(NEW YORK) — As Democrats seek to hold onto their slim majority in Congress, one traditionally blue haven for the party has turned more competitive than expected: New York.
Prominent figures on both sides are flocking to the state as several races, especially those for governor and Congress, have tightened in the final stretch.
President Joe Biden this week made a trip to Syracuse, and first lady Jill Biden will stump for Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney and other Democratic candidates on Sunday.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was on Long Island Saturday to stump for Republican gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin as polls show a tightening in the contest between Zeldin and incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul.
“It was always gonna be a tough cycle. Even in a blue state like New York, not every year is gonna be one where the Democrats run the table the way they did in the last midterms in 2018,” Evan Stavisky, a Democratic political consultant, told ABC News.
The governor’s race
New York has comfortably elected Democratic governors for years. A Republican hasn’t held the position since 2002, when former Gov. George Pataki won reelection.
Over the summer, Hochul at times held an 18-point lead over Zeldin, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. Now, a little more than a week out from Election Day, Hochul’s lead is 6.9 points — still making her a frontrunner but close enough to cause some alarm among Democrats.
“When you consider that there’s a 2 million-plus Democratic registration edge, it shouldn’t be close at all,” Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic strategist based in New York, told ABC News.
Hochul’s spent a large part of her campaign casting Zeldin as an acolyte of former President Donald Trump and criticizing him for his stance on abortion. Zeldin praised the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade as a victory, and once voted in favor of a 20-week ban on abortion. Heading into the general election, he’s tried to shift to a more moderate stance, telling voters he wouldn’t change the state’s abortion laws.
Thomas Doherty, a political strategist and former aide to Pataki, said he thought Zeldin’s enthusiastic response to the Roe decision in a state as pro-choice as New York was “a bad mistake.”
But Doherty and other strategists said crime’s become the forefront issue in the state, as well as the economy. Those issues were front and center of the first and only debate between Zeldin and Hochul earlier this week.
“You’re poorer and less safe because of Kathy Hochul and extreme policies,” Zeldin said in his opening statement.
These past few weeks, Hochul’s been putting more emphasis on her efforts to take guns off the streets and recently announced actions to put more cops on New York City’s subways. In the debate, Hochul said she was “laser-focused” on fighting crime.
A Quinnipiac University poll found crime overshadowed other areas when likely voters were asked to choose the most urgent issue facing the state today. Twenty-eight percent of likely voters chose crime, 20% chose inflation and 6% said abortion was the most urgent issue.
New York’s congressional races
While Hochul has turned her attention toward New York City, where the turnout of reliably Democratic voters is essential to a statewide win, national Democrats have zeroed in on congressional races in suburban districts on Long Island and the Hudson Valley, often a bellwether for voters’ enthusiasm.
“A lot of this has to do with turnout. Where’s the energy? I think the energy is on the Republican side of things right now,” Doherty said. “You can sense that nationally as well and I think that’s carried over into New York.”
Republicans hope a tighter-than-expected campaign for governor will motivate GOP voters down the ballot.
Of the country’s 50 most competitive House races, according to FiveThirtyEight, seven are for New York seats. Five will be defended by Democratic incumbents, including Maloney’s 17th congressional district. Maloney, chairman of the Democrats’ congressional campaign arm, touted the president’s plan to invest in manufacturing jobs in the Hudson Valley and upstate New York on ABC News’ “This Week.”
Asked by ABC’s Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl if he’d support a Biden bid for reelection, Maloney did not commit. “Look, the president will make that decision,” he said.
Forecasters at the Cook Political Report recently changed the race between Maloney and Republican Mike Lawler from “leans Democrat” to “toss up.”
Jill Biden’s visit to the state will look to bolster Maloney and Robert Zimmerman, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 3rd congressional district, a swing Long Island seat vacated by Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat.
