and that he looked forward to working with her.

Gabbard, a military veteran who represented Hawaii in Congress for eight years, has also been aiding Trump as he prepares for his first debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10. Gabbard debated Harris and President Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, and made headlines at the time for taking aim at Harris’ record as a prosecutor.

Since leaving the Democratic Party in 2022 to register as an independent, Gabbard’s adopted several views that align with those held by Trump and his Republican allies.

That includes opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders; criticism of the criminal indictments against Trump; and statements railing against the so-called deep state and “woke” ideologies of the Democratic Party.

Gabbard, an anti-interventionist when it comes to foreign policy, has accused President Joe Biden’s administration of stoking tensions around the globe — describing Democrats as a “cabal of warmongers” when she became an independent.

“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border,” she wrote of the Russia-Ukraine war on X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022.

She also shared false information alleging U.S. involvement in Ukraine biological weapons laboratories. Her comments received pushback from the likes of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican, who described her comments as “treasonous lies” that were “parroting false Russian propaganda.”

The State Department, around the time such claims were being spread, said the Kremlin was intentionally proliferating “outright lies that the United States and Ukraine are conducting chemical and biological weapons activities in Ukraine.”

The year Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard made multiple appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox to discuss the conflict, clips of which were aired on Russian-state media.

After leaving the Democratic Party, she campaigned for election-deniers in the 2022 midterm cycle, including Arizona’s Kari Lake and New Hampshire’s Don Bolduc — both of whom were defeated.

During an event for Bolduc, she compared President Biden (who she endorsed in the 2020 primary after bowing out of the race) to Adolf Hitler.

In 2023 comments to Fox’s Jesse Watters, Gabbard continued to make comparisons to Hitler as she said Biden and the party’s focus on diversity was similar to the “geneticist core principles embodied by Nazism and Adolf Hitler.”

More recently, she’s accused Biden of weaponizing law enforcement to go after his political opponent after Trump was indicted on federal charges stemming from his handling of classified material and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) earlier this year, she suggested, like many Republicans have, that the criminal charges against Trump were an effort to interfere in the 2024 election.

“The Democrat elite and their cronies are using our criminal justice system to prosecute and distract the Republican presidential candidate in the midst of his campaign,” she said.

After Biden dropped out of the race, Gabbard turned her focus toward Harris — though asserted a larger “deep state” was at work in the federal government.

“Biden’s out, Kamala is in. Don’t be fooled: policies won’t change. Just like Biden wasn’t the one calling the shots, Kamala Harris won’t be either. She is the new figurehead for the deep state and the maidservant of Hillary Clinton, queen of the cabal of warmongers. They will continue their efforts to engulf the world in war and taking away our liberty,” Gabbard claimed on X.

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(WASHINGTON) — Coming off of a brief respite from the campaign trail after a star-studded week in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz are heading to Georgia for a two-day bus tour that ends with Harris holding a solo rally in Savannah on Thursday.

The tour marks the first time the two campaigns will be in the crucial swing state together, with a planned stop for their first sit-down interview since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket with CNN’s chief political correspondent and anchor Dana Bash on Thursday.

The tour’s first stop was at Liberty County High School, where Harris, Walz U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams and state Rep. Al Williams were greeted by the school’s principal and superintendent, before listening in on the school marching band’s practice. In remarks to the band and football players, Harris told them that they were leaders that the country is counting on.

“We wanted to come up just to let you know that our country is counting on you. We’re so proud of you,” she said. “You are showing what hard work can achieve.”

Walz, a former teacher and football coach, told the students that education is a path to the middle class.

“Education is the key to the middle class,” he said. “The pathway to the middle class shouldn’t be burdened with debt given the opportunity to get there. This is truly about building towards the future, and you’re that future.”

The pair later stopped at Sandfly BBQ in Savannah, where Walz chatted with a group of teachers, telling them their job is “noble work.”

Although there is no notable post-convention polling that has been released to date, the campaign saw a bump in donations of $82 million during the week of the DNC, bringing the total haul since launching her candidacy last month to $540 million, her campaign said.

Hoping to build on that momentum, Harris and Walz are scheduled to travel through Georgia’s southeast where they will meet with supporters, small business owners and Georgia voters, according to the campaign. It will be their second bus tour after they previously went on a bus tour through western Pennsylvania before the DNC.

