(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department on Thursday said it would take the fight over an abortion pill to the Supreme Court after an appeals court ruling that would restrict access to the widely-used abortion pill mifepristone.
The appeals court ruling was set to take effect early Saturday morning.
“The Justice Department strongly disagrees with the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA to deny in part our request for a stay pending appeal. We will be seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court to defend the FDA’s scientific judgment and protect Americans’ access to safe and effective reproductive care,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
(NEW YORK) — The D.C. Court of Appeals has declined to answer whether then-President Donald Trump was acting within the scope of his employment when he allegedly defamed writer E. Jean Carroll when denying her rape claim.
Carroll sued Trump for defamation over statements he made in 2019 when he denied her claim that he raped her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s.
Trump, who also denies defaming her, has argued that the Justice Department should be substituted as the defendant in the case because, at the time of his allegedly defamatory statements, he was an employee of the federal government. Such a ruling would make the case go away, as the federal government cannot be sued for defamation.
On Thursday, the D.C. Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over federal employees, returned the question to federal court in New York, where Carroll brought the suit.
“We have never adopted a rule that has determined that a certain type of conduct is per se within (or outside of) the scope of employment, and we decline to do so now,” the court said.
The opinion leaves in limbo whether the case can go forward, but Carroll filed a second lawsuit in November alleging defamation and battery that is scheduled for trial April 25.
Trump has sought to delay that trial for four weeks, arguing a “cooling off” period was necessary given the publicity around Trump’s recent criminal indictment on charges of falsifying business records. Carroll has opposed a delay.
(WASHINGTON) — Coordinated groups of inauthentic accounts have been attempting to influence online conversations around the 2024 elections for the better part of a year, according to a recent investigation conducted by Cyabra, a social analysis firm.
According to the Israel-based firm, someone created thousands of automated Twitter accounts that appear to be praising former President Donald Trump and criticizing his political rivals on both sides of the aisle.
“What I found was so interesting about this bot farm [was] that it understood the nuances of the division within the Republican Party and it was exploiting that online,” Jules Gross, a solutions engineer at Cyabra, told ABC News.
Gross said she reviewed hundreds of posts and found that these automated accounts — or bots — were going after Trump’s potential 2024 rivals for the presidency.
As soon as Nikki Haley announced a bid for the presidency in February 2023, Gross said she saw bots accusing Haley of being disloyal to her onetime boss.
Around 40% of the conversation online about Haley was being controlled by inauthentic accounts versus just 2% before her announcement, according to Cyabra.
Haley hasn’t been the only target; these bots also appeared to go after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to the firm.
Although DeSantis hasn’t announced a bid, it hasn’t stopped numerous fake accounts from insisting he not run in the 2024 election, Cyabra said in its report.
Gross said she has also found hundreds of posts accusing Republicans of not being loyal because they cooperated with Democrats.
“Whether it’s Kevin McCarthy, or even Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and also Nikki Haley, the bots say these people are not Republican enough,” Gross said.
She added that the bots allege that “(t)hey are not true Republicans, they need to be more extreme.”
Gross said Cyabra found three coordinated groups of inauthentic accounts created on one of three dates in April, October and November of 2022.
Gross said she was initially scanning conversations around prominent American politicians on Twitter when she noticed seemingly inauthentic accounts popping up among real ones.
“Once I filtered all of the fake profiles from the ones that were just created, on the same days, I could see that they were all promoting the same ideology online, possibly even posting the same exact posts online,” Gross said. “And from that, we’re able to deduce that is a coordinated activity.”
While public perception may be that social media bots are rudimentary, some experts say these coordinated groups are getting more complex and harder to spot.
“Detecting bots is a very difficult challenge that requires analysis of a number of different parameters,” said Sam Woolley, the program director at Propaganda Research Lab at the University of Texas, Austin. “You can’t just look at two or three different things.”
Cyabra said it looked at over 500 different behavioral parameters to identify whether these profiles were fake — parameters like how many hours a day an account was active, the geographic location of their followers and if the content posted was original or repurposed.
