Politics

(WASHINGTON) — As top White House officials reiterate that tackling high inflation remains President Joe Biden’s chief priority, his administration is debating strategies to bring prices down — and sending mixed signals about how, and how quickly, Biden may act on an issue that is top of mind for voters and weighing on his approval ratings.

The president said Monday he could make a decision as soon as this week on whether to support Congress instituting a pause on the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon, which experts have estimated could lower prices by approximately 14.72 cents per gallon.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Sunday that the administration was open to considering such a move, citing the cost on consumers. As of Monday, the national average gas price was $4.98 per gallon.

“Gas prices have risen a great deal, and it’s clearly burdening households,” Yellen said during an appearance on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos. “So [the president] stands ready to work with Congress and [gas tax holidays are] an idea that’s certainly worth considering.”

But Yellen’s counterpart at the Department of Energy seemingly disagreed with that notion in her own appearance Sunday.

“Part of the challenge with the gas tax, of course, is that it funds the roads,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on CNN. “[W]e just did a big infrastructure bill to help fund the roads. So if we do — if we remove the gas tax — that takes away the funding that was just passed by Congress to be able to do that.”

“That’s one of the challenges. But I’m not saying that that’s off the table,” Granholm said.

A gas tax holiday would require approval from Congress, where Democrats hold a fragile majority. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has previously spoken skeptically of the idea, saying it was possibly better “PR” than policy.

Biden told reporters on Monday that, as another relief measure, gas rebate cards were also under deliberation.

“That’s part of what we’re considering,” he said when asked. “That’s part of the whole operation.”

It’s unclear, however, how such rebate cards would work — whether they would be pre-loaded or provide rebates post-purchase.

A recession isn’t guaranteed: White House

Administration officials are united on one point: A recession is “not inevitable,” they have all said.

“There’s nothing inevitable about a recession,” Biden said Monday.

Yellen, Granholm and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese likewise all used variations of that language during their Sunday show appearances.

“There’s a lot of things about the economy right now that are unique,” Deese said. “Americans are spending less money on goods, they’re spending more money on services from companies … The housing market is recalibrating.”

Yellen acknowledged Sunday that inflation was “unacceptably high,” again blaming Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and long-term supply chain issues as contributors.

“These factors are unlikely to diminish immediately, but over time, I certainly expect inflation to come down,” she said.

Still, she noted, “Consumer spending remains very strong. There’s month-to-month volatility, but overall spending is strong.” And, she added, “Bank balances are high. It’s clear that most consumers, even lower-income households, continue to have buffer stocks of savings.”

With the Federal Reserve taking increasingly aggressive action to curb inflation — raising interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, the largest hike in nearly 30 years — Yellen said the goal was a delicate balancing act.

“[Fed] Chair [Jerome] Powell has said that his goal is to bring inflation down while maintaining a strong labor market. That’s going to take skill and luck, but I believe it’s possible,” she said Sunday.

As the administration insist there’s a way to avoid recession while reigning in inflation, Republican lawmakers are taking the opportunity to hammer Biden on higher prices — a key talking point for the GOP ahead of the November midterm elections.

“Bidenflation is costing average Americans an extra $460 a month,” Pennsylvania Rep. Lloyd Smucker tweeted on Monday.

Officials weigh more economic measures

Biden made clear Monday he has no plans to meet oil executives in person but is instead tasking top aides, like Granholm, with making his administration’s position clear.

In a letter last Wednesday, Biden called out seven oil refiners for earning record profits while oil supplies decrease. He asked the companies to increase production or risk facing White House intervention.

While the president did not specifically identify the tools he could use, Granholm hinted during a Wednesday CNN appearance that the Defense Production Act may be on the table.

In his letter, Biden also instructed his energy secretary to convene an emergency meeting with oil company executives.

Granholm will probe the companies to explain reductions in oil refining capacity, according to an ABC News report. Trade groups representing the producers contend that “U.S. refineries are running at 94 percent of capacity.”

The American Petroleum Institute also fired back at Biden’s letter, with its CEO and president arguing it was “the administration’s misguided policy agenda shifting away from domestic oil and natural gas [that] has compounded inflationary pressures and added headwinds to companies’ daily efforts to meet growing energy needs while reducing emissions.”

Separately, Yellen told federal lawmakers earlier this month that her department was reviewing Trump-era tariffs targeting China.

Economists in a March policy brief said that “eliminating the tariff would save US firms and households about $81 billion annually on direct purchases from China.”

When asked Saturday about his position on eliminating those tariffs, the president said, “We are still in the process of making up my mind.”

ABC News’ Justin Gomez contributed to this report.

