(WASHINGTON) — Herschel Walker, a Georgia football icon and U.S. Senate hopeful, has denied a report in the Daily Beast that an ex-girlfriend claimed he paid the cost of her abortion more than 10 years ago, a claim that would seem to contradict his anti-abortion posture on the campaign trail.

Walker, a Republican, immediately denied the claim and promised to file a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast, which published the story, on Tuesday morning. Walker later appeared on Fox News Channel’s Hannity, where he issued additional denials.

“I can tell you right now, I never asked anyone to get an abortion,” Walker told Sean Hannity. “I never paid for an abortion — it’s a lie.”

The Daily Beast reported Monday that an unidentified woman who claimed to be Walker’s ex-girlfriend said she sought a medical abortion after the couple conceived in 2009. The woman shared documentation with the news outlet: a receipt from an abortion clinic, a bank deposit receipt with an image of a $700 check that appeared to be signed by Walker sent within a week of the abortion and a “get well” card that appeared to be signed by Walker.

ABC News was not able to confirm the Daily Beast’s reporting.

Walker has carved out a staunch anti-abortion position as a candidate for U.S. Senate, aligning himself with a bill proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that would institute a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks.

Without explicitly citing the Daily Beast’s reporting, Walker’s adult son, Christian Walker, an outspoken conservative social media personality and podcast host, lambasted his father on Twitter.

“Every family member of Herschel Walker asked him not to run for office, because we all knew (some of) his past. Every single one,” Christian Walker wrote Monday. “He decided to give us the middle finger and air out all of his dirty laundry in public, while simultaneously lying about it. I’m done.”

The younger Walker also leveled additional allegations against his father, who has attracted scrutiny in recent months for allegations of violence in his past. In a book years ago, Herschel Walker has described himself as having been diagnosed with a dissociative identity disorder, or D.I.D. He has said that treatment healed him.

“I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us,” Christian Walker wrote Monday on Twitter. “You’re not a ‘family man.'”

Walker is currently locked in a heated and high-stakes battle for Georgia’s Senate seat with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, the outcome of which could tilt the balance of power in Washington come November.

When asked about the Daily Beast report late Monday, Warnock deferred to the “pundits [who will] decide how they think it will impact the race.”

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(UVALDE, Texas) — Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke rolled out an ad campaign Saturday featuring tearful endorsements from families of victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde.

One ad begins with parents looking straight to the camera, holding photos of their children and sharing what they hoped to do when they grew up: Lexi Rubio wanted to be a lawyer, Jackie Cazares hoped to become a veterinarian and Layla Salazar, a track star.

Another ad solely focuses on Maite Rodriguez, whose mother, Ana Rodriguez, stoically narrates the video.

“She wore green Converse with the heart drawn on the right toe. Those shoes ended up being one way to identify her body in that classroom. I never want another family to go through this. Greg Abbott has done nothing to stop the next shooting. No laws passed. Nothing to keep kids safe in school. So, I’m voting Beto for Maite,” Ana Rodriguez says in the video.

Beto for Texas’ director of communications, Chris Evans, told ABC News the ads are running in all major markets across the state of Texas indefinitely.

Uvalde families have continued to voice how unheard they feel by their representatives as they plead for gun control statewide and nationally. Parents have spoken publicly about wanting commonsense gun legislation, and their calls on Abbott to convene a special session have gone unanswered.

Nineteen students and two teachers died at the hands of a gunman on May 24. The police response to the shooting has come under intense scrutiny after it was revealed that officers did not breach the classroom containing the gunman for over an hour. The response also spurred a Texas House investigation that published a damning report in July outlining law enforcement’s failures.

The ad campaign began just one day after the first and only Texas gubernatorial debate between O’Rourke and incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, which notably featured many questions to both candidates on the topic of the shooting in Uvalde. The entire debate was less than an hour in duration, and the Uvalde-related discussion comprised more than 10 minutes of it.

Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas-Austin, told ABC News that according to his research and expertise, he does not see Uvalde heavily influencing the upcoming election.

“As horrific as that may sound, polling has consistently shown that in the wake of mass shootings, and even mass shootings as horrific as the one that occurred in Uvalde, that partisan voters tend to look to partisan interpretations of those events. And so, while we might expect to see large shifts in sentiment in the wake of these tragedies, we tend not to find them,” Blank said.

A Quinnipiac University poll last month found that the top three issues likely voters in Texas saw as most urgent were the Texas-Mexico border, at 38%, followed by abortion (17%) and inflation (11%). Gun policy garnered 8%, according to the poll, illustrating Blank’s point.

Blank also said partisan voters approach solutions to gun violence differently.

“I think the issue is that voters of different persuasions come to the issue of gun violence and gun safety with a different set of expectations about what would be effective in addressing the pandemic or the epidemic of gun violence,” Blank said.

