(WASHINGTON) — A federal jury Friday returned a guilty verdict on one count of obstruction of justice against a former Capitol Police officer charged with aiding a rioter who participated in the Jan.6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Michael Riley, a 26-year veteran of the Capitol Police, was charged last year after he allegedly encouraged a participant in the attack to delete social media posts that showed the person joining the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol.
Investigators said Riley reached out to the rioter, Jacob Hiles, over Facebook on Jan. 7, and encouraged him to delete posts that showed him inside the Capitol the day before.
“I’m a capitol police officer who agrees with your political stance,” Riley’s message said. “Take down the part about being in the building, they are currently investigating and everyone who was in the building is going to be charged. Just looking out!”
Riley was found guilty on one count of obstruction related to his attempts to cover up his messages with Hiles after news reports surfaced of Hiles’ arrest.
The jury failed to reach a verdict on a second count related to Riley’s communication with Hiles on Jan. 7.
He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
(NEW YORK) — The enduring debate about whether UFOs are caused by extraterrestrial beings will once again be front and center next week as U.S. intelligence agencies will provide Congress with an updated report on UFO incidents over the past year.
Meanwhile, it appears that other more recent incidents are being attributed to weather balloons, other airborne clutter, and foreign surveillance, according to a U.S. official.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has until Monday to provide Congress with its first annual unclassified update on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, the new term for UFOs, that includes all new UAP incidents over the past year and any previously unreported incidents.
The report was required by the 2022 Defense Bill that mandated that the DNI provide an annual declassified update and a classified annex by Oct. 31 of every year through 2026.
The update follows the DNI’s first-ever report released in June 2022 that listed 144 UAP incidents, only one of which could be explained. At a congressional hearing earlier this year Pentagon officials said that the number of UAP incidents under investigation had risen to more than 400.
While it is unclear how many new reports will be included in the upcoming update, a U.S. official told ABC News that the most recent UAP incidents can be explained as a mix of weather balloons, airborne clutter, and foreign surveillance. But the official stressed that other incidents still cannot be explained.
The official added that it cannot be determined who is behind the foreign surveillance but the most likely candidates would be China and Russia since they have the most interest in monitoring the U.S. military.
“There is no single explanation that addresses the majority of UAP reports,” Sue Gough, a Defense Department spokesperson, said in a statement. “We are collecting as much data as we can, following the data where it leads, and will share our findings whenever possible. We will not rush to conclusions in our analysis”
“In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as ‘unidentified’ simply because sensors were not able to collect enough information to make a positive attribution,” said Gough. “We are working to mitigate these shortfalls for the future and to ensure we have sufficient data for our analysis.”
Analysis of more recent UAP incidents is helped by the amount of information and data available as compared to older incidents.
The U.S. official told ABC News that two of the three videos declassified by the Pentagon in 2020 and recorded from the sensors aboard fighter aircraft now have plausible explanations.
In the “Go Fast” video Navy pilots are heard exclaiming how fast an object is moving above the water. According to the U.S. official, the leading assessment from experts is that what the pilots saw on their video screens was actually an optical illusion of an object that was not moving very fast at all. The illusion was created by the angle and height at which the object was viewed by the sensors as it moved above the water.
The “gimbal” video taken in 2015 by a jet fighter crew that shows an object rotating in the clouds. The official says it’s now believed that the object’s strange movements and observed spinning was caused by the sensor aboard the plane that captured that image.
There is no assessment for what is being seen in the third video commonly referred to as the “Flir” video that was taken in 2004.
The general public’s appetite for UFOs is sure to continue, and just last week NASA announced the 16 people who would serve on a new panel tasked with studying UAPs. Their report, based on unclassified information, is slated to be released in mid-2023.
(WASHINGTON) — In her 2003 opinion upholding affirmative action in higher education, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously predicted that in 25 years “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary” in America.
Next week, years after that milestone and with lingering gaps in minority college acceptance and achievement, a new group of justices will decide whether to overrule O’Connor — and more than 40 years of precedent — to declare that admissions policies must be race-blind.
“That would be a sea change in American law with huge implications across society,” said Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.
In a pair of oral arguments Monday, the justices will take up race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private college, and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest public university.
It is the first test for affirmative action before the current court with its six-justice conservative majority and three justices of color, including the first-ever Black woman justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“I think we have to be realistic in that this is a very conservative Supreme Court,” said David Lewis, a Harvard University junior and member of the school’s Black Students Association. “But this issue has been tried over and over again at the court, and the precedent has still been upheld.”
Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative and multiracial coalition of 22,000 students and parents, sued the schools in 2014 alleging intentional discrimination toward Asian American applicants in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The group, led by longtime affirmative action critic Edward Blum, is asking the Supreme Court to outlaw consideration of race in admission to public and private colleges and universities nationwide.
“There are better ways of achieving racial diversity than treating people differently by race,” Blum, who is white, told ABC News in an interview.
He argues race-neutral approaches, like a focus on socio-economic background, could meet the same objectives.
The high court has previously resisted those arguments.
In a landmark 1978 decision, a five-justice majority said that race was a permissible factor in admissions so long as a school did not use a quota system. Twenty-five years later, Justice O’Connor reaffirmed that principle in a 5-4 decision that said a school’s use of race must be narrowly-tailored. And in 2016, a similarly divided court again upheld the use of race at the University of Texas.
“Every justice on the Supreme Court and the justices that have served over the last 30 or 40 years have voted to overturn precedent,” Blum said. “It is far overdue for the Supreme Court to revisit the use of race and ethnicity in higher education, and we hope that the court will rein in that practice.”
Lower federal courts have sided with Harvard and UNC, ruling that neither broke from the Supreme Court’s long-standing precedent, which permits the limited use of race as one factor in a holistic review of individual applicants’ qualifications for admission.
“An applicant’s race is only one among dozens of factors,” UNC wrote in its brief to the high court, as admissions officers bring “together a class that is diverse along numerous dimensions — including geography, military status, and socioeconomic background.”
Harvard University argues separately that the Constitution “does not require us to disregard the commonsense reality that race is one among many things that shape life experiences in meaningful ways.”
“Nothing in the text or history of the 14th Amendment suggests that universities must uniquely exclude race from the multitude of factors considered in assembling a class of students best able to learn from each other,” the school wrote in its brief.
The 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified after the Civil War with the express purpose of extending equal rights of citizenship to former slaves and other Black Americans.
The lower courts also affirmed the schools’ “compelling interest” in pursuing educational benefits from a diverse student body and agreed that race-neutral alternatives may fall short. Blum and Students for Fair Admissions dispute those conclusions.
“In UNC’s academic judgment, diversity is central to the education it aims to provide,” the school told the court. “Ideally, UNC could achieve this diversity without consideration of race … [but it] remains necessary.”
A varied approach to race in university admissions
Since 1996, 10 states have banned the use of race in public university admissions. But roughly one-in-five U.S. public universities still consider race during the admissions process, according to a report by Ballotpedia.
“There’s something very particular about growing up in this country dealing with the ways that you were underestimated, the educational opportunities you’re denied,” said Fordham University President Tania Tetlow, the first woman to lead the Jesuit institution in its 181-year history.
“When a student comes to us having overcome all of that and succeeding,” Tetlow said, “we’re even more eager for them to be here. And the idea that we’re supposed to ignore that I just don’t understand.”
Fordham has been among the biggest defenders of affirmative action, seeing the policy as much a moral imperative as a critical tool for building a diverse campus. The undergraduate student body is 64% white, according to the school.
But not all institutions see race-conscious admissions as an imperative.
Baruch College, part of the City University of New York located in lower Manhattan, is one of the most racially diverse campuses in the country, with more than 70% students of color. The school does not consider race in admissions.
“It’s a tool to achieve the kind of campus diversity that we’re talking about, but it’s not the only tool,” said Baruch College president David Wu, the first Asian American to lead a school within the City University of New York.
Wu argues that a more effective approach is targeted recruitment in underserved communities much earlier in high school.
“By the time you get into the admission policy of diversifying the student body, that’s a little bit too late,” Wu said. “Before all that happens, you need to put in the effort to build that pipeline.”
A key contrast between schools like Fordham and Baruch is cost. The private university charges roughly $56,000 a year in tuition; the public school is around $7,000 a year.
“Race has to be part of the conversation. I also think socioeconomic status is really important, and we need to find a way to talk about both of them in a nuanced way,” said Jake Moreno Coplon, CEO of America Needs You, a nonprofit that helps first-generation college students get accepted to college and navigate the transition.
“It’s hard to know what the impact of the erasure of affirmative action will do to the higher education landscape,” Coplon added.
