Politics

By Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Gun safety advocates are pushing U.S. President Joe Biden to take stronger measures on his own to curb gun violence after the Texas elementary school shooting, but the White House is putting responsibility on Congress to pass laws that would have more impact.

The White House has spoken with gun safety groups since Tuesday’s rampage in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed – the deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade – activists said.

The groups are urging Biden to make an emergency declaration on gun violence, name a gun violence czar, advocate lifting the Senate filibuster if necessary and issue an executive order on background checks for firearms purchases if lawmakers do not pass legislation tightening loopholes in current law.

For the moment, the Biden administration is pressing Congress to pass tighter gun laws that can have more lasting impact than executive action. The White House has been in touch with top Democrats in Congress regarding next steps on firearms laws.

Bills backed by Democrats requiring background checks, banning semi-automatic rifles and strengthening gun safety measures have failed for a decade in Congress in the face of stalwart Republican opposition and objections from some moderate Democrats and independents. Gun-rights advocates believe in a broad interpretation of U.S. constitutional protections for keeping and bearing arms.

Democrats in Congress said Wednesday they would try again on legislation.

“The plan is to work hard at a compromise for the next 10 days,” said Senator Chris Murphy. “Hopefully, we succeed and the Senate can vote on a bipartisan bill that saves lives.”

After the Texas gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, 18, used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle to kill students and teachers before being killed, many gun safety activists demanded more urgency from the White House.

“President Biden is not doing enough,” David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, high school massacre, said on Wednesday.

The White House has said it was looking at every tool at its disposal to stop gun violence, including executive action, but stressed that Biden needed help from the legislature.

“It is time for Congress to act,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who was grilled by reporters about what the administration was doing on the issue. “The president cannot do this alone.”

PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY

Since taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration has taken several steps without Congress. They include requiring that “ghost guns,” which are often assembled from kits, be regulated the same way as traditional firearms, and launching a strike force aimed at cracking down on illegal firearms trafficking in major cities, including New York and Los Angeles.

Gun safety advocates say there is more the president can do alone.

“He should declare gun violence a public health emergency,” said Kris Brown, president of Brady, a gun violence protection group. “We need to tackle this in a way that prevents the violence from happening in the first place and not walk away from it because it’s a public health emergency that happens to involve guns.”

A national emergency declaration gives the president additional statutory powers to address a crisis. The White House says Biden has already called it an emergency and a legal invocation would not lead to the authorities needed to address gun violence.

Brown said if the Senate did not pass gun safety measures under consideration, Democrats should lift the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-member body to approve legislation. Biden, a former U.S. senator, has been largely reluctant to advocate such a change to pass his policy agenda.

Po Murray, who chairs the grassroots group Newtown Action Alliance, said the White House needs an office of gun violence prevention. “We appreciate that (domestic policy council director) Susan Rice is tasked with addressing this issue, but we believe we need somebody that could spend 100% of his or her time doing this work,” Murray said.

“Since we elected a gun safety president, he could certainly do more,” she said.

Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, a gun violence protection group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said the White House should write an executive order on background checks if a bill does not pass.

It could be used to mandate that anyone who sells as few as two guns per year would need to become a federal firearms licensee and conduct background checks, he said.

“The administration needs to make gun violence protection a governing – not just a political – priority,” Ambler said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal; additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Joey Roulette; editing by Heather Timmons, Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman)

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OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Voters in an Oregon county where a ballot-printing error has delayed primary results for nearly two weeks have elected the same county clerk five times in the past 20 years despite missteps that impacted two previous elections and cost taxpayers at least $100,000.

Opponents have repeatedly tried to unseat Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall, who was first elected in 2002, following elections errors in 2004, 2010 and 2011 and a state vote-tampering investigation in 2012. Hall makes $112,600 a year in the nonpartisan position overseeing elections, recording property transactions, keeping public records and issuing marriage licenses. She is running for a sixth four-year term in November in the suburban county south of Portland.

The latest scandal in Oregon comes against the backdrop of a polarized political landscape in which vote counts are increasingly scrutinized. Races for local elections clerks — who until recently toiled in obscurity and relative anonymity — are getting new attention, particularly from right-wing voters who deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Local elections chiefs are the first line of defense for elections integrity, but most voters don’t know who their county clerk is, or even what they do, and are likely to skip over the nonpartisan race on Election Day, or simply pick the incumbent. Some county clerks are appointed, but in many counties in Oregon and elsewhere they are beholden to the whims of voters who may not be paying attention, said Christopher McKnight Nichols, an associate professor of history at Oregon State University.