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(ATLANTA) — Buried in the data about the nation’s abortion debate is an uncomfortable truth: A disproportionate number of women seeking to end their pregnancies are Black.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women as a population have the highest rate of abortions — nearly 24 abortions per 1,000 Black women, compared to about seven abortions per 1,000 white women.

That means that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the biggest impact would be felt by Black women in the South, where conservative legislators are set to enact restrictions.

To Monica Simpson, a leading Black activist in Georgia and executive director of SisterSong, none of this should be surprising.

“If it’s obliterated,” Simpson said of the right to abortion, “then we’re not only dealing with an access issue. In a bigger way, we’re also dealing with criminalization possibilities. And that’s a very scary thing in particular for Black folks in this country who are already over-criminalized in so many ways.”

The Supreme Court was expected to rule on the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, in the next few weeks. According to a leaked draft opinion, the court’s decision would leave the issue up to states. If that happens, more than two dozen states, mostly in the South and Midwest, plan to move ahead to severely curtail access to abortion.

Simpson’s organization SisterSong, a lead plaintiff in a Georgia abortion case, and several other Black advocacy groups say the decision is tightly coupled with race. Slavery, painful gynecological experiments and forced sterilizations are part of the nation’s history when it comes to Black women.

“We all need to be able to determine how many children we’re going to have, if we’re going to have children. We all have a human right to make decisions about our bodies,” said Toni Bond, an ethics and religious scholar who in the 1990s helped to coined the term “reproductive justice” to distinguish concerns among Black women from those of wealthier white feminists.

Among those concerns: Black women are considerably more likely to die from childbirth than white women, even when accounting for education. According to one federal study, college-educated Black women are five times more likely to die from pregnancy than college-educated white women.

Health care access is limited, too, and expensive, with many of the same states voting to restrict abortion also blocking efforts to expand Medicaid, the government’s insurance for low-income families.

Police brutality is another factor, advocates say.

“When you look at all of that in its totality, then yes, it’s going to feed into the decisions that black women make,” said Simpson.

“And if that decision is that they choose not to bring a child into this world right now, that is a decision that is a human right to make, and they should not be shamed for that decision,” she added.

During arguments on the abortion case, conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested safe-haven laws that allow a woman to relinquish her child to a fire station or police station have relieved women of the burdens of parenthood.

Also, anti-abortion groups say their church-based crisis pregnancy centers can assist every women, regardless of her race or ethnicity, on their journey through motherhood.

Simpson and others said that kind of thinking ignores the unique challenges that minority communities face, including the higher medical risk of pregnancy for Black women.

“I think they are not about pro-life at all. They are absolutely about pro-birth,” Simpson said of pregnancy crisis centers. “They want us to bring babies into this world, but they have not proven to us or shown us in any way where they have walked with our folks in our community through their lives.”

In the end, several advocates told ABC News they were prepared to work outside the legal system if necessary, as Black people have done historically.

“We should see this as something deeply, deeply troubling. This is not just about what is legal. This is about what is moral and just,” said Paris Hatcher, executive director of Black Feminist Future.

Because of that, Hatcher said, “I will make sure that anyone who needs an abortion will get (one) by any means.”

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(NEW YORK) — The federal gun safety proposal announced last week by a bipartisan group of senators in response to the attack on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, is “a step in the right direction,” according to several authorities — but the measures, had they already been in place, might not have prevented the Uvalde shooting, mental health and violence experts told ABC News.

The legislative framework, by 10 Republicans, nine Democrats, and one independent senator, contains six proposals focusing on mental health plus three gun-specific proposals that include targeting criminals who illegally evade licensing requirements and cracking down on those who illegally purchase and traffic guns.

The proposal does not raise the age limit to purchase semiautomatic assault-style weapons — but for buyers under 21 years of age, it “requires an investigative period to review juvenile and mental health records, including checks with state databases and local law enforcement.”

“Our plan increases needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons,” the 20 senators in a statement.

Officials caution that the framework, which members have been negotiating for weeks, is not yet in its final form. Although the backing of 10 Republicans would give the current framework enough votes to overcome its biggest hurdle in the Senate, it’s not clear if the final proposal will have the same support.

Some experts ABC News spoke with praised the current proposal for its focus on mental health, which includes making major investments to increase access to mental health and suicide prevention programs, as well as investments in programs that increase access to mental and behavioral services via telehealth, and support for state crisis intervention orders.

“The fact that it brings together a multi-tiered set of interventions in schools and communities and families as well as safety provisions … the comprehensiveness of this is what I feel most hopeful about,” said Dr. Andy Keller, president of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, who advised at least one of the senators who sponsored the bill.

But other experts said it’s far from certain that the measures, had they already been in place, would have prevented the deaths of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde last month.