A 2020 study of public universities that have banned affirmative action found long-term decline in black, Latino and Native American representation on those campuses — on average more than 15 percentage points lower than among state high school graduates in just the first year a ban was implemented.
At the University of California-Berkeley, which eliminated race as a factor in its admissions 1996, the admissions rate for Black students dropped from 50% to 20% in the first year and from 45% to 21% for Latinx students, according to the ACLU.
Public supports diversity but cool to affirmative action
While most Americans say they support promotion of racial diversity on college and university campuses, strong majorities also oppose the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions.
More than 60% of Americans said they would support a ban on race-based affirmative action, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll released this month.
The views appear to be shared by majorities across racial and political groups. A Pew Research Center study earlier this year found 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asian Americans and 59% of African Americans oppose the use of race or ethnicity in college admissions.
“There’s just talent everywhere, and if they look in the right places, they’ll find it,” said German Ortega, a Fordham University freshman and son of a Mexican immigrant from Corona, Queens, who grapples with the pros and cons of affirmative action.
Ortega is attending Fordham on a scholarship specifically earmarked for Hispanic students.
“It’s sad that I got a full ride because I’m Hispanic,” Ortega said. “It’s good for me, but you know, it says a lot.”
Lewis, the Harvard junior, said minority students should never be ashamed about consideration of their race as a factor in admissions.
“Our race is not just liek a color or like a checkbox on our college applications,” Lewis said. “It tells us a whole history about what opportunities you had access to. We know how powerful systemic racism is in this country. To overcome that, and to be part of this small group of people being considered at these institutions shows that you do have incredible merit.”
Forty years of precedent on race in admissions
Affirmative Action was developed in the 1960s and 70s in part to ensure opportunity after decades of inequality and racism kept students of color on the margins of higher education.
For Baruch College in New York City, enrolling a diverse mix of students has not been difficult, but at Fordham University, Harvard, UNC and dozens of other institutions across the country, it remains a challenge.
“If the court were to follow settled precedent, our side would prevail, and we are asking the court to hold the line,” said Yasmin Cader, ACLU deputy legal director, which is backing the schools. “We are not asking or seeking advancement, just seeking that they don’t overturn efforts to achieve equality.”
Critics of affirmative action say the precedent was wrongly decided from the start and is now ripe for correction.
“A lot of the devil is going to be in the details, the scope of the rule,” said Roman Martinez, a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts and then-judge Brett Kavanaugh and veteran Supreme Court litigator.
If precedent is overturned, Martinez said, a key question will be what options universities will have to pursue their goals.
“Will they be able to use approaches that do not explicitly take race into account but are adopted, in part, to promote diversity? There’s a lot of play in the joints,” he said.
A key figure in it all could be Justice Jackson. She recused herself from the Harvard case because of a past role on the University’s board of overseers but will fully participate in the UNC case. The court’s ultimate decision is expected to take her views and vote into account.
“I think it’s important to hear from the first black female justice on the Supreme Court of the U.S. how she feels about race consciousness in American life,” said Devon Westhill, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group that opposes race-conscious admissions. “We don’t have a good record of what her thoughts are on that.”
(SAN FRANCISCO) — Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was “violently assaulted” by a man who broke into his San Francisco home early Friday, according to her spokesperson.
The suspect, 42-year-old David Depape, attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer when officers responded to a priority well-being check at 2:27 a.m. local time, San Francisco police said. Officers tackled the suspect and disarmed him, police said.
Paul Pelosi, 82, is in the hospital and “is expected to make a full recovery,” the speaker’s spokesperson, Drew Hammill, said in a statement. But two sources familiar with the matter told ABC News his injuries are “significant.”
Depape allegedly entered the house through a sliding glass door, law enforcement sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. The suspect shouted “Where’s Nancy?” before allegedly striking Paul Pelosi, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Nancy Pelosi was in Washington, D.C., with her protective detail at the time, according to the Capitol Police.
Depape, who was hospitalized with injuries, will be booked on charges including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and elderly abuse, police said.
The motive is under investigation, Hammill said.
The Capitol Police, FBI and San Francisco Police Department are all involved in the investigation. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office said the case will be handled locally. Charges are forthcoming but have not yet been filed, the district attorney’s office said.
“The Speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time,” Hammill added.
