Politics

(ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.) — New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has amended her emergency public health order suspending the right to carry firearms in public in and around Albuquerque, days after a judge temporarily blocked its enforcement.

During a press briefing on Friday, Lujan Grisham announced that the amended order allows for open and concealed carry, except in public parks or playgrounds “where we know we have high risk of kids and families,” she said.

The governor originally issued a 30-day suspension of open and concealed carry laws on Sept. 8 in Bernalillo County, where Albuquerque, the state’s most populous city, is seated. It was quickly met with pushback, prompting multiple lawsuits and a call for impeachment of the Democratic leader.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, a fellow Democrat, also said he would not defend the state in the lawsuits over the order, stating in a letter that he did not believe the order would have any meaningful impact on public safety.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Albuquerque granted a temporary restraining order, blocking enforcement of the governor’s public health order until an Oct. 3 court hearing.

Lujan Grisham said the changes to the order come after “listening to the debate in court.”

“We believe that a suspension is very different from a ban; court is leaning to determine otherwise,” Lujan Grisham said during the press briefing while addressing Wednesday’s hearing. “We can be wrong about the law on that case.”

“I want to point out that the conversation in that court was pretty clear that we are not wrong about this emergency, or about the issues related to violence, gun violence and public safety generally,” she continued.

The governor cited the recent shooting deaths of three children, including an 11-year-old boy gunned down outside a minor league baseball park last week, in issuing the temporary ban.

The decree came a day after Lujan Grisham declared gun violence a statewide public health emergency, saying “the rate of gun deaths in New Mexico increased 43% from 2009 to 2018.”

When asked about the criticism of the order on Friday, the governor said, “When you try to build consensus on gun violence measures, I’m going to tell you, you cannot.”

Lujan Grisham said if the amended order is still challenged at the October hearing, “then we’ll go to the legislature and see what will hold muster.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday delivered a stirring defense of the need to educate American school children about the nation’s dark history of racial inequality and violence in a still-ongoing battle for civil rights.

“The work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom, and to do that, we’re going to need the truth — the whole truth — about our past,” Jackson said in a speech at the Birmingham, Alabama, 16th Street Baptist Church, where a bomb planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls and injured dozens of others 60 years ago.

“We must teach it to our children and preserve it for theirs,” Jackson said. “Knowledge of the past is what enables us to mark our forward progress. If we’re going to continue to move forward as a nation, we can’t allow concern about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth, or history.”

The remarks by the nation’s first Black female justice come as policy makers in several states, led by Florida, have issued controversial new curriculum standards for Black history that some critics have said whitewashed the past and advanced misconceptions about slavery.

GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has defended Florida’s curriculum while campaigning for president, particularly the notion that slavery benefited Black Americans.

“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into things later in life,” DeSantis said during a news conference in July.

The governor further defended the curriculum changes in an interview with Fox News in August contending the curriculum’s wording lets teachers show “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

“That particular passage wasn’t saying that slavery was a benefit. It was saying there was resourcefulness, and people acquired skills in spite of slavery, not because of it,” he said.

While Jackson did not directly address any of the policies, she warned that downplaying “atrocities” from the country’s history would be “dangerous.”

“Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice, but can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now?” she said. “We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them.” Only doing so can “guarantee our democracy’s ultimate survival,” she added.

The rare public appearance by Jackson, who recently completed her first term on the bench, was a highly symbolic moment in a state that was an epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. She said it was her first visit to Alabama.

The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on Sept. 15, 1963, garnered worldwide attention and outrage for the shocking loss of young life at a time when Black Americans and their allies were peacefully mobilizing for social change.

Jackson, a mother of two teenage daughters, reflected poignantly about the magnitude of the loss.

“Those girls were just getting started. They could have broken barriers. They could have shattered ceilings. They could have grown up to be doctors or lawyers or judges appointed to serve on the highest court in our land. They could have been any one of us. And we could have been any one of them,” she said.