As of Thursday, the three coordinated groups identified are still active on Twitter, Gross said. Most recently, Cyabra said these accounts have been posting and re-sharing posts about the health and whereabouts of Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania following his recent hospitalization for severe depression.
According to Cyabra, Elon Musk hired the data analysis firm to analyze bot activity on Twitter before he purchased the company.
ABC News has reached out to Twitter for comment.
“It shows just how likely it is that the conversations on social media surrounding the 2024 presidential election will be controlled and will be full of not just of disinformation and misinformation, but also harassment, disenfranchisement content, and all other sorts of forms of misleading information,” warned Woolley.
Cyabra said it does not know who is behind these coordinated accounts.
Research found that bots have helped spread falsehoods and manipulate conversations in all major U.S. elections — and many others worldwide — since 2016. Bots spreading misinformation aren’t specific to Twitter; networks of inauthentic accounts have been uncovered and taken down on Facebook and Instagram in the past, experts say.
But experts like Woolley say social media companies need to “take a stand and provide more clarity with what kinds of automation is unacceptable.”
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. and international government agencies are urging software manufacturers to “revamp” the design of certain software to take the burden of cybersecurity flaws out off of the customer.
Historically, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI, the NSA and a host of international law enforcement agencies say that “technology manufacturers have relied on fixing vulnerabilities found after the customers have deployed the products, requiring the customers to apply those patches at their own expense,” according to an alert from the agencies released on Thursday.
The alert is aimed at tech providers, and customers according to CISA Executive Director Eric Goldstein.
Goldstein said he hopes tech providers will use the product to “actually change their internal cultures,” and invest in the changes they are hoping to outline. He is also hoping that customers use the guidance as well so that they know what to ask for when dealing with software companies, but he acknowledged the document is just the beginning.
“We see this document as an opening to an international conversation,” he explained.
The agencies are urging software manufacturers to “revamp their design and development programs to permit only Secure-by-Design and -Default products to be shipped to customers,” and the agencies are calling it “Secure by Design” and “Secure by Default.”
“Products that are Secure-by-Design are those where the security of the customers is a core business goal, not just a technical feature,” the alert says. “Secure-by-Design products start with that goal before development starts. Secure-by-Default products are those that are secure to use “out of the box” with little to no configuration changes necessary and security features available without additional cost.”
The government agencies say there are three software principals manufacturers should abide by when designing products.
“Now more than ever, it is crucial for technology manufacturers to make Secure-by-Design and Secure-by-Default the focal points of product design and development processes,” the alert says. “Some vendors have made great strides driving the industry forward in software assurance, while others lag behind.”
The burden should not fall solely on the customer to protect their systems when they purchase software, share information with other companies when relevant to help secure customers systems, and build a structure of leadership to employ the “Secure by Design” and “Secure by Default” principals.
Goldstein said the hope is that the solutions outlined are not just done by the technical advisors but by senior leaders at the top of software companies, and he said they are looking “forward to opening the apiture of collaboration,” so that way all the voices in the software industry are heard.
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration is pausing a key effort to reform and increase asylum processing at the border, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed on Wednesday.
First introduced last year, the new asylum processing policy had allowed asylum officers with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to grant or deny claims. Those powers were previously limited to immigration judges at the Department of Justice.
A Homeland Security spokesperson said the asylum officer adjudication process would start up again “in the near future” and migrants who already had interviews scheduled would be allowed to continue. The pause is intended “to ensure operational readiness,” the spokesperson said, before the end of an emergency pandemic expulsion policy next month that has limited asylum requests under Title 42 of the U.S. Code.
The Los Angeles Times was first to report the pause.
Authorities at the border have been preparing for the aftermath of the emergency Title 42 policy since the Biden administration first tried to end it in 2021 before hitting legal roadblocks lodged by GOP-led states. Without the ability to conduct rapid expulsions, authorities may be left to handle an even greater number of asylum claims, which can take months or years to resolve.