President Joe Biden spoke with Nancy Pelosi Friday morning “to express his support after this horrible attack,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, “What happened to Paul Pelosi was a dastardly act. I spoke with Speaker Pelosi earlier this morning and conveyed my deepest concern and heartfelt wishes to her husband and their family, and I wish him a speedy recovery.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted that he’s “horrified and disgusted” by the attack, adding, “Grateful to hear that Paul is on track to make a full recovery.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reached out to Nancy Pelosi to “check in on Paul and said he’s praying for a full recovery,” according to his spokesperson.
ABC News’ Trish Turner, Pierre Thomas, Rachel Scott and Alex Stone contributed to this report.
(SAN FRANCISCO) — Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was “violently assaulted” by someone who broke into his San Francisco home early Friday, according to her spokesperson.
The suspect is in custody, her spokesperson, Drew Hammill, said in a statement.
Paul Pelosi is in the hospital and “is expected to make a full recovery,” Hammill said.
Nancy Pelosi was not in San Francisco at the time, Hammill said.
The motive is under investigation, he said.
“The Speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time,” Hammill added.
(PHILADELPHIA) — President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris will deliver remarks at a fundraiser for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party in Philadelphia on Friday evening, where two key candidates on the ballot this November will also be in attendance, according to a Democratic official.
“Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Rep. Matt Cartwright, [Democratic National Committee] Chair Jaime Harrison and Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Senator Sharif Street will also be in attendance,” the official told ABC News.
Fetterman is the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, while Shapiro is the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania. Both are running in critical midterm elections in a pivotal battleground state.
Pennsylvania’s marquee Senate race is the best opportunity Democrats have to flip a seat currently held by Republicans, who are vigorously challenging Democratic incumbents across the country. Fetterman delivered a rocky performance at the first and only debate on Tuesday night, more than five months after experiencing a stroke. He jumbled words and struggled to complete sentences during the hourlong televised debate in Harrisburg against Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon and former TV host. Fetterman has refused to commit to releasing his medical records amid concerns about his health.
Meanwhile, the battle for Pennsylvania’s governorship could determine whether women have the right to an abortion. Shapiro’s Republican opponent is Sen. Doug Mastriano, who opposes abortion with no exceptions and has pushed former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Friday’s fundraiser is expected to raise $1 million for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, which the official said is “the most in recent history.” The keynote addresses by Biden and Harris will focus on “the criticall-important choice before voters” in the Keystone State, according to the official.
“With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, the president will contrast his vision for continuing to rebuild the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, with the Republicans’ mega MAGA trickle down plan to raise prescription drug costs, cut Medicare and Social Security, and double down on Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich,” the official added.
(WASHINGTON) — Former D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone appeared in court Thursday to confront a rioter who dragged him into the mob of Trump supporters that brutally assaulted him during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, urging a federal judge to hand down the maximum sentence possible for his crimes.
“I would trade all this attention to return to policing,” Fanone said at the sentencing of Tennessee resident Albuquerque Head. “But I can’t do that. And the catalyst for the loss of my career and the suffering that I’ve endured in the past 18 months is Albuquerque Head.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ultimately sentenced Head to seven-and-a-half years in prison, describing him as one of the “most serious offenders” in her Jan. 6 caseload and “instrumental to one of the most horrific attacks on officers” that day.
Prosecutors had urged Judge Jackson to sentence Head to eight years in prison, one year longer than the sentence handed down to one of Head’s co-defendants, Kyle Young, who also joined in the attack on Fanone.
They said the longer sentence was justified based on Head’s initiation of the assault on Fanone and his substantial criminal history that includes roughly 45 prior arrests.
During the hearing, prosecutors played out Fanone’s bodycam footage in which you can hear Head’s voice after grabbing Fanone, seemingly assuring he would protect him.
“I’m going to try to help you out here. You hear me?” Head said.
Fanone then replied, “Thank you.”
Seconds later, however, Head called out to the violent mob, “Hey! I got one!”
He then wrapped his arm around Fanone’s neck and started dragging him away from the barricade of officers protecting the Lower West End Tunnel.
Fanone was then viciously beat by rioters in the crowd and tasered in the neck, suffering a heart attack before he was escorted back to the police line and later transported to the emergency room, prosecutors said.
“Your Honor, I would ask you to show Mr. Head, the same mercy that he showed me on January 6,” Fanone said Thursday. “Which in case there’s any question in this courtroom — is none.”