Jackson, the daughter of public school teachers, was raised in Miami, Florida, going on to attend Harvard Law School and serve as a federal public defender and later federal appeals court judge.

President Joe Biden nominated Jackson to replace Justice Stephen Breyer in February 2022. She was confirmed by the Senate in April 2022 by a vote of 53-47, with three Republicans joining all Democrats to support her.

Reflecting on her appointment, Jackson called it a ” bold marker of our nation’s collective progress” and a sign that ” we all share in the promise of our democracy.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Congressional Republicans, who have made Hunter Biden one of their top targets, signaled they’re not satisfied with the new indictment brought against him.

Hunter Biden was indicted Thursday by special counsel David Weiss on felony gun charges. The three criminal counts are related to his 2018 purchase of a revolver while he was addicted to cocaine.

The development comes weeks after a plea deal between prosecutors and the Hunter Biden fell apart. The agreement would’ve allowed Hunter Biden to plead guilty to a pair of misdemeanor tax offenses and avoid prosecution on a felony gun charge by entering into a pretrial diversion program.

“Ironically, that’s the one crime you can’t tie Joe Biden into,” Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters in response to the indictment.

“The Justice Department’s sweetheart plea deal fell apart after a federal judge refused to rubberstamp it,” Comer added in a statement. “Mountains of evidence reveals that Hunter Biden likely committed several felonies and Americans expect the Justice Department to apply the law equally. Today’s charges are a very small start, but unless U.S. Attorney Weiss investigates everyone involved in fraud schemes and influence peddling, it will be clear President Biden’s DOJ is protecting Hunter Biden and the big guy.”

House Republicans have criticized Weiss’ investigation in the past, arguing Hunter Biden should be more aggressively prosecuted over his business dealings.

Comer said Republicans are looking for indictments related to “money laundering, violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, tax evasion, the list goes on and on.”

Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican hard-liner, claimed Thursday “more serious charges” will be coming Hunter Biden’s way.

“These should not be the last charges Hunter Biden faces,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., also wrote in a post to X.

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin said the indictment is evidence that “the rule of law is functioning in America.”

“He’s entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence the way Donald Trump is,” Raskin said. “And we should support the rule of law as it applies to all criminal suspects and defendants in the country.”

The White House is not commenting on the indictment, instead referring reporters’ questions to Hunter Biden’s legal team and the Department of Justice.

Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s attorney, criticized the charges and accused Weiss of “bending to political pressure.”

“As expected, prosecutors filed charges today that they deemed were not warranted just six weeks ago following a five-year investigation into this case,” Lowell said. “The evidence in this matter has not changed in the last six weeks, but the law has and so has MAGA Republicans’ improper and partisan interference in this process.”

“We believe these charges are barred by the agreement the prosecutors made with Mr. Biden, the recent rulings by several federal courts that this statute is unconstitutional, and the facts that he did not violate that law, and we plan to demonstrate all of that in court,” Lowell added.

President Biden has long defended his son amid controversies and legal woes.

Biden had maintained he was confident Hunter had done nothing wrong as the federal investigation into his tax affairs and overseas business dealing was being conducted. When the now-defunct plea deal was first announced in June, Biden responded to questions shouted by reporters with the statement: “I’m very proud of my son.”

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(MADISON, Wisc.) — Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul on Thursday filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state’s nonpartisan elections chief, Meagan Wolfe, whom the state Senate has just voted along party lines to fire.

Kaul argued that the 22-11 vote in the Republican-led chamber has “no legal effect” and that Wolfe “is lawfully holding over” in her position as Wisconsin’s elections commission administrator.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has been indicted by special counsel David Weiss on felony gun charges.

The charges bring renewed legal pressure on the younger Biden after a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors imploded in recent months.

The younger Biden has been charged with two counts related to false statements in purchasing the firearm and a third count on illegally obtaining a firearm while addicted to drugs. The two counts of making false statements carry sentences of up to 10 years and five years, respectively, while the possession charge carries a sentence of up to 10 years.