There’s a “myopia and invisibility about this sort of office in American public life,” he said.

The situation in Oregon’s third-largest county underscores the importance of such contests.

In the current election, tens of thousands of ballots sent out with blurry barcodes were rejected by a vote-counting machine. The issue affected Democratic and nonpartisan ballots more than Republican ones, state officials have said. The fiasco forced the county to shift nearly 200 county employees to vote tabulation duties; county officials don’t yet know the full cost of the cleanup job.

For days, workers have been transferring each voter’s intent from spoiled ballots to fresh ones, by hand using purple markers, in a painstaking process that might not be complete for more than two more weeks. More than 81,000 ballots out of more than 116,000 had been counted by early Friday, and nearly 35,000 spoiled ballots remained to be duplicated, according to county tallies.

“This affects all of us. This is voter integrity,” said Janet Bailey, a Republican voter who protested outside the Clackamas County election offices Thursday with about a dozen others. “We, in Oregon, a week ago we had our primary, and we still don’t know the results.”

Hall knew of the problem with the ballots on May 3, but did not take significant action until after the election on May 17, when it became clear the vote tally was substantially delayed. The Oregon Secretary of State has said Hall refused offers of help from the state; at least one Democratic state lawmaker has demanded a legislative inquiry into the ballot blunder.

Meanwhile, the results of several contests, including the much-watched Democratic primary for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, remain undecided. And some voters are seizing on the county’s problems to demand an end to Oregon’s trailblazing vote-by-mail system and the use of electronic machinery to count votes.

“Our votes have to count,” said Cindy Hise, a Clackamas County voter who wants the entire primary redone. “This has been going on for days. We’re past all hope of it being a true vote.”

Hall declined a phone or in-person interview with The Associated Press for this story but said in response to emailed questions Thursday that she would cooperate with any investigation. She said she has no comment on calls from some for her resignation.

She also addressed numerous 2020 contributions she made to national Republican causes, saying in a brief email that she “maintains neutrality.” The donations to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and to WINRED, a Republican Party fundraising platform, were all $100 or less.

“I have the right as a private citizen to exercise free speech and association. I do give small contributions to a large number of organizations,” she wrote. “I do not accept endorsements of any kind.”

Controversy isn’t new to Hall, who has overseen the county’s elections since she took office in 2003.

— In 2004, the county excluded three annexation questions on ballots mailed to 300 voters and didn’t alert the public for 10 days.

— In 2010, a county commission race was listed on the primary ballot when it should not have been. The ballots were reprinted at a cost of more than $100,000. Hall later filed a complaint with state elections officials saying the episode, including press “leaks” and public criticisms of her by county officials, cost her primary votes and forced her into a November runoff.

— In 2012, an elections worker was caught tampering with two ballots and was sentenced to 90 days in jail.

— In 2018, Hall placed her name and the county clerk title on the ballot return envelopes and on voter information pamphlets while also seeking reelection to the post, a decision critics called egregious self-promotion in a tight race.

Hall said in her email that all the elections incidents “did happen under my watch” and that she or those in her office “took appropriate steps as needed.”

Pamela White, who challenged Hall in 2018 and lost by fewer than 6,000 votes, said even with such missteps it seemed impossible to defeat Hall. In that election, more than 52,000 voters skipped the county clerk race altogether despite persistent criticisms of Hall’s elections oversight and White’s endorsement by Hall’s recently retired elections manager.

White spent $100,000 on the race, including $25,000 of her own money, and campaigned for two years, she said.

“I worked very hard,” she said. “I knew what I was doing, but that down-ballot thing is an issue even in your own party. It just takes all the air out of the room.”

Steve Kindred, the former elections manager who endorsed White, said his relationship with Hall soured after a 2014 incident in which she asked him to do work on her reelection campaign during office hours without telling him what it was for. She was later fined $100 by state elections officials for the lapse. Kindred retired early.

Kindred said seeing the ballot fiasco now after experiencing the ballot-tampering probe in 2012 was like a “punch to the gut.”

“We had a couple of hell elections, not nearly as bad as this one,” he said. “It’s almost like she’s frozen, like a deer in the headlights.”

For now, the county is focused on getting the votes counted by June 13, the state’s election certification deadline.

