Politics

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The two Republican candidates in Alabama’s U.S. Senate primary runoff on Tuesday can each boast that at one point they had Donald Trump’s endorsement in the race.

Trump first backed U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks in the spring of 2021. That endorsement stood for nearly a year until Trump rescinded it as the conservative firebrand languished in the polls. The former president took his time in issuing a second endorsement, supporting Katie Britt in the race only after she emerged as the top vote-getter in the state’s May 24 primary.

In other races Tuesday, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser is facing voters amid growing concerns about crime. Runoffs in Georgia will resolve close contests in several congressional races and a secretary of state nomination, while primaries in Virginia will set up competitive congressional contests for the fall. Arkansas is holding primary runoffs for several legislative races.

What to watch in Tuesday’s primaries:

ALABAMA

The Senate runoff will decide the GOP nominee for the seat being vacated by 88-year-old Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, who announced his retirement in February 2021 after serving six terms.

Two months later, Trump announced his endorsement of Brooks, rewarding the six-term congressman who had objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election and spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

But Trump soured on Brooks as the primary campaign progressed, growing unhappy with his showing in the race and some of his comments urging the party to move on from the former president’s fixation on his 2020 election defeat. He pulled his endorsement last March.

Britt, Shelby’s former chief of staff and a former leader of a state business group, won the most votes in last month’s primary, capturing nearly 45% of the ballots compared to Brooks’ 29%. Britt had needed to earn more than 50% of the vote to win outright and avoid a runoff.

Another top candidate, Mike Durant, best known as the helicopter pilot who was held captive in Somalia during the 1993 battle chronicled in the book and film “Black Hawk Down,” finished in third place and failed to advance to the runoff.

Brooks has been backed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, both of whom campaigned with him. Britt comes into Tuesday’s runoff with a fundraising advantage and a shiny new endorsement from Trump, which came a couple of weeks after the primary.

The former president, who has a mixed record of success in backing winning candidates in this year’s midterm elections, waited to make an endorsement to help stave off the embarrassment of backing a losing candidate in a high-profile race.

The winner of the GOP race will face Democrat Will Boyd in November, though Democrats have found limited success in the deep-red state in the last 20 years.

GEORGIA

A Democratic contest for secretary of state headlines the Tuesday runoffs in Georgia, while Republicans will settle three congressional nominations.

State Rep. Bee Nguyen, backed by Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, is trying to defeat former state Rep. Dee Dawkins-Haigler in the secretary of state’s race. The winner will face Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the fall.

Raffensperger beat back a challenge in his May 24 primary from U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who was endorsed by Trump. Trump made Raffensperger a top target for rebuffing his efforts to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state’s 2020 presidential election.

In congressional runoffs, Vernon Jones, a Trump-backed candidate and former Democrat, is competing against trucking company owner Mike Collins for the Republican nomination for the 10th Congressional District seat east of Atlanta. Collins was endorsed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who also won his primary over a Trump-backed challenger.

In the 6th District in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, emergency room physician Rich McCormick is trying to hold off Trump-backed lawyer Jake Evans. That race has revolved around accusations by each candidate that the other is insufficiently conservative.

The Republican winners in the 6th and 10th are heavy favorites in the November election over their Democratic opponents.

Republicans also have high hopes of knocking off 30-year Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop in southwest Georgia’s 2nd District. The GOP is choosing between former Army officer Jeremy Hunt and real estate developer Chris West.

VIRGINIA

In Virginia, voters will be picking Republican nominees to take on Democratic U.S. House incumbents in two of the most highly competitive districts in the country.

In the coastal 2nd District, which includes the state’s most populous city, Virginia Beach, four military veterans are competing for the GOP nomination. With a big fundraising lead and the backing of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans, state Sen. Jen Kiggans is widely seen as the front-runner. The winner will face Democrat Elaine Luria, a retired Naval commander and member of the Jan. 6 committee, in the general election.

In central Virginia’s 7th District, six candidates are jockeying to take on Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Bowser, the two-term mayor of Washington, D.C., is trying to fend off challenges from a pair of Council members as the district contends with rising crime rates and homelessness concerns.

Bowser has had a tumultuous second term that saw her repeatedly face off against Trump and walk a public tightrope between her own police department and a vocal coalition of activists led by Black Lives Matter. She is campaigning on the need for proven leadership and her history as one of the faces of Washington’s ongoing quest for statehood.