Prosecutors have spent years scrutinizing Hunter Biden’s business endeavors and personal life — a probe that appeared to culminate in a plea agreement the two sides struck in June, which would have allowed him to plead guilty to a pair of misdemeanor tax offenses and enter into a pretrial diversion program to avoid prosecution on a felony gun charge.

But that deal fell apart during a court hearing in July after U.S. Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern over the structure of the agreement and questioned the breadth of an immunity deal, exposing fissures between the two parties.

Weeks later, on Aug. 11, Attorney General Merrick Garland elevated Weiss, who was originally appointed by then-President Donald Trump, to special counsel, granting him broader authority to press charges against Hunter Biden in any district in the country.

Prosecutors subsequently informed the court that a new round of negotiations had reached “an impasse,” and attorneys for Hunter Biden accused Weiss’ office of “reneging” on their agreement.

Thursday’s charge is unlikely to be the last. Weiss also withdrew the two misdemeanor tax charges in Delaware with the intention of bringing them in California and Washington, D.C. — the venues where the alleged misconduct occurred. Prosecutors have not offered a timeline for those charges.

Hunter Biden’s legal team maintains that the pretrial diversion agreement, which was signed by prosecutors, remains in effect. Weiss’ team said the probation officer never signed it, rendering it null and void.

The conduct described in Weiss’ indictment dates back to October of 2018, when Hunter Biden procured a gun despite later acknowledging in his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” that he was addicted to drugs around that time.

According to prosecutors, Biden obtained a Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver and lied on a federal form about his drug use. In documents filed by prosecutors as part of that ill-fated plea deal, prosecutors wrote that Hunter Biden abused crack cocaine on a near-daily basis.

And while the statute is clear — it is a crime to lie on a gun application form or to possess a firearm as a drug user — legal experts have said prosecutors could face headwinds.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans recently ruled that drug use alone should not automatically prevent someone from obtaining a gun. That ruling is not binding, since the Fifth Circuit does not cover Delaware.

But Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, recently suggested that it could play into his defense.

“If people have paid attention, the only law that’s changed [since the plea deal dissolved] has been a court of appeals in the federal system that has called that statute unconstitutional,” Lowell said earlier this month in an interview on MSNBC.

Lowell also claimed that federal prosecutors in Delaware have never used this particular statute as a “standalone” crime, without attaching it to an additional charge.

While Hunter Biden’s future remains uncertain, one immediate implication of Weiss’ charge is clear: the elder Biden will head into the 2024 election season once again dogged by his son’s legal tribulations.

The president’s political foes have latched onto Hunter’s overseas business dealings to level allegations depicting the entire Biden family as corrupt, despite uncovering no clear evidence to date indicating that Joe Biden profited from or meaningfully endorsed his son’s work.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday said he would initiate an impeachment inquiry against President Biden over his alleged role in his son’s influence-peddling. The White House has called the move “extreme politics at its worst,” adding that “the president hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“Today’s charges are a very small start, but unless U.S. Attorney Weiss investigates everyone involved in the fraud schemes and influence peddling, it will be clear President Biden’s DOJ is protecting Hunter Biden and the big guy,” Comer, one of the lead committee chairs now overseeing Republicans” impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, said in a statement to ABC News, referencing unproven allegations against Hunter Biden and his father.

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(AUSTIN, Tex.) — A federal judge in Texas on Wednesday ruled — again — that the federal government’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is illegal, but he refrained from taking action to remove protections for the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants shielded under DACA.

The program, which began in 2012 under the Obama administration, currently covers around 600,000 young adults, commonly referred to as “Dreamers,” who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children.

Under the program, those people have been protected from deportation and granted work authorization for the past 11 years.

U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen, who issued the latest ruling, previously found DACA unlawful in 2021, leading to a protracted appeals process.

