Politics

(WASHINGTON) — Opposition to Julie Su as President Joe Biden’s next labor secretary, and the reluctance of some Democrats to back her, has put her nomination in doubt as she faces a confirmation hearing Thursday.

Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana are Democratic holdouts and their opposition could derail Su’s confirmation vote in the 51-49 Senate.

Her nomination is further put in question by the absence of Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is sidelined recovering from shingles and unable to vote.

Time is dwindling for the Biden administration and Senate Democratic leaders to persuade Manchin and Tester — along with independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — to consider approving Su, formerly California’s top labor official, as Biden’s choice to replace Marty Walsh.

Walsh left the administration in March in order to head up the National Hockey League Players Association.

Su will appear before the Senate HELP committee on Thursday, facing what is likely to be a turbulent confirmation process.

The Los Angeles native was narrowly confirmed on a party-line vote in 2021 to become Walsh’s deputy secretary of labor. Tester, Manchin and Sinema, who voted to confirm Su at that time, all now face competitive reelection races in 2024 and appear to be distancing themselves from Biden.

“My vote for her last time was all predicated on Marty,” Manchin told Politico last month.

Republican critics oppose Su’s labor policy record in California and her oversight of the disbursement of unemployment benefits across the state during the pandemic — a process they say was marked by fraud.

But Su, a first-generation Chinese American who would be the only Asian American member of Biden’s Cabinet if confirmed, has robust support from most Asian American organizations, immigrant rights advocates and women’s groups.

She also has backing from much of organized labor, which has said “well-heeled lobbyists and corporate special interests are spending big to block her confirmation.”

“What stands out about Su, beyond her expertise in labor law and policy, is that she believes so deeply in what she does,” the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said in a statement.

“Prior to her predecessor, it had been decades before workers even had a union member at the helm of the Labor Department,” the union added.

Of the 606 nominees Biden has picked for his administration, 511 have been confirmed so far, with 93 nominations pending in the Senate, according to the Washington Post’s appointee tracker.

But Su is hardly the first nomination snarl the Biden administration has had in recent months.

Several important judicial nominations have been delayed due to Feinstein’s absence from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Some Democrats have have called on her to resign while Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer and Judiciary chairman Dick Durbin have attempted to replace her on the committee — a move Senate Republicans have blocked.

Phil Washington withdrew his name as Biden’s nominee to head the Federal Aviation Administration after he was unable to shore up Democratic support. Sinema and Tester had expressed reservations.

Also last month, Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn withdrew after ​​Manchin announced he would vote against her.

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(NEW YORK) — A federal judge has denied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s request to block a congressional subpoena for a former prosecutor in Bragg’s office who investigated former President Donald Trump.

Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil on Wednesday declined to enjoin the subpoena for testimony about Trump’s indictment, clearing the way for Mark Pomerantz to be interviewed privately Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee.

Pomerantz was a special assistant district attorney who resigned in 2022 over Bragg’s unwillingness to pursue a case against Trump. After Pomerantz left Bragg’s office, he wrote a memoir about his experience, telling ABC News in February he felt “strongly you do have to apply the same legal standards to everyone, regardless of your president or pauper.”

The subpoena seeking testimony from Pomerantz is the first to be issued by the Republican-controlled committee. Bragg has sued the GOP chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan, over the congressional probe, calling it a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” the office.

The decision is a win for Jordan, a Trump ally who subpoenaed Pomerantz as part of what he’s claimed is a probe into whether Bragg’s office used federal funds in the investigation of the former president.

Bragg’s office immediately said it was seeking a stay of the judge’s decision.

“We respectfully disagree with the District Court’s decision and are seeking a stay pending appeal,” said a spokesperson.

“In our federalist system, elected state and federal actors sometimes engage in political dogfights,” Vyskocil said in her ruling. “The Court does not endorse either side’s agenda. The sole question before the Court at this time is whether Bragg has a legal basis to quash a congressional subpoena that was issued with a valid legislative purpose. He does not.”

“It is not the role of the federal judiciary to dictate what legislation Congress may consider or how it should conduct its deliberations in that connection. Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition. No one is above the law,” Vyskocil’s decision said.

The judge urged Bragg and Jordan to “reach a mutually agreeable compromise” about the deposition of Pomerantz, which is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday in Washington, D.C.