Her primary challengers are Robert White and Trayon White, who are not related to each other. Both accuse Bowser of mishandling public safety issues amid rising violent crime rates and favoring developers as spiraling costs of living drive Black families out of the city.

The Democratic primary essentially decides the mayoral race in deeply blue Washington, D.C.

Robert White has a history of successful insurgent campaigns, having unseated an entrenched incumbent for an at-large Council seat in 2016.

Trayon White openly invokes the spirit of late D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who remains a controversial but beloved figure among many Washingtonians. White was criticized in 2018 for claiming the Rothschilds, a Jewish banking dynasty and frequent subject of antisemitic conspiracy, were controlling Washington’s weather conditions. He later said he didn’t realize his comment could be construed as antisemitic.

___

Associated Press writers Jeff Amy in Atlanta, Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Va., Ashraf Khalil in Washington, and Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Ark., contributed to this report.

___

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

source

NEW YORK (AP) — By the numbers, the Jan. 6 committee hearings attracted 20 million live viewers on opening night, 11 million for the first daytime session and nearly 9 million for Thursday’s third installment.

Yet those traditional Nielsen company yardsticks don’t begin to measure the true reach of what is being said there.

Memorable moments from each hearing are sliced for quick consumption on countless news programs, comedy shows and online, to the point where some have been seen more times later than when they were live.

In many respects, it’s the first congressional hearing in memory that seems specifically designed with modern media needs in mind, said Jeff Jarvis, a City University of New York journalism professor and frequent blogger on the media.

“That has already worked,” he said.

While it’s impossible to know what — if anything — covered in the initial stages of the hearing will stick much beyond the week’s news, there are already breakout moments and characters.

GIULIANI AND ALCOHOL

Receiving wide circulation: snippets where President Donald Trump’s former political director, Bill Stepien, aide Jason Miller and committee member Liz Cheney say that lawyer Rudy Giuliani had too much to drink before advising Trump on election night 2020.

Hours after the allegation had been made, the clips were featured in the monologues of top-rated late-night comics Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. The shows are typically seen by a combined audience of nearly 5 million people each night, with many more people watching online the next morning. Kimmel accompanied it with a film package of times when Giuliani acted oddly in defense of Trump.

The episode resonated in part because it was a connectable moment in an otherwise very serious story, said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.

“Having people who are major figures in a national political setting outed for being wasted is something that people can find immediately understandable,” Thompson said.

BARR’S REALITY

Former Attorney General William Barr’s recorded testimony that he found Trump “detached from reality” with some of his claims about election fraud was the lead in several news stories about Monday’s hearing. It was a vivid and disturbing image of a former president from the man who ran Trump’s Justice Department.

The ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts that night all featured the clip of Barr’s comment, and together the three programs typically reach more than 20 million viewers — or double the amount of people who saw the hearing live.

There’s no count of how many times it was repeated on cable news, or estimate of how many people saw it that way.

Two anecdotal examples illustrate the extent to which it was seen online. A clip of the moment posted by Reuters on Facebook was watched 928,000 times, and the clip posted on The New York Times’ Instagram account was seen 404,000 times.

DAUGHTER AND SON-IN-LAW

Filmed testimony from Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner has been particularly potent, in large part simply because they come from the family of a man who prizes loyalty.

A clip of Ivanka Trump saying she trusted Barr’s assessment of the fraud allegations amassed more than 1.6 million views in an Instagram post published by The Shade Room, a media outlet that focuses on celebrity entertainment, and 1 million when Bloomberg shared it on Twitter. Twitter posts of the video uploaded by MSNBC and the committee itself got more than 900,000 views together.

A video of her recollection of a phone call her father made to Vice President Mike Pence on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021 was shown on each of the three evening newscasts on Thursday, sometimes accompanied by the colorful descriptions of his language.

Kushner’s halting response when asked about what he had said to his father-in-law about Giuliani — as if he was weighing in real time what it meant to be under oath — became fodder for jokes.

NEW STAR

Previously little-known, former White House attorney Eric Herschmann has become a breakout star this past week for his filmed testimony concerning his conversations with John Eastman, architect of Trump’s failed maneuvering to hold onto power.

Editing his own colorful language, Herschmann recalls saying “are you out of your effing mind?” when Eastman talks the day after the Capitol riot about a potential appeal of Georgia election results. Like a stern parent, he tells Eastman that the only words he wants to hear from him are “orderly transition” and advises him to “get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.”