Retired brigadier general Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a former army psychiatrist and senior adviser to the Defense Department, told ABC News that the proposal’s investment in children’s and family’s mental health services might have helped mitigate the attack, since there’s “considerable evidence” that accused shooter Salvador Ramos had mental health problems.

“Proactive outreach and engagement could have gotten him into treatment and avoided the deterioration leading to the shootings,” Xenakis said.

The same holds true for the proposal’s protections for victims of domestic violence and funding for school-based mental health support services and telehealth services.

“[If he was] a victim of abuse … had the mental health system and protective services engaged early, he may have been diverted from becoming a shooter,” said Xenakis. “He clearly had problems in school, and would’ve been helped by school-based mental health and wraparound services.”

James Densley, a professor of criminal justice who cofounded the Violence Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group that studies mass shootings, said that successful treatment comes from ease of access.

“You want to remove as many barriers as possible to getting people the help they need,” Densley, who called the legislative proposal a “step in the right direction,” told ABC News. “You put [a mental health clinic] right in the school, where that kid walks through the door every day and it’s right there, and if it’s accessible and affordable, then you’re going to get more of an uptake.”

But former FBI agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, a leading expert in profiling criminals’ brains, said that even with all the proposals in force, Ramos could still easily have fallen through the cracks.

“Where he would have fallen through the loop was, he was not in school — he was he was at work,” O’Toole told ABC News. “He wasn’t in a position where someone that knew him could have reached out and tried to get him mental health care … through the school system.”

In addition, said O’Toole, for him to have been directed toward mental health assistance that might have prevented the shooting, those around him would have needed to be aware of the warning signs.

Speaking about the people close to him — “whether they worked in that fast food restaurant with him, or if his grandparents were aware of it” — O’Toole said that “if you don’t have something specifically designed to teach people how to recognize the warning behaviors … he still could have gotten away with it.”

Xenakis praised the proposed funding for school safety resources, including additional training for school personnel and students, but said he would also like to see “expanded school violence prevention that includes identifying students at risk for such behaviors.”

Regarding the proposal’s gun-safety measures, Xenakis said that if Ramos had not availed himself of the proposed mental health services, it’s not clear they would have helped avert the attack.

For gun buyers under 21 years of age, the framework proposes an enhanced review process that requires an investigative period to review juvenile and mental health records, including checks with state databases and local law enforcement — but that would have only impacted Ramos’ ability to buy a weapon had he sought out mental health assistance or had a criminal record.

“This provision with background checks could’ve been protective … if he had had treatment and been involved in a mental health program,” Xenakis said.

And since Ramos purchased his AR-style weapon legally, the proposal’s crackdown on criminals who illegally evade licensing requirements would not have applied to him, said Xenakis.

School safety experts like Ron Avi Astor say that’s why more gun safety provisions are needed. Astor, part of a group of researchers who recently issued an eight-point plan for immediate government action to reduce gun violence, told ABC News that without a bill that focuses on responsible gun ownership, there is going to be little impact on the number of shootings that occur.

Astor, who supports gun education, safety training, and stricter licensure for gun owners, said “that’s where you’re going to get the biggest difference: if you implement even the licensing alone, not even background checks.”

“If we were willing to go for licensing like we do with cars, that would save potentially tens and tens of thousands of lives,” Astor said.

The current Senate proposal “is not a perfect solution that’s going to solve the problem,” said Densley. “It might make these types of mass shootings less frequent. It might make them less deadly in the coming years. But it’s not going to solve the problem.”

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(NEW YORK) — The Texas Republican Party this weekend formally “rebuked” multiple GOP senators, including one of their own, for helping lead bipartisan negotiations on new gun legislation.

The resolution, adopted at the state’s convention on Saturday in Houston, dismissed the Senate compromise announced last week that had the filibuster-proof support of at least 10 Republicans.

“We reject the so called ‘bipartisan gun agreement,’ and we rebuke Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lindsey Graham 1601 (R-S.C.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.),” the resolution reads.

The party’s admonishment reflects, in part, the difficulty of congressional action around guns, given some opposition in highly conservative circles. The state GOP’s response followed Cornyn being booed, too, by the crowd while speaking at the convention on Friday.

Cornyn stepped up to help lead bipartisan negotiations around modest gun reforms following the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. The bipartisan group of senators working on the legislation announced an initial agreed-upon framework on June 12 that would increase funding for school safety and mental health as well as require enhanced background checks for 18 to 21-year-olds and support “red flag” laws enacted by states.

The agreement did not include more sweeping restrictions backed by Democrats and President Joe Biden, like raising the legal buying age for assault-style weapons.

Work continues on final text of the bill, with leaders in the House and Senate vowing quick votes if Republicans remain onboard — with hopes to bring text to the floor of the Senate this week.