A spokesperson for Jordan celebrated the judge’s ruling.

“Today’s decision shows that Congress has the ability to conduct oversight and issue subpoenas to people like Mark Pomeranz, and we look forward to his deposition before the Judiciary Committee,” said spokesman Russell Dye.

ABC News’ Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — While there is much to learn about the alleged Pentagon leaker, reports have indicated suspect Jack Teixeira was driven by a desire to impress friends he made on the social media platform Discord.

Will that make a difference as the case moves forward?

Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested last week and charged with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and willful retention of classified documents.

The charges collectively carry a maximum of 15 years in prison. Teixeira has yet to enter a plea.

Brandon Van Grack, a former Justice Department national security prosecutor, said what struck him about the case so far is the purported motive. Unlike previous individuals associated with disclosing national security and military secrets, including Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, Teixeira doesn’t appear to have been motivated by ideology or a sense of duty to inform the public.

“We’re much more familiar with individuals that appear to be whistleblowers or have a motive to disclose conduct they disagree with, and that’s not the case here,” Van Grack told ABC News.

The Washington Post interviewed a friend of Teixeira who described his motives as wanting to share the information he knew to a small private chat room whose members who bonded over their love of video games.

One Discord user who claimed to be a longtime member of the server where Teixeira is accused of sharing the classified information similarly told ABC News that Teixeira was not interested in “clout” or winning arguments, and “just wanted us to be informed, ahead of the news cycle.”

Still, Van Grack said motive has no major impact in terms of the law or the case the U.S. government will bring against Teixeira.

“Even if you do not intend to have harmed national security interests, the bottom line is you’ve now disclosed this to an infinite number of individuals and so the damage is done,” he said.

Steve Stransky, an attorney who previously served as senior counsel to the Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence Law Division, argued a person in Teixeira’s position would know leaking sensitive information could damage the U.S.

Stransky said once an individual gets to the level of security clearance Teixeira had, they would have received routine training and educational materials warning about the harm that could result from that information landing in the hands of unauthorized third parties.

“So, even if his motive was not to create a negative impact against U.S. foreign policy and national security, it was pretty clear that doing this could have those intended results,” Stransky told ABC News.

Federal prosecutors said in the 11-page criminal complaint that Teixeira possessed a high-level, top secret clearance known as Top Secret — Sensitive Compartmented Information.

Teixeira would’ve had to sign “lifetime binding non-disclosure agreement in which he would have had to acknowledge that the unauthorized disclosure of protected information could result in criminal charges,” according to FBI Special Agent Patrick Lueckenhoff.

Questions have been raised about how the junior airman who provided IT support for the 102nd Intelligence Wing had such a high-level security clearance. The Air Force has opened its own investigation into how Teixeira could have had access to the classified documents that he allegedly posted online.

The criminal complaint, while not mentioning any claims about motive, alleged that Teixeira even used his top secret clearance to try to search for the word “leak” on April 6, around the time when media outlets began reporting on the unauthorized disclosure of documents.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday declined to divulge more details of the case but stressed the importance of national security, telling reporters, “We intend to send that message.”

Teixeira was due back in court Wednesday for a detention hearing, but a federal judge granted his team’s request for a delay for more time to address arguments for keeping him in federal custody.

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(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday unveiled a long-awaited GOP proposal to lift the debt limit and enact federal spending cuts.

Speaking on the House floor, McCarthy outlined what’s included in the so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act, designed to raise the debt limit into next year and also provide more than $4.5 trillion in savings.

“The American people have elected a divided government, and our government is a divine compromise,” McCarthy said. “That is why the House, the Senate and the White House should be negotiating a responsible debt limit increase right now.”

The legislation would claw back unspent COVID-19 money, block federal student loan cancellation, rescind billions of dollars for the Internal Revenue Service provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, end green tax credits and put in place stricter work requirements for federal aid programs. It would also limit government spending to pre-inflationary, fiscal year 2022 levels and limit spending increases to 1% per year, according to McCarthy.

President Joe Biden, who gave the proposal a chilly reception, last met with McCarthy to discuss the debt limit in February. Their standoff has intensified in recent weeks as lawmakers stare down a fast-approaching summer deadline to lift the debt ceiling or risk an economically catastrophic default.

