Politics

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A congressional hearing into the attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat presented testimony on Thursday showing that close allies – even his daughter – rejected his false claims of voting fraud.

The House of Representatives select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault also showed graphic footage of thousands of rioters attacking police and smashing their way into the Capitol. It was the first of six planned hearings intended to show that the Republican former president tried to subvert the U.S. Constitution and unlawfully hold onto power.

The Democratic-led committee presented video of testimony from notable Trump administration figures including his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, Attorney General William Barr, campaign spokesperson Jason Miller and General Mark Milley.

It also showed part of Trump’s incendiary speech before the attack in which he repeated false election fraud claims and directed his supporters’ anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who was at the Capitol overseeing congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election win – a process the riot failed to prevent.

Democratic committee chair Bennie Thompson said Trump was at the center of a conspiracy to thwart American democracy and block the peaceful transfer of power.

“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one writer put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” Thompson said. “The violence was no accident. It was Trump’s last stand.”

Barr in videotaped testimony said: “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I call the bullshit. And, you know, I didn’t want to be a part of it.”

Barr’s view convinced Trump’s daughter.

“I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying,” Ivanka Trump said in videotaped testimony.

Trump, who is publicly flirting with another White House run in 2024, issued a statement before the hearing calling the committee “political Thugs.”

“Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Well, maybe our supporters have the right idea,’” said Representative Liz Cheney, one of the two Republicans on the nine-member panel and its vice chairperson.

Since leaving office last year, Trump has kept up his false claims that his 2020 election loss to Biden was the result of widespread fraud, an assertion rejected by numerous courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.

“We can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election,” Barr, who resigned about two weeks before the Capitol attack, said in the video.

Kushner was shown on video dismissing threats by some Trump aides to resign after the riot, deeming their concerns “whining.”

The hearing also featured two witnesses who testified in person, U.S. Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who sustained a brain injury in the attack, and Nick Quested, a filmmaker who captured footage of the far-right Proud Boys group, accused of helping to plan the attack.

Edwards described insults hurled by rioters at her during the melee but said she was proud of fighting them off even after being injured.

“I was slipping in people’s blood,” Edwards said. “It was carnage. It was chaos.”

“What I saw was just a war scene,” Edwards added.

The hearings are being held ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections that will determine whether Biden’s party retains control of the House and the Senate.

‘SUMMONED THE MOB’

The mob attacked police, sent lawmakers and Pence fleeing for their safety and caused millions of dollars in damage. Four people died that day, one fatally shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, and one died the next day. Four officers later died by suicide.

“Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them: That the election was stolen and that he was the rightful president,” Cheney said. “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”

To her fellow Republicans – who voted to remove her from her House leadership position – Cheney offered a warning: “Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: ‘There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.’”

Biden on Thursday described the attack as “a clear, flagrant violation of the Constitution,” telling reporters: “I think these guys and women broke the law, tried to turn around the result of an election.”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday underscored the partisan lens through which many Americans view the assault. It found that among Republicans about 55% believed the false claim that left-wing protesters led the attack and 58% believed most of the protesters were law-abiding.

Two Republican Georgia state election officials who Trump tried to pressure to “find” votes that would overturn his election defeat will testify at hearings later this month, a source familiar with the matter said.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Richard Cowan; Additional reporting by Linda So, Trevor Hunnicutt, Kanishka Singh and Jason Lange; Editing by Will Dunham, Scott Malone, Andy Sullivan and Alistair Bell)

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By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A rare bipartisan effort in the U.S. Senate to agree on legislation to address a wave of mass shootings could reach a watershed moment on Thursday as lawmakers decide whether the drive has enough momentum to succeed.

About a dozen lawmakers led by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and Republican Senator John Cornyn are trying to find common ground on a plan that would bolster school security, address gaps in the U.S. mental health system and keep guns out of the hands of criminals and individuals deemed to be a danger to the public and themselves.

