(WASHINGTON) — Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro reported to prison on Tuesday, one day after the Supreme Court denied a stay of his sentence.
He was convicted in September of two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide testimony and documents to the House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Navarro spoke Tuesday morning in a strip mall in West Miami near the prison where he will serve four months.
“I will walk proudly in there to do my time,” Navarro said. “I will gather strength from this: Donald John Trump is the nominee.”
Navarro remained defiant as called he the case an “unprecedented assault on the constitutional separation of powers.”
He went on to mention former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress case and how Bannon was allowed to remain free from prison while he appeals his case.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in a short opinion, wrote Monday that he saw “no reason to disagree” with lower courts, which also rejected Navarro’s request.
Navarro’s appeal on the merits remains pending, but he will have to begin serving his sentence in the meantime.
Navarro was ordered on March 11 to report to prison on Tuesday.
He filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court last week in an attempt to remain out of prison as he works to overturn his conviction.
In testimony during Navarro’s trial, former Jan. 6 committee staff director David Buckley said the House panel had wanted to question Navarro about efforts to delay Congress’ certification of the 2020 election, a plan Navarro dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep” in his book “In Trump Time.”
Navarro unsuccessfully argued that former President Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege over his testimony and document production.
-ABC News’ Devin Dwyer contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Congressional leaders and the White House have reached agreement on how to fund the Department of Homeland Security, one of the last hurdles to prevent an approaching partial government shutdown deadline Friday — but it might not come together in time.
Funding for DHS was the final major sticking point in negotiations for the six spending bills that need to pass to avert a shutdown. The details of the negotiation haven’t yet been released.
The agreement on DHS funding paves the way for lawmakers to start processing the spending package in the hopes of meeting Friday’s deadline to avert a partial government shutdown. A deal has been reached on the remaining six government funding bills, congressional leaders confirmed.
“An agreement has been reached for DHS appropriations, which will allow completion of the FY24 appropriations process,” said Speaker Mike Johnson. “House and Senate committees have begun drafting bill text to be prepared for release and consideration by the full House and Senate as soon as possible.”
But with negotiators still working out the details and legislative text of the full agreement still not out, lawmakers are up against the clock to prevent a shutdown. The House has a rule requiring 72 hours for members to review legislation before voting; the Senate also can take a few days to process House-passed bills. That means a vote may not happen until the end of the week or weekend — increasing the chances of shutdown — unless Johnson speeds up the process.
Another wrinkle: the funding agreement may face pushback from some House GOP hard-liners. The House Freedom Caucus — made up of many of the House’s most conservative members — have urged members of the party to reject the appropriations package “otherwise Republicans will be actively funding Biden’s ‘open borders’ policies” — a reference to the DHS deal, its members said in a letter Monday.
President Joe Biden said Tuesday that once Congress approves the package, he “will sign it immediately.”
This shutdown threat has been the latest in a series of challenges for Johnson, whose party maintains a razor-thin margin in the lower chamber.
Congress has nearly shut the government down, at least partially, five times since October. During those votes, Johnson has had to rely on House Democrats’ votes to prevent shutdowns — something that landed his predecessor Kevin McCarthy in hot water with the party and contributed to his ouster last year.
ABC News’ Sarah Beth Hensley contributed to this report.
Ohio’s GOP Senate primary is heading for a fierce finish Tuesday night as three Republicans bludgeon each other for the chance to run in one of the country’s marquee races this year.
Businessman Bernie Moreno and state Sen. Matt Dolan are duking it out in polling, with Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose lagging as voters cast their ballots. The victor will run in November against Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat with a long-standing brand as a populist, working-class advocate facing stiff headwinds in the Republican-friendly state.
The lead-up to the primary has been characterized by allegations of party disloyalty, ideological insincerity, personal attacks, immense spending from self-funders Moreno and Dolan and Democratic meddling, along with a rally over the weekend by former President Donald Trump and his allies to boost Moreno.
Over a half-dozen political strategists who spoke to ABC News in the days leading up to the primary projected that Moreno entered voting Tuesday as the slight favorite, riding the wave of his alliance with Trump in a state where the former president remains popular with the grassroots. But with recent polls still pegging at least a fifth of the electorate as undecided, the race remained unsettled with the clock ticking down.
