Politics

(NEW YORK) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defended sending buses of migrants from the Texas-Mexico border to Democrat-led cities amid a feud with New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who accused Abbott of using migrants as “political pawns” amid a crisis on the southern border.

Abbott and Adams spoke with “Nightline” co-anchor Byron Pitts in interviews that aired on Wednesday, where Adams criticized the Republican governor for not coordinating the arrivals of migrants with NYC officials and Abbott doubled down on his policy to bus migrants out of Texas.

“We’ve got to secure our border because the Biden administration is not securing it,” Abbott said. “And then the reason why we began putting people on buses in the first place is because the Biden administration, they were literally dumping migrants off in small little towns of 10 or 25,000 people, and they were completely overwhelmed.”

Meanwhile, Adams criticized Abbott for not coordinating with NYC officials as buses of migrants arrived over the past two weeks.

“It’s the worst type of politics,” Adams said. “It’s hateful politics to raise his national profile and, you know what, you should not be doing it by taking away the respect and dignity of people who are in need.”

According to Adams, more than 6,000 migrants seeking asylum have arrived in NYC since May – many of whom were sent there due to Abbott’s busing policy.

Adams said during a June 21 press conference that the city will find shelter for migrants arriving from Texas under the state’s “right to shelter” law.

But as thousands of asylum seekers arrived in New York City over the past couple of months, the shelter system has been strained and city officials acknowledged that the NYC Department of Social Services violated New York City’s right to shelter mandate when it failed to place four families in shelters overnight.

Asked about Adams’ accusation that the policy to move migrants to New York City is political showmanship and “un-American,” Abbott accused Adams of “playing politics” and called him a “hypocrite.”

“He’s also being a hypocrite because New York City is a self-declared ‘sanctuary city,’” Abbott said. “And so why he’s ever complaining for one moment about these people being bused into a city goes against his own self-declaration of being a sanctuary city.” The term “sanctuary city” refers to municipalities like New York City that are willing to defy federal immigration laws in order to protect undocumented immigrants.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has requested help from the National Guard to deal with the crisis.

A defense official told ABC News in a statement on Aug. 5 that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “has declined to approve the DCHSEMA request for DCNG to provide personnel and the DC Armory to assist the NGO, SAMU First Response, with transportation and reception of migrants arriving in the DC area.”

“We have determined providing this support would negatively impact the readiness of the DCNG and have negative effects on the organization and members,” the official said, adding that there is sufficient funding through FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program to address the crisis.

But Bowser renewed her call for help from the National Guard later that week.

“We need help from our federal partners as we seek to stabilize and manage our operating environment in this critical moment,” Bowser tweeted on Aug. 11. “I have been honored to work with the men and women of the DC National Guard many times and today we renewed our request for their assistance.”

Asked if he may also request help from the National Guard, Adams said, “We’re going to do everything that’s possible at this time.”

“We believe that we can continue to carry out our moral and legal responsibility,” he added. “We are calling on Washington. It is Washington’s purpose to assist the states and cities during these difficult times. So we are looking for help from Washington, D.C.”

Adams urged Abbott to coordinate with NYC officials as buses continue to arrive in the city.

Asked if he had spoken directly with Abbott, Adams said, “no, I have not.”

“He should have picked the phone up, and we should communicate because, as I stated, this is a crisis,” Adams said.

Pressed on whether he would work with Adams to coordinate migrant arrivals, Abbott said that he previously sent Adams a letter and urged him to visit Texas to witness the “chaos” of the migrant crisis in the state firsthand, but Adams did not take him up on the offer.

“Before we began busing illegal immigrants up to New York, it was just Texas and Arizona that bore the brunt of all of the chaos and all the problems that come with it. Now, the rest of America is understanding exactly what is going on,” Abbott said.

The feud between Adams and Abbott comes amid a heated policy battle between the Republican governor, who is currently seeking reelection, and the Biden administration over a surge of migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border.

ABC News’ Armando Garcia, Beatrice Peterson, Luis Martinez and Kyla Guilfoil contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — A magistrate judge in Florida heard in-person arguments Thursday on a request from a coalition of media outlets to make public the affidavit supporting the search warrant executed at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last week.

After hearing the Justice Department’s case, the judge appeared inclined toward deciding that at least a portion of could be unsealed with government redactions.