In recent days, the House speaker has tried to amp up pressure on Biden and Democrats to negotiate. Biden and other party leaders have so far declined to do so as they push for a “clean” debt limit increase not tied to federal spending cuts.

“President Biden is skipping town to deliver a speech in Maryland, rather than sitting down to address the debt ceiling,” McCarthy said on Wednesday. “He’s giving America’s debt the Southern border treatment: ignore it and hope that it goes away.”

Biden shot back at the Republican leader during his Maryland event, taking aim at McCarthy’s debt ceiling comments delivered Monday at the New York Stock Exchange.

“They say they’re going to default unless I agree to all these wacko notions they have. Default would be worse than totally irresponsible,” Biden said.

Biden warned a default “would destroy this economy. And who do you think will hurt the most? You, hardworking people, the middle-class, neighborhoods I got raised in — not the super wealthy or the powerful, but working folks.”

The legislative text of the House GOP bill, which clocks in at 320 pages, was released shortly after McCarthy’s remarks.

McCarthy said the chamber will vote as early as next week on the plan. While it’s not yet clear he’ll have the 218 votes necessary to pass it, he expressed optimism about its prospects.

“We’re going to get there,” he told reporters. “I never give up. We’ll get them.”

-ABC News’ Gabe Ferris, Justin Gomez contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave itself more time to decide whether to wade into a legal challenge to FDA’s approval of the abortion pill, a case that could restrict access to the drug mifepristone nationwide – even in states where abortion is legal.

The court, which was expected to act by the end of the day Wednesday, extended a temporary stay of a lower court ruling until 11:59. p.m. Friday.

If the Supreme Court agrees to take up a Texas judge’s ruling that threatened to pull the drug from the market, it would be the second time in less than a year that the high court will deal with limits to abortion access, potentially paving the way for another blockbuster ruling this summer that could dramatically change how drugs are approved in the U.S.

“It is not a stretch to say that a judge can wake up in the morning and decide that they want to take a certain medication off the market,” including vaccines or anti-depressants, if the lower court rulings stand, said Josh Sharfstein, former principal deputy commissioner at the FDA.

The case has deeply divided the country, with Republican governors and lawmakers lining up behind the conservative plaintiffs in the case.

“Fundamentally, chemical abortion drugs pose serious health and safety risks to women and girls,” states a brief filed with the Supreme Court, signed by nearly 150 Republican lawmakers including Senate Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

On the other side are Democratic governors, lawmakers and the nation’s largest medical associations, as well as hundreds of pharmaceutical executives and companies. They note mifepristone has been widely available for 23 years — used by an estimated 5 million women and accounting for more than half of all abortions in the US.

“There is a greater risk of complications or mortality for procedures like wisdom-tooth removals, tonsillectomies, colonoscopies, and plastic surgeries, than by any abortion method (medication or procedural),” the American Medical Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote in a court brief.

Mifepristone is the sole drug approved by the FDA to end early pregnancies, typically given along with second drug misoprostol that helps empty the uterus.

Since the drug’s 2000 approval, the FDA later expanded access, greenlighting a generic version of the drug and allowing it to be given up to 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven and provided via telehealth and the mail.

The drug’s rise in popularity and widespread accessibility has made it a target of the anti-abortion rights movement. Last fall, the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom sued the FDA, insisting that federal regulators ignored critical safety concerns during the drug’s 23 years on the market.

Earlier this month, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the FDA to roll back its rules on the drug — only allowing the drug to be given to patients up to seven weeks of pregnancy instead of 10 after three in-person doctor visits and prohibiting it from being mailed.

The Biden administration appealed, and Justice Samuel Alito’s original administrative stay of the ruling last Friday – keeping FDA’s current rules on the drug in place — was intended to give the high court a chance to consider how to address the case.

If the Supreme Court decides to weigh in, it is expected the justices also would decide by Friday whether to keep the 5th Circuit ruling on hold — preserving the status quo — while the legal challenge plays out.

Depending upon what the Supreme Court decides, access to the abortion pill could potentially be severely restricted or even eliminated, including in states where abortion is legal – at least until the case has a chance to wind its way through the legal process.

Complicating the issue is an opposing ruling by a federal judge in Washington who ordered the FDA to keep the drug on the market under its current rules. Danco Labs, which makes the brand-name version of the drug Mifeprex, said the dueling rulings if left unaddressed would create “regulatory chaos.”