“I think it’s tighter than a lot of folks expected,” said one longtime Ohio GOP strategist. “I think Bernie still wins this thing by probably closer than people thought it would be. Dolan’s dumped on a shit-ton of money into this race, just personal money. And he’s got the momentum, but I think at the end of the day, in my opinion, I think Bernie will be able to win probably by 5ish points or so, I think. We’ll see.”
Moreno has been pressing his advantage with Trump’s followers, rallying with the former president and others such as Ohio GOP Sen. JD Vance, in Dayton last weekend. The event served a dual purpose of exciting the grassroots to vote before Tuesday and reminding the broader electorate of who won the support of the GOP kingmaker.
“The biggest challenge he’s had is establishing awareness that he is Trump’s preferred candidate. And so, this will get an enormous amount of attention and build some excitement … A lot of those [undecided voters] have no idea who Trump’s endorsed in this race, and they will know after this week,” David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, told ABC News on Friday.
Dolan, meanwhile, is leaning into his own strengths.
An erstwhile critic of Trump who lost the GOP Senate primary in 2022, Dolan ran this year as more agnostic on Trump, saying that he endorses the former president’s policies while remaining more circumspect on the man himself. He’s supplemented his establishment bona fides with endorsements from Gov. Mike DeWine and former Sen. Rob Portman, lawmakers more aligned with the traditional wing of the party.
Dolan has also tapped into his own immense wealth to blanket the airwaves with ads, emerging as easily the biggest spender in the primary.
“The spending really matters,” said former Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio. “The endorsements matter because they’re main line, trusted voices, and when your vote goal is to get to 35%, 36%, which I think somebody will win this with less than 40, those kinds of trusted voices help you.”
Stagnating in third place has been LaRose, who got swamped by the spending of Moreno and Dolan and who tried to run as a strong Trump ally without the former president’s endorsement. Still, his campaign sounded a confident note Monday, with spokesperson Ben Kindel saying the campaign is “confident” LaRose would win as “a proven conservative” — a contrast, he said, to the other two candidates.
Remarks like those have punctuated much of the race.
Moreno has pounced on Dolan as anti-Trump, citing his criticism in 2022 and reticence to embrace Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee this year. And Dolan has labeled Moreno as a “phony.” A super PAC supporting Moreno also hit out at LaRose in an ad last month as a “champion for trans equality.”
Some GOP strategists expressed caution at reading Tuesday’s results as part of a broader Republican proxy war, suggesting the gobs of money being spent are more determinative than any one candidate’s stance on Trump. But Moreno’s allies expressed confidence in their footing on that ideological battlefield, contrasting Dolan’s recent endorsements with Trump’s involvement.
“The biggest gift Matt Dolan’s team gave us was rolling out endorsements from Rob Portman and Mike DeWine over the last week because it allowed our campaign to reframe the race as being between the RINO establishment and the Trump/America First wing of the party,” said one Moreno adviser.
The race entered a more personal phase late last week after the Associated Press reported that an email account associated with Moreno’s business set up an account on a website seeking “men for 1-on-1 sex.” Moreno’s campaign has said that he didn’t have access to the email associated with the account, and a former intern said he set it up as a “prank.”
A pro-Dolan super PAC launched ads over the story after its publication, dubbing Moreno “damaged goods.” Trump and allies hit out at the story at the rally on Saturday, and Moreno’s wife released a statement laying the controversy squarely at Dolan’s feet.
Dolan’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment from ABC News.
The story ended up getting minimal play in local media, which Moreno allies attributed to wariness of the AP report.
“It’s not going to get the full message delivery that I think they thought they would be able to pull off,” one Ohio GOP strategist involved in the race said of Dolan allies’ seizing on the story.
On top of all the infighting, Democrats have spent over $3 million on efforts labeling Moreno as too conservative and close to Trump — a strategy viewed as backhandedly trying to boost him with Ohio’s conservative and pro-Trump primary electorate. Democratic sources said they were confident all three Republicans would be vulnerable on policy attacks but viewed Moreno as more vulnerable than Dolan and LaRose.
Whoever wins Tuesday will have the daunting yet possible task of unseating Brown.
The gravelly-voiced Democrat has for years centered his messaging around the “dignity of work,” establishing a pre-Trump era reputation as a populist with a muscular constituency services operation that has helped him transcend Ohio’s rightward drift — so far.