Recognizing the testimony’s potential impact, Cheney released it on Twitter the day before it was prominently featured in the hearing, giving it extra attention. That also served to highlight the committee’s finding that Eastman had unsuccessfully sought a presidential pardon.

Politico even did a story on the art hanging on the wall behind Herschmann during his testimony.

CHENEY’S PREDICTION

Cheney’s prosecutor-like outline of the committee’s case at the top of its only prime-time hearing drew wide attention, along with some advice that may live longer than her political career.

“Tonight, I say this to our Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone — but your dishonor will remain,” she said.

The Associated Press’ tweet with video of Cheney making that remark has been seen more than 1 million times.

Someday, depending on how history regards the events of Jan. 6, 2021, it may wind up the moment most recalled, like when it was revealed during the Watergate hearings that John Dean has warned Richard Nixon about a “cancer on the presidency,” Thompson said.

“I see that as the classic quote,” Thompson said.

___

Associated Press correspondent Arijeta Lajka in New York contributed to this report.

source

WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Sunday they may subpoena former Vice President Mike Pence and are waiting to hear from Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about her role in the illegal plot to overturn the 2020 election.

Lawmakers indicated they will release more evidence about Donald Trump’s alleged effort to defraud supporters by fundraising off false claims of a stolen presidential election. They also pledged to provide pertinent material to the Justice Department by the end of the month for its criminal investigation. The department complained in a letter last week that the committee was complicating its investigation by not sharing transcripts from its 1,000 interviews.

“We’re not taking anything off the table in terms of witnesses who have not yet testified,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, who described a Pence subpoena as “certainly a possibility.”

“We would still, I think, like to have several high-profile people come before our committee,” said Schiff, D-Calif.

For example, the committee has been able to document most of Trump’s end of his call to Pence on the morning of the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when the then-president made his final plea for Pence to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory when Pence presided over the Electoral College count in Congress. Members have not yet documented directly what Pence said in response.

The committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., recently said the committee was still “engaging” with Pence’s lawyers, while also suggesting it may not be necessary for him to appear because of testimony from many of Pence’s closest aides.

Committee members also hope to learn more about Ginni Thomas’ own effort to keep Trump in office and the potential conflicts of interest posed on her husband as a result on Jan. 6 cases that come before the Supreme Court.

Republican state Rep. Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, is scheduled to testify at the committee’s hearing Tuesday focusing on state officials who were contacted by Trump and the White House as Trump tried to overturn the results. Bowers is likely to be asked about emails he received from Thomas urging him and other state officials to set aside Biden’s 2020 win and choose their own set of electors.

“We have questions for her and we may have questions for him as well,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.

Thomas has publicly indicated that she “can’t wait” to appear before the committee after receiving their request by letter last week.

Along with emailing Arizona officials, Thomas, who attended a rally Trump held just before the Capitol riot, also had written to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the election encouraging him to work to overturn Biden’s victory. Emails recently obtained by the committee also show Thomas had email communications with John Eastman, the lawyer who played a key role on behalf of Trump in efforts to pressure Pence to overturn the election.

“I think the committee will be interested, in among other things, whether this was discussed with Justice Thomas, given that he was ruling on cases impacting whether we would get some of this information,” Schiff said.

This past January, Thomas was the lone member of the court who supported a bid by Trump to withhold documents from the Jan 6. committee.

Lofgren said the committee would release additional evidence it has gathered on the “big rip off,” in which the committee alleges Trump may have committed fraud by fundraising by making a false claim the election was stolen.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said that in the end, the public will have a clear picture of a “failure of the oath” by Trump.

“I think what we’re presenting before the American people certainly would rise to a level of criminal involvement by a president,” he said.

Kinzinger also said that he and his family have received threats because of his role on the committee. He spoke of his concern that “there’s violence in the future. … And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”

Schiff appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lofgren was on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and Kinzinger spoke on ABC’s “This Week.”

___

For full coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, go to https://www.apnews.com/capitol-siege

source

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House panel investigating the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol will present evidence this week that former President Donald Trump was involved in a failed bid to submit slates of fake electors to overturn the 2020 election, a key lawmaker said on Sunday.

“We will show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, a member of the House of Representatives Select Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“We will also again show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme, and we’ll show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden,” he said.