The Justice Department had urged the judge, Bruce Reinhart, to keep the affidavit fully under seal, arguing that if it were to be made public it could “cause significant and irreparable damage” to an ongoing criminal investigation involving highly classified materials related to national security.

Arguing on behalf of the Justice Department Thursday, Jay Bratt, the head of the agency’s counterintelligence and export control section, acknowledged the heightened public interest in this case, but argued there is another public interest which is the government’s position to keep the underlying affidavit sealed as it would provide a roadmap and “suggest next investigative steps that we would be about to take.”

Bratt said the investigation is in its “early stages” and feared for the safety of witnesses and potential witnesses and the threat of “possible obstruction and interference.”

“This investigation is open. It is in its early stages,” Bratt said.

Bratt argued that redactions to the affidavit would not be sufficient, as information in it could identify witnesses based on the descriptions of events that only certain people would have knowledge about.

But after hearing the government’s arguments, Judge Reinhart said, “I am not prepared to find that the affidavit should be fully sealed.”

The judge said he believes there are portions of it that presumptively could be unsealed — whether they would be meaningful is for someone else to decide, he said. The government may disagree with him on some points, he said, giving DOJ until next Thursday to file its proposed redactions.

ABC News and a number of other media organizations have called for the release of the affidavit, noting the historical significance of the unprecedented law enforcement search of a former president’s residence and the “immediate and intense public interest as well as a vociferous reaction from Mr. Trump and his allies.”

Officials said in their Monday filing, however, that they believed the redactions that would be necessary to protect the investigation “would be so extensive as to render the remaining unsealed text devoid of meaningful content.”

DOJ would likely seek an immediate appeal on any ruling by Judge Reinhart that would reveal further substantive details underlying their investigation.

The government said, though, it would not object to the unsealing of other materials filed in connection with the warrant, such as cover sheets for the application, the government’s motion to keep the warrant under seal and Judge Reinhart’s original sealing order — none of which will likely reveal much beyond the materials already disclosed.

Thursday afternoon, the court posted the other redacted materials that the Justice Department did not object to being unsealed.

The redacted copy of the search warrant released last Friday sent shockwaves through Washington, as it revealed the Justice Department was investigating the potential violation of at least three separate criminal statutes in its search of Mar a Lago, including obstruction of justice and one crime under the Espionage Act.

A property receipt accompanying the warrant shows agents seized 11 boxes of documents of various classifications, including one set referring to “classified/TS/SCI documents” (the acronym stands for top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information that not everyone with even top-secret clearance can view) and four other sets of top-secret documents.

The documents were discovered by authorities after a lawyer for Trump signed a statement in June to the FBI affirming that all classified documents on the premises had been handed over to investigators, sources confirmed to ABC News.

Trump’s team has yet to take court action despite publicly trying to pressure the Justice Department to release the full affidavit.

Christina Bobb, who is on Trump’s legal team, said they had no plans to file anything or speak publicly, but told reporters she came to watch the hearing.

Trump in recent days has called for the “immediate release” of the affidavit while leveling various attacks at the FBI and Justice Department, while also demanding over his social media website that the documents be returned to him. But Trump’s legal team has yet to take any sort of legal action on either front in response to the search.

Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone and former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin are among multiple other witnesses interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation, ABC News confirmed Tuesday, with sources saying both sat with investigators sometime in the spring. But there’s no indication that the Justice Department’s filing referencing officials’ hopes of protecting witnesses who testified in the investigation was a direct reference to Cipollone or Philbin.

ABC News’ John Santucci contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Internal Revenue Service does not plan to use the nearly $80 billion it’s set to receive in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to hire 87,000 new agents in order to target middle class Americans, a Treasury Department official told ABC News, rejecting a claim widely circulated by Republican lawmakers and right-wing media personalities.

A sizable portion of the money will go toward improving taxpayer services and modernizing antiquated, paper-based IRS operations, Treasury Department spokesperson Julia Krieger said, in an effort to update the agency — well documented as being chronically starved of resources for decades.

The agency also is planning on hiring auditors who can enforce the tax laws against high-income Americans and corporations, not the middle class, along with employees to provide customer service to taxpayers, the official said. The majority of hires will fill the positions of about 50,000 IRS employees on the verge of retirement, Krieger said, which will net about 20 to 30-thousand workers, not 87,000.