Stivers, who estimated Republicans would have a “tiny, tiny advantage” in November, dubbed Brown as “probably the best retail politician I’ve ever met,” recounting a story of running into him in a crowded elevator at an event.
“Sherrod Brown gets in right as the before the elevator door closes, and in the time between the bottom floor and the eighth floor where the event was, Sherrod Brown had a brief yet meaningful exchange with every individual person on that elevator. I mean, he’s a good retail politician, and he works hard,” Stivers said.
Virtually every Republican who spoke to ABC News expressed confidence that the ultimate nominee would be able to lick his wounds in time to face Brown, given that Ohio’s primary is in March, while other states offer shorter runways with primaries as late as August.
But observers predicted that recent weeks would not be the last characterized by such political brutality, given declining power of state powerbrokers in the Trump era and just the overall viciousness of modern politics.
“There’s no infrastructure, there’s no trusted voice who could guide the party away from these fights,” Niven said. “It’s a great indicator of the massive change in the nature of the party. They can’t avoid fighting with themselves anymore.”
(WASHINGTON) — The presidential nominations are locked up — but the primaries remain, along with any tea leaves they may provide.
Ohio’s GOP Senate primary is the headliner Tuesday, with car salesman Bernie Moreno considered by several strategists to be the slight favorite, running with former President Donald Trump’s endorsement against state Sen. Matt Dolan and Secretary of State Frank LaRose. All are running as staunch conservatives, though some dividing lines have emerged on policy and their approach to Trump himself.
The winner will get the chance to run against Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, in one of the most competitive Senate races of the year.
And while Trump and President Joe Biden have locked up the delegates needed to win their respective parties’ nominations, primaries in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas and Ohio could reveal any linger grumbling in either party base over their presumptive nominees.
All the while, the battle for the House will continue to get fleshed out Tuesday night.
Here are three things to watch for in Tuesday’s primaries:
Ohio primary a political knife fight
Ohio’s GOP Senate primary is heading toward a ferocious finish after Moreno, Dolan and LaRose have savaged each other for months.
National Republicans have helped clear several Senate primary fields in favor of a favored candidate, but with no clear preference in Ohio, the race has remained crowded and contentious.
Moreno has given Trump a political bear hug, earning his endorsement and rallying with him and other allies in Dayton on Saturday. Dolan has run as a more traditional conservative, earning the support of Gov. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and former Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, while saying he supports Trump’s policies without as much personal fealty. And LaRose has also run in the Trump lane, though he has been able to keep up with the high spending levels from Moreno and Dolan and suffered setbacks by not gaining Trump’s endorsement.
Keeping up with recent races in Ohio, the primary has resembled a political knife fight, with candidates accusing each other of phoniness in their ideology and deep character flaws.
The victor will emerge bloodied — though, strategists said, with enough time to recover by the time he faces off in November against Brown, who is running against his state’s partisan lean but brings a beefy resume and populist bona fides, making Ohio’s Senate race one of the most competitive this year.
Lingering protest votes against Trump or Biden?
While Trump and Biden have handily won every primary state so far. But they also have faced different forms of protest votes.
Before former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley suspended her GOP presidential campaign, she routinely got at least a quarter of the vote in primary states. And Biden has faced waves of criticism over his handling of the war in Gaza, with over 100,000 people backing “uncommitted” in the Michigan Democratic primary as a protest vote.
Now, the protest votes in both parties are expected to diminish.
Haley dropped out of the race earlier this month, and few, if any, states have as favorable a Democratic electorate for a protest vote as do Michigan or other states like Minnesota or Washington.
However, the chances of a protest vote remain.
Haley, who dropped out after Georgia’s early voting had already started but after Election Day there, still got over 13% of the vote on March 12. And Democratic voters could still sit out of the race, producing low turnout, or vote for more minor candidates like author Marianne Williamson.
As both candidates try to consolidate support among their party bases, operatives and observers alike are eyeing any signs of division heading into November.
Battle for House continues to take shape
While the presidential and Senate races will take center stage, the battle for the narrowly divided House of Representatives will continue to take shape Tuesday.
Ohio’s 6th Congressional District is hosting a special election to complete the term of former GOP Rep. Bill Johnson, who retired to become a college president, and a primary to be the Republican nominee in the race for a full term starting in January.
