Jason Aldean kicks off his Rock N’ Roll Cowboy Tour tonight in Scranton, Pennsylvania, beginning an extensive string of dates that will give him a chance to introduce fans to the live version of his latest double album, Macon, Georgia.
That project — his 10th — is named after the singer’s hometown Macon, which Jason says had a massive impact on his eventual career as a country star.
“It all started there,” he recounts. “…That’s where I learned to play guitar and where I learned to sing and where I played bars for the first time.”
At the time, Jason wasn’t even old enough to drink, but he fell in with a group of older musicians who taught him everything he knows about jam sessions and playing late nights in bars on small stages.
“When I was a 15, 16 year old kid, guys — you know, other musicians in that town — kinda took me under their wing and would take me to these after-hours bars and have jam sessions,” he recounts. “When I had to be at school the next day. So I was getting home at three in the morning.”
Jason may have lost a little sleep, but he learned important lessons about his chosen career path during those long nights out.
“It was just kind of where I learned to be a musician. It’s just where it all started for me,” he says, explaining that it felt only fitting to mark that early memory in the title of his landmark 10th album. “It was me kind of paying tribute to where it all started from.”
Jason just released his latest country radio single, “That’s What Tequila Does.” The song comes off the Macon half of his double album.
The 14-track collection features the lead single “If This Is Goodbye,” which recently broke into the top 20 of Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary chart.
“‘If This Is Goodbye’ was one of the first songs I heard as a possibility to be on the album, and immediately I knew that this definitely should be a contender,” founding Chicago trumpet player Lee Loughnane tells ABC Audio. “And I think 15, 20, maybe even 30 songs came in, [but when I heard that one, I thought,] ‘Yeah, this has got…some legs on it.’ And turns out it does.”
The song is a showcase for Chicago singer Neil Donell, who joined the group in 2018.
“He is the latest tenor voice in the band. And he sings as well or better than [former member Peter] Cetera ever did…and Cetera was at the top of his game when he ended up leaving us,” Loughnane maintains. “So…it’s really good to have him in, and he’s enjoying it, we’re enjoying having him…The band is smokin’ right now.”
Lougnane says recording Born for This Moment was challenging, since most of the project was done remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We couldn’t even get into the same rooms together to speak with each other,” notes Lee. “[W]e missed being able to have that camaraderie, but I think it came out pretty good, despite not seeing each other all that much.”
Loughnane reveals that the entire band did record one song on the album together, a tune he co-wrote called “If This Isn’t Love.”
“We were on tour and I had us set up before the show,” Lee explains, “and we ran the song down…three or four times.”
(WASHINGTON) — Jury selection is set to begin Monday in the trial of former President Donald Trump’s ally Steve Bannon over his defiance of a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Bannon, who previously served as Trump’s White House chief strategist but departed in August of 2017, was first subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for records and testimony in September of last year. The committee told Bannon at the time it had “reason to believe that you have information relevant to understanding activities that led to and informed the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Last week, the committee revealed that it had obtained records showing Bannon twice spoke with Trump over the phone on the day before Capitol attack, with one call taking place before Bannon made comments on his podcast predicting “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
At the time of the Capitol riot, Bannon was already facing federal charges related to an alleged conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering over his involvement in a crowdfunding effort to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, to which he had pleaded not guilty. Trump pardoned Bannon on his final night in office, but declined to pardon two other men Bannon was initially charged with, both of whom recently pleaded guilty. A judge declared a mistrial in the case of another defendant after one juror refused to join in deliberations. The Justice Department has said it will seek to retry that case.
The Justice Department indicted Bannon last November on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress, roughly 20 days after the full House of Representatives voted to hold him in contempt over his defiance of the Jan. 6 subpoena.
Bannon’s attorneys have repeatedly claimed that Trump had invoked executive privilege over Bannon’s testimony, which prevented him from cooperating — despite Trump’s status as a former president and the fact that Bannon was not a White House adviser at the time of their alleged communications about Jan. 6.