Schiff’s comments came as the Democratically-led committee prepares to hold its fourth public hearing on Tuesday on their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and Trump’s role in trying to block Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.

Evidence against Trump could potentially be crucial in an ongoing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) into the alleged fake elector plot.

In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed the department had received referrals about slates of alternative fake electors that were sent to the National Archives, and said prosecutors were reviewing them.

In March, the non-profit watchdog group American Oversight published copies https://www.americanoversight.org/american-oversight-obtains-seven-phony-certificates-of-pro-trump-electors of the phony electoral slates, which had been assembled by groups of Trump supporters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Since then, the DOJ has convened a grand jury to subpoena witnesses and documents as part of the probe, multiple media outlets have reported.

Jamie Raskin, another Democratic member of the panel, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that new information and tips kept coming in.

“There are still people who are turning over information to the committee,” he said. “We know things this weekend that we didn’t know last weekend.”

Last week, the DOJ renewed a demand that the House Select Committee turn over transcripts of its interviews with witnesses, saying in a letter those transcripts could be relevant to ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions.

The committee’s failure to turn them over “complicates the department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct,” the letter said.

Asked about the letter on Sunday, Schiff said that usually the two separate branches of government don’t allow one another to “rifle through” each others’ files.

However, he added: “When the Justice Department asks for things specifically… We work with them, and we will work with them here.”

Trump, meanwhile, has continued to peddle false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. On Friday, he lashed out at former Vice President Mike Pence, saying he “did not have the courage to act” and reject the 2020 election results.

On Sunday, Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans serving on the committee, said he received death threats aimed at him, his wife, and their baby.

“This threat that came in, it was mailed to my house,” he said on ABC’s “This week.”

“We got it a couple of days ago and it threatens to execute me as well as my wife and five-month old child. Never seen or heard anything like that,” he added.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Kanishka Singh; Editing by Heather Timmons and Daniel Wallis)

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republicans in Texas formally rejected President Joe Biden’s election in 2020 as illegitimate and voted in a state-wide convention that wrapped up this weekend on a party platform that calls homosexuality an “abnormal lifestyle choice.”

The party’s embrace of unfounded electoral fraud allegations in a bedrock Republican state came as a bipartisan congressional committee seeks to definitively and publicly debunk the false idea that Biden did not win the election.

Biden received 7 million more votes than rival Donald Trump. Biden also received 306 votes from the Electoral College, more than the 270 needed to win.

The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol is building a case that Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election — including by denying he lost — amounted to conspiracy to illegally hold onto power.

Trump, the 45th U.S. president, has denied any wrongdoing.

“We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,” the Texas party said in a resolution, passed in a voice vote at its convention.

Texas is a major player in U.S. national politics, with 38 electoral votes, the second highest after California. Voters there have backed Republican presidents for the past four decades.

The White House had no comment.

According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about two-thirds of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. State and federal judges dismissed more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies challenging the election while reviews and audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.

PLATFORM ATTACKS ‘CHOICE’ OF HOMOSEXUALITY

One of the proposed principles in the latest Texas Republican party platform https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Permanent-Platform-Committee-FINAL-REPORT-6-16-2022.pdf also includes new language criticizing homosexuality and voicing opposition to “all efforts to validate transgender identity.”

“Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice,” it reads, a statement that is not in the 2020 platform https://texasgop.org/platform.

Votes on the provision are being tallied and certified following the bi-annual state party convention, a party spokesperson said.

The Log Cabin Republicans of Houston, an organization that represents LGBT conservatives, said it was once again denied a request to set up a booth at the party’s convention this week, as it has been for past conventions. The group called the Texas Republican Convention’s actions “not just narrow-minded, but politically short-sighted.”

However, the group is seeing “no evidence” of other state Republican conventions adopting similar bans or exclusionary language, Charles Moran, Log Cabin Republican managing director, told Reuters.

“If anything we are being more included” than in the past, he said, noting that the 2020 Republican presidential campaign had an official pride coalition, and the gay Republican vote doubled between 2016 and 2020. “President Trump was the most pro-gay Republican that we have ever had,” he added.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Heather Timmons and Lisa Shumaker)

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, a spokesperson said, a week before he is due to accompany President Joe Biden to a meeting of the Group of Seven advanced economies.

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said Sullivan had not been in close contact with Biden, and was asymptomatic. It was his first COVID infection, she said.