The seat is deep red and features state Rep. Reggie Stoltzfus, state Sen. Michael Rulli and Rick Tsai, a chiropractor. Stoltzfus and Rulli are running as more staunch conservatives, though Rulli is also getting support from Defending Main Street, the super PAC arm of the more middle-ground Republican Main Street Partnership.
Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, which is represented by Democrat Marcy Kaptur but also voted for Trump in 2020, is a top GOP target. Republicans caught a break when scandal plagued candidate J.R Majewski, who lost to Kaptur in 2022, dropped out of the race.
The two candidates left there are state Rep. Derek Merrin, who has drawn support from national Republicans, and former state Rep. Craig Riedel, who has been attacked over a resurfaced video of him criticizing Trump.
Illinois’ 7th Congressional District is featuring a generational battle, with 82-year-old Rep. Danny Davis running for reelection against Chicago Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin and activist Kina Collins, with the ultimate nominee all but guaranteed a win in November in the deep-blue seat.
Davis has several well-connected backers, including Gov. JB Pritzker, while Conyears-Ervin was endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union and Collins has several allies in the activist community.
If the 7th Congressional District features internal Democratic fissures, Illinois’ 12th Congressional District features Republican divides.
Rep. Mike Bost, who is running for reelection with Trump’s endorsement, is facing off against Darren Bailey, a former state lawmaker and failed 2022 gubernatorial nominee who has found room to the right of the deeply conservative incumbent and touted policies like trying to remove Chicago from Illinois.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the Black Conservative Federation Gala on Feb. 23, 2024 in Columbia, South Carolina. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has shrugged off Donald Trump’s suggestion on social media that she and other members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated Jan. 6 should be jailed.
The former president attacked Cheney and the others on social media this week. He also questioned whether Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide in his White House, would be “prosecuted” because part of her testimony to the committee changed over time and has been disputed.
Neither Hutchinson nor Cheney or the Jan. 6 committee members have been accused of a specific crime.
“She should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee,” Trump wrote about Cheney on Sunday on his social media platform, reposting articles making claims that the Jan. 6 committee suppressed evidence during their investigation.
Cheney, a former member of Republican House leadership-turned-vocal Trump critic, responded bluntly to his threats.
“Lying in all caps doesn’t make it true, Donald,” she posted on X later on Sunday. “You know you and your lawyers have long had the evidence.”
The back and forth comes as a Republican-led House committee last week released a report on their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and the previous Jan. 6 committee.
The new report claimed that Hutchinson’s 2022 testimony about what she was told of then-President Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 was contradicted, in part, by Trump’s driver that day.
In her public committee testimony, Hutchinson recalled a conversation she had at the White House on Jan. 6 with Bobby Engel, part of Trump’s security detail, and Trump White House staffer Tony Ornato.
Hutchinson said she was told on Jan. 6 that Trump had lunged at a Secret Service agent in anger after he was told he could not go to the Capitol the day.
Trump denies all wrongdoing.
In a statement last week, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democrat who led the previous Jan. 6 committee, pushed back on the new report’s findings and said the work, led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican, was “dishonest.”
On Monday, Trump took direct aim at Hutchinson, one of the previous committee’s central witnesses.
In the interview with his former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, Trump claimed Hutchinson “made up” her story and that the Jan. 6 committee “destroyed” its evidence.
“And I say what’s gonna happen to her?” he said of Hutchinson.
“The whole thing was such a fake story,” Trump continued.
In the wake of last week’s GOP-led report, Hutchinson’s attorney referred ABC News to a letter he sent to Loudermilk in January in which he wrote, in part, that Hutchinson “has and will continue to tell the truth.”
“Ms. Hutchinson will not succumb to a pressure campaign from those who seek to silence her and influence her testimony, even when done in the name of ‘oversight,'” her lawyer wrote.
As the 2024 general election ramps up — some seven months away — Trump has recently made multiple headlines during his campaign appearances.
A Saturday rally in Ohio was kicked off by him praising the people who have been jailed for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, calling them “hostages.”
Later in his speech, while talking about the need to protect American auto workers, Trump also warned there would be a broader “bloodbath” if he’s not reelected — sparking criticism from Biden.