But the Justice Department revealed last week that in a recent interview with federal investigators, former President Trump’s current lawyer, Justin Clark, said that at no point did Trump actually invoke executive privilege over Bannon’s testimony.
Clark also told investigators that he had made clear to Bannon’s attorney Robert Costello, prior to Bannon’s indictment, that Trump was not instructing Bannon to refuse cooperation with the committee altogether.
As his trial date was nearing, Bannon signaled to the committee last week that he was prepared to testify before the committee in a “public hearing,” and provided a letter from Trump in which Trump claimed to have previously invoked executive privilege and said he would now waive it. However, members of the committee have said they won’t consider Bannon’s offer to testify until he first complies with their subpoena’s demand for documents.
Prosecutors questioned the timing of Bannon’s last-minute offer and suggested in a filing that his efforts in conjunction with Trump to offer to finally testify before the committee were no more than a stunt to try and make him more a sympathetic figure to the jury.
“[Bannon’s] continued failure to comply with the subpoena’s document demand while claiming he now will testify suggests his actions are little more than an attempt to change the optics of his contempt on the eve of trial, not an actual effort at compliance,” investigators said in the filing. “[Bannon’s] timing suggests that the only thing that has really changed since he refused to comply with the subpoena in October 2021 is that he is finally about to face the consequences of his decision to default.”
Ahead of the trial, Bannon unloaded on the committee during an episode of his “War Room” podcast last week, vowing to go “medieval on these people.”
“Pray for our enemies, OK? Because we’re going medieval on these people. We’re going to savage our enemies,” Bannon said. “So pray for them. Who needs prayers? Not MAGA, not War Room, and certainly not Stephen K Bannon.”
It’s unclear whether Bannon’s actions leading up to Jan. 6 will factor into his trial, as prosecutors focus on proving their relatively narrow case involving his defiance of the committee’s subpoena.
In a pretrial hearing last week, the judge overseeing Bannon’s case, Carl Nichols, entered a series of rulings that will significantly limit the lines of defense Bannon’s attorneys will be able to present to the jury.
Nichols said Bannon won’t be able to claim he defied the subpoena because Trump asserted executive privilege over his testimony, nor can Bannon claim he relied on the advice of his lawyer, or that he was “tricked” into believing he could ignore the subpoena due to internal DOJ opinions from previous administrations about executive branch officials’ immunity from complying with congressional subpoenas.
Nichols also rejected Bannon’s defense that prosecutors would need to show that he knew his conduct was unlawful, saying that prosecutors only need to prove that Bannon acted “deliberately” and “intentionally” to defy the Jan. 6 panel.
Bannon’s attorney, David Schoen, questioned the judge’s rulings, asking the judge at one point, “What’s the point in going to trial here if there are no defenses?”
In a separate hearing on Thursday, Nichols left open the possibility that Bannon’s recent offer to testify before the committee could be presented at trial, noting that it could be relevant to a line of defense regarding whether Bannon believed the deadline for his compliance with the subpoena was flexible. But Nichols also publicly questioned the strength of putting forward such a defense.
Bannon’s attorneys are likely to fight vigorously to ensure that nobody seated on the jury has leanings that would make them critical or even aware of Bannon’s political activities.
Bannon’s attorneys have argued that widespread negative media coverage of Bannon, including the mention of him at last week’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, will effectively taint any jury pool — though assistant U.S. attorney Molly Gaston expressed confidence last week that they could seat a full jury that would potentially have no idea who Bannon is.
If convicted, Bannon would face a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison plus fines — though such sentences are rare and Bannon would likely appeal any conviction.
Prior to Bannon, the last time a criminal contempt case was brought by the Justice Department was in 1983 during the Reagan administration, against an EPA official who was eventually found not guilty by a jury at trial.
Last month, the Justice Department indicted former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro on two counts of contempt of Congress, over his similar defiance of a subpoena from the Jan.6. committee. Navarro has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial in November.