It marked the second time Fanone has spoken at the sentencing for one of the rioters convicted of assaulting him. He delivered a similar statement in September at the sentencing of Young, urging Judge Jackson to hand down a harsh sentence and saying the attack “cost me my career, it cost me my faith in law enforcement and many of the institutions I dedicated two decades of my life to serving.”
Judge Jackson delivered impassioned remarks in her sentencing of Head, rebuking his attorneys for claiming he didn’t bear responsibility for what happened to Fanone after he pulled him into the crowd.
“I cannot accept that for one moment,” Jackson said. “Who exposed him to the mercy of the crowd?… Officer Fanone was trapped in a crowd you delivered him to.”
As she did in her sentencing of Young, Jackson called out directly those who still seek to spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing them of stoking anger “for their own selfish purposes.”
“They need to think about the havoc they’ve wreaked, the lives they’ve ruined, the harm to their supporters’ families even, and the threats to this country’s Foundation,” Jackson said. “And the people who still believe what they’re being told, the people who are upset, need to understand that no matter how outraged they are — when they cross the line and break the law and most importantly, when they decide to do battle with the officers who are doing their duty, they will be held accountable and the consequences will be serious.”
(PHOENIX) — The campaign headquarters of Arizona’s Democratic candidate for governor and current Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was burglarized earlier this week, according to her campaign manager and local police.
The Phoenix Police Department said it received a 911 call about a break-in at Hobbs’ downtown office in Arizona’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon at around 2 p.m. local time. Officers responded to the scene and learned that several items had been taken from the property the night before. Police did not specify what those items were, citing an “active investigation.” Investigators are reviewing footage from surveillance cameras in the area to try to identify suspects, police said.
Hobbs’ campaign manager, Nicole DeMont, said they “continue to cooperate with law enforcement as they investigate” the burglary and that they “are thankful to the men and women of the Phoenix Police Department for their work to keep us safe.”
“Secretary Hobbs and her staff have faced hundreds of death threats and threats of violence over the course of this campaign,” DeMont said in a statement Wednesday. “Throughout this race, we have been clear that the safety of our staff and of the Secretary is our number one priority.”
“Let’s be clear,” she added, “for nearly two years Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit. The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation.”
With less than two weeks until midterm Election Day and early voting underway, Hobbs and Republican candidate Kari Lake are in a close and combative contest for Arizona’s governorship. Lake, 53, is a conservative former television news anchor with no political experience whose gubernatorial candidacy has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump. Lake has fervently echoed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
Hobbs, 52, has declined to debate her Republican opponent, saying she feels it wouldn’t be worthwhile. In response, Lake has taunted Hobbs to face her in a series of videos, painting the Democratic rival as having something to hide for refusing to debate.
DeMont said the intimidation “won’t work” and that Hobbs “will win this race.”
The Arizona Democratic Party was also quick to point the finger at Lake.
“Make no mistake — this is a direct result of Kari Lake and fringe Republicans spreading lies and hate and inciting violence — and it is despicable,” the party said in a Twitter post on Wednesday.
When asked for comment, Lake told reporters after a campaign event in Scottsdale on Wednesday that she bears no responsibility for the burglary and said it “sounds like a Jussie Smollett part two,” referring to a hoax the actor was implicated in.
“I can’t believe that she would blame my amazing people or blame me for something like that,” Lake added. “I don’t even know where her campaign office is. I’m assuming it’s in a basement somewhere because that’s where she’s been campaigning.”
(WASHINGTON) — The House Jan. 6 committee, in its last scheduled hearing, warned that those involved in what they called the attempted coup must be held accountable or history could repeat itself.
“With every effort to excuse or justify the conduct of the former president, we chip away at the foundation of our republic. Indefensible conduct is defended,” chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said as the panel gaveled in on Oct. 13. “Inexcusable conduct is excused. Without accountability, it all becomes normal and it will recur.”
But has the committee succeeded in swaying public opinion? And will that be a factor in the midterm elections?
Polling indicates overall views have not changed much even after 10 public hearings — nine since June — in which the committee presented damning evidence about a plot to overturn the 2020 election.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice chair of the committee, has told ABC News she’s working to “ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers.”
But more than one-third of Americans said it would make no difference in their vote if a candidate said they believed the election was stolen from Donald Trump, an October ABC News/Ipsos poll found. A narrow majority of Americans said it would make them less likely to vote for that candidate, but just 3% said it would cause them not to vote in November.