“The resources to modernize the IRS will be used to improve taxpayer services — from answering the phones to improving IT systems — and to crack down on high-income and corporate tax evaders who cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The majority of new employees will replace the standard level of staff departures over the next few years,” Krieger said in a statement.

“New staff will be hired to improve taxpayer services and experienced auditors who can take on corporate and high-end tax evaders, without increasing audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year,” she said.

The IRA, the wide-ranging tax, climate and health care bill signed into law by Biden on Monday and touted as a major legislative achievement for Democrats, includes roughly $78 billion for the IRS over the next 10 years.

The heightened funding will also act as a key part of how will provisions under the IRA will be paid for — increased tax enforcement of the wealthy and large corporations is expected to raise revenue by $204 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Congress has cut funding for the IRS for most of the past decade, leaving the agency with technology systems dating back to the 1970s and as of July, a backlog of over 10 million unprocessed individual returns, according to the IRS.

“Bringing IRS technology into the 21st century is long past due. Our technology system is over 60 years old, the oldest in government, and fuels both taxpayer frustration and government waste,” said Executive Director Chad Hooper of the Professional Managers Association – formed in 1981 by IRS managers.

Republicans, ahead of the midterm elections, have been denouncing the package as irresponsible spending while inflation reaches record highs. They’ve hammered the claim that the bill’s IRS provisions would would bad news for the middle class.

“Do you make $75,000 or less?” tweeted House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k.”

The 87,000 new agent number that GOP leaders have been circulating is in reference to a year-old report released by the IRS, which described what the agency could do with nearly $80 billion in new funding if Congress would pass the American Families Plan.

In a table in that report, the IRS shows by 2031 the IRS could increase the size of its workforce by 86,852 full-time employees. But most of those hires would not be IRS agents and wouldn’t be new positions, according to the Treasury official, and the report is not in reference to IRA funding.

The claims appeared to have been ramped up after last week’s FBI search of Trump’s Palm Beach residence, with GOP leaders capitalizing on current Republican mistrust of bureaucratic agencies.

The search is said to have been part of a wider investigation into whether Trump took classified documents from the White House at the end of his presidency, with no reports of a connection to the IRS.

“After todays raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, after news of the raid broke.

GOP voices have also claimed that the hypothetical IRS agent hiring splurge would include armed tax enforcers. Fox News host Tucker Carlson and guest U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. on Aug. 4 claimed the government is beginning to treat “the IRS as a military agency.”

“Well, Joe Biden is raising taxes, disarming Americans, so of course they are arming up the IRS like they are preparing to take Fallujah,” Gaetz said.

Treasury officials rejected the claim that agent hires would be carrying weapons — saying the faction of armed agents are an “extremely critical but small” piece of the IRS, representing less than 3% of its total workforce.

The armed agents do not interact with average Americans, they focus only on specialized issues like narcotics, money laundering and Bank Secrecy Act violations, they said. Recently, they’ve been involved in the task force that is tracking assets of Russian oligarchs.

But the widely debunked claims may have begun to have an impact on some American voters.

“Even the Democrats, they heard, they just hired 85,000 IRS agents, they’re not not happy about it,” said John Ellingson, an Iowa GOP strategist, noting that the claims have been widely discussed since the information has been circulated by leading Republican voices.

Democrats have attempted to quell concerns over assertions that average Americans might be targeted by the federal government.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia refuted GOP claims on Twitter, telling Americans they are “being lied to.”

“In typical fashion, Republicans have chosen to lie and embellish in order to scare the American people. There is no army of 87,000 new IRS agents. It’s entirely made up. The truth is that the Republican Party hollowed out the IRS and has repeatedly slashed its budget over the years. Rich tax cheats run wild, meanwhile the average American can’t even get someone from the IRS on the phone. The Inflation Reduction Act will restore the IRS so it actually works for the American people,” Connolly said in a statement to ABC News.

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(WASHINGTON) — A magistrate judge in Florida is set to hear in-person arguments Thursday on a request from a coalition of media outlets to make public the affidavit supporting the search warrant executed at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last week.

The Justice Department earlier this week urged the judge, Bruce Reinhart, to keep the affidavit under seal, arguing that if it were to be made public it could “cause significant and irreparable damage” to an ongoing criminal investigation involving highly classified materials related to national security.