The same day Navarro was taken into custody, the DOJ informed the Jan. 6 committee it was declining to prosecute former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former top Trump adviser Dan Scavino, both of whom had provided some cooperation with the committee but were held in contempt by the full House over their refusal to testify.
In a post to her Instagram story showing the star in bed, and sporting a brand-new wedding ring, Jennifer Lopez has announced she and Ben Affleck tied the knot in Las Vegas.
Pointing to the full story on her official website, OnTheJLo, Lopez posted a lengthy statement that began with, “We did it. Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.”
The singer and actress said she and the two-time Oscar winner got “Exactly what we wanted,” a wedding ceremony at Sin City’s famous Little White Wedding Chapel.
“Last night we flew to Vegas, stood in line for a license with four other couples, all making the same journey to the wedding capital of the world,” Lopez recounted. “…all of us wanting the same thing,” she said of her fellow lovebirds, “…for the world to recognize us as partners and to declare our love to the world through the ancient and nearly universal symbol of marriage.”
J. Lo admitted “We barely made it to the little white wedding chapel by midnight. They graciously stayed open late a few minutes, let us take pictures in a pink Cadillac convertible, evidently once used by the king himself (but if we wanted Elvis himself to show, that cost extra and he was in bed).”
Lopez explained she changed in a waiting room, and Affleck changed in the men’s room.
“So with the best witnesses you could ever imagine, a dress from an old movie and a jacket from Ben’s closet, we read our own vows in the little chapel and gave one another the rings we’ll wear for the rest of our lives.”
“[I]n the end it was the best possible wedding we could have imagined,” Lopez says. “One we dreamed of long ago and one made real (in the eyes of the state, Las Vegas, a pink convertible and one another) at very, very long last.”
“They were right when they said, ‘all you need is love,’ Lopez also added, signing the message, “Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck.”
Of course, Ben and Jen were supposed to be married in 2003, but postponed their nuptials and ultimately went their separate ways. Affleck went on to marry Jennifer Garner in 2005; they divorced in 2018. Lopez married her third husband, singer Marc Anthony,in 2004, but they divorced in 2014.
In April of this year, following J Lo’s breakup with fiancé Alex Rodriguez, she and Affleck rekindled their relationship.
(UVALDE, Texas) — The loved ones of those killed in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are reacting with anger and disappointment Sunday after a committee of state lawmakers investigating the massacre released a 77-page report that said law enforcement officers who responded to the rampage “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”
The public release of the report came as the joint committee of the Texas Legislature met Sunday afternoon with the families of the victims and just days after security video footage from inside Robb Elementary School showing the delayed police response to the attack was leaked and obtained by two Texas news outlets.
The committee’s report laid out in detail the lapses in preparation, training and judgment in connection with the police response to one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
“It’s a joke. Texas failed the students. Law enforcement failed the students. Our government failed the students. What else do you want me to say? The truth is out there. Everybody saw the truth,” Vincent Salazar, whose 11-year-old granddaughter, Layla Salazar, was killed in the attack, told ABC News.
Salazar said he wasn’t going to attend the meeting with the committee at Uvalde Junior College and was only there to pick up a copy of the report to take home and read through it thoroughly.
He said he believes the killer should have never made it into the school, let alone been allowed nearly 77 minutes to kill as numerous state, federal and local law enforcement officers waited in the hallway outside the classrooms where the shooter was holed up.
“If I were these officers, I would leave town,” Salazar said. “They don’t deserve to be here.”
Sergio Garcia, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Sergio Garcia, was also killed in the mass shooting, agreed.
“I get paid at my job to do my job. If I didn’t do my job, I wouldn’t be working,” Garcia said told reporters Sunday. “Now, they took an oath, had a badge, they had unlimited resources and they need to pay for what they did not do.”
Garcia said he was “mad at everybody” who appeared to do nothing to save the 19 children and two teachers from being killed.
