(NEW YORK) — American Values 2024, the super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid, aired an ad during Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday night rebooting a commercial aired during the 1960 presidential campaign for the candidate’s uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
The ad substitutes photos of RFK Jr. for photos of his uncle while keeping the same jingle.
The $7 million ad, which flooded television screens across America in the second quarter of the game, sought to tie RFK Jr. to his storied family, even as some of his relatives have publicly disavowed his candidacy over his anti-vaccine opinions.
In a statement to ABC News, the super PAC’s co-chair Tony Lyons said, in part, “RFK Jr. offers us real change along with freedom, trust and hope. Like his uncle and his father, Kennedy is a corruption-fighter, and it’s no wonder the DNC is trying every old trick and inventing new tricks to stop him. The public sees through it all and won’t stand for it.”
Kennedy’s campaign was “surprised and grateful” about the ad.
“We are pleasantly surprised and grateful to the American Values PAC for running an ad during the Super Bowl where more than 100 million Americans got to see that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is running as an independent candidate for President of the United States,” press secretary Stefanie Spear said in a statement to ABC News on Sunday night.
At least one member of the Kennedy family spoke out against the ad.
Bobby Shriver, son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, posted on X, “My cousin’s Super Bowl ad used our uncle’s faces- and my Mother’s. She would be appalled by his deadly health care views. Respect for science, vaccines, & health care equity were in her DNA. She strongly supported my health care work at @ONECampaign & @RED which he opposes.”
Kennedy later addressed the spot on X.
“I’m so sorry if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain,” he wrote on the social media site. “The ad was created and aired by the American Values Super PAC without any involvement or approval from my campaign. FEC rules prohibit Super PACs from consulting with me or my staff. I love you all. God bless you.”
Kennedy’s independent candidacy has attracted some voters disaffected by America’s two major parties. Though polling suggests his support is low enough to make him a long shot to win the election, he may have enough backing to cause headaches for the Democratic and Republican nominees.
(ATLANTA) — Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Sunday pushed back on former President Donald Trump’s argument that he should be granted legal immunity for his actions while he was in the White House.
“My personal opinion is, no one is above the law,” Kemp told ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
“You know, I’ve continued to talk about following the law and the Constitution and that’s what I’m going to continue to do in the great state of Georgia,” Kemp said.
His comments come as Trump faces four looming trials for 91 criminal charges. Trump has denied all wrongdoing, including in the federal case alleging he participated in an illegal effort to overturn the 2020 election results. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were both pressured by Trump to help reverse his loss in the state that year. When they refused, they became the target of Trump’s anger — with Kemp then facing a Trump-backed primary challenger during his 2022 reelection campaign, which he went on to win.
Kemp said on “This Week” that that victory showed how continuing to focus on the 2020 presidential election could be harmful for conservatives. It was a warning that he’d also shared with other top Republicans, he said.
“We’ve got to tell people what we’re for. We’ve got to stay focused on the future. Quit looking in the rearview mirror. I believe that the voters that are going to decide this presidential election are tired of hearing about the 2020 election and want to focus on what candidates are going to do for them in the months and years ahead,” Kemp said, echoing past veiled criticism of Trump’s fixation on the last race.
“We showed in the 2022 election if you run on issues and your record and tell people what you’re going to do for them in the future, you can be very successful,” Kemp said, arguing that voters are looking for “leadership” during crisis.
On Saturday, speaking at a political conference at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Kemp said that it’s “pretty clear [voters] aren’t sold on what Republicans will do if they win this November.”
Asked on “This Week” to elaborate on what he was referring to, Kemp cited what he sees as voter “frustration.”
“I just think at any level, whether it’s the presidential race, people are that are running for the United States Senate, Congress, local races, I think there’s been a lot of frustration out there amongst the American people of politicians trying to destroy the other side versus telling people why you should vote for us,” he said.