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Cline reported from Portland. Associated Press writer Andrew Selsky in Salem and AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Many voters in heavily Democratic Los Angeles are seething over rising crime and homelessness and that could prompt the city to take a turn to the political right for the first time in decades.

One of the leading candidates for mayor is Rick Caruso, a pro-business billionaire Republican-turned-Democrat who sits on the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and is promising to expand spending on police, not defund them.

At another time, the high-end mall and resort developer would seem an unlikely choice to potentially lead the nation’s second-most populous city, where democratic socialist Bernie Sanders was the runaway winner in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A progressive City Hall has embraced so-called sanctuary city protections for people who entered the U.S. illegally and “Green New Deal” climate policies.

But these are fraught times in LA, with more than 40,000 people living in trash-strewn homeless encampments and rusty RVs, distress over brazen smash-and-grab robberies and home invasions while inflation and taxes are gouging wallets — gas in a region built on car travel has cracked $6 a gallon. Rents and home prices have soared.

Caruso is spending millions of his estimated $4.3 billion fortune to finance a seemingly nonstop display of TV and online ads to tap into voter angst. At issue is whether enough people will embrace his plans to add 1,500 police officers and promises to get unhoused people off the streets, while not recoiling from his vast wealth.

Twelve names are on the ballot for the primary election that ends June 7, though several candidates have dropped out and the race is shaping up as a fight between Caruso and Democratic U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, who was on then-President elect Joe Biden’s shortlist for vice president.

If no candidate clears 50% – which is likely with a crowded ballot — the top two finishers advance to a November runoff. Bass could become the first woman to hold the office and the second Black person.

Bass and Caruso are not well known in a city that can be notoriously indifferent to local politics.

“Part of this is going to be how people feel about them as they get to know them better. We don’t know the answer to that,” said veteran Democratic consultant Bill Carrick, who thinks voters are looking for solutions for homelessness and crime, not obsessing with past political affiliations. The contest is technically nonpartisan.

Bass, 68, is a favorite of the party’s progressive wing, while Caruso, 63, is a political shape-shifter who calls himself a “centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.”

According to government records, he was a Republican for over two decades before becoming an independent in 2011. Caruso changed back to Republican in 2016 — a year when he served as California campaign co-chair for Republican John Kasich’s presidential bid — then to independent again in 2019. He became a Democrat shortly before entering the mayor’s race in February.

He’s donated to candidates in both parties, which has led to criticism from Democrats who point to his financial support for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, among others. And he’s been routinely attacked for an opulent lifestyle, including owning a 9-bedroom yacht.

The mayor’s race is one of several competitive contests in the state’s primary where political loyalties are being tested by questions about the direction of California’s dominant Democratic Party, which holds every statewide office and commanding margins in the Legislature and congressional delegation.

Voters in San Francisco are considering whether to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a Democrat who critics say has failed to prosecute repeat offenders, while Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta is facing several challengers who assert he favors criminal justice reform over crime victims, which he disputes.

A looming question in LA is who will show up. About 80% of voters didn’t cast ballots when outgoing Mayor Eric Garcetti was reelected in 2017.

There is a deep dismay with government across L.A. A major challenge for Caruso, Bass and other rivals — including city Councilman Kevin de Leon, a former Democratic leader in the state Senate — will be convincing voters change is possible.

A case in point: Gas station owner Wignesh Kandavel. He says his complaints have gone unheard for years about homeless people setting up campsites around a freeway overpass just steps from his pumps and convenience market.

Sagging tents and trash are cleared from time to time, only to have homeless people return again. He says drug use is rampant, shoplifting a constant problem and panhandling at the freeway exits a daily routine.

The Nigerian immigrant and registered Republican who came to the U.S. in search of a better life has lost interest in the election and doesn’t see any candidate as credible.

“The whole system is gone,” Kandavel said.

Caruso’s ascendancy in the race – polls show him closely matched with Bass — has alarmed longtime Democrats who are attacking him as a poseur trying to buy the job. His campaign has raised about $30 million, most of it his money.

There is the expected competition over celebrity endorsements — Earvin “Magic” Johnson is backing Bass, while Caruso has Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow behind him. Already, the rivalry is taking on a nasty edge, particularly in ads from groups supporting the candidates.

Bass’ commercials recall her work as a physician’s assistant during the crack epidemic and her time in Congress and the Legislature. But the police union that endorsed Caruso is running ads that attempt to link Bass to a federal corruption case involving her longtime friend, suspended city Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. She calls the ads lies.