A Biden campaign spokesperson said, in part, “This is who Donald Trump is: a loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience doubles down on his threats of political violence.”
Posting on his social media platform on Monday, Trump claimed that his “bloodbath” warning was “simply” about the potential challenges for auto workers if he’s not back in the White House to impose tariffs on China.
Trump’s campaign also capitalized on the controversy, with a fundraising email sent on Monday insisting that his political opponents and others had “viciously” misquoted him as part of a broader effort to “keep control.”
Trump’s praise of his supporters — even those whom prosecutors say participated in Jan. 6 — has been a central theme of his campaign as he vows to “free” people convicted for their roles that day as one of his first acts as president should he be reelected.
His rhetoric on the trail about his political opponents being “vermin” and migrants who come into the country illegally “poisoning the blood of” America has further alarmed some critics and experts who note it parallels the words of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Trump has denied any intentional link.
He has also campaigned, in part, on a message of retribution for his voters, suggesting he will help them get revenge on a federal government that he says targets conservatives like him unfairly.
“This is the final battle. … Either they win or we win,” he said last year.
More recently, he has said, “Our ultimate retribution is success.”
During his radio interview on Monday with Gorka, Trump defended his “bloodbath” language and made more incendiary statements about Jewish Democrats, contending that they should be “ashamed of themselves” — echoing comments he has made in the past.
“If you vote for a Democrat, you’re being disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel,” he said in 2019.
Those comments invoked the antisemitic trope of “dual loyalty”: that Jews can’t be trusted because of their faith and must first have loyalty to something other than their country.
Elsewhere in the interview with Gorka on Monday, while attacking Biden’s policies, Trump argued that the backlash he’s been facing over “bloodbath” is a part of his political opponents’ efforts to “cheat” in the 2024 election, making unfounded claims that his opponents have used the term more often.
“We’re getting ripped off with Biden’s really dumb auto policy,” he said.
Trump claimed, too, that any auto workers who vote against him are “not the smartest people.”
Trump later said Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats — amid Israel’s war against Hamas and other tensions in the Middle East — “hate” their religion and Israel and that they “should be ashamed of themselves.”
“I actually think they hate Israel. Yes,” he said.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he said. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”
Biden’s campaign quickly slammed that statement, saying in their own that “the only person who should be ashamed here is Donald Trump.”
(WASHINGTON) — As election season gets underway, officials in a key battleground state said they are prepared to handle the task of counting and certifying ballots despite a rise in threats.
Nearly four years ago, the staff at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix was hounded by former President Donald Trump’s supporters, who pushed his false claims that votes in his favor were not counted.
Maricopa County election officials and workers have been harassed and threatened over those false claims long after the election was certified, according to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.
“This isn’t just a normal political lie,” he told ABC News. “This is a lie that then leads to targeting of people.”
Richer, a Republican who has been in his position since 2021, said he has taken steps to ensure that his office completes the certification process properly and transparently.
Richer has been offering public tours of his facility and posting live streams of many of the processes that take place there — from tabulating votes from voting machines to hand-checking the thousands of mail-in ballots that come in every election.
During a tour of the facility with ABC News, Richer showed how the ballot processing team takes on counting those mail-in ballots and how every aspect is thoroughly vetted.
“These are teams of different parties, so by the lanyard that they’re wearing, either Republican or Democrat — or yellow is an Independent,” he said of the ballot workers.
Richer said “millions of dollars” have been added since 2020 to help improve his office. But despite the transparency and extra resources, Richer said the police have made arrests against people who have threatened him and his staff.
“We’re talking about the stuff like, ‘we are coming to hang you, we are coming to shoot you,’” he explained.
Richer is facing a reelection challenge from State Rep. Justin Heap (R), who has been backed by state lawmakers who have also denied the outcome of the 2020 election. Heap did not respond to ABC News for comment.
When asked by ABC News about the large number of election denial claims coming from his own party, Richer said, “We’re better than the drivel that you might see on the 27th comment on a blog post.”
“But some of that has been elevated by people who are in positions of power and words matter, and words matter from these people,” he added.
Those words have already affected some Maricopa election officials’ future.
Maricopa County Supervisor Clint Hickman said he won’t seek reelection this year following threats against him and his family since 2020. He is one of two Maricopa election officials who declined to run for reelection.