The party is still favored to keep power there and in the neighboring 4th district, according to forecasters the Cook Political Report, where candidates are jousting for a long-held Democratic seat that shades moderate. Both Republican Anthony D’Esposito and Democrat Laura Gillen bucked their own party in a Newsday debate, D’Esposito insisting that “[abortion] is not on the ballot in New York” and Gillen taking aim at cashless bail, a policy advanced by Democrats in Albany.
Rep. Pat Ryan, who won a summer special election in the 19th district largely on the progressive momentum gained after the Dobbs case, will have to defend a Democratic seat in the 18th District on Election Day because of redistricting.
It will be a test of Democrats’ enthusiasm at the halfway point of Biden’s term in a state that sent him to the White House by 23 points.
(NEW YORK) — Congresswoman Val Demings, who spent 27 years working in law enforcement in Orlando, Florida, said her background has been crucial to her views as a politician. Now running to be a U.S. senator against incumbent Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, her principles will once again be put to the test.
“I’ve seen people at their worst and I’ve seen people at their best,” she told ABC News Correspondent Linsey Davis during an interview. “And I have a really clear understanding of how people find themselves in the circumstances they’re in in the first place.”
Demings, a former social worker, spent nearly three decades in law enforcement — beginning as an officer and working her way up to police chief.
Despite her tenure in law enforcement, several unions representing officers in the state, including her own former department, have endorsed Rubio, her opponent in the race.
“I think it’s politics again,” she told ABC News. “What I found is my opponent and too many other people try to use fear, [saying] ‘you know, she’s not with you because she’s a Democrat.’”
“I am the police chief who brought the community and the department together to reduce violent crime by over 40%,” she added.
It has been more than a decade since Florida has had a Democratic senator, and more than two decades since the state had a Democratic governor.
If she is elected, Demings would be the only Black woman actively serving in the U.S. Senate, and only the third in American history.
She told ABC News she believes the biggest issue for Floridians right now is the rising cost of living, a matter near and dear to her heart.
“I sit here as the daughter of a maid and a janitor,” she said. “I’ve struggled in my own life. I remember graduating from Florida State, saddled with college debt.”
“We have an affordable housing crisis in Florida,” she said. “People are worried about keeping a roof over their head, keeping the lights on.”
In a dependably red state, Demings is running against difficult odds. ABC News partner FiveThirtyEight’s figures show Rubio ahead by 7 percentage points.
Demings, who has served as a well-respected Congresswoman for the past five years, decided to run for the so-called upper chamber because she believes “our nation is in trouble.”
“I just want to create better opportunities for others,” she said. “It’s worth the run for me. It is worth the risk for me.”
Her campaign has raised more than $64 million, making her one of the top fundraisers among Senate hopefuls.
No stranger to adversity, she remembered being told that, “I was the wrong color, the wrong gender,” she said, and that “I probably wouldn’t amount to much.”
When asked what her greatest weakness is, she said her grandchildren. Demings is a mother of three and grandmother of five.
Her greatest strength? Her fearlessness, she said.
(NEW YORK) — GOP victories in the midterm elections could lead to more abortion restrictions in a handful of states.
The races range from gubernatorial seats to ballot measures, to eking out a veto-proof majority in the statehouse. In many states, it’s not just one race that will define the abortion rights outlook but a few different races coming together to form the new landscape for constituents.
Here’s are the six states where abortion laws could flip.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania might be the most straightforward example of how the gubernatorial race could flip a state’s abortion access on its head. If Democrat Josh Shapiro wins, abortion will stay accessible in Pennsylvania because he’s expected to veto any attempts at restrictions. If Republican Doug Mastriano wins, it would be a green light for the Republican-led state legislature to pass laws either severely restricting or outright banning abortion, with a nearly-guaranteed signoff from the governor’s office.
Kansas
Yes, Kansas passed a ballot initiative that made it clear the voters there support abortion rights in the state. But it didn’t enshrine protection for abortion — it only rejected the chance to chip away at it.