At the center of the plot, committee members said, was former President Donald Trump. Trump was subpoenaed by the committee last week to produce documents and appear for testimony next month.
“That kind of drama is the stuff of history,” Ray Smock, a former historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, told ABC News.
Despite the made-for-television hearings, views on the Capitol attack and on Trump have remained consistent over the past several months.
A poll conducted by ABC News/Ipsos in mid-June, after three of the committee’s hearings, found 58% of Americans believed Trump bore a good or great deal of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack. That number was unchanged from a poll ABC News and Ipsos conducted in January, well before the hearings began.
Just 9% of Americans said they were watching the hearings “very closely” while 36% said they weren’t following the events closely at all, the June survey showed. This was despite most Americans saying the committee was doing a fair and impartial job.
Monmouth University polling from June showed 65% of Americans considered the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol a riot, 50% said it was an insurrection and 34% said it was legitimate protest. By the end of July, after eight hearings, those numbers were practically the same: 64% said Jan. 6 was a riot, 52% said it was an insurrection, and 35% said it was legitimate protest.
And while Trump undoubtedly has been the focus of the Jan. 6 hearings, he remains a top figure in the Republican Party. An October ABC News/Ipsos poll found 64% of registered Republican voters think Trump should have a great deal or good amount of influence on the future direction of the party.
Republicans in Congress — besides the two members of the committee — Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — have also largely brushed off the panel’s work as a partisan exercise.
Trump acolytes, including candidates who support and spread his election lies, have succeeded up and down the ballot this November. According to FiveThirtyEighty, 199 Republican nominees running for office have fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election despite no evidence of fraud.
At the. same time, the ABC News/Ipsos poll shows 58% of independent voters say that if a candidate says they believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, they are less likely to vote for that candidate.
While Democrats have tried to make the threat to democracy a focus of the midterms, with President Joe Biden framing the 2022 midterms as a referendum on extremist MAGA Republicans, surveys show the economy, abortion and crime are the top issues for voters. A New York Times/Sienna College poll found that while voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, few call it the nation’s most pressing problem.
The House Jan. 6 committee has more work to do, including releasing a final report on its findings and recommendations. The panel is expected to complete the report by the end of the year.
There’s also the overarching question of whether the Justice Department will take action after the committee wraps up its investigation.
It’ll be up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide whether to take legal action against Trump. Garland has vowed to pursue charges for anyone criminally responsible for Jan. 6 and the department’s made more than 880 arrests so far in connection with its investigation, but hasn’t made any public indications about Trump’s fate.
A prosecution could affect public opinion about Jan. 6, Smock said.
“The full verdict on the impact of this committee is yet to be felt,” he told ABC News.
“They made the case but their work stops at the water’s edge and it now becomes the executive branch, through the Department of Justice, that has to take this up. If the Department of Justice does not take it up sufficiently or adequately, then this hearing will have a different view in history — that whatever the committee did, it didn’t resonate,” he added.
(NEW YORK) — With the midterms just 13 days away, the New York City Police Department is warning that amid a “complex” threat environment, both racially motivated and anti-government extremists could target poll workers, political rallies, political officials and voting sites, according to a Wednesday intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News.
The bulletin urges that this assessment requires “elevated vigilance as the US midterm elections begin.”
The NYPD is not aware of any credible threats to polling sites in New York City or any candidates.
“However, hostile rhetoric and an abundance of generalized threats from likeminded [extremists] and malicious actors in chat groups, encrypted messaging channels, and other online forums may effectively create echo chambers that circulate and reinforce false narratives and establish a permissive environment for violent action against election-related infrastructure and personnel,” the bulletin states.
In one example of the rhetoric outlined in the document, the NYPD described how a user in an online community asked if there would be “gallows” for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
And on Aug. 26, the bulletin states, a user on a pro-Donald Trump message board “encouraged individuals to ‘show up’ in ‘disguise’ at ‘one of these political rallies with a ghost gun and shoot your shot.'”
Two weeks earlier, according to the bulletin, an online user targeted the elections department in Arizona’s Maricopa County, writing in one message: “Fire the building. Execute the traitors trying to leave it.”
The NYPD also said that “recent online calls for violence have led to specific and credible threats, and at least one violent incident, resulting in the arrests and prosecutions of individuals who planned to or did target election officials and political figures.”
Due to a “smaller security footprint,” some local candidates might be easier to target, the bulletin advised, citing the attack this summer against Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin.