Kemp has yet to endorse in the 2024 Republican primary; however, when asked about the state of the race and the calls for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who campaigned for Kemp during the 2022 midterms, to end her campaign after losing to Trump in the early voting states so far, he said, “I would encourage her to keep fighting.”
“If I was the Trump campaign, you know, I would be pushing to get Nikki Haley out. If I was Gov. Haley, I’d be, you know — she feels strongly about what she’s doing and the message that she’s bringing to the American people, then I would encourage her to keep fighting,” he said.
“I think you need to let the process play out,” he said.
Asked to respond to Trump’s recent remarks suggesting Haley’s husband — Maj. Michael Haley, a South Carolina national guardsman who is currently serving a voluntary deployment in Africa — left to get away from her on the campaign trail, Kemp said he would let Trump “answer that question” while defending military families.
“I think it’s unfortunate for anybody to be criticizing our men and women serving overseas regardless of whether they’re overseas fighting a battle or on the border doing the same,” Kemp told Karl.
Kemp spoke most bluntly about the situation at the southern border and criticized what he called Biden’s utter failure to address immigration issues.
Kemp was among more than a dozen Republican governors that joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at the U.S.-Mexico border last week. On Sunday, Kemp criticized Congress for being unable to agree on new immigration legislation after many Republicans — and Trump — came out against a bipartisan deal in the Senate that would tighten border security.
“I think people in D.C. ought to be voting on policy, not what somebody’s telling them what to do. That’s just my personal opinion. I’ll let you know each of the senators and the representatives speak to that,” Kemp said.
“But I also think, for President Biden, trying to pass the buck and blame Republicans now about the issue at the border, it’s just a simple lack of leadership,” he said, highlighting the fact that Democrats had control of the legislative and executive branches from 2020 to 2022 and also didn’t pass new laws.
Biden has maintained he is taking major action in order to cut back on illegal border crossings while allowing migrants to seek humanitarian protections.
The White House has also said Congress isn’t helping because they won’t approve more border resources amid GOP skepticism of Biden.
“People have been working on this for the last 10 or 20 years. Just secure the dang border, that’s what the people want,” Kemp said on Sunday.
“We’ve got to secure the whole southern border,” he continued. “And it takes the president to do that.”
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t protect a NATO nation that didn’t contribute enough defense funds and he’d “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.”
“You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple,” Trump said Saturday at a campaign event in Conway, South Carolina. “Hundreds of billions of dollars came into NATO and that’s why they have money.”
Trump recalled a past conversation with a leader of one of the 31 NATO countries, saying, “One of the presidents of a big country stood up [and] said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?'”
“I said, ‘You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent,'” Trump said. “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”
In his comments, Trump also falsely suggested that NATO contributions come in the form of loans. In 2006, NATO leaders agreed that member countries would commit to a minimum of 2% of their GDP that would go toward military readiness.
However, Trump has in the past criticized NATO, taking specific aim at the defense spending of other countries compared to the United States and has even previously vowed not to help other countries if they faced attacks because of it, raising concerns among international allies.
As President, Trump endorsed the NATO policy that outlines a collective defense procedure where an attack on one member is considered “an attack against all;” however, he has since ramped up his attacks on supporting other countries.
The White House responded to Trump’s comments, calling them “appalling and unhinged.”
“Encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged — and it endangers American national security, global stability and our economy at home,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also criticized Trump’s comments, arguing it “undermines all of our security.”
“Any attack on NATO will be met with a united and forceful response,” Stoltenberg said in a statement. “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”
Trump’s comments Saturday also come as he attempts to squash a national security supplemental after senators just cleared a procedural logjam to eventually finish working on a bill to provide aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. He posted to his social media platform, Truth Social, that “no money in the form of foreign aid should be given to any country unless it is done as a loan, not just a giveaway.”
(WASHINGTON) — Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a co-chair of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, grew animated on Sunday as he defended Biden after special counsel Robert Hur’s new report detailing what Hur called Biden’s significant lapses in memory.