“The Court, as it did before, hereby stays the effective date of the vacatur as to all DACA recipients who received their initial DACA status prior to July 16, 2021. The defendants may continue to administer the program as to those individuals, and that administration may include processing and granting DACA renewal applications for those individuals,” Hanen wrote on Wednesday.

His decision continues the limbo under which DACA has operated for two years: Current recipients can seek to renew their protections but new applicants are barred from applying.

An appellate court in 2022 had ordered Hanen to review the program again in light of the Biden administration’s efforts to now codify the policy in administrative law, an issue which had been the basis of Hanen’s original decision.

The program was first launched in 2012 via a Department of Homeland Security memo under President Barack Obama and has been the subject of near-constant legal battles and political lobbying since.

At a hearing at the beginning of June, a coalition of the largely Republican-led states who are challenging the program claimed the Biden administration’s administrative changes were not substantive and DACA remains unlawful.

The states, led by Texas, also argued that DACA recipients are an economic liability.

Hanen had sided with the nine states in 2021, agreeing with “the hardship that the continued operation of DACA has inflicted on them.”

“The court clearly saw that this program is against the law through and through,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement after Hanen’s 2021 ruling. “This lawsuit was about the rule of law – not the reasoning behind any immigration policy. The district court recognized that only Congress has the authority to write immigration laws, and the president is not free to disregard those duly-enacted laws as he sees fit.”

But lawyers representing DACA recipients have argued that the states failed to show proof of injury and were not accounting for the economic contributions the hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers” have made after being able to enter the workforce, become homeowners and integrate into society.

Lawyers for the immigrants also argued the program is an example of executive discretion that any president can make, in line with past administrations.

Under President Donald Trump, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions attempted to terminate DACA in 2017, declaring the program to be unconstitutional. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the Trump administration failed to properly end the program.

Esther Jeon, 28, was first brought to the U.S. from Korea when she was 3 years old and has been protected under DACA since she was a high school senior.

“The loss of DACA would not just mean the loss of work authorization and protection from deportation, but would be the loss of these values we should hold as county,” Jeon told ABC News. “It’s helped me to remember that there are still 10 or more million other undocumented people who have never had DACA and have found a way to be resilient and continue to live in the United States.”

Attorneys for MALDEF, one of the co-litigators in the case representing DACA recipients including Jeon, told reporters in late May that they expect Hanen’s ruling to be appealed and that the case may end up for review by the Supreme Court.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(WASHINGTON) — Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a new interview that he has “lots of regrets” about how the United States’ 20-year conflict in Afghanistan ended, telling ABC News’ Martha Raddatz that “in the broader sense, the war was lost.”

August marked the two-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, when the military and State Department worked to evacuate some 124,000 embassy personnel, American citizens and at-risk Afghans following the Taliban’s takeover of the country at the end of America’s longest war.

In an interview for ABC’s “This Week” that will air Sunday, Milley, who is retiring at the end of September, praised the courage of those involved while acknowledging the chaos that unfolded as the Afghan government collapsed before a planned power-sharing agreement with the Taliban could take effect after the U.S. left.

Raddatz asked Milley if he shared the feelings of Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former head of U.S Central Command, who said in a recent interview that he “particularly” regrets not evacuating embassy staff, American citizens and at-risk Afghans earlier.

“Of course, I mean, we lost, obviously, the 13 at Abbey Gate on top of the 2,400 that were killed from 9/11 on in Afghanistan,” Milley told Raddatz in a clip from his interview, referring to an attack at the Kabul airport in which 13 U.S. service members were killed along with scores of Afghans.

“It didn’t end the way I wanted it. That didn’t end the way any of us wanted it,” Milley said. “Look, at — when the enemy is occupying your capital … that’s a strategic setback, strategic failure. That’s what I testified to in public. And there’s no way you can describe that as a strategic success.”

However, Milley also pointed to successes during the withdrawal, calling the evacuation “an amazing logistical feat.”

“It exceeds that which came out of Vietnam during Operation Whirlwind,” he said. “And those people are free today because of the courage and the bravery of all of those that were on the ground at the airport.”