So all eyes are on the governor’s race, where a defeat of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly would mean that the state legislature could pass restrictions and see them signed off by Republican challenger Derek Schmidt. But almost more importantly, a bunch of seats on the Kansas Supreme Court, which has been sympathetic to protecting abortion rights, are up for replacement. And new judges are chosen by the governor, which means Kansas could face a more conservative court that is far more open to allowing new abortion restrictions to stand.
Michigan
The governor’s race will actually have less influence over abortion rights in the state than a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights no matter who has political control.
If that ballot measure passes, it would keep abortion legal in the state and protect against future bans. But if the measure fails and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is defeated by challenger Tudor Dixon, a Republican, the Republican-led statehouse could bring Dixon abortion restrictions or bans and see them quickly enacted. Two other races matter, though: the attorney general and the Michigan supreme court races, which Republicans would need to win to get rid of the Democrats currently protecting abortion rights from those perches.
North Carolina
It’s all about the statehouse in North Carolina. Republicans are very close to getting enough seats to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto power — and right now that’s all that’s standing in the way of state Republicans enacting a law that further restricts abortion in the state, where abortion is currently legal until 20 weeks. Republicans need to pick up two seats in the state Senate and three in the state House to have a veto-proof majority.
Arizona
Abortion is legal until 15 weeks of pregnancy in Arizona. If Republican Kari Lake wins the gubernatorial race, abortion could be restricted even further. If Democrat Katie Hobbs is elected, it will remain restricted at 15 weeks. (Hobbs wouldn’t have the votes in the statehouse to repeal that law, since it’s already in place). Of course, there’s still a near-total ban looming over the state in the form of a pre-Roe law that’s locked up in legal limbo.
Wisconsin
Even though Democrats control the governorship in Wisconsin, abortion is currently banned in the state by way of complete legal limbo that forced clinics to give up because of the confusion. But if incumbent Democrats Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul are defeated by Republicans in this election, abortion could be banned more concretely — regardless of the outcome of the current lawsuit — by the state legislature armed with a new Republican governor.
(NEW YORK) — Domestic violent extremists across the ideological spectrum pose a “heightened threat” to the 2022 midterms, according to a joint intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News.
The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center and the U.S. Capitol Police also warn that following the midterms, “perceptions” of election fraud could cause violence.
“We assess that election-related perceptions of fraud and DVE reactions to divisive topics will likely drive sporadic DVE plotting of violence and broader efforts to justify violence in the lead up to and following the 2022 midterm election cycle,” the bulletin dated Friday said. “Following the 2022 midterm election, perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets―such as ideological opponents and election workers.”
Domestic violent extremism activity leading up and during the midterms are likely to focus on “election-related infrastructure, personnel, and voters involved in the election process as attractive targets—including at publicly accessible locations like polling places, ballot drop-box locations, voter registration sites, campaign events, and political party offices.”
“Potential targets of DVE violence include candidates running for public office, elected officials, election workers, political rallies, political party representatives, racial and religious minorities, or perceived ideological opponents.”
The hope, the law enforcement agencies say, is possibly to sway voter habits, undermine perceptions of legitimate elections or prompt a particular government reaction.
“Enduring” ideological grievances and the “perceptions” of election fraud are “likely” driving the potential for DVE violence.
Certain factors that are likely to increase a DVE attack during the election cycle are people urging violent action, threats related to perceived illegitimate elections, perceptions of voter suppression and attacks on one group or party.
The federal government bulletin comes as the NYPD warned this week that poll workers could be targets and urged vigilance.
“However, hostile rhetoric and an abundance of generalized threats from likeminded [extremists] and malicious actors in chat groups, encrypted messaging channels, and other online forums may effectively create echo chambers that circulate and reinforce false narratives and establish a permissive environment for violent action against election-related infrastructure and personnel,” the NYPD bulletin dated on Wednesday and was first reported by ABC News states.
The number of domestic terrorism investigations nearly doubled from 2020 to 2021, largely due to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a report released Friday by the FBI and DHS.