“As you well know, small gaffes are a part of what all of us in public life do,” Coons said in an interview with ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
Coons pointed to mistakes that had also been made by House Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald Trump and he recalled being with Biden during an hourslong meeting at the White House in which, he said, the president “led a masterful conversation about the challenges to our security, the pathway to peace, the difficulties with Iran and with its proxies.”
Coons reiterated what Biden himself said in hastily scheduled remarks on Thursday night that challenged Hur’s findings even as Hur said he wouldn’t recommend charges against Biden over the president’s handling of classified information while out of office.
“We should be focused on two things: the outcome of this report, he was cleared completely, while Donald Trump faces 40 federal felony charges for obstruction of justice and refusing to protect our national secrets — and President Biden is accomplishing remarkable things for our country,” Coons said. (Trump denies wrongdoing.)
But Karl noted that on Thursday, even as Biden pushed back on Hur, he made another mistake, misidentifying the president of Egypt.
“Here is what matters, not the occasional small gaffes: He [Biden] had a 12-minute press conference where he was focused, engaged, purposeful, and all you’re focused on is that one minute at the end,” Coons said. “That’s not what distinguishes him from his opponents.”
Karl followed up that Trump’s own moments of apparent confusion, including mixing up Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, had been well covered in the press.
But Karl pointed to other notable recent moments in which Biden mistakenly referenced meeting with a French president who has been dead for decades and didn’t seem to immediately remember the name of Hamas, the terrorist group that launched deadly attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.
Karl also pointed to polling that has continually found the American people have issues with Biden’s age, including a new ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday that shows 86% of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term.
Coons dismissed that.
He said “that poll should have been about” other things like the Senate’s deal to tighten border security, which Biden backed, and Biden’s support for foreign allies, in contrast with Trump’s position on those issues.
“If press coverage focuses relentlessly on things that don’t represent Joe Biden’s real body of work, you can push towards that kind of result,” he argued.
“Joe Biden and Donald Trump and most elected officials make small gaffes, just like the ones you just showed,” Coons later added. “That’s not what matters. We are in a fight for the soul of our nation.”
The senator insisted that the nation should instead be focused on “the way Donald Trump is undermining rule of law, democracy and our safety as a nation.”
Karl cited other polls that show Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of some of the same topics that Coons mentioned, like the border.
Coons responded by shifting blame to Trump and Republicans in Congress for opposing the Senate agreement.
Karl also asked Coons about when Biden said during the 2020 campaign that he was “a bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders.
“I’ve spoken to some of the leaders that were behind him who have privately said that they took that as basically a promise he was going to serve one term and he was going to be a bridge to the next leadership of Democrats,” Karl said. “Why hasn’t that happened, and should that happen?”
Coons deflected by pointing to Biden’s track record against Trump.
“Joe Biden ran … to make sure that Donald Trump was not reelected. Donald Trump is again going to be the candidate of the Republican Party,” Coons said. “Joe Biden is the one Democrat who has beaten him, who can beat him and who will beat him.”
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden-Harris campaign, its surrogates and allies were forced to do damage control on Friday after special counsel Robert Hur’s report about President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents painted a scathing picture of his age and memory, raising new questions for voters nine months before the November election.
Despite Hur not bringing criminal charges, his report levied what amounted to a political indictment against the 81-year-old president, with investigators writing that a main reason for not pursuing charges was because “Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden clapped back in a hastily-scheduled news conference Thursday night, just hours after the report was released, telling reporters, “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.”
The president’s top surrogates, from Vice President Kamala Harris to congressional Democrats, kept pushing back on Friday, dismissing the special counsel’s report as “politically motivated” and “inappropriate.”
The Biden campaign declined to comment when asked how it’s trying to quell renewed concerns about the president’s age.
A source familiar with the campaign’s thinking told ABC News that Republicans attacking the president’s age is nothing new, saying that strategy didn’t work in 2020 and won’t work in 2024, when the source said voters value experience and wisdom as well.