Nonetheless, he said, “In the broader sense, the war was lost. We were fighting the Taliban and their allies for 20-plus years. And they prevailed in that capital for a lot of reasons that we don’t have time to go over today. But, sure, lots of regrets by a lot of us from, from 9/11 on.”

Other administration officials have challenged the view that the withdrawal was in disarray or mishandled. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said in April: “For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch.” And Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress in March that he had “no regrets.”

“Wars aren’t lost in the last 10 days or 10 months. Typically, they’re the cumulative effect of lots of turns and twists over many, many years,” Milley told Raddatz. “And this war, when the final history is written, will prove to be the same. Lots of lessons learned. Lots of lefts when you should have gone right. And that’ll all come out in due time. But lots of regrets, absolutely, 100%. Every single soldier I lost is a regret.”

Milley said he had a message for those who fought in Afghanistan.

“I want everyone who ever wore the uniform over there to hold their head high because they did what their nation asked,” he said. “And we protected the United States for 20 consecutive years from attack from Afghanistan, and we gave the Afghan people hope for a better life.”

Raddatz circled back to McKenzie’s comments that it was a mistake not to evacuate more quickly.

“Do you agree with that?” she asked.

“Yeah, I agree with that,” Milley answered.

“So that was a mistake,” Raddatz pressed.

He said, “I think as you look back on it, I think that some decisions with respect to moving the embassy and Department of State could have been made a little earlier.”

ABC News’ Matt Seyler contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Rep. Mary Peltola’s, D-Alaska, office announced Wednesday that her husband died in a plane accident in Alaska.

“We are devastated to share that Mary’s husband, Eugene Peltola Jr. — ‘Buzzy’ to all of us who knew and loved him — passed away earlier this morning following a plane accident in Alaska,” Peltola’s chief of staff Anton McParland said in a statement on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“He was one of those people that was obnoxiously good at everything. He had a delightful sense of humor that lightened the darkest moments. He was definitely the cook in the family. And family was most important to him. He was completed devoted to his parents, kids, siblings, extended family, and friends — and he simply adored Mary. We are heartbroken for the family’s loss,” McParland said.

McParland said Peltola is traveling back to Alaska to be with her family and that her staffers will “continue to meet with constituents and carry on the work of the office …”

McParland’s statement did not include any details on the crash, but the National Transportation Safety Board Wednesday said it was probing the crash of a single-engine Piper PA 18-150 Super Cub near St. Mary’s, a town in western Alaska.

Peltola first won her seat in a special election in August of last year and later won a full term of her own in November.

Bipartisan colleagues flooded social media with condolences, including Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican.

“I am shocked, saddened and truly beyond words to express my grief at the loss of Gene Peltola Jr. Anyone who met Buzzy felt his warmth, generosity and charm. It was easy to see why so many Alaskans called him a friend, and how he was so loved by his family,” Murkowski wrote on X.

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(ATLANTA, GA) — An appeals court on Wednesday granted former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ request for an expedited review of his emergency motion seeking to block a lower court’s ruling that kept his Georgia election interference case in state court.

Meadows appealed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals after Judge Steve Jones last week rejected Meadows’ bid to have his case moved, based on a federal law that calls for the removal of criminal proceedings brought in state court to the federal court system when someone is charged for actions they allegedly took as a federal official acting “under color” of their office.

In its ruling Wednesday, the appeals court ordered Meadows to file initial briefs on the matter by Sept. 18, with a response from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis due by Sept. 25.

The ruling came a day after Jones denied a separate request for a stay from Meadows, saying that Meadows had “failed to show a stay should be granted.”

As part of the order, Jones took note of Meadows’ argument that he would be irreparably harmed by the possibility of a trial next month, but the judge said that “no trial date has been set for Meadows, and he admits that it is not guaranteed his trial will be in October.”

The development comes as Fulton Country District Attorney Fani Willis continues to push for all 19 defendants in the case to be tried together.