(WASHINGTON) — A federal jury Friday returned a guilty verdict on one count of obstruction of justice against a former Capitol Police officer charged with aiding a rioter who participated in the Jan.6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Michael Riley, a 26-year veteran of the Capitol Police, was charged last year after he allegedly encouraged a participant in the attack to delete social media posts that showed the person joining the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol.
Investigators said Riley reached out to the rioter, Jacob Hiles, over Facebook on Jan. 7, and encouraged him to delete posts that showed him inside the Capitol the day before.
“I’m a capitol police officer who agrees with your political stance,” Riley’s message said. “Take down the part about being in the building, they are currently investigating and everyone who was in the building is going to be charged. Just looking out!”
Riley was found guilty on one count of obstruction related to his attempts to cover up his messages with Hiles after news reports surfaced of Hiles’ arrest.
The jury failed to reach a verdict on a second count related to Riley’s communication with Hiles on Jan. 7.
He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
(NEW YORK) — The enduring debate about whether UFOs are caused by extraterrestrial beings will once again be front and center next week as U.S. intelligence agencies will provide Congress with an updated report on UFO incidents over the past year.
Meanwhile, it appears that other more recent incidents are being attributed to weather balloons, other airborne clutter, and foreign surveillance, according to a U.S. official.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has until Monday to provide Congress with its first annual unclassified update on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, the new term for UFOs, that includes all new UAP incidents over the past year and any previously unreported incidents.
The report was required by the 2022 Defense Bill that mandated that the DNI provide an annual declassified update and a classified annex by Oct. 31 of every year through 2026.
The update follows the DNI’s first-ever report released in June 2022 that listed 144 UAP incidents, only one of which could be explained. At a congressional hearing earlier this year Pentagon officials said that the number of UAP incidents under investigation had risen to more than 400.
While it is unclear how many new reports will be included in the upcoming update, a U.S. official told ABC News that the most recent UAP incidents can be explained as a mix of weather balloons, airborne clutter, and foreign surveillance. But the official stressed that other incidents still cannot be explained.
The official added that it cannot be determined who is behind the foreign surveillance but the most likely candidates would be China and Russia since they have the most interest in monitoring the U.S. military.
“There is no single explanation that addresses the majority of UAP reports,” Sue Gough, a Defense Department spokesperson, said in a statement. “We are collecting as much data as we can, following the data where it leads, and will share our findings whenever possible. We will not rush to conclusions in our analysis”
“In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as ‘unidentified’ simply because sensors were not able to collect enough information to make a positive attribution,” said Gough. “We are working to mitigate these shortfalls for the future and to ensure we have sufficient data for our analysis.”
Analysis of more recent UAP incidents is helped by the amount of information and data available as compared to older incidents.
The U.S. official told ABC News that two of the three videos declassified by the Pentagon in 2020 and recorded from the sensors aboard fighter aircraft now have plausible explanations.
In the “Go Fast” video Navy pilots are heard exclaiming how fast an object is moving above the water. According to the U.S. official, the leading assessment from experts is that what the pilots saw on their video screens was actually an optical illusion of an object that was not moving very fast at all. The illusion was created by the angle and height at which the object was viewed by the sensors as it moved above the water.
The “gimbal” video taken in 2015 by a jet fighter crew that shows an object rotating in the clouds. The official says it’s now believed that the object’s strange movements and observed spinning was caused by the sensor aboard the plane that captured that image.
There is no assessment for what is being seen in the third video commonly referred to as the “Flir” video that was taken in 2004.
The general public’s appetite for UFOs is sure to continue, and just last week NASA announced the 16 people who would serve on a new panel tasked with studying UAPs. Their report, based on unclassified information, is slated to be released in mid-2023.
(WASHINGTON) — In her 2003 opinion upholding affirmative action in higher education, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously predicted that in 25 years “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary” in America.