“Your own party is shoving knives in your back when you walk out the door. And it’s very difficult. It’s been very difficult to deal with for myself [and] my colleagues,” Hickman, a Republican, told ABC News.
Hickman said he received several death threats and at one point 100 people came to his house while he, his wife and children were home. Two sheriff’s deputies were stationed outside to guard his home.
“It’s horrible to talk to citizens and say, ‘Hey, can you come out and help run an election? Can you observe the election?’ I don’t want any part of that because of bad behavior, because of criticism,” Hickman said. “It’s ridiculously horrible. If you can’t get the best, expect the worst.”
Richer said that despite the threats, he is confident he and his team will conduct their duties this November.
“The board is committed. Their side of the operation is committed. Everyone understands the game plan. Arizonans are going to be able to participate. Their votes are going to count. It’s going to be valid. It’s going to be bipartisan. It’s going to be fair, and it’s going to be certified eventually,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — Ahead of President Joe Biden making campaign stops on Tuesday in Arizona and Nevada, advisers are laying out why they still place him in a better position than former President Donald Trump to win those two key battlegrounds, despite Biden’s mediocre polling in the early lead-up to the long general election fight.
On a call with reporters on Monday, aides to the president’s reelection bid previewed key areas where, they say, they see Biden having the advantage — including on abortion and in wooing more moderate and independent voters, some of whom rejected Trump during his Republican primary fight with Nikki Haley.
“Nevada and Arizona are states that President Biden and Democrats won in 2020 and again in 2022. And this year, we have the message and the infrastructure to win yet again,” one Biden campaign aide told reporters.
“These are states where voters overwhelmingly support a woman’s right to choose and where abortion rights will likely be on the ballot [as well in November] — and they are benefiting tremendously from the president’s policies with tens of thousands of new good-paying jobs in clean energy and chips manufacturing,” the aide argued.
Echoing what is likely to be a key campaign message from Biden throughout the year, another adviser drew a “stark contrast” with the president and “what you see the Trump campaign not doing” in Arizona.
This aide went on to ding the Trump team for, they suggested, failing to connect with non-white voters, though Trump has made specific appeals to Black and Hispanic Americans, including as recently as his Ohio rally on Saturday.
Exit polls from the 2020 race against Biden also show Trump did marginally better with those groups than previous Republican candidates.
Knowing both states have a large population of independent voters, the Biden campaign said it continues to seek out former Haley supporters and moderates and independents not on board with Trump.
“Our campaign is paying attention to that and will be engaging voters very intentionally, to draw that contrast and invite them in,” one of the advisers said.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to hammer Biden over high inflation and immigration as well as a variety of foreign policy issues.
Seizing on what polling shows is broader feeling of economic discontent around the country, despite low unemployment and a strong stock market, among other factors, Trump has also cast himself as the candidate who can bring more prosperity back to everyday voters.
He assailed Biden at Saturday’s rally as the “worst president we’ve ever had.”
When asked if the campaign has reached out ahead of Tuesday’s primary to organizers of a planned protest vote in Arizona — spurred by Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza — and whether Biden planned to address it while in the state, an aide offered what’s now a canned response to ultimately say they won’t take any vote for granted.
“The conflict between Israel and Hamas is painful. It’s a difficult situation, and [President Biden] believes and this campaign believes that people have every right to make their voices heard,” the aide said. “And in many respects, the president shares the goal of the many who remain ‘uncommitted,’ which is working toward the end of the violence and working towards a just and lasting peace. That’s his focus and the campaign supports that.”
The protest movement, focused on urging voters to cast “uncommitted” or similar ballots instead of choosing Biden in the Democratic nominating contests, has gained some traction in a few states, including Minnesota and Michigan.
Uncommitted is also estimated to have won some delegates to the Democrats’ national convention this summer, giving them more of a voice.
Organizers of the protest vote in Arizona are urging Democrats to vote for Marianne Williamson instead of Biden since there isn’t an uncommitted or write-in option on the ballot.
The Biden campaign said on Monday that he plans to spend time this week in the battleground counties of Washoe in Nevada and Maricopa in Arizona.
One of the advisers also defended the president so far mixing smaller events with a few larger-scale gatherings, unlike Trump, who favors massive and often headline-making rallies.