Caruso’s advertising touts his immigrant grandparents, philanthropic endeavors and promise to work for $1 a year. But ads being run by an independent group backing Bass and funded by unions and former Disney studios chief Jeffrey Katzenberg depict Caruso as an L.A. version of former President Donald Trump who is attempting to conceal an “extreme” record.

Retired public defender Paul Enright said he was undecided in the mayor’s race but turned off by Caruso’s spending spree that totals more than the other candidates combined. A Democrat who supports public financing for campaigns, he is leaning toward Bass or de Leon.

It’s a “classic example of how money talks,” Enright said.

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By Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) -Former U.S. President Donald Trump must testify under oath in the New York Attorney General’s civil investigation into his business practices, an intermediate state appeals court ruled on Thursday.

A four-judge panel unanimously upheld a trial court decision from February enforcing subpoenas for Trump and his two eldest children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, to provide deposition testimony in Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation.

“Once again, the courts have ruled that Donald Trump must comply with our lawful investigation into his financial dealings,” James said in a statement. “We will continue to follow the facts of this case and ensure that no one can evade the law.”

Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In January, James said her nearly three-year investigation into the Trump Organization had uncovered significant evidence of possible fraud https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ny-attorney-general-details-possible-fraud-donald-trumps-family-business-2022-01-19.

She described what she called misleading statements about the values of the Trump brand and six properties, saying the company may have inflated real estate values to obtain bank loans and reduced them to lower tax bills.

Trump issued a statement earlier this year calling the accusations false and accusing James of a political agenda in targeting him and his family.

Trump and his children have said testifying would violate their constitutional rights because their words could be used in a related criminal probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, which James joined last May.

Trump, a Republican, has also accused James of selectively prosecuting him because he is a political enemy. James and Bragg are Democrats.

The appeals court rejected those arguments, saying James reviewed “significant volumes of evidence” before issuing the subpoenas.

“Appellants have not identified any similarly implicated corporation that was not investigated or any executives of such a corporation who were not deposed,” the court said of the Trumps. “Therefore, appellants have failed to demonstrate that they were treated differently from any similarly situated persons.”

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Additional reporting by Luc Cohen; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Diane Craft and Bill Berkrot)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — With mass shootings in Texas, New York and California fresh in Americans’ mind, the Supreme Court will soon issue its biggest gun ruling in more than a decade, one expected to make it easier to carry guns in public in some of the largest cities.

Already in an uncomfortable spotlight over a leaked draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade’s nationwide right to abortion, the justices also are facing a possible backlash from the guns case. In both cases the court could issue decisions that polls say would be unpopular with the majority of people in the United States.

“I think the court is heading into uncharted waters. I can’t recall the last time the Supreme Court ruled in so many cases likely to spark a strong political backlash,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on the court and gun policy.

Winkler predicted the recent shootings would not do anything to change the outcome in the guns case, where the court’s conservative majority has been expected to strike down a New York gun law. “Pro-gun justices are pro-gun,” he said, adding it is not likely that recent mass shootings have done anything to change that.

The decisions in both the abortion and guns cases are expected to be released sometime in the next month before the justices take their summer break.

The reaction to the decisions could add to criticism the court has faced recently over the disclosure that conservative political activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, urged the White House and Republican politicians in Arizona to work to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory and keep Trump in office.

A poll released this week found public approval of the court has fallen to 44%, down from 54% in March. The poll was conducted after the leak of the draft abortion decision, which has sparked protests and round-the-clock security at justices’ homes, demonstrations at the court and concerns about violence following the court’s ultimate decision. The court itself has been ringed in a tall security fence for weeks in anticipation of the abortion ruling.

In 2020, AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate, showed 69% of voters in the presidential election said the Supreme Court should leave the Roe v. Wade decision as is, while 29% said the court should overturn the decision.

In the leaked decision overturning Roe, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court should not be swayed by public opinion. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision. … And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision,” he wrote.

Still, the justices do not live in a bubble, and New York University scholar Barry Friedman has argued that the court’s decisions are never too far out of step with public opinion.

“You know we don’t have an army. We don’t have any money. The only way we can get people to do what we think they should do is because people respect us,” Justice Elena Kagan said in 2018.

Eric Tirschwell, the legal director at Everytown for Gun Safety, said it is “hard not to think that what’s going on in the country doesn’t impact to some degree” how the justices go about their work. The recent violence, he said, underscores that “interpreting the Second Amendment is not an abstract exercise. It has life or death consequences.”