The now-paused process for more quickly adjudicating asylum cases was intended to ease a massive case backlog. The number of asylum seekers waiting for hearings in the U.S. has exceeded 1.5 million, according to researchers at Syracuse University.
ABC News was among the first to report last week that the Biden administration would attempt to accelerate the asylum process by holding screening interviews at Border Patrol stations. Immigrant advocates fear that moving up the initial screening interview closer to a migrant’s initial encounter with authorities would limit their ability to adequately prepare a case.
The effectiveness of that move would ultimately depend on the ability of asylum officers to adjudicate cases, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
“If after all this efficiency we send them to the immigration courts, it just won’t work because that’ll be the bottleneck,” Chishti told ABC News.
“I think the combination of the new [screening interview] proposal at the border with the asylum officer rule is probably the best way forward,” he said, noting the training necessary for asylum officers may take time.
The government funding deal produced by Congressional negotiators last December resulted in USCIS getting roughly one-third of the $765 million in funding Biden initially requested, according to the publication Government Executive. The White House has said additional funding for the agency is necessary in order to reduce the growing backlog of asylum cases.
Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — An unprecedented ruling by a single federal judge in Texas on mifepristone is raising concerns of “judge shopping” in a legal clash that could reshape abortion access in the U.S.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas, in his April 7 order, ruled to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill. In his order, Kacsmaryk the drug — which has been on the market for 23 years — is unsafe and its approval process was rushed.
The order is set to take effect at the end of the day Friday unless the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court intervene.
President Joe Biden, in his first on-camera reaction to the ruling, said Tuesday he thought it was “completely out of bounds what the judge did.”
Legal experts, too, have both scrutinized Kacsmaryk’s ruling and how the case ended up in his court in the first place.
“I think his order shows why the lawsuit was brought in Amarillo,” Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, told ABC News. “It gives the appearance of being a sort of a judicial decision that was written to reach a foreordained result.”
Texas is home to four federal district courts, and several of them have created so-called “single judge divisions” where just one judge is responsible for hearing 100% of the cases filed there.
Kacsmaryk is the sole judge seated in the Amarillo division of the U.S. District of Northern Texas. He was appointed to the federal bench in 2019 under former President Donald Trump, and has since been at the center of several contentious legal fights over policies on immigration, LGBTQ protections and more — often ruling against the Biden administration.
Before his appointment, Kacsmaryk worked with the conservative First Liberty Institute, where he participated in a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” requiring health insurers to pay for birth control. Kacsmaryk said at the time the requirement aimed to “punish” those who follow “their religious beliefs and moral convictions.”
Kacsmaryk’s sister told the Washington Post, which reported in depth his stance on abortion, she felt he “was made” for this case.
But during his confirmation process, Kacsmaryk said as a district judge he would “not advocate for clients or a particular policy but instead is bound by oath to faithfully apply all Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit precedent.”
Critics have accused the plaintiffs in this case of exploiting the single-judge division and purposely seeking out Kacsmaryk because they thought he’d be friendly to their point of view. The group Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, filed the lawsuit last year.
Some legal observers have pointed to the specific language from Kacsmaryk’s order as evidence of his ideological inclinations. Instead of referring to a fetus or embryo, he used the term “unborn human” or substituted the phrase “chemical abortion” for medication abortion.
“It is very clearly anti-abortion movement language,” said Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University.
The issue of judge shopping, Vladeck said, undermines fairness in the judicial process and raises ethical concerns.
“The legal system is not supposed to work this way,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be able to handpick your judge.”
Huberfeld said this “playbook already existed” but has intensified in recent years.
In response to accusations that plaintiffs specifically sought out Kacsmaryk, Erik Baptist, a senior attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, told ABC News his organization “goes wherever our clients take us.”
“And in this instance, we have eight different plaintiffs: four national Medical Association’s and four individual doctors,” Baptist said. “Two of our clients are based in the Amarillo, Texas, area and we went where they took us this time.”
Asked about the broader issue of judge shopping, and whether it undermines the legal process, Baptist said the group didn’t have a position on the matter.