Terry Harper, one of the members of the executive committee for Texas’s GOP, voted against the resolution criticizing Cornyn and others — and even tried to get it taken out — though he is skeptical of the negotiations around a possible deal on guns.

“I don’t always approve of what my elected officials do, but they are my elected officials. It’s kind of like marriage. I’ve been married for 45 years, and we don’t always agree, but we don’t part the sheets over it,” Harper told ABC News.

“It was all just a little harsh and embarrassing when they booed,” Harper continued in a phone call with ABC News.

At Saturday’s convention, the Texas GOP also added a series of positions on LGBTQ issues as part of their adopted platform and they officially continued to cast doubts on the validity of Biden’s 2020 election victory, rooted in former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.

The Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing the LGBTQ community in the Republican Party, was denied space for a booth at the event. (The group later shared a statement they said was from Donald Trump Jr. that criticized their exclusion.)

The state party’s new platform as posted online as of Sunday states that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice” and that, as a party, “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” The party also said it opposed various medical treatments for transgender people who are 21 and younger including so-called “puberty blockers,” hormone therapy and surgery.

The Texas GOP’s latest position on the gay and transgender community comes as conservatives across the country have increasingly refocused on LGBTQ issues, particularly as they relate to children – including bans on transgender kids’ medical care and discussions of sexuality and gender in classrooms.

The party’s platform was quickly and widely criticized by LGBTQ advocates after it was adopted this weekend, with some saying it could herald broader discrimination.

Following the leaked draft opinion suggesting the Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, Biden argued the high court could next reduce protections for gay and transgender people or reverse other major precedents, such as the national guarantee to same-sex marriage. (The draft of that opinion shows the court majority insisting its ruling on abortion would not affect other cases.)

With its new platform, the Texas GOP also continued to push the narrative of a false 2020 election and said they did not believe Biden was legitimately elected — despite any evidence and multiple recounts and audits in key battleground states.

Trump, as the party standard-bearer, has continued to assail the race he lost and promoted those who wish to overturn it, backing various local and state officials who could soon be in charge of overseeing the next elections.

During this month’s ongoing Jan. 6 committee hearings in the House, testimony from multiple members of Trump’s inner circle showed how they repeatedly rejected his claims in private, including former Attorney General Bill Barr.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll earlier this year found that 65 percent of Americans believed Biden was legitimately elected, though that number had sharp a partisan divide with nearly three-quarters of Republicans believing the opposite.

The final version of the platform will be posted in the coming days. Members voted on each part of the platform separately and votes are still being tallied, though staff with the state party told ABC News that no major changes are expected and it is rare for portions of the document to fail in the final vote. The rebuke of Cornyn was a resolution passed by voice vote.

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(NEW YORK) — One of two Republicans on the House’s Jan. 6 committee said Sunday he believes former President Donald Trump’s actions as described during this month’s public hearings “rise to a level of criminal involvement” in the events around the U.S. Capitol attack.

When asked by anchor George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” if he thinks Trump should be prosecuted, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger said: “I certainly think the president is guilty of knowing what he did — seditious conspiracy, being involved in these kind of different segments and pressuring the DOJ, Vice President [Mike Pence], etc.,” Kinzinger said.

He continued: “Obviously, you know, we’re not a criminal charges committee. So I want to be careful specifically using that language. But I think what we’re presenting before the American people certainly would rise to a level of criminal involvement by a president and definitely failure of the oath.”

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday showed that 58% of Americans think Trump “bears a good or great amount of responsibility for the events of Jan. 6 and that he should be charged with a crime.” (Trump has repeatedly dismissed the House’s Jan. 6 investigation as politically motivated and one-sided.)

The House select committee was set up to probe what took place surrounding the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, following Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss and his months-long campaign to overturn that defeat.

In a series of ongoing hearings, the House committee has detailed some of the evidence gathered in its 11-month investigation, including testimony from Trump’s inner circle showing, investigators say, that Trump knew his push to contest the 2020 results and have Pence reject Joe Biden’s victory was baseless — and illegal.

“It is essential at this moment that we get a grip on this and figure out how to defend our democracy,” Kinzinger, a vocal member of the GOP’s anti-Trump minority, said on “This Week.”

“I think this blows, actually, Watergate out of the water,” Kinzinger said of the current moment, blaming the “lack of leadership” for the partisan division. The congressman, who is not running for another term, said his party had “utterly failed the American people at truth. … Makes me sad, but it’s a fact.”

“If you’re not willing to tell people the truth in America, you shouldn’t run for Congress,” he said.

Stephanopoulos also asked Kinzinger about upcoming elections, noting that the next presidential contest could have “a similar controversy.”