About half of voters in the 2020 presidential election said gun laws in the U.S. should be made more strict, according to AP VoteCast. An additional one-third said gun laws should be kept as they are, while about 1 in 10 said gun laws should be less strict.

The gun case the court is considering involves a New York law that makes it difficult for people to get a permit to carry a gun outside the home. To do so, a person has to show a particular need to carry the weapon.

When the case was argued in November, it sounded from the justices’ questions as though the justices were prepared to strike down the law as too restrictive. Similar laws exist in California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island, and the Biden administration has said those states could be affected by a ruling against New York. Opponents have said that could lead to more guns on the streets and more resulting violence.

Just since the court heard arguments in the case, there have been 16 shootings where four or more people were killed, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.

One of two conservative justices, Thomas or Amy Coney Barrett, probably is writing the guns opinion, based on the court’s usual practice of giving each justice at least one opinion for each month the court hears cases. Neither has written yet in the cases heard early in November.

No matter how the court decides the New York case, other gun rights disputes are already at or nearing the court. The justices have been asked to hear cases challenging limits on ammunition magazine capacities in New Jersey and California as well as a challenge to Maryland’s assault weapons ban.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court struck down California’s ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under 21, holding it violated the Second Amendment. That case too could be headed to the court.

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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/school-shootings

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By Gabriella Borter

(Reuters) -Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt on Wednesday signed into law the strictest abortion ban in the United States, one that prohibits abortions from fertilization and allows private citizens to sue those who help women terminate their pregnancies.

“I promised Oklahomans that as governor I would sign every piece of pro-life legislation that came across my desk and I am proud to keep that promise today,” Stitt said in a statement.

The Republican-backed legislation, which takes effect immediately, makes exceptions only in cases of medical emergency, rape or incest.

Oklahoma is among the country’s Republican-led states rushing to pass anti-abortion laws this year, anticipating that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established the constitutional right to abortion.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a global advocacy group based in New York, said it would “imminently file a challenge to the ban and seek to block it in court.”

“Oklahoma is now the only state in the United States to successfully outlaw abortion while Roe v. Wade still stands,” the center said in a statement.

A draft Supreme Court opinion leaked on May 2 showed the court’s conservative majority intends to overhaul federal abortion rights and send the issue of legalization back to individual states.

Oklahoma’s four abortion clinics have already stopped providing abortion services in anticipation of the ban.

Earlier this month, Oklahoma enacted another bill that banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, as opposed to fertilization. Like the latest measure, it relies on civil lawsuits for enforcement.

The enforcement provision in both bills was modeled after Texas legislation that took effect in September and stopped clinics from performing nearly all abortions in that state.

Before the passage of the Oklahoma laws, it had become a destination for Texas women seeking abortions after six weeks. The restrictions in Oklahoma have now expanded a region of the country where there is little to no legal abortion access, forcing patients to travel to states such as Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado to end their pregnancies.

(Reporting by Gabriella Borter and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Sandra Maler and Tom Hogue)

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Two leading contenders for the GOP nomination for Michigan governor could be ruled ineligible for the primary ballot on Thursday, after the state’s elections bureau said they didn’t file enough valid petition signatures to qualify for the August contest.

In a recommendation that immediately shook up the governor’s race, board staff on Monday said former Detroit Police Chief James Craig and businessman Perry Johnson, along with three other lesser-known candidates, should be declared ineligible. A four-person, bipartisan Board of State Canvassers will vote on the recommendations Thursday, though candidates that don’t make the ballot could challenge the decision in court.

The candidates were among a 10-person field vying to take on Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for control of the battleground state in November.

Democrats challenged the GOP candidates’ petitions, alleging mass forgery and other issues. Another Republican candidate, Tudor Dixon, had also contested Craig’s voter signatures as fake. The bureau, however, said it discovered the fraud on its own review and didn’t process the challenges filed by the Michigan Democratic Party and Dixon.

Craig had been leading in most Republican primary polls, while Johnson has already spent millions of his personal fortune on the contest. Bureau staff also determined that three other lesser-known GOP candidates — Donna Brandenburg, Michael Brown and Michael Markey — did not turn in enough valid signatures. Brown withdrew from the race on Tuesday.

Candidates for governor were required to submit valid signatures from 15,000 registered voters to make the ballot. In a report released late Monday, bureau staff said multiple petition sheets for various candidates “displayed suspicious patterns indicative of fraud.” Some of the petitions for Craig’s campaign, for example, had signatures that all appeared to be written in the same handwriting.