Lawmakers including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, had expressed hope for an agreement by the end of the week.

Negotiators and aides said there was a chance of reaching an agreement in principle. But short of that, lawmakers would have a clearer sense of the scope for further discussions before leaving Washington on Thursday for the weekend.

“We’ll have a much better idea tomorrow morning,” Cornyn told reporters on Wednesday after a private meeting to discuss potential legislation. “We’ll have a better idea of whether we still have momentum, which I believe we do right now.”

Murphy told reporters that his aim was to pass legislation that can stem the tide of shooting deaths in America before the Senate breaks for the July 4 holiday at the end of the month. “We need to move expeditiously. But this would be a big, historic deal and we need to get it right. That’s my priority,” the Connecticut Democrat said.

The effort follows mass shootings in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and elsewhere.

Democrats including President Joe Biden have called for new limits on gun ownership, including a ban on semi-automatic, assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, and for raising the minimum age to buy those weapons from 18 to 21.

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted on Wednesday on a package of partisan gun legislation with no chance of clearing the Senate.

With the 100-seat Senate split 50-50, Republicans committed to protecting gun ownership rights, and gun legislation needing 60 votes for passage, negotiations are aimed at making relatively modest changes that lawmakers insist can still protect lives.

Talks on bolstering mental health assistance and incentivizing state “red flag” laws to keep guns from disturbed individuals have turned to the question of how to provide potentially billions of dollars in funding without increasing the federal deficit.

Lawmakers are also discussing provisions to enhance the physical security of schools, including more on-campus security officers, and proposals to add juvenile records to national background check databases.

(Reporting by David Morgan, editing by Ross Colvin and Cynthia Osterman)

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(Reuters) – The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has been working for almost a year, interviewing witnesses and amassing documents ahead of public hearings set to start on Thursday.

Here are some facts about the investigation.

MULTIPLE DEATHS

Thousands of supporters of Donald Trump attacked the Capitol, the home of Congress, in a bid to stop formal certification by U.S. lawmakers of the Republican then-president’s 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, causing millions of dollars in damage. Four people died on the day of the attack, and one Capitol Police officer who fought against the rioters died the next day. Four officers have since taken their own lives and 140 others were injured.

THE COMMITTEE

Nine House members sit on the committee, which Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created on July 1, 2021, after Republicans prevented creation of a bicameral commission.

Its seven Democrats include Representative Bennie Thompson, the panel’s chairperson, as well as Representatives Zoe Lofgren, Elaine Luria, Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, Stephanie Murphy and Jamie Raskin.

The panel’s two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney – the vice chairperson – and Adam Kinzinger, were censured by the Republican National Committee for their participation. The RNC had never before censured any sitting congressional Republican.

THE INVESTIGATION

The committee and its dozens of investigators have conducted more than 1,000 depositions and interviews. Most people who are interviewed have not been identified, but those known to have appeared include Trump’s daughter and close adviser Ivanka Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and attorney Rudy Giuliani.

To compel testimony and obtain documents, the committee has announced it has issued 99 subpoenas and is known to have issued more that have not been made public.

Some of the most notable known subpoenas have been sent to Mark Meadows, a former congressman who served as a Trump White House chief of staff; Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser; Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operative; Trump’s son Eric; major social media firms; and leaders of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups that have backed Trump.

The committee has amassed a trove of more than 140,000 documents and has followed up on 472 tips from its tip line.

CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS

The House has voted, largely along party lines, to recommend contempt of Congress charges for four Trump associates for refusing to cooperate. Trump has urged former aides to disregard committee subpoenas.

The House recommendation referred the four cases – Bannon, Meadows and former top Trump administration aides Peter Navarro and Daniel Scavino – to the Justice Department to decide on whether to bring criminal charges, which bear a penalty of up to a year’s imprisonment and a fine up to $100,000.

The Justice Department has pursued charges against Bannon in a case set to go to trial in July, as well as against Navarro. It has not charged Meadows or Scavino.