“If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” officials said in a Monday filing, noting that the affidavit contained “highly sensitive information about witnesses” already interviewed by the government.

“In addition, information about witnesses is particularly sensitive given the high-profile nature of this matter and the risk that the revelation of witness identities would impact their willingness to cooperate with the investigation,” the DOJ’s filing said. “Disclosure of the government’s affidavit at this stage would also likely chill future cooperation by witnesses whose assistance may be sought as this investigation progresses, as well as in other high-profile investigations.”

ABC News and a number of other media organizations have called for the release of the affidavit, noting the historical significance of the unprecedented law enforcement search of a former president’s residence and the “immediate and intense public interest as well as a vociferous reaction from Mr. Trump and his allies.”

It is unclear how Judge Reinhart will ultimately rule on the request, but the Justice Department has requested that if he were to order even a “partial unsealing” of the affidavit that they be given a chance to provide the court with proposed redactions.

Officials said in their Monday filing, however, that they believed the redactions that would be necessary to protect the investigation “would be so extensive as to render the remaining unsealed text devoid of meaningful content.”

DOJ would likely seek an immediate appeal on any ruling by Judge Reinhart that would reveal further substantive details underlying their investigation.

The government said, though, it would not object to the unsealing of other materials filed in connection with the warrant, such as cover sheets for the application, the government’s motion to keep the warrant under seal and Judge Reinhart’s original sealing order — none of which will likely reveal much beyond the materials already disclosed.

The redacted copy of the search warrant released last Friday sent shockwaves through Washington, as it revealed the Justice Department was investigating the potential violation of at least three separate criminal statutes in its search of Mar a Lago, including obstruction of justice and one crime under the Espionage Act.

A property receipt accompanying the warrant shows agents seized 11 boxes of documents of various classifications, including one set referring to “classified/TS/SCI documents” (the acronym stands for top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information that not everyone with even top-secret clearance can view) and four other sets of top-secret documents.

The documents were discovered by authorities after a lawyer for Trump signed a statement in June to the FBI affirming that all classified documents on the premises had been handed over to investigators, sources confirmed to ABC News.

It’s not immediately clear whether lawyers for President Trump will be present at Thursday’s hearing in Florida.

Trump in recent days has called for the “immediate release” of the affidavit while leveling various attacks at the FBI and Justice Department, while also demanding over his social media website that the documents be returned to him. But Trump’s legal team has yet to take any sort of legal action on either front in response to the search.

Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone and former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin are among multiple other witnesses interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation, ABC News confirmed Tuesday, with sources saying both sat with investigators sometime in the spring. But there’s no indication that the Justice Department’s filing referencing officials’ hopes of protecting witnesses who testified in the investigation was a direct reference to Cipollone or Philbin.

ABC News’ John Santucci contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — In June of this year, seven weeks before the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in search of classified materials, former Defense Department appointee and outspoken Trump loyalist Kash Patel vowed to retrieve classified documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website.

Trump had just issued a letter instructing the National Archives to grant Patel and conservative journalist John Solomon access to nonpublic administration records, according to reporting at the time.

Patel, who under Trump had been the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary, claimed in a string of interviews that Trump had declassified a trove of “Russiagate documents” in the final days of his administration. But Patel claimed Trump’s White House counsel had blocked the release of those documents, and instead had them delivered to the National Archives.

“I’ve never told anyone this because it just happened,” Patel said in an interview on a pro-Trump podcast on June 22. “I’m going to identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified at the National Archives, and we’re going to start putting that information out next week.”

Patel did not provide a clear explanation of how he would legally or practically obtain the documents.

“White House counsel and company disobeyed a presidential order and implemented federal governmental bureaucracy on the way out to basically send the stash to the National Archives, and now that’s where it’s at,” Patel said in a subsequent interview on June 23 on a different pro-Trump internet show.

Trump and his allies have for years pushed aggressively to declassify materials related to the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation that examined alleged ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia — a probe that was later put under the control of Robert Mueller following his appointment as special counsel. Patel, who previously served under then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) during Nunes’ time as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has claimed that nonpublic information provided to Congress undercut the Russia probe and helped support Trump’s claim that the investigation lacked merit.