“ADF doesn’t have a position,” he said. “But those are the rules that the courts have established for themselves, and we honor what those rules are as the court deems appropriate.”
Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, told ABC News “all lawyers file a case in the place where they can have the best shot of winning.”
The bigger issue, Blackman argued, is the nature of nationwide injunctions — where a single district court judge can prevent the government from enforcing a statute or regulation coast to coast.
“The problem, to the extent that exists, is where single judges can sort of change policy overnight,” he said.
The nation now waits for word from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on the Justice Department’s emergency stay motion to block Kacsmaryk’s order. The DOJ has asked the court to enter an administrative stay or grant a stay pending appeal by noon on Thursday.
And at the same time, there is a competing order out of Washington in a separate case regarding the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. That order prevents the FDA from “altering the status quo” as it relates to the availability of the drug.
“I think it’s important to recognize that these legal battles matter,” Huberfeld said, “that they have real implications for people, that people won’t get the care that they need, that it increases the risk of injury and death. And this isn’t going to stop anytime soon. It is a health problem whether or not people want to recognize it as such.”
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump sought Wednesday to delay a writer’s defamation and battery case that is scheduled to go on trial this month, arguing the “deluge” of media coverage of his recent indictment on 34 criminal charges makes fairness impossible.
The writer, E. Jean Carroll, sued Trump in November alleging he defamed her by calling her a liar when he denied her claim that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room. She added a charge of battery under a recently adopted New York law that allows adult survivors of sexual abuse to sue their alleged attacker regardless of the statute of limitations.
Trump has repeatedly denied Carroll’s allegations.
The trial is scheduled to begin April 25 in Manhattan federal court but Trump’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, asked the judge for a “cooling off” period in an overnight filing.
“President Trump can only receive a fair trial in a calmer media environment than the one created by the New York County District Attorney,” Tacopina wrote in a letter to the judge asking for a four-week delay.
If the trial goes forward as scheduled, “prospective jurors will have the criminal allegations top of mind,” Tacopina said.
Carroll opposed Trump’s attempt to delay her upcoming defamation and battery case, calling it “obviously meritless.”
Her attorneys took issue with Trump’s assertion the publicity associated with his indictment makes it impossible for the court to seat a fair jury.
“Trump is exceptionally ill-suited to complain about fairness when he has instigated (and sought to benefit from) so much of the very coverage about which he now complains,” Carroll’s attorneys said in a letter to the judge.
Trump is not required to attend the trial. The judge has given Trump’s attorneys until next week to inform the court whether he will attend.
(WASHINGTON) — With Americans’ access to the abortion pill mifepristone still in limbo, Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday convened a meeting of a White House task force on reproductive health care during which Cabinet officials expanded on a new way they intend to protect a person’s privacy when it comes to abortion access.
The meeting fell just hours after the Department of Health and Human Services announced it had drafted a new federal rule intended to make clear to doctors and other medical professionals that divulging details of a person getting an abortion violates the privacy law HIPAA.
Harris explained that an exception written into the 1996 HIPAA law provides that if law enforcement officials needed information in pursuit of a criminal matter, they could access a person’s medical records after getting a court order.
The new rule is in response to several red states passing laws, in the wake of the Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade, which abortion rights advocates warn are intended to criminalize health care providers and women who seek abortions, even in states where the procedure is legal.
This proposed change, then, is aimed at blunting state-run investigations into women traveling for abortions, so it would essentially provide cover for doctors where abortion is legal to not provide records in investigations stemming from states where the procedure is not.
“I have met with and talked with doctors who are in fear of losing their license or being prosecuted, and of this situation actually having an impact on the relationships of trust that they have with their patients. This indeed is a health care crisis in America,” Harris said.
“Since the Dobbs’ decision, in particular, many states have proposed and passed laws that are now going to criminalize health care providers for providing reproductive health care,” she continued. “It’s going to be a crime, which means that it is very likely if law enforcement requests your personal and private medical records, they may be entitled to receive them.”