The Harris campaign is looking to sway voters in battleground Georgia — a state President Joe Biden only narrowly won in 2020, beating former President Donald Trump by about 12,000 votes.

Currently, Harris is neck-and-neck with Trump in the polls in the state, according to 538’s average. Trump barely leads in Georgia with 46.6% compared to Harris’ 46%, 538’s polling average shows.

“Campaigning in southern Georgia is critical as it represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban, and urban Georgians — with a large proportion of Black voters and working class families,” said Harris-Walz Georgia state director Porsha White in a memo.

This is all in addition to their 35,000 new volunteers, as well as more than 190 Democratic campaign staffers in 24 coordinated offices across the state, officials said.

Through extensive “Get Out the Vote” organizing efforts, Black voters were a huge contributing factor to Biden’s win in a state that former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had all but skipped during their presidential runs.

Harris’ tour is a testament that the campaign still feels like Georgia’s 16 electoral votes are in play.

“We turned Georgia blue for the first time in three decades in 2020, and we’re seizing on the energy and putting in the work to win again in 2024,” White said in the memo.

A Harris spokeswoman told ABC News said that the vice president will make two stops at local small businesses in South Georgia on Thursday, then thank volunteers in Chatham County, before rallying in Savannah late in the afternoon.

Walz, meanwhile, will travel to North Carolina for a “local political event” and a campaign reception.

Following CNN’s interview, Walz will head to Massachusetts for a solo rally on Thursday. Voters will see Harris, Walz and their spouses — second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, respectively — on the trail again for a Labor Day blitz across several battleground states prior to ABC News’ debate on Sept. 10.

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(WASHINGTON) — A photography-related “incident” occurred at Arlington National Cemetery Monday during a visit by former President Donald Trump, leading to a report being filed, the cemetery said in a statement to ABC News.

While the cemetery did not immediately provide specifics, NPR reported that a source had told the publication that two Trump campaign officials engaged in a verbal and physical altercation with a cemetery staff member during Trump’s visit, which came on the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 service members during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The alleged altercation took place after the Trump campaign officials were asked not to take photos and videos in Section 60, a section of the cemetery where recent U.S. veterans are buried, NPR reported.

When contacted by ABC News on Tuesday night, a representative for the Arlington National Cemetery released a statement that confirmed an “incident” but didn’t provide specifics.

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed,” the statement read.

On Tuesday, Trump’s campaign posted a video capturing moments from the former president’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery, including more images of his visit to Section 60 where the alleged altercation occurred, and appears to be an example of how the campaign violated the cemetery’s rules.

The TikTok video, which is overlayed by guitar instrumentals, shows a montage of Trump participating in the wreath-laying ceremony, taking photos with Gold Star families and visiting Section 60.

In the video, Trump can be heard making a political point throughout the video — blaming the Biden-Harris administration for the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The video is also captioned “Should have never happened,” again condemning his political opponent’s previous actions.

In the TikTok video, Trump and some of the family members are seen smiling and holding thumbs up as they posed for photos, with overlaid captions claiming Trump didn’t lose a single soldier in 18 months, but that a “disaster” ensued after the Biden-Harris administration took over.

Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, posted on X what he said was proof of the team’s approval to have an official photographer and videographer outside the main press pool.

“Only former President Trump may have an official photographer and/or videographer outside of the main media pool,” a screengrab of what appears to be an access guideline posted by Cheung reads. However, it should be noted that campaign officials — not professionals — were also taking photos and videos of the day’s events.

Cheung also claimed on Tuesday night after the news broke that, “There was no physical altercation as described, and we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made” in a statement to ABC News.

Trump campaign staffers posted multiple pictures and videos of Trump visiting Arlington Cemetery, including from what appears to be Section 60, using the moment to criticize Vice President Kamala Harris’ absence. Trump was at the cemetery on the third anniversary of the attack at Abbey Gate during the withdrawal from Afghanistan to pay tribute to the 13 U.S. Service members killed in the incident.