The company also warns that if left in place, the 5th Circuit ruling would result in all doses of mifepristone being “misbranded” because the labeling would no longer comply with the approval standard.

Adjusting the drug’s labeling “could take months,” they say, resulting in a stop of production.

The 5th Circuit ruling also would invalidate the 2019 FDA approval of the generic version of the drug — an estimated two-thirds of the market.

ABC’s Devin Dwyer contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The head of the Pentagon office reviewing UFO incidents reported by military personnel told Congress Wednesday that his office is now reviewing 650 incidents, but that there is no evidence that any of them is of extraterrestrial origin.

Two new videos were released at the rare open congressional hearing on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs as the Pentagon calls them, to highlight how the recently established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) can explain some incidents but not others.

“I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as ‘anomalous,'” Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.

“The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources,” he added.

Kirkpatrick told the panel that his office is now reviewing more than 650 UAP incidents reported by military personnel an increase from the 510 the U.S. intelligence community reported in its last UAP report released in January.

As was the case in that earlier report, Kirkpatrick said the number of unresolved incidents is due to a lack of available data that could help investigators in their reviews.

“Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution, and I will not close a case that we cannot defend the conclusions of,” said Kirkpatrick.

Most of the UAP reports fall follow similar trendlines, according to Kirkpatrick, with most occurring between 15,000 to 25,000 feet in altitude which is the controlled airspace for military aircraft.

Fifty-two percent of the reports involve objects that are described as “round or spheres” with the remainder fall into other shape categories. Most of the round objects range in size from one-to-four meters and are described as being “white, silver, or translucent metallic” with apparent velocities ranging from stationary to twice the speed of sound.

Kirkpatrick said no thermal exhausts are usually detected adding that “we get intermittent radar returns, we get intermittent radio returns and we get intermittent thermal signatures.”

But he emphasized that his team has still not found any non-Earthly explanations in the incidents.

“I should also state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” said Kirkpatrick.

“In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encountered can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform the U.S. Government’s leadership of its findings,” he added.

Kirkpatrick urged UFO enthusiasts to submit their research ana analysis of UAP incidents to credible peer reviewed scientific journals because AARO is working to do the same. That is how science works, not by blog or social media,” he added.

Kirkpatrick played the committee two videos gathered by American military surveillance MQ-9 drones flying over the Middle East and South Asia that captured UAP’s flying across their camera screens.

He said his purpose in showing the two videos was to demonstrate one incident that cannot be explained and contrast it with another one that could be explained by data.

The first drone video was of an unexplained incident captured while the drone monitored some buildings below when what appeared to be a round silvery object suddenly flew across the screen.

“It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based off of that video,” said Kirkpatrick.

“Now what we can do and what we are doing is keeping that as part of that group of 52% to see what are the similarities, what are the trends across all these do we see these in a particular distribution do they all behave the same or not?” he said. ” As we get more data, we will be able to go back and look at these and for context.”

The second drone video showed what was described as a blob moving across the video’s field of view creating what appeared to be a propulsion wake behind it.

Kirkpatrick said the wake was actually an “artifact” captured by the drone’s sensors and he explained that after investigators reviewed the video “frame by frame” they were able to determine that it was not real.

“If you squint, it looks like an aircraft because it actually turns out to be an aircraft,” he said.

An infrared detector, he said, determined that “this is the heat signature off of the engines of a commuter aircraft that happened to be flying in the vicinity of where those two MQ-9’s were.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday extended a temporary stay to maintain the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone amid ongoing litigation.

The administrative stay will be in place until the end of day Friday.

The decision came just hours before an end-of-the-day deadline from Justice Samuel Alito, who had granted a temporary, five-day pause of an unprecedented Texas order deeming the drug unsafe.

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

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(WASHINGTON) — Just a day after the Justice Department announced a series of indictments targeting the Chinese government’s alleged efforts to intimidate dissidents living in the U.S., senior FBI officials on Wednesday raised alarm about what they described as an “inflection point” in authoritarian regimes seeking to engage in similar acts of so-called “transnational repression” in America and other countries.

“We are really trying to emphasize this moment in time because … we have really seen an inflection point in the tactics and tools and the level of risk and the level of threat that has changed over the past few years,” a senior FBI counterintelligence official said in a background call with reporters.