“In certain schools, they have police, sheriffs in the front. Why don’t they protect our kids like they protect money in a vault at a bank?” Garcia said. “Our kids are more valuable than that money. This is not the first time a school has been shot up and kids have lost their lives. This need to be the last time this happens. It shouldn’t happen anymore. Nobody should ever go through this.”
The report paints the most complete portrait to date of the massacre, which was described a series of “shortcomings and failures of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and of various agencies and officers of law enforcement.”
But committee members said they do not know whether a faster or more competent response could have saved lives in the face of a heavily armed gunman who appeared bent on killing everybody in his sight with a high-powered assault rifle.
In addition to making its report public, the committee released video that captured the police response inside the schools.
The official release of the video comes after footage from inside the school as the attack was unfolding was leaked and obtained by Austin ABC affiliate KVUE and the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.
KVUE released a statement, saying, it and the Austin-Statesman elected to publish that footage “to provide transparency to the community, showing what happened as officials waited to enter that classroom.”
KVUE and the American-Statesman both published an edited portion of the never-before-seen footage on Tuesday, ahead of Sunday’s planned release of the video by state lawmakers. The outlets also published the unedited 77-minute version footage online.
Uvalde:365 is a continuing ABC News series reported from Uvalde and focused on the Texas community and how it forges on in the shadow of tragedy.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who expressed anger over the video being leaked and aired before the families first had a chance to review it.
Following Sunday’s meeting, committee members are expected to hold a news conference and make the video public along with its report on the shooting.
Rep. Dustin Burrows, the committee chairman, said the committee had planned to give the families the opportunity to see the video in private before it was released to the public and expressed disappointment that the two media outlets preempted those plans.
The leak of the video infuriated some of the victim’s family members. Some saw it as the latest source of frustration with the investigation that has included inaccurate information from investigators and elected leaders, including an initial statement from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that the school’s police immediately engaged the gunman before he got into the school. Abbott later said he was “misled” about the circumstances of the shooting.
“They weren’t supposed to do it without our consent,” Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter, Jackie, was killed in the attack, told ABC News after the video was leaked.
Several of the families were meeting with lawmakers in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, when the video was aired on television and online. Despite the family members and some elected leaders, including Abbott, repeatedly calling for the video’s release, the local district attorney denied the requests.
“We’ve been asking the DA for this video for a while and she refused to let us see it,” Nikki Cross, the aunt of 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, who was killed in the rampage, told ABC News. “So once again, the world got to see it before us. Just like the day of the shooting when Gov. Abbott announced to you all that our children are dead and we have no idea. It’s like reliving that day all over again.”
Christina Mitchell Busbee — the 38th Judicial District Attorney, whose jurisdiction includes Uvalde County — defended her now overridden decision not to release the video in an interview over the weekend with the Uvalde Leader-News, saying the move threatens to jeopardize the investigation, which she said is ongoing and could lead to possible criminal charges if anyone is found to have aided the suspect in planning the attack.
“My goal is to secure justice for the victims, their families, and the citizens of the 38th Judicial District,” Busbee told the newspaper. “This goal cannot be accomplished unless there is a thorough investigation buttressed by fairness, integrity and impartiality free from political and media pressures.”
Burrows said the committee’s release of the video and report are intended to provide transparency to the families of those killed despite guidance from the local district attorney that the footage remain under wraps.
The video published by the news outlets and now released by the committee, including police body-camera video and footage from a surveillance camera mounted in a hallway of the school, shows dozens of law enforcement officers waiting in the hallway outside the adjoined classrooms where the gunman was committing the mass shooting. The officers — including some with protective shields, wearing tactical armor and armed with high-powered rifles — didn’t breach the classroom for more than 70 minutes, even as additional volleys of gunfire could be heard on the video from the classrooms 45 minutes after police arrived on the scene, the footage released by the news organizations shows.
The video began by showing the 18-year-old suspect, wearing tactical gear and wielding a high-powered AR-15 style weapon, entering the school unabated at 11:33 a.m. on May 24 and walking down the hallway to the classrooms. A barrage of gunfire could be heard on the footage soon after the gunman entered the school.