In one video posted by Trump campaign’s senior adviser Chris LaCivita, Trump can be seen laying flowers on the grave of Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, who died in the attack. LaCivita wrote in the post that Trump was speaking on the phone with Knauss’ family, who couldn’t make it to the ceremony on Monday.

Multiple other Trump campaign staffers posted photos from there, and some of the images were then shared by the Trump campaign on their official X account.

Prior to the event, the cemetery had been explicit in its rule that no Trump activity could be filmed during his visit to Section 60.

Monday’s press pool note read: “The family visit to Section 60 following the wreath laying is private and at their explicit request, there will be NO coverage at that location. Your POOL will wait inside the press van during this visit. POOL will then be taken to an unknown location for an OTR stop to round out the morning.”

On Tuesday, following NPR’s report, Cheung said in a statement that “there was no physical altercation as described.” He also claimed someone “decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team.”

In a statement to ABC News, LaCivita, a combat-wounded Marine, stressed that Trump “was there on the invitation of the Abbey Gate Gold Star Families to honor their loved ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country,” calling the individual who attempted to block Trump campaign officials “despicable.”

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(WASHINGTON) — With 70 days before Election Day as of Tuesday, both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump get back to campaigning with Harris in Georgia on Wednesday and Trump in Wisconsin on Thursday.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, campaigned in Michigan while Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz picks up the trail on Wednesday in Boston.

Here’s how the news is developing…

Walz promises to fight for labor freedoms at International Association of Fire Fighters

Gov. Tim Walz addressed the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) convention on Wednesday in Boston, making the case that the Democratic ticket was the one that would fight for their freedoms, including labor protections.

“People tell me, look, I’m really not that into politics. My response to that is, too damn bad — politics is into you,” Walz said to what he acknowledged as a bipartisan audience.

Walz said that Harris “is proudly part of the most pro-labor administration in history,” and that when they “win this election, we’ll have your back like you’ve had ours.”

“We believe that you, not politicians, should be made free to make your own health care choices,” Walz concluded. “We believe that workers deserve to collectively bargain for fair wages and safe working conditions.”

-ABC News’ Isabella Murray

Harris-Walz campaign responds to superseding indictment

Quentin Fulks, the Harris-Walz campaign’s principal deputy campaign manager, reacted to the news of the superseding indictment against Donald Trump Tuesday afternoon on MSNBC and avoided remarking on “ongoing legal cases” but characterized Trump as a danger.

“They saw it with their own eyes, and so we’re going to continue to take the fight directly to Donald Trump on the issues that matter. But American voters aren’t stupid. They know who Donald Trump is, and they know what he will do if he gets more time in the White House,” Fulks told MSNBC.

-ABC News’ Isabella Murray, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Fritz Farrow and Will McDuffie

Harris-Walz campaign responds to superseding indictment

Quentin Fulks, the Harris-Walz campaign’s principal deputy campaign manager, reacted to the news of the superseding indictment against Donald Trump Tuesday afternoon on MSNBC and avoided remarking on “ongoing legal cases” but characterized Trump as a danger.

“They saw it with their own eyes, and so we’re going to continue to take the fight directly to Donald Trump on the issues that matter. But American voters aren’t stupid. They know who Donald Trump is, and they know what he will do if he gets more time in the White House,” Fulks told MSNBC.

JD Vance responds to new special counsel indictment

Sen. JD Vance, asked by ABC News on the tarmac in Nashville about the superseding indictment in former President Donald Trump’s federal election interference case, framed the special counsel’s actions as an effort to influence the election.

“I haven’t read the whole thing, but it looks like Jack Smith doing more of what he does, which is filing these absurd lawsuits in an effort to influence the election,” the GOP vice presidential candidate said.

The new indictment adjusts the charges to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.

Vance pushed back against the Harris-Walz campaign’s assertion that the Supreme Court ruling goes too far and grants the former president too much immunity, arguing that the president needs some immunity in order to do the job.

“If the president doesn’t have some level of immunity in how he conducts his office, in the same way that judges have to have immunity, police officers have to have immunity. There has to be some recognition that people can’t be sued for doing their job,” Vance said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Coming off of a brief respite from the campaign trail after a star-studded week in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz are heading to Georgia for a two-day bus tour that ends in a solo rally with the vice president in Savannah.