The day before he left office, Trump authorized the declassification of a set of documents related to the Russia probe. The memorandum, released in January 2021, acknowledged that “portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public.”

So according to Patel, Trump asked him to work on retrieving the classified documents from the National Archives and then release them to the public. “President Trump was like, ‘Who knows those documents better than anyone?’ And I was like, ‘If you want me to go, I’ll go,'” Patel said.

“I know what’s there” in the Archives, said Patel. “I can’t still talk about them, but the whole process is going to be: Identify the documents, whether it’s Russiagate, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Jan 6th — and put them out.”

Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Patel, told ABC News that Patel was acting as “a representative on behalf of President Trump to work with the National Archives to get them to disclose information.”

“The GSA has their own policies and procedures for how presidential records must be handled, which Patel is in full cooperation with,” Knight said of the federal government’s General Services Administration, an adjunct of the National Archives.

Patel’s comments claiming that Trump had directed him to retrieve classified documents came in the middle of the former president’s growing dispute with National Archives officials. By June, the National Archives had asked the Justice Department to investigate the former president’s handling of White House records, after National Archives officials had in January retrieved 15 boxes of records that had been improperly taken to Trump’s home in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

And while Patel has said the former president said to declassify “a mountain of documents,” experts say there are protocols in place to ensure that national security is not harmed when information is declassified — even by the president.

“[Patel] is lashing out at the bureaucracy, but it’s that bureaucracy and those protocols that are in place to prevent damage to our national security by an inappropriate disclosure of national security information,” said John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security official who is now an ABC News contributor.

“I can’t stress how important those protocols are,” Cohen said. “For everyone who has a clearance, it is ingrained in your brain that even an inadvertent disclosure of top secret information could cause great harm to national security.”

According to Patel, the plan in June was to retrieve the documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website “for free,” then “make a big announcement every time” a new document was published.

Patel, a former GOP congressional aide who worked on Trump’s National Security Council before joining the Pentagon, was also involved in security preparations for the Jan. 6 counting of the electoral vote on Capitol Hill, according to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, citing records obtained from the Defense Department.

Last September, the Jan. 6 committee issued subpoenas to four former senior Trump administration officials, including Patel, who appeared before the committee for several hours in December.

This past April, Patel was brought on as a member of the board of directors for the former president’s media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which launched the “Truth Social” platform in February. Patel also published a pro-Trump children’s book titled “The Plot Against the King.”

As of last month, Patel was still pursuing his plan to publish documents currently in the National Archives.

“Now we’re in this fight,” Petal told conservative commentator Benny Johnson in a July 4 interview. “I’m working on it. And of course, the bureaucracy is getting in the way, but that’s not going to stop us.”

“I will be going to the National Archives in the coming weeks, I will be identifying those documents,” he said.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Florida state attorney who was suspended by Gov. Ron DeSantis this month sued the governor on Wednesday, claiming his removal from office violated his First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges the Republican governor retaliated against Andrew Warren, the Hillsborough County state attorney, for siding with progressive prosecutors who vowed not to prosecute crimes related to abortion and gender-transition treatments for children.

Warren, a Democrat, has called the suspension “political theater” and has claimed DeSantis suspended him to advance his own career.

Warren’s legal team filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. They hope a judge will rule to reinstate the twice-elected state attorney, who is the top prosecutor in the Tampa Bay area.

“I have the same first amendment right that everybody else in Florida does,” Warren said at a press conference in Tallahassee on Wednesday morning, adding that the governor’s decision amounted to an abuse of power.

Jean Jaques Cabou, a lawyer for Warren, said at the press conference that the governor had no grounds to oust Warren. He said DeSantis took his client out of office “because of policy differences [and] because the governor would like to do his job differently than Mr. Warren wants to do his job.”

“Those are not bases for which the governor can suspend Warren,” Cabou added.

DeSantis did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the lawsuit. After he suspended Warren on Aug. 4, the governor said in a statement that “state attorneys have a duty to prosecute crimes as defined in Florida law, not to pick and choose which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda.”

The governor also touted his decision to remove Warren from office while on the campaign trail this week.

“Out of 20 elected prosecutors, we found one who decided to put himself above the law, saying he didn’t have to enforce laws that he disagreed with,” he said during a speech in Carlsbad, New Mexico, on Sunday.