Here are five ways Biden allies are striking back:
Hur is a Trump appointee and Republican
Biden surrogates have been quick to point out that Robert Hur, a Republican, was appointed by former President Donald Trump to be U.S. Attorney in Maryland in 2018. However, it was Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden-appointee, who chose Hur to lead the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Some are now accusing Hur of having an agenda despite not having enough evidence to criminally indict Biden.
“At the end of the day, it looks as though the special counsel couldn’t charge him with anything, so he just threw the books at him anyway,” said former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile, an ABC News contributor. “The report read like it was going to get published in the New York Post or on Trump campaign website. It did not read like a legal document.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, called the report’s descriptions of Biden “partisan editorializing by a Republican-appointed prosecutor.”
“This is a Republican special counsel who completely went out of his way to editorialize, to include material in his report that is unnecessary and irrelevant to what he was tasked with doing,” Goldman said, of Hur. “The fact that he’s a Republican and he’s exonerating President Biden, he knows he’s going to be under attack because Republicans want to create this false equivalency between President Biden and former President Trump.”
Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, at an unrelated news conference on Friday, deemed the comments by Hur “unfair” and “unnecessary,” also noting he was a Republican appointee.
“I smell a rat in the comments that were made,” he told reporters.
Hur had no comment.
Doesn’t compare to Trump’s classified docs case
Biden aides and allies say the bottom line is that while the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents ended with charges, Biden fully cooperated, and Hur decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.
Juxtapose that, they say, to Trump’s case, in which he’s charged with obstructing efforts to secure the documents.
Jim Messina, former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign manager, urged his social media followers not to equate a “heavily editorialized special counsel’s report” as a bigger liability than the 91 criminal charges pending against Trump. (Trump has denied all wrongdoing).
“Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn’t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically,” Messina said in a post.
“We’ve got to stop treating a single line in a gratuitously long, heavily editorialized special counsel’s report–in which no crime was found btw–by a partisan Republican investigator like it’s a bigger liability than Trump’s 91 criminal charges and being found liable for rape,” he said in another.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also highlighted on social media Friday the differences between Trump and Biden’s respective investigations.
“Read the documents. It’s not hard. Biden fully cooperated. Trump obstructed at every turn,” he said in a post. “They know this. And they know how damaging their arguments are to Americans’ confidence in their democracy.”
While Trump’s popularity among Republican voters has risen with each criminal indictment, according to his national polling average on 538, Biden’s mishandling of documents might not be as easily accepted by his base.
There’s also a gap when it comes to perceptions of Trump, 77, and Biden, 81. A recent NBC News poll found 62% of voters have “major concerns” about Biden’s age whereas only 34% have “major concerns” about Trump’s age.
The special counsel has no business making ‘gratuitous’ statements
“Gratuitous” is swiftly becoming a buzzword for Democrats to describe the language they take issue with in Hur’s report.
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized, could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly, politically motivated, gratuitous,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, a former federal prosecutor. “When it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there will be a higher level of integrity than what we saw,” she added.
The Democratic National Committee War Room on Friday blasted a press email listing nearly a dozen instances of other prosecutors and legal experts questioning whether Hur’s comments on Biden’s memory were appropriate, with the email characterizing them as “political cheap shots that came straight from MAGA Republican talking points.”
Among the voices was former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who said in a post on X that the report had “many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.”
Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, was among the first to characterize Hur’s criticisms of Biden’s memory as “inaccurate, gratuitous and wrong.”
Recounting personal Biden stories about mental agility
Biden allies are also offering first-hand accounts of Biden’s sharpness as they face renewed questions about his mental acuity.
Goldman has recounted in multiple interviews how he spoke with Biden the day before the president’s voluntary interview with the special counsel on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas attacked Israel.