“We’re seeing allies of President Trump being elected to run elections in state after state. I’ve already pointed out the divide between Republicans and Democrats over what happened on Jan. 6. How worried are you about 2024?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“Very worried,” Kinzinger replied.

“This is the untold thing,” he continued. “We focus so much on what goes on in D.C. and Congress and the Senate, but when you have these election judges that are going to people that don’t believe basically in democracy – authoritarians – 2024 is going to be a mess.”

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(NEW YORK) — A recession is not “at all inevitable” as the Federal Reserve takes increasingly aggressive action to address sharply rising inflation, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday.

“I expect the economy to slow,” Yellen told “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “It’s been growing at a very rapid rate, as the economy, as the labor market, has recovered and we have reached full employment. It’s natural now that we expect a transition to steady and stable growth, but I don’t think a recession is at all inevitable.”

“Clearly, inflation is unacceptably high,” Yellen continued. “It’s President [Joe] Biden’s top priority to bring it down. And [Fed] Chair [Jerome] Powell has said that his goal is to bring inflation down while maintaining a strong labor market. That’s going to take skill and luck, but I believe it’s possible.”

The current inflation rate, year-over-year, is at a 40-year high of 8.6%, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On Wednesday, in an effort to cool those rising costs, the Fed increased interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point — marking the largest rate increase since 1994. A higher interest rate increases borrowing costs for consumers and companies, potentially slowing inflation by decreasing demand.

“You say it’s not inevitable, but I guess the question is: Is it likely?” Stephanopoulos pressed Yellen, citing data on consumer pull-back and slowing movement in the job market and noting that she, Biden and Powell were all wrong about inflation’s lasting impact last year.

“Consumer spending remains very strong. There’s month-to-month volatility, but overall spending is strong, although patterns of spending are changing and higher food and energy prices are certainly affecting consumers,” Yellen said.

“But bank balances are high,” she continued. “It’s clear that most consumers, even lower-income households, continue to have buffer stocks of savings that will enable them to maintain spending. So I don’t see a drop-off in consumer spending as a likely cause of the recession in the months ahead. And the labor market is very strong, arguably the strongest of the post-war period.”

Yellen attributed inflation partly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying the conflict had increased global prices on energy and food.

“It’s important to recognize that the United States is certainly not the only advanced economy suffering from high inflation,” Yellen said. “We see it in the U.K., we see it in France, Germany, Italy; and the causes of it are global, not local.”

She said “energy prices spillover is really half of inflation,” but that Biden has been working to keep oil prices from going even higher.

Gas prices remain at record highs after months of increases. The current national average is about $4.98 per gallon.

Yellen cited Biden’s “historic” release of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve over six months in an effort to reduce prices — though costs continue to climb.

“[Biden] stands ready to work and is encouraging producers of oil and refined products, gas, to work with him to increase supplies, to bring gas prices and energy prices down,” Yellen said.

On Wednesday, Biden sent a letter to seven major oil refiners in the U.S., blasting them for posting record profits while consumers face record-high gas prices and calling on them to increase production.

The American Petroleum Institute fired back, with its CEO and president arguing it’s “the administration’s misguided policy agenda shifting away from domestic oil and natural gas [that] has compounded inflationary pressures and added headwinds to companies’ daily efforts to meet growing energy needs while reducing emissions.”

“How do you respond to that?” Stephanopoulos pressed.

“I don’t think that the policies are responsible for what’s happening in the oil market,” Yellen said. “I think that producers were partly caught unaware of the strength of the recovery in the economy and weren’t ready to meet the needs of the economy. High prices should induce them to increase supplies over time.”

While long-term efforts to bring down the cost of gas are being debated, Stephanopoulos asked about the short term.

“Several in Congress are calling for gas tax holidays. Prices average around $5 a gallon. Is that on the table?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“President Biden wants to do anything he possibly can to help consumers,” Yellen said. “Gas prices have risen a great deal and it’s clearly burdening households. So he stands ready to work with Congress, and that’s an idea that’s certainly worth considering.”

Yellen also said the administration is considering lifting some Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods.

“We all recognize that China engages in a range of unfair trade practices that it’s important to address,” Yellen said. “But the tariffs we inherited, some serve no strategic purpose and raise costs to consumers. And so, reconfiguring some of those tariffs so they make more sense and reduce some unnecessary burdens is something that’s under consideration.”

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(NEW YORK) — With the first full week of hearings for the House select committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol now complete, nearly 6 in 10 Americans believe former President Donald Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the incident, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.

Six in 10 Americans also believe the committee is conducting a fair and impartial investigation, according to the poll.