Warren has signed two joint statements pledging not to prosecute crimes related to abortion and gender-transition treatments for children. By doing so, DeSantis claims, Warren has neglected his duty and demonstrated incompetence.

DeSantis signed a law in April that bans abortions in Florida after a 15-week gestation period. The law went into effect on July 1, a week after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Florida health care providers last week filed a notice of appeal with the state Supreme Court challenging the abortion law. The plaintiffs argue the law violates the state constitution.

There is currently no law in Florida that criminalizes gender-related treatment for minors, although some state legislators have pushed for one. The state’s Agency for Health Care Administration recently passed a rule barring transgender residents from using Medicaid to pay for gender-affirming care.

The governor says Warren’s decision to sign the joint statements, coupled with other decisions Warren has made in his two terms as a state attorney, are sufficient under the Florida Constitution for suspension.

Cabou argues that it’s up to the court to decide whether Warren’s statements meet the criteria for a suspension.

“Just because the governor calls something neglect of duty or the government calls something incompetence doesn’t make it true,” he said.

Scott Stephens, a Florida constitutional law professor and former Hillsborough County circuit judge, told ABC News the court will decide whether Warren’s decision to sign the two letters can be used as evidence that he neglected his duty or is incompetent.

Under Florida law, Warren has the right to a hearing before the state senate to decide whether his suspension was constitutional.

Debbie Brown, the secretary of the Republican-controlled body, sent Warren a letter on Monday to initiate the process for a hearing.

This process is now on hold due to Wednesday’s filing.

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(ATLANTA) — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp filed a motion on Wednesday looking to delay a subpoena for his testimony in front of the special grand jury as part of the ongoing criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Fulton County.

In the 121-page motion, Kemp’s legal team pushed back on the subpoena, claiming Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis “engineered the Governor’s interaction with the investigation to reach a crescendo in the middle of an election cycle.”

In a statement to ABC News, a spokesperson for Kemp noted the proximity to the November midterm elections.

“For more than a year, the Governor’s team has continually expressed his desire to provide a full accounting of his very limited role in the issues being looked at by the special grand jury,” said Katie Byrd, Kemp’s communications director. “We are now just weeks away from the 2022 general election, making it increasingly difficult to dedicate the time necessary to prepare and then appear.”

Kemp’s office said they are asking the judge “to allow the Governor to come in after the November election and direct investigators to work with our legal team to ensure the topics discussed during his appearance remain on his defense of state law and the Constitution in the aftermath of the 2020 election.”

Kemp is currently slated to testify before the special grand jury on Thursday. The Georgia governor is running for reelection against Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams, who lost her bid against Kemp in 2018.

The motion from Kemp follows the news that former President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was informed that he is a target of the investigation. Giuliani testified before the special grand jury in Atlanta on Wednesday.

The special grand jury does not have the ability to return an indictment, and can only make recommendations concerning criminal prosecution — a process that’s expected to take months.

Another grand jury would be needed in order to bring any possible charges.

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(WASHINGTON) — Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday castigated Republicans who are attacking the FBI after the agency searched Donald Trump’s residence in Florida.

The Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago, which sources told ABC News is tied to the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and other White House records, has Republicans railing against the federal law enforcement agency as well as the Department of Justice.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, the number 3 House Republican, said the search was “a complete abuse and overreach of its authority.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., is calling to defund the FBI. Trump himself has consistently assailed the FBI and Department of Justice, calling the raid “an assault on a political opponent at a level never seen before in our Country. Third World!”

The FBI has warned about rising threats against law enforcement since the search. A joint intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News said there has been an “increase in threats and acts of violence” against law enforcement and government personnel in response to what occurred at Mar-a-Lago.

Last week, a man armed with AR-15 style rifle allegedly tried to break into an FBI field office in Cincinnati and later was shot dead by police. Law enforcement officials said they were investigating the suspect’s social media posts, which included calls for violence in the days after the raid.

Speaking at a political event in Manchester, New Hampshire on Wednesday, Pence said the criticisms coming from members of his own party have to end.

“The Republican Party is the party of law and order,” Pence said. “And these attacks on the FBI must stop; calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.”

Pence said he was “deeply troubled” to learn that a search warrant was executed at Trump’s estate but said the party can still hold Attorney General Merrick Garland accountable “without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI.”