“He was incredibly on point. His recall, his knowledge of a very tricky geopolitical situation was remarkable right off the bat. And he had spoken to a number of leaders, and he knew exactly where the pressure points were,” Goldman said. “And that’s where his age is so beneficial because he has 50 years of foreign policy experience.”
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison also shared his Biden story in a post, moments after the president’s impromptu Thursday night news conference.
“On AF1 I chatted with him on a myriad of topics from politics to family. Saw him bring down the house in SC talking about the promises made and the promises kept!” Harrison assured his followers.
Other Democrats are flatly stating the undeniable truth: Biden is old.
But so, they add, is Trump.
“President Biden and former President Donald Trump have both old, and if that’s the only issue in the 2024 campaign, then the American people will have to judge between two elderly men,” Brazile said. “The president has has acknowledged that he is an elderly man, and he also has acknowledged that he’s still up to doing the work on behalf of the American people. I don’t know what else we can say.”
The youngest member of Congress, Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., in a press call for the Biden-Harris campaign on an unrelated topic on Friday, flatly acknowledged Biden “is old” but deflected to the administration’s record, which he said is what Democrats will run on.
“Number one, yes. OK. President Biden is old. OK. Yeah. It doesn’t sound like breaking news to me,” said Frost, who is 27. “When it comes down to how this is gonna impact folks down ballot and how Joe Biden’s candidacy will impact folks down ballot, I see nothing but positivity — because we’re looking at an agenda and we’re looking at a record that is positive.”
Biden isn’t the only one confusing names – so are Trump and Johnson
The report alleging Biden couldn’t recall the years he served as vice president or when his son, Beau, died, followed the president twice this week confusing European leaders with their dead predecessors — instances his allies are dismissing as common mistakes.
“If he had a momentary blip where he couldn’t remember, as his mind is racing from the war in the Middle East to the questions that he’s been asking, I think that’s understandable for any of us,” Goldman told ABC News Live.
After Biden mistakenly called Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi the president of Mexico during his news conference, surrogates were quick to pounce on the fact that Biden isn’t the only big-name politician to recently confuse a name.
Goldman called it “nit-picking” and “inappropriate,” he said, “unless you’re also going to do it with Speaker Mike Johnson or anyone else who makes a mistake.”
Notably, the House speaker confused Iran with Israel last week on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, and Trump, at a rally last month, twice mentioned Nikki Haley when he meant Nancy Pelosi. Trump has also repeatedly confused former President Barack Obama with Biden at recent rallies.
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration announced Friday that it expects to commit $5 billion in a public-private consortium for research and development of computer chips.
The White House said this would advance President Joe Biden’s goals of driving research and development in the United States, which include cutting down on the time and cost of commercializing new technologies.
The development comes as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are gearing up for the global chips competition through a new partnership that would tap into what they say is one of America’s greatest strengths: diversity
HBCU leaders and federal government officials convened on Thursday to support research and development in advanced computer chips and diversify the semiconductor industry.
“It’s a moment for everyone to get in the boat and row in the same direction,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in her remarks at the HBCU CHIPS Network event, adding “[It] may be the first time in the United States’ history we make sure that the people who get these jobs look like America.”
Sec. Raimondo said the semiconductor industry needs diversity if the country wants to out-compete China, Taiwan, and the rest of the world.
“I’m just here to say we need you,” Raimondo said to the auditorium of HBCU leaders.
During the network’s public kickoff in Washington, D.C., more than a dozen HBCUs joined White House and Commerce Department officials to discuss the Biden administration’s Chips and Science Act. The legislative victory became law in August 2022 and provides funds to support the domestic production of semiconductors. In addition, the law authorizes various programs and activities of the federal science agencies, according to the text.
The HBCU CHIPS Network, which is unaffiliated with commerce’ CHIPS for America under the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), held its convening of stakeholders and institutions at commerce’s headquarters in D.C. The event sparked an opportunity for Black schools to pool their resources together with help from Georgia Tech University.