One of the key issues of O’Rourke’s campaign platform is gun safety. He’s made it clear he believes significant policy reform is the answer, in forms such as “red flag” laws, universal background checks and a repeal of permitless carry. Abbott, conversely, says he “will continue to fight any federal government overreach that aims to disrupt the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding Texans,” according to his website. His stance has also been illustrated by his passage of open and campus carry across the state during his tenure as governor.

Even if many agree that gun violence is an issue Texas officials should do more to prevent, Blank said this “doesn’t mean that a majority of Texans think that the policy response that would be most effective necessarily has to do with stricter gun laws.”

In the Quinnipiac poll, likely voters were also asked, between Abbott and O’Rourke, who would do a better job handling gun policy; 53% said the sitting governor would do a better job, while 44% responded that O’Rourke would.

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(WASHINGTON) — Five members of the Oath Keepers facing charges of seditious conspiracy “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy,” a federal prosecutor said Monday in opening statements at the D.C. district court, kicking off the high-stakes first trial for members of the far-right militia group.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler told jurors the defendants, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, along with members Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson and Thomas Caldwell, “banded together to do whatever was necessary” to stop the transfer of power between Donald Trump and then-President-elect Joe Biden — and that they saw U.S. Congress certification of the electoral college as their perfect opportunity.

In addition to their alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, the Oath Keepers members conspired to stage “an arsenal of firearms,” including multiple semi-automatic rifles at a hotel just outside of Washington D.C. and multiple teams of so-called “Quick Reaction Forces,” with Caldwell even plotting for ways to potentially ferry weapons into the city by boat across the Potomac River in case they were called on, the prosecution alleged.

Nestler showed jurors multiple photo and video exhibits during his more than hour-long opening statement, including the now-infamous picture of members of the group climbing the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot in a military-style “stack” formation. He also showed video snippets of members of the Oath Keepers militia participating in training sessions with semi-automatic rifles.

All of the defendants, except Meggs, formerly served in the military before joining the Oath Keepers.

“These defendants use their training, knowledge and experience they gained in the United States Armed Forces to further their ability to succeed and plot to oppose by force the government of the United States,” Nestler said on Monday.

While Rhodes is not alleged to have participated in the breach of the Capitol, Nestler described him as the group’s ringleader in calling members to Washington and urging them to resist the transfer of power by force if necessary.

Nestler played audio of various public appeals Rhodes made to Trump directly, asking him to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he believed would help mobilize members of the group to take up arms and resist any efforts to remove Trump from office. He said Rhodes, a Yale-educated former lawyer, told the group “they needed to be careful with their words” and used coded language to shield their true aims of opposing by force the lawful transfer of presidential power, the prosecution alleged.

Even after the riot, as they learned law enforcement was seeking to arrest those involved in the attack on the Capitol, Rhodes attempted to pass a message directly to Trump assuring him it was not too late to take action, Nestler said.

“My only regret is that they should have brought rifles,” Rhodes said in recorded audio on Jan. 10. “We could have fixed it right then and there.”

Rhetoric used by the group’s members grew increasingly violent in the days leading up to Jan. 6, Nestler said, with Rhodes and others raising the prospect of civil war or “bloody war” erupting as the end of Trump’s time in power grew closer.

All of the defendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Defense attorneys for the five charged Oath Keepers are expected to argue their clients did nothing illegal in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, while claiming the government’s decision to charge them with the rarely-used seditious conspiracy statute is an effort to target members of the militia group over their political beliefs.

“The real evidence is going to show our clients were there to do security on [January] 5th and 6th,” Stewart Rhodes’ attorney Phillip Linder said during his opening statement Monday. “The type of security they’ve done for 13 years throughout their history.”

Linder said Rhodes would testify during the trial. He described Rhodes as “extremely patriotic” and claimed the Justice Department’s presenting of his recorded statements about opposing the transfer of power were merely an attempt to “alarm and anger” the jury.

“You take a handful of texts and you take a handful of things you don’t understand, take some things that look bad and put them together then you come to a conclusion or an incorrect mischaracterization,” Linder said on Monday. “We want to bring you the full picture.”

The trial is expected to last upward of a month, lawyers have estimated, with a second set of defendants from the Oath Keepers militia charged in the conspiracy slated to stand trial in late November.

Nestler said the five Oath Keepers did have other reasons for being in Washington on Jan. 6 other than the storming of the Capitol, such as providing security for VIPs and attending Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse that preceded the riot.

But, Nestler said, all of them “also agreed to do whatever was necessary, including using force to make sure that presidential power was not transferred,” and that included driving to D.C. so they were able to bring their “weapons of war” close to the nation’s Capital.

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