“The truth of the matter is, we need to get to the bottom of what happened,” Pence continued. “We need to let the facts play out, but more than anything else, the American people need to be reassured in the integrity of our justice system and the very appearance of a recurrence of politics playing a role in decisions that the Justice Department demands transparency as never before.”

The vice president said he will continue to urge Attorney General Merrick Garland to make such information available to the public.

Trump and his allies want the search warrant affidavit to be released but the Department of Justice said doing so would jeopardize the integrity of the ongoing investigation.

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday on the request from multiple media outlets, ABC News included, to unseal the affidavit.

Pence also commented on the work of the Jan. 6 committee at the “Politics & Eggs” breakfast at St. Anselm College. The former vice president stating he would consider testifying if asked. Sources have told ABC News that committee investigators have been privately engaging with Pence’s lawyer about securing his potential testimony for months.

“Any formal invitation rendered to us, we’d give it due consideration. But my first obligation is to continue to uphold my oath, continue to uphold this framework of government enshrined in the Constitution, this created the greatest nation in the history of the world,” he said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Rep. Liz Cheney is looking to turn her landslide loss in Wyoming’s Republican primary Tuesday night into a nationwide crusade to keep Donald Trump out of the White House — one she said Wednesday could include her running for president herself.

Despite her six-year tenure in Congress now headed to a close, Cheney said her political work isn’t done yet and is previewing what’s to come next — including a potential run for the presidency and an organization aimed at taking down Trump in 2024.

Cheney’s first hint at a presidential campaign came in her concession speech, in which she invoked President Abraham Lincoln as an example of patriotism and a champion of the Republican Party.

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all,” she told her supporters on Tuesday night. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our Union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

Cheney, once a rising Republican star, was soundly defeated by Trump-backed Harriet Hageman. Cheney said Tuesday she could have won another term but only if she accepted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

As vice-chair of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Cheney has become one of the party’s most outspoken critics of the former president.

“It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic — that was a path I could not and would not take,” she said as she addressed her supporters on Tuesday night.

Cheney made a more direct indication she’s thinking about running for the White House on Wednesday morning.

“I’m not going to make any announcements here this morning, but it is something that I am thinking about and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” Cheney told NBC’s “Today” program on Wednesday.

In the meantime, her focus will be on stopping Trump.

“In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our Republic, and to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president,” Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler told ABC News.

The news of the anti-Trump group was first reported by Politico.

Trump has yet to formally announce a campaign but has repeatedly hinted at a comeback since the day he left office. Most recently, he told Fox News at CPAC that the “the time is coming” for a formal announcement.

Trump took a victory lap as Cheney was defeated on Tuesday night, calling Hageman’s win “great and very decisive.”

“This is a wonderful result for America, and a complete rebuke of the Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “Liz Cheney should be ashamed of herself, the way she acted, and her spiteful, sanctimonious words and actions towards others. Now she can finally disappear into the depths of political oblivion where, I am sure, she will be much happier than she is right now.”

His criticism of Cheney continued in another post on Wednesday.

“The Fake News Media is claiming that Liz Cheney has such a ‘wonderful and bright’ political future. Maybe they didn’t notice that she lost by nearly 40 points? She’s too angry and sick to succeed in the future, but who knows!” he wrote on the conservative social media site.

ABC News’ Will Steakin contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Wyoming’s Republican voters got one step closer to picking their secretary of state on Tuesday in a primary matchup of candidates with opposing views on the 2020 election.

ABC News reports that state Rep. Chuck Gray is projected to win the Republican nomination for secretary of state.

Gray, who is endorsed by Donald Trump, claimed the 2020 race was “illegitimate.” He faced state Sen. Tara Nethercott, who has said that she believes the 2020 election was secure; and geologist Mark Armstrong.

Gray also supported the former president after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, tweeting: “This is political persecution!”

There were no listed Democrats on Tuesday seeking the party’s nomination to be secretary of state, though voters could submit write-ins.

The winner of November’s general election will succeed Ed Buchanan, who is retiring and has himself defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

While Wyoming is not a competitive state at the presidential level, the race marks another example of election deniers running for a position that would involve overseeing elections.

The secretary of state is also first in line to the governorship, since Wyoming does not have a lieutenant governor.

ABC News’ Alina Kim contributed to this report.

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