Chip production, according to Morgan State University’s Willie E. May, is an “existential issue” for America. He believes it’s time to include African Americans in this movement.
“The only way that we can succeed is to invest in our natural resources,” Mays said. “It’s the talent that resides in the Black community.”
HBCUs enroll nearly 10% of all Black undergraduates and promote the majority of Black engineers, and other scientific and technological professionals, according to United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. As a matter of national security, Tuskegee University Provost S. Keith Hargrove said the U.S. shouldn’t depend on one country or company. Therefore, he said the partnership is as important now more than ever.
Provost Hargrove told ABC News there are three major challenges facing the U.S., including national security risks since chips power our military weaponry, supply chain shortages of consumer products, and semiconductor workforce.
CHIPS for America Chief Opportunity and Inclusion Officer Kylie Patterson said her unit is dedicated to supporting underrepresented and overlooked individuals nationwide. This event led many of the country’s leaders in higher education to Washington so that they could engage with the federal branch.
“This is one of those moments where we can be super intentional about creating a table where everyone is at the table,” Patterson told ABC News.
CHIPS for America leads the execution of the department’s efforts to establish activities that engage “economically disadvantaged individuals,” as stated in provision 104 of the Chips and Science law. Georgia Tech values diversity of thought, according to the university’s Senior Director of Partnerships George White, who said his team reached out to the HBCUs to boost collaboration and help them with research.
“It’s not so much specifically with the HBCUs but it’s also the communities that those HBCUs serve,” he said, adding “as we start lifting those boats up, then it kind of gravitates to the community.”
This comes as federal government data found HBCUs have been underfunded for decades and higher education advocates previously told ABC News that it’s time to support these institutions with the resources they are owed. UNCF Senior Director of National STEM Programs and Initiatives said HBCUs have been behind since the start of the race.
“We have been, in some cases, intentionally debilitated by lack of funding and lack of support so it’s hard to compete,” UNCF’s Chad Womack told ABC News.
Neelam Azad is vice president for research at Hampton University. She said additional funding for research would help HBCUs build on their overall capacity.
“Build our infrastructure, build our capacity,” Azad said. “If our capacity, our capability, if our infrastructure is stronger, we can explore [more] things.”
(WASHINGTON) — Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is being floated as a possible running mate to Donald Trump in 2024, signaled if she had been serving as vice president in 2020 she wouldn’t have certified the election results.
“I would not have done what Mike Pence did,” Stefanik said.
Stefanik made the comments Thursday night during an appearance on CNN’s “The Source” with Kaitlan Collins. Collins asked Stefanik if she’d been part of any vetting process yet with the Trump team.
“I would be proud to serve in a future Trump administration, but we have a lot to do,” she said, referring to priorities for House Republicans and her role as conference chair.
Stefanik was later asked what she would’ve done if she were in Pence’s shoes on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results was interrupted by a violent mob breaching the U.S. Capitol.
Pence, who said Trump endangered his life and his family’s lives on Jan. 6 by disparaging him in social media posts while the riot was happening, oversaw the certification of results and announced the final results: 306 votes for Biden, 232 for Trump.
“I don’t think that was the right approach,” Stefanik said of Pence.
Stefanik was one of the 147 Republicans in Congress to vote to reject the election results, though she only rejected electors from Pennsylvania, not Arizona like many other GOP lawmakers.
“So, you would have rejected the votes?” CNN’s Collins asked.
Stefanik responded by repeating false claims that there was “unconstitutional overreach in states like Pennsylvania” and that the 2020 presidential race was not a “legal and secure” election.
Pence has made clear that he did not have the authority as vice president to unilaterally reject the results. Speaking to ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl last year, Pence said “Trump is wrong” on this issue.
“I know by God’s grace, we did our duty that day, to act out the express language of the Constitution of the United States,” Pence told Karl.
Stefanik’s comments were quickly met with push back from another member of the New York delegation: Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman.