Medical providers and doctors would not be forced to comply with those investigations if the proposed rule is finalized, officials said.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland flanked Harris for the discussion, to expand on what the change means.
Becerra, like Harris, said his office has already heard “first-hand” from women that their health care providers are being targeted by hostile actors trying to weaponize private information surrounding abortion care.
“And so we want to make sure we do everything we can to ensure patient privacy, bolster trust between individuals and their health care providers and enable individuals to obtain high-quality appropriate health care,” he said.
Garland also made his first public comments about the mifepristone ruling by the federal judge in Texas, since the Justice Department appealed it, saying the nation’s top law enforcement agency “strongly disagrees with the court’s unprecedented decision.”
An example of the rule’s application might be Idaho prosecutors investigating whether an adult helped drive a minor out of state for an abortion, which would violate the state’s “abortion trafficking” law. Doctors who assisted the patient out-of-state would not be required to comply with Idaho’s investigation.
“I have met with doctors across the country who have shared their stories,” said Melanie Fontes Rainer, director of the civil rights office within Health and Human Services, which drafted the rule. “These providers have expressed fear, anger, and sadness that they or their patients may end up in jail for providing or obtaining evidence-based and medically appropriate care.”
According to a senior administration official, the concern is that some doctors — particularly with smaller practices — might be fearful when faced with subpoenas. This rule reminds them that the federal law prohibiting them from sharing sensitive medical information includes reproductive health care.
Following a 60-day public comment period, the rule will need to be finalized before taking effect.
ABC News Anne Flaherty and Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.
(MEMPHIS, Tenn.) — Less than a week after being ousted by the Tennessee House of Representatives by the Republican supermajority, District 86 representative Justin J. Pearson has just been reinstated by a unanimous vote by Shelby County Commission.
Pearson’s reinstatement comes just two days after Nashville’s Metropolitan Council unanimously voted to reinstate Rep. Justin Jones, the other representative who was expelled last week for his involvement in a gun control rally. Jones will serve as an interim legislator until a special election is called.
“Nashville thought they could silence democracy,” Pearson said after the commission’s vote. “The message for all the people in Nashville who decided to expel us: You can’t expel hope. You can’t expel justice. You can’t expel our voice. And you ‘shol can’t expel our fight. We look forward to continuing to fight. Continuing to advocate until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Let’s get back to work.”
Mickell Lowery, chairman of the Shelby County Commission, announced the special meeting Sunday evening.
Lowery shared he believed the Thursday expulsion of Pearson “was conducted in a hasty manner without consideration of other corrective action methods,” after Pearson, Jones and Rep. Gloria Johnson violated the chamber’s rules of decorum by participating in last month’s protest.
Johnson evaded expulsion by one vote.
“I am amongst the over 68,000 citizens who were stripped of having a representative at the State due to the unfortunate outcome of the State Assembly’s vote,” he said in the statement. “I am certain that the leaders in the State Capitol understand the importance of this action on behalf of the affected citizens here in Shelby County, Tennessee and that we stand ready to work in concert with them to assist with only positive outcomes going forward.”
At the March 30 protest at the Capitol prompted by the Nashville Covenant School shooting three days prior, Jones and Pearson participated and were seen using a bullhorn leading to chants on the House floor, causing a brief interruption in legislative business. Johnson participated also, but was not seen using the bullhorn.
A group of Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Raphael Warnock, wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday, urging the Department of Justice to investigate last week’s expulsion of Tennessee Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson.
The Senators want the Department to determine “whether any violations of the United States Constitution or federal civil rights laws have occurred, and to take all steps necessary to uphold the democratic integrity of our nation’s legislative bodies.”
“This was a tragedy that happened at the Covenant School in Nashville. But instead of addressing the tragedy, the Republican super-majority in Tennessee decided that using our First Amendment right to listen to the thousands of protesters deserved expulsion,” Pearson said during an ABC News group sit down interview with Jones and Johnson on Monday.