Sullivan met at the White House on Friday with Senegal’s foreign minister, Aissata Tall Sall, the White House said on Saturday. He met in person with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Luxembourg for four and a half hours on Monday.

It was not immediately clear whether the positive test would affect Sullivan’s travel plans.

The White House announced last week that Biden would travel to southern Germany for the Group of Seven summit and continue on to Spain for a NATO summit in late June.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Writing by Aram Roston; Editing by Daniel Wallis and William Mallard)

source

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana lawmakers ended a special session Saturday saying they were unable to agree on a new congressional map that includes a second majority Black district as ordered by a federal judge, prompting an angry blast from the governor.

U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick on June 6 had struck down the state’s original U.S. House map approved earlier this year by lawmakers, one with white majorities in five of six districts. It retained a single majority-Black district currently held by U. S. Rep. Troy Carter, a New Orleans Democrat.

On Saturday, the Senate Senate spent two hours grappling with the remapping issue and then took an hourlong recess to see how proposed changes to a last-ditch bill might settle out. But the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Rick Ward III, R-Port Allen, said none of the proposed amendments presented could muster the 20-vote minimum needed for Senate approval, The Advocate reported.

“When you’re dealing with something like this, every time you satisfy four people you lose four people,” Ward told the Senate. “When you satisfy six people you lose seven over here. It is a difficult task.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards issued a statement later Saturday lashing out at the lawmakers for failing to come up with a new map. Since the Legislature did not devise a new map in the session, it now appeared likely any remapping of boundaries would fall to the courts.

“It is disappointing that after every opportunity to do the right thing and create a second majority African-American congressional district as ordered by the U. S. Court for the Middle District the Legislature has once again failed to do so,” Edwards said.

The Republican-dominated legislature and Edwards, a Democrat, have been fighting over the boundaries since February, when lawmakers initially approved their map. Democrats and the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus argue that the current map dilutes the political clout of African American voters and that at least two of the six districts should have Black majorities. Nearly one-third of Louisiana’s population is Black.

Dick, the federal judge, had originally ordered the Legislature to come up with a new may by Monday, which was the deadline for the six-day special session called by Edwards. On Friday, the judge then ordered attorneys to submit proposed maps with a second majority-Black district by June 22, with a hearing on the issue set for June 29.

Backers of the order said the Legislature had a duty to comply with the federal court.

Critics said the issue will ultimately be decided in the federal courts and possibly could rise to the U. S. Supreme Court.

Lawmakers had said for days that any hopes for agreement in the GOP-controlled Legislature appeared unlikely.

A House committee on Friday rejected three bills that would have added a second majority-Black congressional district. A Senate committee on Friday voted 6-3 against a plan by Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, to do the same after two days of testimony.

“There was no will from the Legislature,” Fields said after the session ended. “That is why we are where we are in Louisiana.”

The sudden end of the session finished a six-day roller coaster on the issue.

Dick on Thursday rejected a request by Louisiana Senate President Page Cortez and House Speaker Clay Schexnayder to extend her deadline for action until at least June 30.

The judge also had blasted the House for only devoting 90 minutes to the issue on the first day of the special session, and stopped just short of accusing Schexnayder of ignoring a federal court order.

source

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats are going to hold onto the House after November’s midterm elections. They will pick up as many as four seats in the Senate, expanding their majority and overcoming internal dissent that has helped stifle their agenda.

As the challenges confronting President Joe Biden intensify, his predictions of a rosy political future for the Democratic Party are growing bolder. The assessments, delivered in speeches, fundraisers and conversations with friends and allies, seem at odds with a country that he acknowledged this week was “really, really down,” burdened by a pandemic, surging gas prices and spiking inflation.

Biden’s hopeful outlook tracks with a sense of optimism that has coursed through his nearly five-decade career and was at the center of his 2020 presidential campaign, which he said was built around restoring the “soul of America.” In a lengthy Oval Office interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, Biden said part of his job as president is to “be confident.”

“Because I am confident,” he said. “We are better positioned than any country in the world to own the second quarter of the 21st century. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.”

While presidents often try to emphasize the positive, there is a risk in this moment that Biden contributes to a dissonance between Washington and people across the country who are confronting genuine and growing economic pain.