“Breaking this case up into multiple lengthy trials would create an enormous strain on the judicial resources of the Fulton County Superior Court,” Willis wrote in a court filing Tuesday.

Judge Scott McAfee last week set an Oct. 23 trial date for defendants Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell after they both filed speedy trial demands. Several additional defendants — including former President Donald Trump — have filed motions to sever their cases.

Willis, in Tuesday’s filing, laid out a potential “logistical quagmire” if severance is granted: that once granted severance, the defendants then turn around and request their own speedy trials after the Oct. 23 trial has started, thus “forcing the Fulton County Court System to simultaneously accommodate three or more trials, on the same facts, before three or more sets of judges.”

As a result, the DA asked the judge to require the other defendants to waive their right to a speedy trial and “go on the record” with their requested trial date, in order to “prevent the logistical quagmire” she described.

Meadows and 18 others, including former President Donald Trump, have pleaded not guilty to all charges in a sweeping racketeering indictment for alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.

Meadows is accused in the indictment of participating in eight “overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy,” while his attorney has said that “Nothing Mr. Meadows is alleged in the indictment to have done is criminal.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The White House on Wednesday vigorously defended the administration’s deal with Iran to free five detained Americans in exchange for unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue and the release of five Iranian citizens in U.S. custody.

The $6 billion for humanitarian aid is coming from a restricted account in South Korea, where it was effectively frozen when the U.S. reinstated sanctions against Tehran after former President Donald Trump left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program and will be transferred to Qatar with restrictions on how Iran can spend the funds.

National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby insisted during a press briefing Wednesday that “Iran will be getting no sanctions relief,” despite Republicans calling it a ransom payment.

“It’s Iranian money that had been established in these accounts to allow some trade from foreign countries on things like Iranian oil. … It’s not a blank check. They don’t get to spend it anyway they want. It’s not $6 billion all at once. They will have to make a request for withdrawals for humanitarian purposes only,” he said, adding that there will be “sufficient oversight to make sure that the request is valid.”

Kirby was cautious not to reveal much about the detained Iranians that are part of the deal, saying this is still an ongoing process, but in general, the crimes were “largely in the realm of sanctions evasions.”

The detained U.S. citizens include Siamak Namazi, Emad Shargi and Morad Tahbaz, as well as two others who asked that their identity not be made public. Two Iranians, Reza Sarhangpour Kafrani, who was indicted by the Department of Justice in 2021 on counts that included conspiracy, violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and money laundering, and Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi, who was charged by DOJ in 2021 with “acting and conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),” are on the list for a possible swap.

Pressed on why the $6 billion needed to be released in addition to the five Iranian prisoners, Kirby said, “This is the deal we were able to strike to secure the release of five Americans.”

“We’re comfortable in the parameters of this deal. I get – I’ve heard the critics that somehow they’re getting the better end of it. Ask the families of those five American’s who’s getting the better end of it and I think you’d get a different answer,” he said.

When asked about Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s claim that the money is “fungible,” Kirby said, “He’s wrong. He’s just flat out wrong.”

Kirby said the funds in this agreement are “not a payment of any kind” and “not ransom” to secure the release of the Americans.

But Republicans blasting the planned swap earlier this week said the deal was a “ransom” and “sanctions relief.”

“As Chairman of the [Republican Study Committee], we will use all legislative options to reverse this agreement and prevent further ransom payments and sanctions relief to Iran,” Rep. Kevin Hern tweeted Tuesday.

The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, said on Monday that the Biden administration is “demonstrating weakness.”

“The Americans held by Iran are innocent hostages who must be released immediately and unconditionally. However, I remain deeply concerned that the administration’s decision to waive sanctions to facilitate the transfer of $6 billion in funds for Iran, the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism, creates a direct incentive for America’s adversaries to conduct future hostage-taking,” McCaul said in a statement.

ABC News’ Desiree Adib contributed to this report.

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