“She’s a sycophant willing to do or say anything for Trump’s approval, including sacrificing our democracy,” Goldman said in a social media post.
Also appearing on CNN, Goldman added her comments “should scare the American people because that is anti-democratic, and that is going to lead us down a very, very dangerous road if there’s a yes-person as vice president who will do whatever Donald Trump wants.”
Another Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, also criticized Stefanik as “incorrect.”
“The Constitution gives you no power — you being the vice president — no power to decertify the election,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.
In addition to Stefanik, other names that have been mentioned as possible vice president contenders are South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
(WASHINGTON) — Less than 24 hours after the release of a harsh report from special counsel Robert Hur that concluded President Joe Biden would not face charges over his handling of classified documents but cast doubt on his mental fitness, the White House fired back Friday.
President Biden, who lashed out at Hur’s comments about his memory when it came to his son Beau’s death in his own news conference on Thursday night, didn’t take additional questions when he met Friday afternoon with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the Oval Office.
But Vice President Kamala Harris and the White House stepped in to criticize what they called the special counsel’s “gratuitous” statements, taking issue not only with Hur’s description of Biden’s mental acuity but also some of his critical findings that Biden willfully retained and shared classified information.
Harris told ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Selina Wang that, as a former prosecutor, she believed the depictions of Biden included in the report were “inaccurate and inappropriate.”
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly, politically motivated, gratuitous,” Harris said.
Hitting Hur even harder, Harris continued, “When it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there will be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”
At the daily press briefing Friday, White House Counsel’s Office spokesman Ian Sams said he found Harris’ remarks “very powerful” as he suggested Hur may have felt political pressure to criticize the president.
“There’s an environment that we are in that generates a ton of pressure because you have congressional Republicans, other Republicans attacking prosecutors that they don’t like. And it creates, you know, a need — if you’re going to determine that charges weren’t filed, people are human and they’re thinking through, you know, what do we need to do? And it leaves one to wonder exactly why he included a lot of the criticisms that were in there.”
The Justice Department has, so far, declined to comment on the White House statements.
Hur, a Trump appointee tasked by Attorney General Merrick Garland with investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency, ultimately concluded that no criminal charges were warranted.
However, the report said investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen” though the evidence didn’t establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
And most politically damaging, it included many unflattering characterizations of Biden’s mental acuity. Hur said one concern about a possible prosecution would be the jury’s perception that Biden is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
It also described Biden’s memory as “significantly limited.” On example it gave was that Biden didn’t remember the years when his vice presidency began or ended or the year his son Beau died.
That last statement appeared to anger Biden the most as he told reporters, choking back emotion, “How in the hell dare he raise that?”
Biden also insisted he never shared classified information with his ghostwriter, among other details included in the report.
White House insists Biden didn’t willfully retain or share classified material
The White House on Friday defended the president’s handling of the material, arguing the report itself lays out “example after example” of how the president did not willfully take classified documents or share them.
The report specifically states: “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen” including “(1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
Sams, however, pointed to other parts of the report that stated “there is a shortage of evidence” on whether Biden purposefully put the Afghanistan documents in a box found at his home and knew they were there; and one section that states the evidence “does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Biden willfully retained the notebooks.”
On the special counsel’s finding that the president shared classified information in the notebooks with his ghostwriter, Sams noted no classified information was published in the president’s book.
He also sought to downplay the report’s finding that Biden read aloud verbatim from the notebooks to the writer, describing some of those instances as Biden reading from his “personal diary” and that he warned the writer some material might be sensitive.
“I think it’s lost in the shuffle of all this, that the president did what all of his predecessors had done, which was take notes for himself, to keep a diary of his own daily life, so that he could think back on these big moments of the time,” Sams said.
-ABC News’ Mary Bruce, Justin Fishel and Justin Gomez contributed to this report.