Few of Biden’s closest political advisers are as bullish about the party’s prospects as the president. In interviews with a half-dozen people in and close to the White House, there is a broad sense that Democrats will lose control of Congress and that many of the party’s leading candidates in down-ballot races and contests for governor will be defeated, with Biden unable to offer much help.

The seeming disconnect between Biden’s view and the political reality has some in the party worried the White House has not fully grasped just how bad this election year may be for Democrats.

“I don’t expect any president to go out and say, ‘You know what, ‘We’re going to lose the next election,’” said Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, which is in regular contact with the White House’s policy team. What might serve Biden well instead, Marshall said, would be “a sober sense of, ’Look, we’re probably in for a rough night in November and our strategy should be to remind the country what’s at stake.’”

The White House is hardly ignoring the problem.

After years in which Democrats have operated in political silos, there is a greater focus on marshaling resources. Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s 2020 campaign manager who now serves as one of his deputy chiefs of staff, runs the political team from the West Wing along with Emmy Ruiz, a longtime Texas-based Democratic political consultant.

O’Malley Dillon coordinates strategy among the White House, the Democratic National Committee and an array of outside party groups. Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman who co-chaired Biden’s 2020 campaign and was one of his closest White House advisers, left for a job with the DNC in April. He characterized the move as underscoring the administration’s full grasp of the importance of the midterms.

“We understand that you cannot govern if you can’t win,” Richmond said in an interview. “We are treating it with that sense of urgency.”

The president’s political message is being honed by Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden aide who is a protector of Biden’s public image, and veteran party strategist Anita Dunn, who is returning to the White House for a second stint.

Richmond praised Dunn’s political instincts and said he believes she will team with O’Malley Dillion, White House chief of staff Ron Klain and others to promote messaging that many in their own party may underestimate.

“If I had a penny for every time Democrats counted Joe Biden or Kamala Harris out, I’d be independently wealthy,” Richmond said.

Biden turned to Dunn during an especially low political moment in February 2020, giving her broad control of his then-cash strapped presidential campaign as it appeared on the brink of collapse after a disastrous fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucus.

Barely a week later, Biden left New Hampshire before its primary polls had even closed, ultimately finishing fifth. But he took second in Nevada, won South Carolina handily and saw the Democratic establishment rally around him at breakneck speed in mere days after that. O’Malley Dillon then joined the campaign and oversaw Biden’s general election victory.

A similar reversal of political fortune may be necessary now.

But where White House officials last year harbored hopes that voters could be convinced of Biden’s accomplishments and reverse their dismal outlook on the national direction, aides now acknowledge that such an uphill battle is no longer worth fighting. Instead, they have pushed the president to be more open about his own frustrations — particularly on inflation — to show voters that he shares their concerns and to cast Republicans and their policies as obstacles to addressing these issues.

Though he has increasingly expressed anger about inflation, Biden has publicly betrayed few concerns about his party’s fortunes this fall. opting instead for relentlessly positivity.

“I think there are at least four seats that are up for grabs that we could pick up in the Senate,” the president told a recent gathering of donors in Maryland. “And we’re going to keep the House.”

Biden meant Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with potential longer shots in North Carolina or Florida possibly representing No. 4. Some aides admit that assessment is too optimistic. They say the president is simply seeking to fire up his base with such predictions. One openly laughed when asked if it was possible that Democrats could pick up four Senate seats.

The party’s chances of maintaining House control may be bleaker. Still, Tim Persico, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is charged with defending the party’s narrow majority, said Biden remains an asset.

“We love when the president is speaking to the country,” Persico said. “There’ll always be frustrations. I totally get that. But I think he’s his own best messenger.”

Biden has traveled more since last fall, promoting a $1 trillion public works package that became law in November, including visiting competitive territory in Minnesota, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire. During a trip to Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne’s Iowa swing district, the president declared, “My name is Joe Biden. I work for Congresswoman Axne.”

But Bernie Sanders, the last challenger eliminated as Biden clinched the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is making his own Iowa trip this weekend to rally striking workers at construction and agriculture equipment plants.

The 80-year-old Vermont senator has not ruled out a third presidential bid in 2024 should Biden not seek reelection. That has revived questions about whether Biden, 79, might opt not to run — speculation that has persisted despite the White House political operation gearing up for the midterms and beyond.