Three minutes after the killer entered the school, three police officers, wearing bullet-proof vests and guns drawn, are seen running down the hallway toward the classrooms where the gunman was holed up, while at least four other officers entered the school and took cover, the video shows. Moments later, the three officers who charged down the hallway are seen in the video retreating after coming under fire.
Police eventually breached the classroom and killed the gunman 77 minutes after he entered the school, authorities said.
Gian Marco Benedetto/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(LONDON) — As Western Europe experiences a record-breaking heat wave, thousands of firefighters are having trouble containing forest fires in France, Spain and Portugal that have destroyed thousands of acres of land.
The fires have forced thousands of people to evacuate to safety, as extreme heat grips the region. There have also been more than 1,000 heat-related deaths in Spain and Portugal so far in July, according to the respective countries’ ministries of health.
In southern France, more than 14,000 people were forced to flee as fires spread to more than 27,180 acres of land. The country’s Interior Ministry also issued red alerts for heat waves for 15 French departments and orange alerts for 51 departments on Sunday.
Monday could be the hottest day on record in the country, according to France’s BFM TV. Belis, France, reached a high of 40.8 degrees Celsius — 105.44 Fahrenheit — on Sunday.
The number of people who died of heat-related deaths is unknown, but France’s Ministry of Health told ABC News that information on the number of casualties will be released at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, more than 360 people in Spain have died from heat-related deaths between July 10 and 17, with 84 people dying in the last 24 hours, the country’s Ministry of Health reported.
Firefighters there are fighting 30 active fires, mostly in Castilla y Leon, Galicia and Andalusia, Interior Ministry and Catalan Authorities said.
Temperatures on Sunday were forecast to reach 42 C (107.6 F) in three provinces in the country, prompting the state meteorological agency to issue “extreme risk” alerts.
In Mijas, Spain, in the municipality of Malaga, 3,000 people have fled due to fires. More than 22,000 acres of land are at risk of being burned in the Mijas province as firefighters struggle to contain the flames.
Wildfires are happening earlier in the season, ending later and becoming more frequent because of climate change, the European Union said in a report last year.
“Climate change is aggravating the situation, making countries more prone to wildfires and increasing the intensity of such events,” the report said.
In Portugal, wildfires are quickly spreading throughout the country’s central and northern regions. According to Portugal’s Ministry of Health, between July 7 and 13, 238 people had heat-related deaths, and there were more than 421 heat-related fatalities between July 14 and 17.
The sweltering heat is also expected to take hold of other parts of Europe in the coming days. Areas of England are expected to hit 40 C (104 F) on Monday and Tuesday.
The U.K. government issued a national emergency and warned people not to leave their homes unless necessary, according to The Associated Press.
“This year, for the first time, we’ve issued a severe weather emergency response in summer,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said.
(WASHINGTON) — Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday castigated Sen. Joe Manchin after the West Virginia Democrat said he wouldn’t support legislation focused on climate change and tax changes, citing his concerns over high inflation.
Manchin is “intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want. Nothing new about this,” Sanders, I-Vt., told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “And the problem was that we continue to talk to Manchin like he was serious. He was not.”
“When Manchin sabotages climate change, this is the future generations what’s going on right now,” Sanders said. “In the West, all over the world, we’re looking at significantly increased — more and more heat waves. You’d have to look at more flooding. This is an existential threat to humanity.”
The rebuke comes after Manchin told fellow Democrats that he wouldn’t vote — at least not right away — for a party-line proposal to address climate change that some lawmakers had been hopeful to pass with their fragile congressional majority.
Instead, Manchin said, he would back a bill that focused solely on health care measures like prescription drug prices.
Since retaking Congress in 2020, Democrats have been trying to pass major legislation on a slate of social issues to make good on President Joe Biden’s campaign promises and give themselves a boost before the November midterms. But Manchin — and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema — have repeatedly broken with the rest of the caucus because of political objections, largely derailing those efforts in the 50-50 Senate.