Staff said that while it’s typical for petitions to include scattered instances of dubious signatures, “the Bureau is unaware of another election cycle” with such a “substantial volume” of fraudulent signatures, involving multiple candidates. They identified 36 petition circulators — or people who gather signatures and are often paid per signature — who submitted petition sheets made up entirely of invalid signatures. They gathered signatures for 10 candidates, including some seeking judgeships, the bureau reported.

The bureau said Craig submitted 10,192 valid signatures — well short of the 15,000 needed. It tossed 11,113 signatures, including 9,879 that were allegedly fraudulently collected by 18 paid circulators.

Staff said Johnson turned in 13,800 valid signatures. They threw out 9,393, including 6,983 that they said are fraudulent and were gathered by many of the same people who also forged signatures that Craig submitted.

Johnson’s campaign criticized the recommendations from the bureau, which is part of Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office, saying they don’t have the right to toss signatures gathered by “alleged forgers who victimized five campaigns.” Campaign consultant John Yob said the campaign would take the issue to court if necessary.

The bureau said it doesn’t believe specific campaigns or candidates were aware of what “fraudulent-petition circulators” were doing. Staff wrote that the bureau was working to refer the fraud to law enforcement for criminal investigation.

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BUTTE, Mont. (AP) — When Republican Ryan Zinke first ran for Congress, the former Navy SEAL faced false accusations amplified by Democrats that his military career had ended in disgrace.

After winning in 2014 and two years later getting picked as President Donald Trump’s interior secretary, Zinke is seeking a return to Congress and facing a near-identical smear campaign — this time from the right wing of his own party.

A website allied with one of his opponents accuses Zinke of exaggerating his military service — failing to mention two Bronze Stars that Zinke earned in Iraq — and of being demoted, which his service records refute.

It’s part of a broad campaign by some Republicans leading up to the state’s June 7 primary to thwart Zinke’s bid for a political comeback and advance a more conservative candidate for the general election.

The political dynamics reflect the sharp right turn the GOP has taken since Trump barnstormed across Montana’s electoral scene with repeated visits during the 2018 election in a failed attempt to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.

Zinke’s status as a former Trump Cabinet member is simply not enough anymore for some in his party. They say he’s too liberal and too soft on guns and didn’t do enough to build Trump’s envisioned wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Zinke has also been dogged by problems of his own making, including recent revelations that he lied to a federal ethics official before his 2018 resignation from the Department of Interior.

This month came a disclosure from Politico that Zinke’s wife, Lolita, designated her family’s California home as her primary residence. That boosted long-standing suspicions that Zinke spends most of his time outside Montana.

His opponents see a chance to make inroads with Trump voters, who seemed a lock for Zinke when he entered the race last year and quickly secured the former president’s endorsement.

“He quit Montana,” said former state Sen. Albert Olszewski, one of Zinke’s four primary opponents. “He quit Trump.”

Zinke is still acting as the front-runner, referring to himself as the “battleship” and other candidates as “canoes” while speaking to a reporter on the sidelines of a dinner last week hosted by Butte-Silver Bow County Republicans.

“Everybody wants to shoot at the battleship. Nobody shoots at the canoes,” he said.

Zinke denies lying. But he doesn’t deny that his wife is a California resident, and he acknowledges holding fundraisers there. He said he spends “a couple days a quarter” in Santa Barbara.

The Montana House district that’s at stake was created last year to account for the state’s growing population and covers half the state — from Yellowstone National Park, north along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, to the Canadian border.

The district had been eliminated in 1993. Montana Democrats lost the state’s only other House seat a few years later, and over the last several election cycles, Republicans took control of every statewide office in Montana except Tester’s.

Trump won Montana in 2020 with a 16-point advantage. The notion that Zinke quit him could prove hard to sell after Trump held a recent telerally with Zinke supporters reiterating his support. Trump spoke less than four minutes and spent most of the time touting his own accomplishments.

Montana Democrats spent the past six years painting Zinke as extreme, and he suggested the attacks on him in the GOP primary for being too liberal could help if he advances to the November election. It offers a contrast, he said, so moderate voters know he’s not “crazy.”

Still, he’s got much in common with his fellow GOP candidates. He’s refused to acknowledge that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and has called for harsher immigration policies. He’s also backed by the NRA.