In the poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, 58% of Americans think Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the riot. That’s up slightly from late April, before the hearings began, when an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 52% of Americans thought the former president should be charged.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll that asked a similar question days after the attack in January 2021 found that 54% of Americans thought Trump should be charged with the crime of inciting a riot.

Attitudes on whether Americans think Trump is responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol remain relatively stable. In the new ABC News/Ipsos poll, 58% of Americans think Trump bears a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. This is unchanged from an ABC News/Ipsos poll in December 2021 and similar to the findings of an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted just after the attack in January 2021.

The poll divides along party lines, with 91% of Democrats thinking Trump should be charged with a crime compared to 19% of Republicans. On whether Trump bears a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the attack, 91% of Democrats and 21% of Republicans say he does.

Among self-described independents, 62% think Trump should be charged and 61% think he bears a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted after the committee held its third of seven public hearings scheduled for this month, which detail what the committee says was a “sophisticated, seven-part plan” by Trump and his supporters to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.

On Friday, Trump lambasted the hearing, calling the panel “con artists,” while continuing to air false claims about the 2020 election.

“There’s no clearer example of the menacing spirit that has devoured the American left than the disgraceful performance being staged by the unselect committee,” Trump said at a conference hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Nashville, Tennessee.

Overall, 60% of Americans think the committee is conducting a fair and impartial investigation while 38% say it is not, the new ABC News/Ipsos poll found. That was evenly divided at 40% in the April ABC News/Washington Post poll, which also found that 20% of Americans had no opinion on the matter just two months ago.

When it comes to the fairness of the committee, Americans are again divided along party lines in the latest poll, with 85% of Democrats finding the investigation fair and impartial, compared to 31% of Republicans. Independents’ views fall in-between at 63%.

Democrats are more likely to be following the hearings. Overall, 34% of Americans are following the hearings very or somewhat closely, with 43% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans saying so. In a reminder of where political attention is, just under one in 10 (9%) Americans say they are following the hearings very closely.

On whether the investigation will have an impact at the polls, just over half (51%) of Americans say that what they’ve read, seen or heard about the hearings has made no difference in who they plan to support in this November’s election. Meanwhile, 29% say they are more likely to support Democratic candidates and 19% say they are more likely to support Republican candidates.

The bipartisan committee, led by chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and vice-chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., is in the midst of summing up its 11-month-long investigation into the attack. So far the hearings have largely focused on how Trump pushed the “big lie” of a stolen 2020 race and the pressure campaign on then-Vice President Mike Pence.

The panel has also shared never-before-seen footage from the riot and interviews with Trump administration and White House officials.

This ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted using Ipsos Public Affairs‘ KnowledgePanel® June 17-18, 2022, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 545 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 4.5 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 28-26-40 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents. See the poll’s topline results and details on the methodology here.

ABC News’ Dan Merkle and Ken Goldstein contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — As the Jan. 6 committee continues to lay out its evidence surrounding the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge on Thursday ruled that a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion — a voting machine company at the heart of a number of “Big Lie” conspiracy theories — against far-right news outlet Newsmax is allowed to proceed.

Judge Eric M. Davis denied Newsmax’s motion to dismiss the $1.6 billion civil suit. In the original complaint filed in August, Dominion said Newsmax “helped create and cultivate an alternate reality where up is down, pigs have wings, and Dominion engaged in a colossal fraud to steal the presidency from Donald Trump by rigging the vote.”

At the first Jan. 6 hearing last week, former Attorney General Bill Barr said the baseless allegations that Dominion machines switched votes from Joe Biden to Trump were “complete nonsense” and “amongst the most disturbing.”

“I told them it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on it, and they were doing a great disservice to the country,” Barr said of the Dominion conspiracy theories, which were consistently pushed by Trump and his allies. “I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people.”

Dominion has filed a number of defamation suits against those it says helped pushed the false accusations that it helped rig the 2020 election, including Rudy Giuliani and Fox News. Last year, a judge similarly denied requests from Giuliani, attorney Sidney Powell, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to throw out the Dominion suits against them.

Dominion, in its complaint against Newsmax, alleged that Newsmax “manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion.”

In a statement responding to the ruling, a Newsmax spokesperson said they were “not surprised by the judge’s decision as this was a preliminary motion and he made a very similar ruling in the Fox News case,” then went on to defend its coverage of the 2020 election.

“Newsmax reported on both sides in the election dispute without making any claim about the results other than saying they were ‘legal and final,'” the statement said. “We are confident that Newsmax will ultimately prevail given the strong First Amendment protections provided to ensure free speech and a free press.”

Last year, Newsmax retracted some its reporting surrounding the 2020 election as part of a settlement after it was sued by a Dominion employee in a separate suit.