The Shelby County Board of Commissioners decision comes after an over one mile community march on Monday from The National Civil Rights Museum to the County Commission in support of gun violence prevention and support for the reinstatement of Pearson.
“We need to lift up these amazing voices of these young people,” Johnson said prior to the march. “We need a multiracial, multi-generational organization in the Tennessee legislature. And these voices are critical. We need to welcome these young voices and not keep them down. These young people are passionate, they’re smart, they understand the issues and how they affect every single person in their district. And I am so honored. The teacher has become the student and I’m learning from these young men, and I look forward to learning for a long long time.”
“None of this is easy, especially in a state so heavily gerrymandered and so anti-democratic as Tennessee, but our ancestors faced worse and they prevailed. So will we, as long as we stay in the streets, in the halls of power and in the front of the chamber together. Our values of democracy, freedom, equality, safety from gun violence and well-being for all are the majority values in our district, our state and our nation. We are the majority,” Pearson said in a press release Wednesday after being reinstated. “Thank you for bringing me back to the People’s House where we can accomplish great things together. We are the new Tennessee.”
(CHICAGO) — Growing up with nine siblings, who all shared one bathroom, Chicago mayor-elect Brandon Johnson said his father taught him: “We are only as strong as the person who was struggling the most.”
Now, after a highly contested runoff election that garnered national attention, Johnson said he is prepared to live by this mantra as he takes office as Chicago’s 57th mayor.
“We have to make sure we reroute the rivers, if you will, particularly in the places where there’s been drought, to make sure that there’s a flow of infrastructure and investments, because that’s going to make us all strong,” he told “Good Morning America” on Wednesday.
Johnson told “GMA3” about his plans for the city, including investing in under resourced communities to address mounting concerns over crime and education.
Chicago had nearly 700 homicides in 2022, which is lower than those in 2021 — the worst year for shooting deaths since the 1990s — but robberies were up nearly 20%.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, carjackings, looting and muggings in Chicago have become more visible, spreading from concentrated parts of the city to elsewhere, including sleepier neighborhoods that, until recently, were immune from violence, Johnson said.
Johnson said he and his wife are currently raising three children in the Austin community on the west side of Chicago, which he described as “one of the most dynamic neighborhoods” but also one of the most violence ridden.
“It’s one of the highest concentration of Black folks, arguably anywhere in the world,” he said. “And as much as we love it, we’ve had our share of challenges because of disinvestment.”
He plans to respond to the “immediate crisis” of rising crime levels by training and promoting 200 more detectives, implementing the city’s consent decree, and enforcing the red flag laws.
But getting at the “root causes” of crime, Johnson said, requires combatting systemic issues, including by increasing youth employment and improving mental health services.
As a former public school teacher, Johnson said he is also focused on ensuring every child receives a high-quality public education by taking a “comprehensive approach.”
“This very idea of public accommodations comes out of a deep, profound tradition of real liberation,” he said. “There’s a direct correlation between W-2’s in closing the achievement gap between Black and white and brown students.”
“It’s also abysmal, is the fact that we have well over 20,000 students in the city of Chicago who are without homes, and so addressing the housing crisis, making sure that there are real economic opportunities that exist in communities,” he added.
Johnson said it was an “exciting opportunity” to engage young voters in Chicago during the election, who turned out in force to support his candidacy as part of a “multicultural, intergenerational movement.”
“It’s such an incredible moment where the very young people that I taught who are now in their late 20s and early 30s — individuals who probably didn’t like me very much when they were 12 and 13 — I had to go back to them and ask them for their vote,” he said.
“We spoke to not just their hopes and aspirations, we actually gave concrete evidence of the work that we’ve done organizing around economic, racial and social justice and how we can actually translate that into real policy,” he said, mentioning mental health, environmental justice, job opportunities, and transportation as a few priorities.
After the outpouring of support from those young voters, Johnson called it a “great honor” to now have the opportunity to serve the city of Chicago.
“The son of sharecroppers is now prepared to run one of the largest economies in the world. It just shows you how remarkable this country really is,” he said.