Next week, years after that milestone and with lingering gaps in minority college acceptance and achievement, a new group of justices will decide whether to overrule O’Connor — and more than 40 years of precedent — to declare that admissions policies must be race-blind.
“That would be a sea change in American law with huge implications across society,” said Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.
In a pair of oral arguments Monday, the justices will take up race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private college, and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest public university.
It is the first test for affirmative action before the current court with its six-justice conservative majority and three justices of color, including the first-ever Black woman justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“I think we have to be realistic in that this is a very conservative Supreme Court,” said David Lewis, a Harvard University junior and member of the school’s Black Students Association. “But this issue has been tried over and over again at the court, and the precedent has still been upheld.”
Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative and multiracial coalition of 22,000 students and parents, sued the schools in 2014 alleging intentional discrimination toward Asian American applicants in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The group, led by longtime affirmative action critic Edward Blum, is asking the Supreme Court to outlaw consideration of race in admission to public and private colleges and universities nationwide.
“There are better ways of achieving racial diversity than treating people differently by race,” Blum, who is white, told ABC News in an interview.
He argues race-neutral approaches, like a focus on socio-economic background, could meet the same objectives.
The high court has previously resisted those arguments.
In a landmark 1978 decision, a five-justice majority said that race was a permissible factor in admissions so long as a school did not use a quota system. Twenty-five years later, Justice O’Connor reaffirmed that principle in a 5-4 decision that said a school’s use of race must be narrowly-tailored. And in 2016, a similarly divided court again upheld the use of race at the University of Texas.
“Every justice on the Supreme Court and the justices that have served over the last 30 or 40 years have voted to overturn precedent,” Blum said. “It is far overdue for the Supreme Court to revisit the use of race and ethnicity in higher education, and we hope that the court will rein in that practice.”
Lower federal courts have sided with Harvard and UNC, ruling that neither broke from the Supreme Court’s long-standing precedent, which permits the limited use of race as one factor in a holistic review of individual applicants’ qualifications for admission.
“An applicant’s race is only one among dozens of factors,” UNC wrote in its brief to the high court, as admissions officers bring “together a class that is diverse along numerous dimensions — including geography, military status, and socioeconomic background.”
Harvard University argues separately that the Constitution “does not require us to disregard the commonsense reality that race is one among many things that shape life experiences in meaningful ways.”
“Nothing in the text or history of the 14th Amendment suggests that universities must uniquely exclude race from the multitude of factors considered in assembling a class of students best able to learn from each other,” the school wrote in its brief.
The 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified after the Civil War with the express purpose of extending equal rights of citizenship to former slaves and other Black Americans.
The lower courts also affirmed the schools’ “compelling interest” in pursuing educational benefits from a diverse student body and agreed that race-neutral alternatives may fall short. Blum and Students for Fair Admissions dispute those conclusions.
“In UNC’s academic judgment, diversity is central to the education it aims to provide,” the school told the court. “Ideally, UNC could achieve this diversity without consideration of race … [but it] remains necessary.”
A varied approach to race in university admissions
Since 1996, 10 states have banned the use of race in public university admissions. But roughly one-in-five U.S. public universities still consider race during the admissions process, according to a report by Ballotpedia.
“There’s something very particular about growing up in this country dealing with the ways that you were underestimated, the educational opportunities you’re denied,” said Fordham University President Tania Tetlow, the first woman to lead the Jesuit institution in its 181-year history.
“When a student comes to us having overcome all of that and succeeding,” Tetlow said, “we’re even more eager for them to be here. And the idea that we’re supposed to ignore that I just don’t understand.”
Fordham has been among the biggest defenders of affirmative action, seeing the policy as much a moral imperative as a critical tool for building a diverse campus. The undergraduate student body is 64% white, according to the school.
But not all institutions see race-conscious admissions as an imperative.
Baruch College, part of the City University of New York located in lower Manhattan, is one of the most racially diverse campuses in the country, with more than 70% students of color. The school does not consider race in admissions.