On “This Week,” Sanders vented that the latest development echoed negotiations last year when Manchin also walked away from a broader social spending bill.
“Same nonsense that Manchin has been talking about for a year,” Sanders told Raddatz when asked about Manchin’s worries over inflation, which hit an annual pace of 9.1 percent last month, a 40-year high. “In my humble opinion, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families of West Virginia or America.”
In a statement last week, Manchin said he was thinking of everyday costs in opposing the climate and tax proposal.
“Items like chicken, eggs and lunchmeat have increased to new highs, while energy costs rose more than 40% in June with those that can least afford it suffering the most. It is past time we put our country first and end this inflation crisis,” he said.
During his appearance Sunday, Sanders also lamented Biden’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia, saying the president shouldn’t have gone because of Riyadh’s human rights record, including the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and U.S. permanent resident.
U.S. intelligence has assessed that Khashoggi’s killing was approved by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, which Saudi Arabia vehemently denies.
“Should Biden have gone?” Raddatz asked.
“You have a leader of a country who was involved in the murder of a Washington Post journalist. I don’t think that type of government should be rewarded with a visit by the president of the United States,” Sanders said. (The White House says Biden immediately raised Khashoggi’s killing when he met with bin Salman last week.)
“If this country believes in anything, we believe in human rights, we believe in democracy,” Sanders said. “And I just don’t believe that we should be maintaining a warm relationship with a dictatorship like that.”
Raddatz pressed Sanders on whether Biden’s discussions with bin Salman made sense in light of high gas prices, but Sanders argued that action around what he called corporate greed could make a bigger difference at the pump.
“At the heart of the discussions was oil, and President Biden said the Saudis would take action in the coming weeks. Could that make a difference, and doesn’t that explain why he went? What would you have done?” Raddatz asked.
“One of the things we’ve got to look at is the fact that while Americans are paying $4.50, $4.80 for a gallon of gas, the oil company profits in the last quarter have been extraordinarily high,” he said. “And I happen to believe that we’ve got to tell the oil companies to stop ripping off the American people. And if they don’t, we should impose a windfall profits tax on them.”
(LAS VEGAS, N.M.) — Four people aboard a sheriff’s department helicopter have died following a crash Saturday night near Las Vegas, New Mexico, according to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department.
Three members of the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office and one member of the Bernalillo County Fire Department were in the helicopter known as Metro 2 at the time of the crash, officials said.
The first responders were on their way back to Albuquerque after assisting fire crews with the East Mesa Fire, according to the sheriff’s department.
New Mexico State Police said they had arrived at the scene, which is about 120 miles northeast of Albuquerque. Both the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board were expected to investigate the crash, the state police said.
“At this time the investigation into this incident is in its preliminary stages. As we learn further details, we will provide them through official press releases like this one,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “Please keep these individuals and their families in your thoughts and prayers tonight.”
(WASHINGTON) — Ahead of Thursday’s hearing by the House’s Jan. 6 committee, investigators anticipate receiving more information from the Secret Service “to get the full picture” of what occurred before and during the Capitol insurrection last year, including as it related to text messages agents sent in that period of time, Rep. Zoe Lofgren said Sunday.
“We expect to get them by this Tuesday,” Lofgren, a California Democrat and member of the House committee, told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. Lofgren was referring to “pertinent texts” the agency said they had in the wake of a complaint last week from an internal watchdog that the Secret Service had deleted texts from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, after the watchdog sought those records.
“We need all of the texts from the fifth and sixth of January. I was shocked to hear that they didn’t back up their data before they reset their iPhones. That’s crazy, and I don’t know why that would be,” Lofgren told Raddatz, “but we need to get this information to get the full picture.”
In a previous statement, the Secret Service — which was subpoenaed by the committee on Friday — said any “insinuation” that they intentionally deleted texts was false and that the committee had their “full and unwavering cooperation.”