The officials pointed to what they said were a number of recent cases with countries like China and Iran engaging in increasingly brazen attempts to intimidate or harass critics of their regimes inside the U.S.

In addition to the three indictments unsealed earlier this week that detailed, among other acts, how the U.S. says Chinese security officials had set up a “police station” in New York City that was allegedly used to spy on or intimidate Chinese dissidents — the FBI officials also pointed to a growing trend where officials in China and Iran have utilized private investigators inside the U.S. to spy on some of their countries’ most vocal critics.

China has called the U.S. accusations “groundless.”

The Justice Department earlier this year charged three men in an alleged murder-for-hire plot targeting Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad, even after prosecutors the previous year exposed what they said was an Iranian plot to kidnap Alinejad that had utilized the services of a network of private investigators in the U.S.

And last year, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unveiled charges against five people accused of acting as agents of China’s secret police for allegedly stalking critics of the People’s Republic of China. One of the men charged allegedly used a private investigator to try and dig up compromising information on a candidate for Congress in New York who was a former Tiananmen Square protester.

“A lot of these are new tactics and lines that are being crossed that we have not seen China and Iran do on U.S. soil in previous investigations,” one official said.

While the officials declined to characterize the number of transnational repression investigations currently ongoing, they said the recent ratcheting up in activity to target dissidents abroad appears more broadly to be “part of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism that has increased over the last few years.”

The officials said they are urging other members of dissident or diaspora communities who may have experienced similar harassment or intimidation to contact the FBI and visit the bureau’s website, where there is a threat intimidation guide that has been translated into over 60 languages that can help guide victims to the resources that are available to them.

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(BOSTON) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist and attorney from the famed political Kennedy family, announced on Wednesday that he is running for president in 2024 as a Democrat.

Son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, the 69-year-old launched his candidacy at Boston Park Plaza in Boston.

“I’ve come here today to announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States,” he said, noting that the aim of his campaign, and presidency, would be to “end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.”

Kennedy, who has espoused vaccine hesitancy since the 2000s, has become one of the most prominent voices in the anti-vaccine movement, according to experts, as the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit organization known mainly for its anti-vaccine efforts.

Kennedy, a self-described “Lifelong Democrat,” through his support of what critics call conspiracies about the COVID-19 vaccines, has garnered support from some unlikely bedfellows on the right.

“RFK Jr. could jump into the Republican primary for president, and only [Ron] DeSantis and [former President Donald] Trump, I think, would do better,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently said on MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s streaming program, “Lindell TV.”

He’ll now face Marianne Williamson, a self help author who announced her bid on March 4. He’ll likely also oppose President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said he intends to run for reelection in 2024 barring some major issues such as his health. However, the Democrat has not officially announced a decision.

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(WASHINGTON) — In a rare open hearing, lawmakers on Wednesday are set to question the head of the Pentagon’s office charged with tracking UFOs — or what the Defense Department calls unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP).

The director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean M. Kirkpatrick, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on the AARO’s mission and budget, with some senators expressing concerns over whether the Pentagon’s effort is getting adequately funded.

This is only the second recent hearing on the subject — following the first one in more than 50 years happening last May.

The ongoing review by the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon of hundreds of UAP incidents reported by military personnel was one of the techniques that helped identify that China was carrying out a foreign surveillance program using balloons, a U.S. official said in February.

That review of UAP incidents in recent years, required by congressional legislation, helped inform the identification process of the threat posed by China’s balloon program and how it was being done according to the official.

The U.S. intelligence community said in January that the number of UFO reports involving U.S. military personnel is increasing, “enabling a greater awareness of the airspace and increased opportunity to resolve” what is actually being reported.

Roughly half of the new incidents reported in the report had terrestrial explanations, the report said.

The increase in reporting is being partially attributed to the continuing effort to destigmatize the reporting of such incidents and to focus on the potential safety risks they could pose to U.S. personnel.

The report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that since its first June 2021 unclassified report on what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), it is now aware of 510 such reports.

That is significantly more than the 144 incidents reviewed in the initial report, only one of which could be explained.

The report said the Pentagon’s new office looking at UAP reports has looked at 366 new reported incidents and initially determined that about half of them have “unremarkable characteristics.”

Twenty-six are being attributed to drones, 163 are characterized as balloons or balloon-like entities, and six are attributed to clutter.

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