Referring to allegations that Dominion had schemed to rig the election in favor of Biden, the network reported that it “subsequently found no evidence that such allegations were true.”
 

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Beatrice Peterson, ABC News

(WASHINGTON) — It’s been more than a month since a dozen civil rights and religious groups say they sent a letter to the White House calling on President Joe Biden sign an executive order to study reparations by Juneteenth, or this Sunday, June 19, marking the emancipation of enslaved African Americans.

So, this week, because Biden hasn’t yet done so, activists began staging a first-of-its-kind visual installation on the Ellipse, near the White House, to get Biden’s and the public’s attention leading into America’s newest federal holiday, being observed on Monday.

The study activists wants comes after a decades-long push to establish a 13-person reparations commission in Congress.

The installation on the Ellipse includes a giant Pan-African flag, made of red, black, and green flowers alongside mulch provided by Black farmers — what activists say is a visual reminder of the need for reparations.

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Union leaders promised formerly enslaved families “40 acres and a mule” — a promise never fulfilled.

However, a reminder of the centuries-old promise has languished in Congress for decades. H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, has been introduced in every legislative session since 1989.

The measure seeks to establish a commission to study “and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, legal and other racial and economic discrimination, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies …”

In recent years, the bill has gained some political traction.

In 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hundreds of members of Congress and over 350 organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, NAACP and ACLU publicly announced support for reparations.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, “The Big Payback,” a documentary examining reparations, directed by “Living Single” actress Erika Alexander, premiered at the legendary festival in early June.

H.R. 40 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 but has failed to come to a vote in the House or Senate.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated in 2021 that President Biden supported the study of reparations. However, when asked if he would support a bill on reparations Psaki said, “We’ll see what happens through the legislative process.”

Asked if Biden supports an executive order on the study of reparations, Psaki said at the time, “it would be up to him, he has executive order authority, he would certainly support a study, and we’ll see where Congress moves on that issue.”

A White House official told ABC News on Thursday, President Biden still “supports a study of reparations and the continued impacts of slavery but he is very clear that we don’t need a study to advance racial equity.”

The official added, “he is taking comprehensive action to address the systemic racism that persists today, including an executive order on his first day in office establishing a whole-of-government approach to addressing racial inequality and making sure equity is a part of his entire policy agenda.”

Nkechi Taifa is director of the Reparation Education Project, and has been calling for reparations for moire than 50 years. In 1987, she was one of the founders of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), an organization that worked closely with Democratic Rep. John Conyers to draft the introduction of H.R. 40 in 1989. She says now is the time for Biden to sign an executive order so the commission can be up and running before the end of Biden’s presidency.

Taifa says she hopes the display at the ellipse sends a message that reparations advocates need to be paid attention to, and Black people should not be taken for granted.

She told ABC News, “If they think they’re gonna rest on Juneteenth because it’s a holiday and a watered down policing reform bill — that’s not enough. Black people have been run roughshod over, you know, for centuries, and it just, it just cannot continue.”

Joan Neal, deputy executive director and chief equity officer at NETWORK, a social justice advocacy group founded by U.S. religious sisters tells ABC News, that “Slavery was a sin, that was the original sin of this country, and we believe that unless you acknowledge your sin and you make a firm determination to never do it again, and then make restitution for what was lost. You still have not been forgiven.”

She added, “All parties have to be willing to stand up and face the sin in order for the sin to be forgiven and in order for things to be whole again.”

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(WASHINGTON) — In its third hearing Thursday, the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack outlined former President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against then-Vice President Mike Pence — and demonstrated just how close he came to danger in the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The committee detailed what it calls just one part in a “sophisticated seven-part plan” then-President Donald Trump and his allies to unlawfully overturn the 2020 election — with Thursday’s focus on Trump’s attempted coercion of Pence as a desperate last effort to accomplish their goal.

Members focused on a theory espoused by Trump’s White House attorney John Eastman — though they said Eastman never believed the theory was lawful himself — that Pence could unilaterally reject electors on Jan. 6 as Congress met to certify the 2020 election results, as well as the “relentless pressure campaign” against Pence by Trump in private and public — even as White House aides were telling Trump the scheme was illegal.

The committee argued, “that pressure campaign directly contributed to the attack on the Capitol” and put Pence’s life at serious risk, and one witness, a former federal judge and respected conservative, warned against the ongoing threat to democracy saying Trump allies are “executing a blueprint” to overturn 2024 election.

Here are some of the key arguments from the committee Thursday’s hearing:

40 FEET FROM THE MOB

The committee released never-before-seen photos of Pence on Jan. 6 showing the vice president and his family just steps from angry rioters who entered the Capitol to disrupt the electoral vote count.