On “This Week,” Raddatz asked Lofgren about what evidence the public could expect at Thursday’s hearing, which the committee has said will detail the Trump White House’s reaction to the unfolding riot.
“I’m going to let the hearings speak for itself, but we hope to go through minute by minute what happened, what didn’t happen on that day and people can make their own judgment,” Lofgren said.
She said the hearing would not touch on the allegation of witness tampering that Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice-chair, raised during the last hearing — saying that Trump had attempted to contact an unnamed witness who hasn’t appeared publicly. (Trump’s spokesman called Cheney a liar.)
Raddatz noted that while some in the public have been influenced by the committee’s evidence during the hearings, “a recent Monmouth poll [from late June] found less than a quarter of Americans are paying attention and 90% of those say the hearings have not changed their minds.”
“I think some people have heard us. More than 55 million people have watched some part of the committee proceedings,” Lofgren said.
Meanwhile, she said, “This investigation is very much ongoing. The fact that series of hearings is going to be concluded this Thursday doesn’t mean that our investigation is over. It’s very active, new witnesses are coming forward, additional information is coming forward.”
The committee is also weighing seeking interviews with Trump and Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, as was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
“Everything is on the table,” Lofgren said — including a possible criminal referral, which committee members have repeatedly said they are considering but which amounts to a symbolic gesture rather than a legal directive. The decision is ultimately up to prosecutors.
As for the Department of Justice’s cases related to Jan. 6, Lofgren said she believed the wrongdoing went beyond the false electors scheme the committee had detailed — evidence the committee said the DOJ has now requested.
“I do think that there’s a much broader plot here. I think that’s pretty obvious,” Lofgren said. “I would not want to tell the attorney general how to conduct his investigations. But I will say this, they have subpoena power and they have a lot easier way to enforce their subpoenas than the Congress does.”
(UVALDE, Texas) — Lawmakers in Texas on Sunday unveiled the first detailed investigative report into the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, laying out the lapses in preparation, training and judgment in connection with one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
Their report, which painted the most complete portrait to date of the massacre, described a series of “shortcomings and failures of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and of various agencies and officers of law enforcement.”
Members of a special committee of the Texas state legislature met Sunday with family members of the victims to present their findings and field questions from a community still seeking answers nearly two months after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.
Family members of the victims say the anguish of losing their loved ones has been compounded by a failure on the part of state and local leaders to articulate what took police officers nearly 77 minutes to confront and kill the 18-year-old gunman.
Senior law enforcement and elected officials have repeatedly shared misleading or contradictory information about the police response, testing the community’s faith in leadership. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he had been “misled” by authorities after conveying inaccurate information to the public days after the shooting — a blunder that he said left him “livid.”
In those first hours, officials painted a picture of heroism and fast action by police — but in the days and weeks since, that portrait has been turned on its head.
“There are people who deserve answers the most, and those are the families whose lives have been destroyed,” Abbott said. “They need answers that are accurate, and it is inexcusable that they may have suffered from any inaccurate information whatsoever.”
Last month, at a hearing before a state Senate panel, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw called the police response an “abject failure” and claimed that enough officers and equipment arrived on the scene within three minutes to “neutralize” the shooter.
Surveillance video of the shooting obtained and published last week by ABC affiliate KVUE and the Austin-American Statesman showed dozens of officers congregating outside the adjoined classrooms where the gunman had fired indiscriminately on students and teachers.
Lawmakers had planned to release the surveillance video on Sunday after meeting with the families, but were preempted earlier this week when media outlets broadcast the footage — enraging some family members of the victims, who said they felt blindsided by how things were handled.
During his testimony last month, McCraw reserved his harshest criticism for Uvalde ISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who he accused of “[deciding] to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.” Arredondo, who has not responded to multiple interview requests from ABC News, told the Texas Tribune last month that he did not know he was the on-scene commander during the shooting.
ABC News’ Alexandra Dukakis contributed to this report.