“It’s a tool to achieve the kind of campus diversity that we’re talking about, but it’s not the only tool,” said Baruch College president David Wu, the first Asian American to lead a school within the City University of New York.
Wu argues that a more effective approach is targeted recruitment in underserved communities much earlier in high school.
“By the time you get into the admission policy of diversifying the student body, that’s a little bit too late,” Wu said. “Before all that happens, you need to put in the effort to build that pipeline.”
A key contrast between schools like Fordham and Baruch is cost. The private university charges roughly $56,000 a year in tuition; the public school is around $7,000 a year.
“Race has to be part of the conversation. I also think socioeconomic status is really important, and we need to find a way to talk about both of them in a nuanced way,” said Jake Moreno Coplon, CEO of America Needs You, a nonprofit that helps first-generation college students get accepted to college and navigate the transition.
“It’s hard to know what the impact of the erasure of affirmative action will do to the higher education landscape,” Coplon added.
A 2020 study of public universities that have banned affirmative action found long-term decline in black, Latino and Native American representation on those campuses — on average more than 15 percentage points lower than among state high school graduates in just the first year a ban was implemented.
At the University of California-Berkeley, which eliminated race as a factor in its admissions 1996, the admissions rate for Black students dropped from 50% to 20% in the first year and from 45% to 21% for Latinx students, according to the ACLU.
Public supports diversity but cool to affirmative action
While most Americans say they support promotion of racial diversity on college and university campuses, strong majorities also oppose the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions.
More than 60% of Americans said they would support a ban on race-based affirmative action, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll released this month.
The views appear to be shared by majorities across racial and political groups. A Pew Research Center study earlier this year found 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asian Americans and 59% of African Americans oppose the use of race or ethnicity in college admissions.
“There’s just talent everywhere, and if they look in the right places, they’ll find it,” said German Ortega, a Fordham University freshman and son of a Mexican immigrant from Corona, Queens, who grapples with the pros and cons of affirmative action.
Ortega is attending Fordham on a scholarship specifically earmarked for Hispanic students.
“It’s sad that I got a full ride because I’m Hispanic,” Ortega said. “It’s good for me, but you know, it says a lot.”
Lewis, the Harvard junior, said minority students should never be ashamed about consideration of their race as a factor in admissions.
“Our race is not just liek a color or like a checkbox on our college applications,” Lewis said. “It tells us a whole history about what opportunities you had access to. We know how powerful systemic racism is in this country. To overcome that, and to be part of this small group of people being considered at these institutions shows that you do have incredible merit.”
Forty years of precedent on race in admissions
Affirmative Action was developed in the 1960s and 70s in part to ensure opportunity after decades of inequality and racism kept students of color on the margins of higher education.
For Baruch College in New York City, enrolling a diverse mix of students has not been difficult, but at Fordham University, Harvard, UNC and dozens of other institutions across the country, it remains a challenge.
“If the court were to follow settled precedent, our side would prevail, and we are asking the court to hold the line,” said Yasmin Cader, ACLU deputy legal director, which is backing the schools. “We are not asking or seeking advancement, just seeking that they don’t overturn efforts to achieve equality.”
Critics of affirmative action say the precedent was wrongly decided from the start and is now ripe for correction.
“A lot of the devil is going to be in the details, the scope of the rule,” said Roman Martinez, a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts and then-judge Brett Kavanaugh and veteran Supreme Court litigator.
If precedent is overturned, Martinez said, a key question will be what options universities will have to pursue their goals.
“Will they be able to use approaches that do not explicitly take race into account but are adopted, in part, to promote diversity? There’s a lot of play in the joints,” he said.
A key figure in it all could be Justice Jackson. She recused herself from the Harvard case because of a past role on the University’s board of overseers but will fully participate in the UNC case. The court’s ultimate decision is expected to take her views and vote into account.