“Vice President Pence and his team ultimately were led to a secure location where they stayed for the next 4 1/2 hours,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., who led the hearing.

“Approximately 40 feet, that’s all there was, 40 feet between the vice president and the mob,” he said.

Greg Jacob, the vice president’s lawyer who was with him that day, told the committee he could “hear the din of rioters in the building” but was not “aware that they were as close as that.”

In a photo reported by ABC News Wednesday night, Pence and his family are seen hiding from rioters in his ceremonial Senate office just steps from the Senate chamber. Second lady Karen Pence was captured closing the window curtains — presumably afraid rioters outside the building could see her and her family.

“When Mike pence made it clear that he wouldn’t give in to Donald Trump’s scheme, Donald Trump turned the mob on him,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said Thursday. “A mob that was chanting ‘hang Mike pence.’ A mob that had built a hanging gallows just outside the Capitol.”

PENCE REPEATEDLY TOLD TRUMP THE PLAN WAS ILLEGAL

The committee revealed evidence that Trump was repeatedly told that his demand for Pence to reject the certified slates of electors from key states won by Biden to block his victory was illegal — but that he and his allies continued to pressure Pence to do so on Jan. 6.

Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short told the panel that Pence had told Trump that “many times” and that he had been “very consistent.”

Short also told the committee in a videotaped interview that he believed Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, also understood that Pence lacked the power to overturn the election results.

“I believe that Mark did agree,” Short said. “I believe that’s what he told me. But as I mentioned, I think Mark told so many people so many different things that it was not something that I would necessarily accept as … resolved.”

Other figures around Trump — including White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and campaign adviser Jason Miller — told the committee that people around the president at the time believed the plan to stop the counting of Biden electors was “nuts” and “crazy.”

“You’re going to turn around and tell 78-plus million people in this country that your theory is this is how you’re going to invalidate their votes?” Herschmann said in videotaped testimony, recalling his conversation with Trump lawyer Eastman.

Herschmann said he told Eastman, “You’re going to cause riots in the streets.”

“They thought he was crazy,” Miller told the committee when asked what Trump’s lawyers thought of Eastman’s idea.

Jacob told the committee there was “no way” Pence had the authority to determine who would be the president of the United States, laying out how his team examined 230 years of history and found no such instance of this happening “since the beginning of the country.”

‘I REMEMBER THE WORD WIMP’

During Thursday’s hearing, the committee played a video of Trump aides recounting what they overheard in the Oval Office of Trump’s Jan. 6 phone call with Pence ahead of his rally on the National Mall — his last-ditch attempt to pressure Pence to block the electoral results.

The recollections confirmed contemporaneous reporting on the tenor of the heated phone call and of Trump’s anger with Pence.

“I remember the word ‘wimp,'” Trump aide Nick Luna testified to the committee. “Wimp is the word I remember.”

“The conversation was pretty heated,” Ivanka Trump told the committee in her interview. “It was a different tone than I’d heard him take with the vice president before.”

“It was something like … ‘you’re not tough enough to make that call,'” Pence national security adviser Keith Kellogg testified.

Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, Julie Radford, told the committee that the president’s eldest daughter told her Trump called Pence “the p-word.”

EASTMAN KNEW THE LEGAL EFFORT WOULD FAIL

In one exchange with the committee, Pence counsel Jacob said Eastman acknowledged “his theory [about Pence’s power] didn’t hold water,” in the words of Aguilar.

“We had an extended discussion an hour and a half to two hours on January 5 … When I pressed him on the play, I said, ‘John, if the vice president did what you’re asking him to do, he would lose nine to nothing in the Supreme Court.'”

“Initially, he started, ‘Well, I think he would lose only 7 to 2.’ After some further discussion, he acknowledged, ‘Well, yeah, you’re right, we would lose nine to zero,'” Jacob recalled Thursday.

Jacob also said he told Eastman his theory was “just wrong,” and that if the shoe was on the other foot, he would not want Al Gore or Vice President Kamala Harris to have the power to reject slates of electors.

Jacob said Eastman replied by saying “Absolutely — Al Gore did not have a basis to do it in 2000, Kamala Harris shouldn’t be able to do it in 2024, but I think you should do it today.”

EASTMAN ASKED FOR A PARDON

The committee revealed Thursday that Eastman was still pushing Pence’s team to delay the counting of electoral votes even after rioters had been cleared from the Capitol.

But days after the attack, he emailed Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani saying he would be interested in a pardon — which the committee has said could suggest he believed he may have acted illegally.

“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” Eastman said in his email.

Eastman also pleaded the Fifth 100 times in his interview with the committee, for which he appeared under subpoena after repeated delays.

ABC News’ Libby Cathey contributed to this report.

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