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo speaks during the UK Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, in central England, on November 1, 2023. (Photo by Leon Neal / POOL / AFP)
(WASHINGTON) — Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she is “very worried” about artificial intelligence being used nefariously in the 2024 election, she told reporters at a press conference in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
“AI can do amazing things and AI can disrupt our elections, here and around the world,” she said. “We’re already starting to see it.”
Raimondo was asked by ABC News about the robocall sent on the day of the New Hampshire primary purporting to be from President Biden and spreading misinformation about voting times.
She said the government is going to work “extensively” to start putting out AI framework that helps people — including journalists — be able to decipher what is real and what is fake.
The Commerce Secretary added that AI companies want to do the right thing based on her conversations with them.
“Am I worried? Yes,” she said. “Do I think we have the tools to protect our election and our democracy? Yes. Do I feel based on my interactions with the private sector that they want to do the right thing? By and large, Yes. It’s a big threat.”
As it relates to China and AI, Raimondo said “we have to stay ahead of trends.”
On Thursday, the Commerce Department put together a consortium of government and private companies to tackle the challenges of AI.
“This is a big deal,” Raimondo said. “This is the largest collection of frontline AI developers, users, researchers and interested groups in the world. In this consortia, which we’re starting off with more than 200 members, we have Fortune 500 companies, academic teams, nonprofit organizations and government agencies joined forces to focus on the research and development necessary to enable safe and trustworthy AI systems.”
Raimondo said she is frequently asked if AI will “eliminate the human race.”
She pushes back on that, saying right now we are in control and in the “early innings.”
“We are in charge of how we develop and use and regulate AI. So I feel that way about the election. And it’s on us, right now, to do the right things.”
US President Joe Biden speaks in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024. Photographer: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden came out with a fiery defense against Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report that questioned his mental acuity and suggested his memory could be “hazy.”
Speaking from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House on Thursday night, Biden addressed the issue, stating, “I know what the hell I’m doing.”
On Thursday, Biden’s memory was cited as one of the reasons the Justice Department wouldn’t be filing charges against the president for his handling of classified documents. In Hur’s report, he described Biden’s mental fitness and ability to recall key moments of his political career, as sparse, apparently “hazy” and, in one interaction, claiming the president could not recall “even within several years” when his oldest son had died.
On Thursday night, Biden took particular issue with that comment about the death of his son, Beau Biden.
“How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business,” Biden said.
“I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away, or that he passed away,” he continued.
When asked by one reporter if his memory has gotten worse over time, Biden insisted his memory is “fine.”
“My memory — take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president. None of you thought I could pass any of the things I got passed. How’d that happen?” he said.
In a back and forth with another journalist who brought up concerns over his age and mental acuity, and why Biden feels he is the one to beat former President Donald Trump in a general election for the presidency, Biden said he was the “most qualified person in this country to be President of the United States,” and that it was to “finish the job” he started.
Biden said the special counsel’s only role was whether or not to move forward with charges, but as for “any extraneous commentary, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It has no place in this report,” he said.
“The bottom line is the matter is now closed, and we can continue what I’ve always focused on, my job of being President of the United States of America,” he added.
But even as President Biden tried to downplay concerns about his mental acuity, he had yet another misstep: Referring to the President of Egypt as the President of Mexico.
“I think that, as you know, initially, the President of Mexico, el-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in,” he said, referring to the border between Egypt and Gaza.
When Biden was asked by a reporter if there was anything he would do differently now that the investigation has concluded, the president said he wished he “had paid more attention to how the documents were being moved and where. I thought they were being moved to the archives. I thought all was being moved. That’s what I thought.
“I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing,” he added.
Biden did address the special counsel, laying out the differences between his handling of classified documents and the investigation into former President Donald Trump, praising the decision to include in the report information on why the former president was indicted and he wasn’t. But he said it was “misleading” and “just plain wrong” that the report concludes that Biden willfully retained documents.
Spokespeople for both Special Counsel Hur and Attorney General Merrick Garland declined to comment on Biden’s remarks when reached by ABC News.