“These are strategic events. They allow us to break through a fragmented media environment. We do a lot of digital-first content to reach the voters who they know are sort of deeply disengaged from politics,” the aide said. “Smaller retail events support that digital-first content. But I would also flag that we are continuing to do larger events as well. We can do both.”
The campaign pitches their electoral path
In a new memo, also released on Monday, campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote that the center of the campaign’s “multiple pathways” to 270 electoral votes are three key regions of the country.
Chavez Rodriguez highlighted “the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, western battlegrounds like Nevada and Arizona, and southern states like Georgia and North Carolina,” adding they’re also focusing on “Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia, while expanding the map in places like Florida and Texas.”
Five of the states that Biden’s campaign manager singled out — Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — have all become reliably Democratic in past presidential years, suggesting the campaign will be somewhat on the defensive in 2024 in some parts of the country.
Regarding the Southwest, Chavez Rodriguez wrote that the campaign will focus its messaging in the region on abortion rights, job creation and its support from organized labor groups, while Trump allies such as Senate candidate Kari Lake “remain fixated on election denialism.”
(WASHINGTON) — Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro must report to prison on Tuesday as scheduled, after the Supreme Court on Monday denied the stay of his sentence.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in a short opinion, wrote that he saw “no reason to disagree” with lower courts, which also rejected Navarro’s request.
Navarro’s appeal on the merits remains pending, but he will have to begin serving his sentence in the meantime.
Navarro was ordered on March 11 to report to prison in Miami on Tuesday, to serve a four-month sentence.
He was convicted in September of two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide testimony and documents to the House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Navarro on Friday filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in an attempt to remain out of prison as he works to overturn his conviction.
In his filing to the Supreme Court, Navarro’s attorney Stanley Woodward argued Navarro “is indisputably neither a flight risk nor a danger to public safety should he be released pending appeal.”
In testimony during Navarro’s trial, former Jan. 6 committee staff director David Buckley said the House panel had been seeking to question Navarro about efforts to delay Congress’ certification of the 2020 election, a plan Navarro dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep” in his book “In Trump Time.”
Navarro unsuccessfully argued that former President Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege over his testimony and document production.
“For the first time in our nation’s history, a senior presidential advisor has been convicted of contempt of Congress after asserting executive privilege over a congressional subpoena,” Woodward’s filing said. “Dr. Navarro has appealed and will raise a number of issues on appeal that he contends are likely to result in the reversal of his conviction, or a new trial.”
Navarro would become the first former Trump adviser to report to prison for actions related to the Jan. 6 attack.
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders and Laura Romero contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Israel’s expected military invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza was the focus of President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call Monday — their first in more than a month — with the White House saying Biden is still not satisfied that Israel will do enough to prevent civilian casualties as it goes after Hamas fighters in the city.
In the latest development in a standoff between Biden and Netanyahu that’s gone on for weeks — with the U.S. demanding a satisfactory “plan” from Israel — national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Netanyahu, at Biden’s request, would be sending a delegation to Washington to try to work out what he called “an alternative approach.”
Speaking at a White House briefing, Sullivan had some of the administration’s strongest words yet for how Israel has conducted itself in Gaza and how the U.S. would view an invasion of Rafah, where over a million displaced Palestinians are sheltering.
“A humanitarian crisis has descended across Gaza. And anarchy reigns in areas that Israel’s military has cleared, but not stabilized,” Sullivan said.
“A major ground operation there would be a mistake; it would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worse than the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepening the anarchy in Gaza, and further isolate Israel internationally,” he told reporters. “More importantly, the key goals Israel wants to achieve in Rafah can be done by other means.”
Sullivan said during the call Monday, Biden “rejected” that “raising questions about Rafah is the same as raising questions about defeating Hamas.”
“That’s just nonsense. Our position is that Hamas should not be allowed a safe haven in Rafah or anywhere else,” he said.
Sullivan also highlighted that Rafah is also a “key entry point” for humanitarian assistance that could shut down or face a “great risk” if an invasion occurs, and that Egypt has also expressed concern for a military operation there.
He announced that Israel “in the coming days” will be sending a team of officials from across many areas of government to hear the administration’s concerns about the Rafah operation and to work on an alternative.