The tour will mark the first time the two campaigns will be in the crucial swing state together, with a planned stop for their first sit down interview since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket with CNN’s chief political correspondent and anchor Dana Bash on Thursday.

Although there is no notable post-convention polling that has been released to date, the campaign saw a bump in donations of $82 million during the week of the DNC, bringing the total haul since launching her candidacy last month to $540 million, her campaign said.

Hoping to ride on that momentum, Harris and Walz are scheduled to travel through Georgia’s southeast where they will be meeting with supporters, small business owners and Georgia voters, according to the campaign. It will be their second venture on a tour with wheels following their Pennsylvania stops prior to the DNC.

President Joe Biden only narrowly won the state by some nearly 12,000 votes in 2020 that former President Donald Trump continues to heavily contest. Currently, she is neck-and-neck with Trump at the polls in the state, according to 538’s average.

“Campaigning in southern Georgia is critical as it represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban, and urban Georgians – with a large proportion of Black voters and working class families,” said Harris-Walz Georgia state director Porsha White in a memo.

This is all in addition to their 35,000 new volunteers, as well as more than 190 Democratic campaign staff in 24 coordinated offices across the state, officials said.

Through extensive “Get Out the Vote” organizing efforts, Black voters were a huge contributing factor to Biden’s win in a state that former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had all but skipped during their presidential runs.

Harris’ tour is a testament that the campaign still feels like the Peach State’s 16 electoral votes are in play.

“We turned Georgia blue for the first time in three decades in 2020, and we’re seizing on the energy and putting in the work to win again in 2024,” White said in the memo.

Following CNN’s interview, Walz will head to Massachusetts for a solo rally on Thursday. Voters will see Harris, Walz and their spouses — second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, respectively — on the trail again for a Labor Day blitz across several battleground states prior to ABC News’ debate on Sept. 10.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Arlington National Cemetery has confirmed to ABC News that during former President Donald Trump’s visit on Monday, an “incident” related to photos being taken at the site occurred, leading to a report being filed.

When contacted by ABC News on Tuesday night, a representative for the Arlington National Cemetery released a statement that confirmed an “incident” but didn’t provide specifics.

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed,” the statement read.

Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, posted on X what he said was proof of the team’s approval to have an official photographer and videographer outside the main press pool.

“Only former President Trump may have an official photographer and/or videographer outside of the main media pool,” a screengrab of what appears to be an access guideline posted by Cheung reads. However, it should be noted that campaign officials — not professionals — were also taking photos and videos of the day’s events.

Cheung also claimed on Tuesday night after the news broke that, “There was no physical altercation as described [by some reports], and we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made” in a statement to ABC News.

Trump campaign staffers posted multiple pictures and videos of Trump visiting Arlington Cemetery, including from what appears to be Section 60, using the moment to criticize Vice President Kamala Harris’ absence. Trump was at the cemetery on the third anniversary of the attack at Abbey Gate during the withdrawal from Afghanistan to pay tribute to the 13 U.S. Service members killed in the incident.

In one video posted by Trump campaign’s senior adviser Chris LaCivita, Trump can be seen laying flowers on the grave of Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, who died in the attack. LaCivita wrote in the post that Trump was speaking on the phone with Knauss’ family, who couldn’t make it to the ceremony on Monday.

Multiple other Trump campaign staffers posted photos from there, and some of the images were then shared by the Trump campaign on their official X account.

Prior to the event, the cemetery had been explicit in its rule that no Trump activity could be filmed during his visit to Section 60.

Monday’s press pool note read: “The family visit to Section 60 following the wreath laying is private and at their explicit request, there will be NO coverage at that location. Your POOL will wait inside the press van during this visit. POOL will then be taken to an unknown location for an OTR stop to round out the morning.”

In a statement to ABC News, LaCivita, a combat-wounded Marine, stressed that Trump “was there on the invitation of the Abbey Gate Gold Star Families to honor their loved ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country,” calling the individual who attempted to block Trump campaign officials “despicable.”

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(WASHINGTON) — After the supreme leader of Iran signaled a willingness to return to nuclear negotiations with the United States, the Biden administration cast doubt on the likelihood of resuming talks in the near future.