“I think it’s important to hear from the first black female justice on the Supreme Court of the U.S. how she feels about race consciousness in American life,” said Devon Westhill, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group that opposes race-conscious admissions. “We don’t have a good record of what her thoughts are on that.”
(SAN FRANCISCO) — Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was “violently assaulted” by a man who broke into his San Francisco home early Friday, according to her spokesperson.
The suspect, 42-year-old David Depape, attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer when officers responded to a priority well-being check at 2:27 a.m. local time, San Francisco police said. Officers tackled the suspect and disarmed him, police said.
Paul Pelosi, 82, is in the hospital and “is expected to make a full recovery,” the speaker’s spokesperson, Drew Hammill, said in a statement. But two sources familiar with the matter told ABC News his injuries are “significant.”
Depape allegedly entered the house through a sliding glass door, law enforcement sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. The suspect shouted “Where’s Nancy?” before allegedly striking Paul Pelosi, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Nancy Pelosi was in Washington, D.C., with her protective detail at the time, according to the Capitol Police.
Depape, who was hospitalized with injuries, will be booked on charges including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and elderly abuse, police said.
The motive is under investigation, Hammill said.
The Capitol Police, FBI and San Francisco Police Department are all involved in the investigation. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office said the case will be handled locally. Charges are forthcoming but have not yet been filed, the district attorney’s office said.
“The Speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time,” Hammill added.
President Joe Biden spoke with Nancy Pelosi Friday morning “to express his support after this horrible attack,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, “What happened to Paul Pelosi was a dastardly act. I spoke with Speaker Pelosi earlier this morning and conveyed my deepest concern and heartfelt wishes to her husband and their family, and I wish him a speedy recovery.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted that he’s “horrified and disgusted” by the attack, adding, “Grateful to hear that Paul is on track to make a full recovery.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reached out to Nancy Pelosi to “check in on Paul and said he’s praying for a full recovery,” according to his spokesperson.
ABC News’ Trish Turner, Pierre Thomas, Rachel Scott and Alex Stone contributed to this report.
(SAN FRANCISCO) — Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was “violently assaulted” by someone who broke into his San Francisco home early Friday, according to her spokesperson.
The suspect is in custody, her spokesperson, Drew Hammill, said in a statement.
Paul Pelosi is in the hospital and “is expected to make a full recovery,” Hammill said.
Nancy Pelosi was not in San Francisco at the time, Hammill said.
The motive is under investigation, he said.
“The Speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time,” Hammill added.
(PHILADELPHIA) — President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris will deliver remarks at a fundraiser for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party in Philadelphia on Friday evening, where two key candidates on the ballot this November will also be in attendance, according to a Democratic official.
“Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Rep. Matt Cartwright, [Democratic National Committee] Chair Jaime Harrison and Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Senator Sharif Street will also be in attendance,” the official told ABC News.
Fetterman is the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, while Shapiro is the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania. Both are running in critical midterm elections in a pivotal battleground state.
Pennsylvania’s marquee Senate race is the best opportunity Democrats have to flip a seat currently held by Republicans, who are vigorously challenging Democratic incumbents across the country. Fetterman delivered a rocky performance at the first and only debate on Tuesday night, more than five months after experiencing a stroke. He jumbled words and struggled to complete sentences during the hourlong televised debate in Harrisburg against Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon and former TV host. Fetterman has refused to commit to releasing his medical records amid concerns about his health.
Meanwhile, the battle for Pennsylvania’s governorship could determine whether women have the right to an abortion. Shapiro’s Republican opponent is Sen. Doug Mastriano, who opposes abortion with no exceptions and has pushed former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Friday’s fundraiser is expected to raise $1 million for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, which the official said is “the most in recent history.” The keynote addresses by Biden and Harris will focus on “the criticall-important choice before voters” in the Keystone State, according to the official.
“With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, the president will contrast his vision for continuing to rebuild the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, with the Republicans’ mega MAGA trickle down plan to raise prescription drug costs, cut Medicare and Social Security, and double down on Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich,” the official added.