“I do think a lot of folks in the Democratic Party, rightfully, are concerned about what’s going to happen in 2024. That doesn’t have to be mal intent,” said Linn County Supervisor Stacey Walker, whose district includes Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and who was a high-profile Sanders supporter during the last campaign. “I think folks are putting the question to the Democratic Party, ‘Is Joe Biden going to run again? Is he not going to run again?’”

Walker noted that other Democrats who could seek the White House in 2024 if Biden does not, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, joined Sanders in signing a letter supporting 1,000-plus plant workers who have been striking for better pay and benefits for more than a month.

“It is responsible, I think, for those folks within the Democratic Party, who have the profile, who have the infrastructure, to make sure it’s all still in good working condition should they have to dust off the playbook,” Walker said.

Asked if Biden was running again in 2024, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president has responded to such queries repeatedly and “his answer has been pretty simple, which is, yes, he’s running for reelection.”

The more immediate question of Biden’s midterm appeal could be even trickier. He campaigned for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia last November, after winning the state easily in 2020. McAuliffe lost by 2 percentage points, a potentially bad omen for the 16 governorships Democrats are defending this fall.

“We know there are going to be national headwinds, there always are,” Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia, said recently. But she insisted she would be happy to campaign with Biden or top members of his administration: “I welcome anyone willing to lift Georgia up, to come to Georgia and help me get it done.”

That was a departure from Democrat Beto O’Rourke, running for governor in Texas, who told reporters, “I’m not interested in any national politician — anyone outside of Texas — coming into this state to help decide the outcome of this race.”

Biden political advisers say a possible Supreme Court ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, as well as recent mass shootings spurring renewed debate over gun violence, could give Democrats two issues that could energize voters. But they also acknowledge that one or both might help party candidates clinch already close races — not remake the political landscape nationwide.

In the meantime, Biden’s overall approval rating hit a new low of 39% last month. Even among his own party, just 33% of respondents said the country is headed in the right direction, down from 49% in April. The president’s approval rating among Democrats stood at 73%, falling sharply from last year, when Biden’s Democratic approval rating never slipped below 82%.

White House political advisers are already playing down the possibility that some of the party’s most vulnerable candidates may carve out identities distinct from the president’s. As a former senator, Biden understands such maneuvers, they say.

The White House also notes that the president and his party are in far better shape now than before the 2010 midterms, when a tea party wave saw Republicans win back Congress. Since taking office, Biden’s political team has invested significantly in the DNC and state parties, and all sides are cooperating.

The DNC says it has never been larger, with 450 staff members on state party payrolls, or sported a more robust ground operation. It also raised $213 million so far, a midterm record. But DNC Chair Jaime Harrison nonetheless appeared to be trying to head off concerns donors’ contributions might be going to waste, saying, “We’re not promoting it all over the place.”

“When you’re in the Super Bowl, do you think the coach puts all their plays up on Twitter, and says, ‘Here’s what we’re going to run?,” Harrison said at a Los Angeles fundraiser with Biden last weekend. “No. We don’t put all of our stuff out there.”

He said the group is building out an operation “to make sure that, when those close elections happen November, we win them.”

source

One by one, several of Donald Trump’s former top advisers have told a special House committee investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection that they didn’t believe his lies about the 2020 election, and that the former president knew he lost to Joe Biden.

But instead of convincing Trump’s most stalwart supporters, testimony from former attorney general Bill Barr and Trump’s daughter Ivanka about the election and the attack on the U.S. Capitol is prompting many of them to simply reassert their views that the former president was correct in his false claim of victory.

Barr’s testimony that Trump was repeatedly told there was no election fraud? He was paid off by a voting machine company, according to one false claim that went viral this week. Ivanka Trump saying she didn’t believe Trump either? It’s all part of Trump’s grand plan to confuse his enemies and save America.

The claims again demonstrate how deeply rooted Trump’s false narrative about the election has become.

“It’s cognitive dissonance,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Syracuse University professor who has studied how Trump used social media and advertising to mobilize his base. “If you believe what Trump says, and now Bill Barr and Trump’s own daughter are saying these other things, it creates a crack, and people have to fill it.”

The lawmakers leading the hearings into the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol said one of their goals is to show how Trump repeatedly lied to his supporters in an effort to hold onto power and subvert American democracy.

“President Trump invested millions of dollars of campaign funds purposely spreading false information, running ads he knew were false, and convincing millions of Americans that the election was corrupt and he was the true president,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the panel’s vice chair. “As you will see, this misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th.”