Democrats and his Republican detractors alike have highlighted the numerous investigations Zinke came under while at the Interior Department and the large paychecks he received when he later worked in the private sector.

The questions surrounding Zinke’s conduct haven’t put a dent in his fundraising success. Through March 31, Zinke had raised $2.5 million, almost as much as all other candidates from both parties combined.

About 80% of Zinke’s campaign contributions came from out-of-state donors, Federal Election Commission data shows.

For Republican voter Jennifer Howell, Zinke’s outside support “speaks of corruption.”

“That means he’s bought by outside interests. Money talks,” she said before the Republican dinner in Butte, as Zinke spoke with other local members of the party just a few feet away. “To me, that’s rude in your face, like saying, ”I don’t need your money, Montana. I’ll get my money elsewhere.”

Later, as the dinner drew to a close, 70-year-old Barbara Jones passed a donation envelope to Zinke and thanked him for hosting her at his table.

Despite the attacks on him, Jones said Zinke had behaved “like an honorable man.” She also praised him for returning to Montana after linking up with a Washington lobbying firm when he first left the Cabinet.

But Jones hasn’t decided whom to support in the primary. She first wanted to learn more about Olszewski and Republican candidate Mary Todd, a pastor from Kalispell who contends her son was killed after refusing to help a Chinese-backed firm steal U.S. technology.

The $50 for Zinke, Jones said, was because “he paid for my dinner, so I wanted to pay him back.”

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics.

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Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter: @MatthewBrownAP

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A Somali police officer recently received an unexpected summons from the enemy. An unknown caller ordered him to report to a town outside the capital, Mogadishu, where the extremist group al-Shabab would settle a dispute between him and his brother. The caller assured the officer he would be safe even if he showed up in uniform.

Overcoming his fear, Khadar traveled to meet with a panel of four bearded men in an office made from iron sheets. The al-Shabab men wanted to know why he was denying his brothers a share of the land they inherited from their father.

“After an hour and a half of debate, the men directed me to distribute the inheritance among my brothers,” Khadar recalled in an interview with The Associated Press, withholding his last name for safety concerns.

Khadar complied, an extraordinary gesture to an armed group that continues to pose a deadly threat to his police colleagues and his government at large.

The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab is projecting authority and asserting a wider role in public life in this troubled Horn of Africa nation, underlining the extent of the challenge Africa’s deadliest Islamic extremist group presents to the newly elected government of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. The threats range beyond regular attacks on places frequented by officials and include militant control of vast territory where federal officials don’t dare go and can’t even collect taxes.

The group, which seeks to create an Islamic caliphate out of Somalia, is also increasingly undermining authorities by offering a parallel justice system — enforced by the threat of violence — in a country where many have little faith in conventional courts.

Some people who spoke to the AP expressed a favorable view of al-Shabab, saying its mobile courts are not corrupt and that the group appears able to protect vulnerable people in ways the federal government cannot.

“You will get justice in al-Shabab courtrooms if you know you are doing the right thing,” said farmer Muallim Abdi, a father of eight children who lives in another al-Shabab-controlled village near Mogadishu. “But in the government-controlled areas it will take time, and the formal courts are corrupt.”

Abdi acknowledged that life under al-Shabab is “extremely difficult,” citing the children forced to join the group, the tax burden and the inability to enjoy private property. Last Ramadan, he said, al-Shabab asked residents to raise money to buy livestock to be slaughtered for the Eid feast, an unreasonable demand at a time when the riverbed was dry and some people were on the verge of displacement amid drought.

Al-Shabab “remains in a healthy financial position” thanks to illicit taxation as well as income derived from the ongoing sale of $40 million in charcoal stockpiles in the city of Kismayo, a U.N. panel of experts reported last year.

Al-Shabab’s tax code compels all those intending to buy or sell farmland to register with the group’s land office, through which sales can be finalized. Farmers are ordered to notify al-Shabab of the quantities they are harvesting.

“Once I harvested and sold 2,247 bags of onions but did not inform al-Shabab because I had an emergency to attend to,” Abdi said. “I was home when two men on motorcycles arrived. I was accosted for not telling them about the harvest. I was detained in a small, dark room and nearly suffocated.” There’s no room for appeal in the al-Shabab system.

Despite the $1,123 fine he paid, Abdi still sees al-Shabab in a positive light because later it ruled in his favor to settle a land dispute with a neighbor. Both claimants were summoned and told to prove ownership before a committee that found his papers authentic, he said.