The committee also recommended charges for a fifth person, Jeffrey Clark, who was a senior Justice Department official during the Trump administration. The full House never voted on the charges after Clark agreed to a deposition.

CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS

Nearly 850 people have been arrested for crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, including more than 250 charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement. Over those, about 90 have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.

More than 300 people have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, 59 of those to felonies.

Sixteen people who were members of or affiliated with the right-wing Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been charged with seditious conspiracy, which carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

Six individuals have been found guilty at trials.

(Compiled by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Scott Malone, Nick Zieminski and Will Dunham)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — With never-seen video, new audio and a “mountain of evidence,” the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will attempt to show not only the deadly violence that erupted that day but also the chilling backstory as the defeated president, Donald Trump, tried to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory.

Thursday’s prime-time hearing will open with eyewitness testimony from the first police officer pummeled in the mob riot and from a documentary filmmaker who recorded the melee, and it will feature the committee’s accounts from Trump’s aides and family members of the deadly siege that put U.S. democracy at risk.

“When you hear and understand the wide-reaching conspiracy and the effort to try to corrupt every lever and agency of government involved in this, you know, the hair on the back of your neck should stand up,” Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., a member of the 1/6 committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“Putting it all together in one place and one coherent narrative, I think, will help the American people understand better what happened on January 6th — and the threats that that could potentially pose in the future.”

The 1/6 panel’s yearlong investigation into the Capitol attack will begin to show how America’s tradition of a peaceful transfer of presidential power came close to slipping away. It will reconstruct how Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, spread false claims of voter fraud and orchestrated an unprecedented public and private campaign to overturn Biden’s victory.

The result of the coming weeks of public hearings may not change hearts or minds in politically polarized America. But the committee’s investigation with 1,000 interviews is intended to stand as a public record for history. A final report aims to provide an accounting of the most violent attack on the Capitol since the British set fire to it in 1814 and to ensure such an attack never happens again.

Emotions are still raw at the Capitol, and security will be tight for the hearings. Law enforcement officials are reporting a spike in violent threats against members of Congress.

Against this backdrop, the committee will try to speak to a divided America, ahead of the fall midterm elections, when voters decide which party controls Congress. Most TV networks will carry the hearings live, but Fox News Channel will not.

The committee chairman, civil rights leader Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, will set the tone with opening remarks.

The two congressional leaders will outline what the committee has learned about the events leading up to that brisk January day in 2021 when Trump sent his supporters to Congress to “fight like hell” for his presidency as lawmakers undertook the typically routine job of certifying the previous November’s results.

“People are going to have to follow two intersecting streams of events — one will be the attempt to overturn the presidential election, that’s a harrowing story in itself,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the committee, told the AP.

“The other will be the sequence of events leading up to a violent mob attack on the Capitol to stop the counting of Electoral College votes and block the peaceful balance of power,” he said.

First up will be wrenching accounts from police who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the mob, with testimony from U.S. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was seriously injured in the attack. Also appearing Thursday will be documentary maker Nick Quested, who filmed the extremist Proud Boys storming the Capitol. Some of that group’s members have since been indicted, as have some from the Oath Keepers, on rare sedition charges over the military-style attack.

Along with the live eyewitness testimony, the panel will unveil multimedia presentations, including unreleased video and audio, and a “mountain of evidence,” said a committee aide who insisted on anonymity to preview the hearing. There will be recorded accounts from Trump’s senior aides at the White House, the administration and the campaign, as well as members of Trump’s family, the aide said.

In the weeks ahead, the panel is expected to detail Trump’s public campaign to “Stop the Steal” and the private pressure he put on the Justice Department to reverse his election loss — despite dozens of failed court cases and his own attorney general attesting there was no fraud on a scale that could have tipped the results in his favor.

The panel, made up of nine lawmakers, faced obstacles from its start. Republicans blocked the formation of an independent body that could have investigated the Jan. 6 assault the way the 9/11 Commission probed the 2001 terror attack.

Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ushered the creation of the 1/6 panel through Congress over the objections of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. She rejected Republican-appointed lawmakers who had voted Jan. 6 against certifying the election results, choosing her own preferred members to serve.

Trump has dismissed the investigation as illegitimate, and many Republicans are poised to defend him.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York said at a GOP leadership news conference that the committee’s “shameless prime-time show” is nothing but a smear campaign against the former president, his party and his supporters.

But by many measures, the attack was set in motion shortly after Election Day, when Trump falsely claimed the voting was rigged and refused to concede once Biden was declared the winner.

The proceedings are expected to introduce Americans to a cast of characters, some well known, others elusive, and to what they said and did as Trump and his allies tried to reverse the election outcome.

The public will learn about the actions of Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, whose 2,000-plus text messages provided the committee with a snapshot of the real-time scramble to keep Trump in office. Of John Eastman, the conservative law professor who was the architect of the unsuccessful scheme to convince Vice President Mike Pence to halt the certification on Jan. 6. Of the Justice Department officials who threatened to resign rather than go along with Trump’s startling proposals.

Lawmakers have also been caught up in the probe, including House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who defied the committee’s subpoena requests for testimony. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who urged her father to call off the rioters, appeared privately before the committee.

The Justice Department has arrested and charged more than 800 people for the violence that day, the biggest dragnet in its history.

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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

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

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By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -An 11-year-old survivor of last month’s mass shooting at a Texas elementary school told U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday how she desperately acted to save her own life after the gunman shot a friend next to her, saying, “I got the blood and put it all over me.”

Miah Cerrillo, 11, and the parents of multiple young Americans killed and wounded in a spate of recent mass shootings testified on Wednesday before a congressional panel as a bipartisan group of senators worked to see if there was any compromise on gun safety that Democrats and Republicans can agree to.

“He told my teacher ‘good night’ and shot her in the head,” Cerrillo said in a pre-taped interview played for the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee.

“And then he shot some of my classmates and the white board,” she said, adding: “He shot my friend that was next to me … and I thought he was going to come back to the room. I got the blood and put it all on me.”

The young girl said she fears such violence could happen again at school.

Cerrillo spoke about two weeks after the shooting by an 18-year-old at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 of her classmates and two teachers.

A spate of mass shootings across the United States in recent weeks has killed dozens and sparked the latest round of bipartisan talks in the U.S. Senate.

Her testimony came as the United States has suffered more than 200 mass murders just this year.

While the House since last year has been passing a series of sweeping gun-related reforms that likely would be blocked by Senate Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Reuters she had “trust” in the Senate negotiators and noted the urgency for Congress to act.

With Democrats and Republicans deeply divided on guns, the Senate talks have focused on modest goals including encouraging states to pass “red flag” laws to deny firearms to people judged a risk to themselves or the public and federal funding to improve school security.

A bipartisan group of senators on Wednesday were haggling over the likely costs of beefing up treatment of mental illnesses that could contribute to gun violence and for funding states’ red flag programs, according to senators.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said that while “we’re close on a number of these issues,” negotiators still have plenty of details to iron out.

During the House hearing, Republicans on the panel vowed to defend the right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Many of them have objected to proposals such as limiting sales of the assault-style rifles used in the Uvalde massacre and another mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store that killed 10 Black victims.

‘DEFEND MYSELF FROM EVIL’

Another witness, Lucretia Hughes of the DC Project Women for Gun Rights, criticized the idea of more gun control laws.

“Y’all are delusional if you think it’s going to keep us safe,” she said. She added that her 19-year-old son was shot dead in April 2016 by a person with an illegally obtained gun.

“How about letting me defend myself from evil? You don’t think that I’m capable and trustworthy to handle a firearm?” Hughes added.

Public opinion polls show a majority of Americans favor steps to expand background checks of prospective gun buyers and other moves to rein in spiking gun violence.