“We will judge Iran’s leadership by their actions, not their words,” a State Department spokesperson said Tuesday.

“If Iran wants to demonstrate seriousness or a new approach, they should stop nuclear escalations and start meaningfully cooperating with the IAEA,” they added, referencing the International Atomic Energy Agency, an intergovernmental watchdog that Tehran has often subverted.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave Iran’s newly installed president, reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, the go-ahead to relaunch talks with the U.S. on Tuesday while warning the country’s government against putting any trust in Washington.

“This does not mean that we cannot interact with the same enemy in certain situations,” Khamenei said, according to the official transcript of his remarks. “There is no harm in that, but do not place your hopes in them.”

The State Department spokesperson said the administration still saw a negotiated solution as the best way to contain Iran’s nuclear program, but that Iran’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA and its escalatory actions made diplomacy impossible.

“We are far away from anything like that right now,” they said.

Members of the administration also largely view the prospect of returning to indirect talks with Iran as a politically unfavorable step that could prove detrimental to Vice President Kamala Harris’ and other Democrats’ chances at winning in November, several officials told ABC News.

The doubtful outlook for resuscitating negotiations in the coming months further diminishes the already low odds of securing a deal with Iran before President Joe Biden’s time in the White House comes to an end, all but pushing his promise to negotiate a “longer and stronger” agreement out of reach.

Khamenei’s comments Tuesday echo the position he took around the time Tehran signed off on the 2015 nuclear pact known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the JCPOA — a landmark accord that granted Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for limiting its nuclear program.

Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018, calling it “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” and reimposing financial restrictions on Iran.

In the years since, Khamenei’s public comments on the matter have oscillated between encouraging negotiations with the U.S. and outright dismissing the possibility of a renewed pact.

Foreign policy observers say the upcoming U.S. presidential election is injecting even more uncertainty into the prospects of reaching another nuclear agreement with Iran.

Trump has previously made unsubstantiated claims that Iran was ready to accept conditions that were highly favorable to the U.S. at the end of his term and that he was “ready to make a deal.” But on the campaign trail, Trump — a sworn enemy of the Iranian regime — has taken an increasingly hawkish stance against the country, which reportedly carried out a cyberattack targeting his campaign and has plotted against him and his former Cabinet officials.

Harris has also promised to take an aggressive approach to curbing Iran’s malign influence in the Middle East, but she supported the JCPOA, as well as the current administration’s efforts to cut a new deal. However, she has not clearly said whether she would attempt to pick up where Biden left off.

Indirect talks with Iran under the Biden administration officially kicked off in April 2021. Despite mediators’ initial optimism, talks eventually sputtered out after multiple rounds of stop-start diplomacy failed to move both sides toward an agreement.

So far, Biden has made good on another of his major promises regarding Iran: his declaration that the country would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.”

However, officials within his administration say Tehran has made substantial progress toward that goal in recent years.

In July, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Iran was likely only “one or two weeks away” from having breakout capacity to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon, and that the U.S. was watching “very, very carefully” to see whether the country would move toward weaponizing its nuclear program, a step the administration says the regime has not yet taken.

The U.S. shutting down the possibility of any renewed talks with Iran right now comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East, including Israel’s preemptive strike Saturday night on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.

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(WASHINGTON) — An environmental group is calling for a federal agency to investigate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who allegedly used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a dead whale, strapped it to the roof of his minivan, and drove it across state lines roughly three decades ago when he was in his 40s.

On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, a nonprofit group, wrote a letter to directors of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asking them to investigate Kennedy for his alleged actions, which his daughter, Kick Kennedy, recounted to Town & Country in a 2012 interview. The story resurfaced this week amid tabloid reports about Kick Kennedy’s dating life.

According to the Town & Country piece, “word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, [Massachusetts].”

“Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York,” according to the article.

A spokeswoman for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.

Kick Kennedy told the outlet, “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week suspended his independent presidential campaign and endorsed Republican Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign announced later that Kennedy would join his presidential transition team.

In the letter to the NOAA, Brett Hartl, national political director for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, argued that Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and possibly the Endangered Species Act.

“We hope that the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement, at a minimum, is able to ensure that Mr. Kennedy surrenders any and all illegally obtained wildlife that he continues to possess, including the whale skull he took from the Massachusetts beach in 1994,” Hartl wrote, according to a copy of the letter he provided to ABC News.