“The public would rally behind al-Shabab if they stopped killing people,” Abdi said.

Al-Shabab, which has killed thousands of civilians in the last decade, is estimated to have anywhere between 4,000 and 7,000 fighters, according to the Mogadishu-based security think tank Hiraal Institute.

Although al-Shabab’s extortionate power has been a major concern among traders, some businesspeople said they feel more confident in its mediation of disputes.

“They are becoming more reliable, and the people are counting on them,” Hiraal Institute’s Samira Gaid said of al-Shabab’s court system.

Somalis from minority clans, a growing community, see al-Shabab courts as fair, she said.

Al-Shabab has seized even more territory in recent years, taking advantage of rifts among security personnel as well as disagreements between the government seat in Mogadishu and regional states.

Forced to retreat from Mogadishu in 2011, al-Shabab is slowly making a comeback from the rural areas to which it retreated, defying the presence of African Union peacekeepers as well as U.S. drone strikes targeting its fighters.

The militants in early May attacked a military base for AU peacekeepers outside Mogadishu, killing many Burundian troops. The attack came just days before the presidential vote that returned Mohamud to power five years after he had been voted out.

Al-Shabab’s strategy is to “bleed the system” while patiently waiting for the exit of foreign troops, said Gaid, the security analyst.

The restructured AU peacekeeping mission is set to wind down by the end of 2024, when Somali forces would take over security responsibilities.

American officials cited the heightened threat posed by al-Shabab in mid-May as President Joe Biden signed an order to redeploy hundreds of U.S. troops to Somalia. Somali authorities have welcomed the decision reversing a 2021 order to withdraw U.S. troops.

Mohamud has said securing Mogadishu will depend heavily on pushing militants out of the neighboring regions of Lower Shabelle and Middle Shabelle. That could be challenging.

Al-Shabab “has sharply increased its infiltration of state institutions, particularly security institutions,” said political analyst Abdi Aynte, a former government minister.

Rebuilding Somalia’s security system “isn’t an administrative problem but ultimately a political one,” with the new president needing to reform the security services in a way that’s accommodative of all competing groups, he said.

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An Associated Press journalist in Somalia contributed. Muhumuza reported from Kampala, Uganda.

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By Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Centrist U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar was clinging to a razor-thin lead early on Wednesday against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros in a high-profile south Texas Democratic primary battle that illustrated sharp dividing lines over immigration and abortion rights.

The election on Tuesday in a district along the U.S.-Mexico border was the third contest between Cuellar, who has held the seat since 2005, and Cisneros, a 28-year-old attorney who failed to unseat him in 2020 but forced him to a runoff in the state’s March primary this year.

A tally by Edison Research showed Cuellar up by just 177 votes with 92% of the estimated vote counted. Major media outlets held off on calling the race.

Despite the slim margin, Cuellar declared victory. Cisneros, however, declined to concede, saying every ballot needed to be counted.

The race took on new urgency in recent weeks after a leaked Supreme Court opinion indicated that it could overturn a 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

Cuellar, 66, is the lone House Democrat to oppose abortion rights, and abortion-rights groups have spent at least $160,000 to bolster Cisneros’s campaign.

Cuellar has said Cisneros would risk public safety and hurt the local economy by cutting law enforcement funding in a district where many voters work for border patrol agencies.

Cisneros has since distanced herself from her previous call to eliminate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Political analysts have said a Cisneros win could threaten Democrats’ chances to hold the seat in the Nov. 8 election, when Republicans hope to win control of the House of Representatives.

But Cuellar’s strength in the general election should not be a foregone conclusion, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas in Austin.

“The reality is that Cisneros has come very close to unseating Cuellar twice at this point,” Blank said. “If he can’t defeat Cisneros, then I think the logic underlying that should come into question.”

Cisneros has benefited from increased name recognition and an FBI investigation that saw raids on Cuellar’s home and office.

Financial disclosures on Friday showed she has out-raised him by almost $1.4 million, and has around $400,000 more cash on hand than Cuellar.

The race is one of several midterm primary battles between incumbent House Democrats and progressive challengers.

In Oregon, Jamie McLeod-Skinner looks set to oust moderate incumbent Kurt Schrader, while in Pennsylvania progressive Summer Lee has a slight lead over Steve Irwin. Other progressive challengers like Nina Turner in Ohio have lost.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Washington; Additional reporting by Jason Lange and Tim Ahmann; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Alistair Bell and Edmund Klamann)

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