“On the call today, President Biden asked the Prime Minister to send a senior interagency team, composed of military, intelligence, and humanitarian officials, to Washington in the coming days to hear U.S. concerns about Israel’s current Rafah planning and to lay out an alternative approach that would target key Hamas elements in Rafah and secure the Egypt Gaza border without a major ground invasion,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan said that while Netanyahu agreed to send a team to the meeting, he “has his own point of view” on a Rafah operation.
“Send your team to Washington,” Sullivan said. “Let’s talk about it. We’ll lay out for you what we believe is a better way.”
Sullivan stressed several times that Israel needs a “coherent and sustainable strategy” for its military operations that are connected to a “clear strategic end game.” He repeated the administration’s public view that the White House has “every expectation” that no major military operation will happen in Rafah until the two sides meet.
At the same time, though, when pressed by ABC News’ Karen Travers, Sullivan declined to say whether the Biden’s call was the “come to Jesus” meeting with Netanyahu that Biden mentioned in a hot-mic moment on the House floor just minutes after his State of the Union address.
“I’m not going to characterize that on behalf of the president. I will just describe what happened in the conversation as I’ve done here today, and I’ll let you all draw your own conclusions.”
Sullivan said the leaders would stay in “close touch” in the coming days and weeks.
ABC News’ Karen Travers contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Devon Archer, a key witness in House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, will not attend a high-profile open hearing this week, citing what his attorney characterized as a “patently unreasonable” amount of time to prepare.
Matthew Schwartz, an attorney for Archer — a former Hunter Biden business associate, revealed Monday in a letter to a top Oversight Committee investigator that the panel only contacted him on Friday in an “end-of-day email” to inquire about whether his client would attend the hearing, which Schwartz says “is sure to be a closely-watched public hearing that the committee has provocatively entitled ‘Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office.'”
“The answer is no,” Schwartz wrote to the committee, according to a copy of the letter obtained by ABC News. “Providing such short notice for a witness’s public appearance before the Committee on a matter of national importance is patently unreasonable.”
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer publicly invited Archer to appear alongside Hunter Biden and two other witnesses in their probe — Jason Galanis and Tony Bobulinski — at the public hearing on March 7 and has frequently promoted the hearing in public statements since then.
“This is an opportunity for Hunter [Biden] to have the hearing he wanted,” Comer said on Fox News over the weekend. “We want the public hearing. We actually need the public hearing because of the discrepancies” between Hunter Biden’s closed-door testimony and what other witnesses in the probe have told the committee, he said.
But according to Schwartz’s letter, Archer first received word from the committee late Friday. Schwartz alluded to an invitation attached to the Friday email dated March 6 and transmitted to Devon Archer “via counsel,” but he claimed “that latter was never sent to me.”
Schwartz suggested the letter dated March 6 was mistakenly sent to a different attorney.
“As you well know (and as the lawyer to whom you sent the letter has confirmed), I have been the only lawyer to represent Mr. Archer in the Committee’s work, including representing him at the July interview,” Schwartz said.
Archer’s testimony last year was promoted by House Republicans as some of the most damning evidence of the Biden family’s alleged influence peddling. Comer hoped to air some of Archer’s closed-door testimony — including a claim that Hunter Biden frequently put his father on speakerphone in the presence of business associates — in a public setting.
But in his letter Monday, Schwartz wrote that “it is not remotely reasonable to ask an important witness in what is sure to be a closely-watched public hearing … to prepare witness testimony in one business day, and to prepare to give public testimony in less than three business days.”
Schwartz reiterated his client’s willingness to cooperate in the investigation and asked them to suggest other dates in the future for Archer to testify publicly. Archer is currently preparing to report to prison for defrauding a Native American tribe.
Hunter Biden last week also declined the panel’s invitation to testify publicly, despite previously expressing an interest in doing so, calling the hearing a “carnival sideshow” and a “blatant planned-for-media event.”
Archer and the two other witnesses invited to participate in the hearing — Galanis and Bobulinski — are former business associates of Hunter Biden who have since become critics of the Biden family.
Bobulinski released a statement last week signaling his intention to appear for the hearing.
Mark Paoletta, an attorney for Galanis — who is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence in Alabama for securities fraud — said his client “is willing to testify at this hearing to provide his firsthand knowledge of then-Vice President Joe Biden helping his son Hunter Biden in his business dealings.”
A spokesperson for the Oversight Committee did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