“Given Mr. Kennedy’s reckless disregard for the two most important marine conservation laws in the United States, we ask that NOAA consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties as well,” he wrote.

Representatives for the NOAA did not respond to an emailed question about whether the agency had decided to investigate Kennedy.

The resurfaced whale anecdote is the second story regarding Kennedy’s handling of wild animals that has drawn attention and scrutiny this summer.

Earlier this month, he told Roseanne Barr that in 2014 he jokingly planted a dead bear cub in Central Park after picking up the cub from the side of the road and putting it in the back of his vehicle.

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(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to soon face her first post-convention test when she sits for a formal interview airing in primetime Thursday.

CNN announced Tuesday that Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz will be interviewed by anchor Dana Bash, marking the first sitdown with a reporter since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race.

The announcement came as Harris faced growing calls from critics about her availability to reporters since she took over the campaign.

Ian Sams, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, appeared reiterated on Monday that Harris would “schedule” a sit-down interview by the end of the month.

The initial absence of plans for any such sit-down prompted accusations by Republican critics of dodging the press.

“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said of Harris at a North Carolina event earlier this month. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent.”

His campaign has said Harris is trying to “duck and hide” from the news media, which is sure to sling several tough questions her way when she meets the press.

The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris, whose poll numbers are outpacing those of President Joe Biden when he was atop the Democratic ticket, according to 538’s national polling average. As of Tuesday, Harris is polling ahead of Trump, 47.2% to 43.6%; when Biden left the race, he was polling at 40.2% compared to Trump’s 43.5%, according to 538’s polling average.

Harris has also stirred enthusiasm from Democrats that had been absent most of the campaign cycle — and is riding a high following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Moreover, she chose a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose rural background has helped the ticket craft a message Democrats have said they believe will make inroads with voters in conservative parts of the country.

All the while, Trump has seemed to abandon the discipline Republicans had lauded him for this summer. Recently, he has made false claims about the crowd size at a Harris rally and appeared to forget to mention a policy proposal he had been slated to unveil at an event in Michigan.

Democrats have cautioned that Harris has several hurdles to clear in the coming weeks.

One of those hurdles is the pending media interview, where Harris would likely have to defend the decisions of the Biden administration and specify some of her policy stances.

On Monday, Trump sought to spotlight Harris’ connection to the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.

“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed when he spoke to National Guardsmen at a Detroit event later Monday.

Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s capacities prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”

Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.

Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.

Harris would surely be asked about the war in Gaza. She said recently, “We need a cease-fire,” but is a member of an administration that has yet to help broker one.

The situation at the southern border would likely be another topic an interviewer would press Harris on. Republicans have linked her to an increase in unauthorized border crossings earlier in Biden’s term, misleadingly dubbing her the “border czar.”

An interviewer might also ask Harris to respond to the criticism of her recently unveiled economic plan, in which she called for an end to grocery “price-gouging,” prompting accusations by some Republicans that she wants “communist price controls.”

Harris travels this week to south Georgia, where she will embark on a bus tour and hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia.

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(WASHINGTON) — Climate change may not be a top concern for voters for the 2024 presidential election, but that hasn’t stopped many Republicans from making misrepresentations about environmental and energy policy – a departure from the previous tactic of majority climate change denial, according to experts on environmental politics who spoke with ABC News.

Debates around energy policy, specifically regarding renewable energy versus fossil fuels, are inherently connected to climate change, in large part because fossil fuels are the largest contributor to climate change, according to the United Nations, accounting for more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90% of carbon dioxide emissions.

In recent years, Republicans have been finding opportunities to condemn green energy, like in February 2021, when a historic freeze caused widespread power outages in Texas, affecting more than 4.5 million people and killing hundreds. At the time, some Republican politicians used the crisis to make false claims about renewable energy, claiming that it was unreliable and the cause of the outages. However, a failure to adequately winterize power sources – particularly the state’s natural gas infrastructure, which “represented 58 percent of all generating units experiencing unplanned outages, derates or failures to start” during the outage – is what caused the grid failure, according to a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released the following November.