For those who accept Trump’s baseless claims, Barr’s testimony was especially jarring. In his interview with investigators, he detailed Trump’s many absurd allegations about the election 2020, calling them “bogus” and “idiotic.”

Barr told the committee when he talked with Trump, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said.

Following his testimony, many Trump supporters using sites like Reddit, GETTR and Telegram blasted Barr as a turncoat and noted that he’s disputed Trump’s election claims before.

But many others began grasping for alternative explanations for this testimony.

“I’m still hoping Barr is playing a role,” one poster said on a Telegram channel popular with Trump supporters.

One post that spread widely this week suggested Barr was paid by Dominion Voting Systems, a company targeted by Trump and his supporters with baseless claims of vote rigging. “From 2009 to 2018, DOMINION PAID BARR $1.2 million in cash and granted him another $1.1 million in stock awards, according to SEC filings. (No wonder Barr can’t find any voter fraud!),” the post read.

Wrong Dominion. Barr was paid by Dominion Energy, a publicly traded company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, that provides power and heat to customers in several mid-Atlantic states.

Unlike Barr, Ivanka Trump has remained intensely popular with many Trump supporters and is seen by many as her father’s potential successor. That may be why so many had to find an an alternative explanation for why she told Congress she didn’t accept her father’s claims.

Jordan Sather, a leading proponent of the QAnon theory, claims both Barr and Ivanka Trump lied during their testimony on Trump’s orders, part of an elaborate scheme to defeat Trump’s enemies by confusing Congress and the American public.

“I can just imagine Donald Trump telling Ivanka: ’Hey, go to this hearing, say these things. Screw with their heads,’” Sather said last week on his online show.

Some Trump supporters dismissed Ivanka Trump’s testimony entirely by questioning whether any of it was real. That’s another common refrain seen on far-right message boards. Many posters say they don’t even believe the hearings are happening, but are a Hollywood production starring stand-ins for the former president’s daughter and others.

“She looks different in a big way,” one poster asked on Telegram. “CGI?”

source

By David Morgan and Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The day after the latest U.S. congressional hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, the former president criticized Mike Pence’s actions that day, saying that his vice president had lacked courage.

The hearings have detailed the ways in which Trump urged his supporters to turn on Pence for refusing his requests to reject the November 2020 election results, before they stormed the Capitol, fighting with police as some chanted “hang Mike Pence!”

“Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic,” Trump told an audience of Christian conservatives in Nashville on Friday.

“Mike, and I say it sadly because I like him, but Mike did not have the courage to act,” Trump added.

Republican Trump repeated his false claims that his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud, assertions that were rejected by multiple courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.

Multiple Trump allies including his daughter Ivanka, former attorney general William Barr and other officials have testified to the committee that they did not believe Trump’s false claims.

Pence’s staff were not immediately available for comment.

Pence defended his actions, however, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Friday.

“Ultimately, I believe that most Americans understand that we did our duty that day under the Constitution and the laws of this country,” the newspaper quoted Pence as saying.

Trump attacked the bipartisan nine-member Jan. 6 select committee, which has held three hearings in little more than a week and is building a case that Trump acted illegally by trying to overturn his election loss.

“Let’s be clear, this is not a congressional investigation, this horrible situation that’s wasting everyone’s time. This is a theatrical production of partisan political fiction. That’s getting these terrible, terrible ratings and they’re going crazy,” Trump said.

On Thursday, former Pence aides told the committee that Trump pressed Pence to overturn the election results in Congress, after being told repeatedly that it was illegal to do so. Democrats on the panel said Trump kept up the pressure even though he knew a violent mob of his supporters was threatening the Capitol, where Pence and lawmakers worked to certify the election results.

Trump has protested that the hearings lack “equal representation.” Democrats initially pressed for a balanced bicameral investigation, but Republicans rejected the plan.

The committee’s proceedings are taking place in the runup to congressional elections in November, which will determine the balance of power in the Senate and House of Representatives ahead of the 2024 general election.

Trump continues to flirt publicly with the idea of running for president again in 2024.

But for now, the former president is concentrating on a revenge election campaign this year against his perceived enemies, including 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Capitol attack, among them Representative Liz Cheney, who is vice chair of the investigating committee.

(Reporting by David Morgan, Doina Chiacu and Katharine Jackson; Editing by Scott Malone; editing by Grant McCool)

source