While many Republicans previously denied the science that human-caused emissions exacerbated climate change, experts on environmental politics say the conversation has evolved to focus less on the climate science.

“There’s been a real shift in the rhetoric in the past few years,” according to Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School, whose research has focused on the history of climate science and climate denialism. “We’ve seen this shift in rhetoric from denying the reality of climate change to maybe kind of problematizing some of the major solutions that are on the table, like wind and solar energy in particular.”

The effects of climate change are worsening in every part of the U.S., according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a breakdown of the latest in climate science coming from 14 different federal agencies, published in November.

Even so, climate change policies are not among the top of concerns for Republican voters, according to January 2024 polling from the Pew Research Center. While 54% of Americans overall view climate change as a major threat, just 12% of Republicans and those who lean Republican say dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

While denying climate change no longer resonates with some GOP voters as strongly as it once did, the policies that are required to transform the energy economy in the U.S. and around the world to address climate change are still unfavorable to a lot of them – hence the change in messaging, according to David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

“It’s very difficult for Republicans to reconcile any interest in addressing climate change along with messaging and a commitment to maintain reliance on fossil fuels,” Konisky told ABC News.

In the end, the widespread opposition to climate policy reform has little to do with disputing climate science and more to do with objections to the monetary cost of addressing it, according to Aseem Prakash, a professor of political science at University of Washington and director of the Center for Environmental Politics.

The Democratic and Republican divide concerning environmental issues began during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, according to Aronowsky. However, the politics of climate have changed a lot in recent years, according to Prakash. For example, Republicans rarely use the term “climate change” anymore – “it’s become a trigger word,” Prakash said – and instead are framing the subject as “renewable energy” and the problems they claim could arise from policies implementing it.

During a rally in South Carolina in September 2023, former President Donald Trump lambasted offshore wind turbines, claiming that the “windmills are driving [whales] crazy” and are causing an increase in the number of dead whales washing ashore – one of many false claims the former president has made about wind power. During a Republican fundraising dinner in 2019, Trump also claimed that noise from the wind turbines causes cancer, and that they are a “graveyard for birds.”

The rhetoric has surfaced in local politics, too, according to the experts. A protest against offshore wind turbines that took place in February 2023 in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, featured several local Republicans, including the mayors of New Jersey’s Seaside Park and Point Pleasant Beach, and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith.

Despite the claims, there are “no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Many Republicans are also talking about oil in new ways, touting domestic oil as cleaner and more pristine than imported oil, though supporting data has been absent. Trump has vowed to boost U.S. oil production if elected to a second term, promising to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the costs of energy. Yet data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration in March showed that the United States “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time, according to our International Energy Statistics, for the past six years in a row” – 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023, during the Biden administration, breaking the record set in 2019 of 12.3 million during the Trump administration.

Playing into those politics are gasoline prices, which have become a partial barometer of economic security, Matt Huber, a professor in Syracuse University’s geography and environment department, told ABC News. He also noted that that the oil and gas industry has history of funding research that contradicts climate science.

The state of modern American politics includes heavy investment by the fossil fuel industry into the Republican Party and its candidates, Konisky said: “I think that has become almost religious doctrine for many in the Republican Party … whatever the U.S. energy future looks like, it must rely heavily on fossil fuels.”

Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, received $354,937 in funding from the oil and gas industry as of March 2023, according to Open Secrets, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. While the vice-presidential hopeful spoke publicly about the country’s “climate problem” as recently as 2020, he changed his position in 2023 after he was elected to the Senate, championing fracking and decrying clean energy ever since, Politico reported.

Neither the Republican National Committee nor the Trump/Vance campaign responded to an ABC News request for comment.

Other established Republican senators have received much more funding from oil companies than Vance has. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney has received nearly $8.7 million from the oil and gas industry. Texas Sen. John Cornyn has received $5.1 million, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has received more than $5 million, according to Open Secrets.

Another explanation for the Republican departure from climate denial is that it’s becoming an increasingly untenable position to assert that climate change is not real, Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist who has researched how climate change has affected people’s psychological health, told ABC News.

The main reason is that the effects of climate change are now happening in people’s backyards, she said. Those effects include extreme wildfires, drought, a higher frequency of major hurricanes, and sea level rise.

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