But Wednesday’s hearings underscored the deep emotions of the debate.

The sobbing parents of one of the dead Uvalde students urged Congress to take tough steps to control gun sales.

“Somewhere out there, there’s a mom listening to our testimony … not knowing that our reality will one day be hers unless we act now,” said Kimberly Rubio, mother of murdered daughter Lexi.

The mother of a victim of the Buffalo massacre, the alleged work of an avowed white supremacist, asked the committee: “What in the world is wrong with this country?”

Zeneta Everhart, mother of Zaire Goodman, who was injured in the shooting at a Buffalo supermarket, added, “Lawmakers who continuously allow these mass shootings to continue by not passing stricter gun laws should be voted out.”

Meanwhile, the full House was debating a bill to raise the minimum age to 21 from 18 on purchases of certain firearms and toughen prohibitions on untraceable guns.

Rather than pushing for a quick vote on the broader House bills, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has opted to give more time for bipartisan negotiations in his chamber.

Democrats have signaled to Republicans that they would be willing to accept a narrow first step with legislation, even as President Joe Biden calls for tougher action, such as banning assault weapons.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan and David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone and Mark Porter)

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ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) – The White House expects the next round of economic data to show elevated numbers on inflation, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters as President Joe Biden flew to Los Angeles, Jean-Pierre said inflation numbers to be released at the end of this week are likely to show more evidence of high inflation.

“We expect the headline inflation number to be elevated. And we expect the war in Ukraine to have some effects on core inflation, particularly when you look at things like airfares and the effect of higher jet fuel costs,” she said.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Democrats on Wednesday braced for renewed Republican attacks on their management of crime across the U.S. after residents in San Francisco voted overwhelmingly to recall the city’s progressive district attorney, suggesting that even the party’s most loyal supporters are frustrated with the way in which violence and social problems are being addressed.

Chesa Boudin was swept into the district attorney’s office pledging to seek alternatives to incarceration, end the racist war on drugs and hold police officers to account. But the city’s longstanding problems with vandalism, open drug use and robberies proved too much for voters, who blamed him for making the situation worse.

While a single city race is hardly a barometer of the national mood, the rejection of Boudin by residents in the nation’s progressive epicenter carried symbolic significance for members of both parties. Republicans were emboldened by the vote, planning to highlight crime in several critical Senate races. At the White House, meanwhile, President Joe Biden acknowledged that the vote sent a “clear message” about public safety.

“Both parties have to step up and do something about crime as well as gun violence,” Biden said ahead of a trip to California, noting he sent “billions of dollars and encouraged them to use it to hire police officers and reforming police departments.”

“It’s time to move,” Biden continued. “It’s time that states and the localities spend the money they have to deal with crime as well as retrain police officers.”

The Democratic president’s tough-on-crime comments come as his party continues to face pointed attacks from Republicans about its commitment to public safety two years after progressive activists responded to the police murder of George Floyd by championing calls to “defund the police.” Biden has rejected such calls, as have the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress, yet polling suggests that voters have become increasingly likely to trust Republicans more than Democrats on public safety.

Republicans, pointing to the San Francisco election, signaled that they would continue to hammer vulnerable Democratic candidates in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin for their record on crime or associations with the Black Lives Matter movement. While the economy is widely considered the central issue of this midterm season, Republicans believe a focus on crime will help them this fall, especially among suburban voters.

“The very first thing that I talk about everywhere we go is ending the war on our police, ending the war on cops,” said Andrew Giuliani, a Republican candidate for New York governor.

Public safety remains a potent political issue, even as the numbers suggest a more complicated reality.

Crime statistics for the first quarter of 2022, released by the FBI on Monday, suggest that a rise in violent crime is not the fault of either party’s criminal justice policies. Democratic-led cities such as Detroit, Fort Wayne and South Bend, Indiana, as well as Wichita, Kansas and Portland, Ore., listed fewer murders for the first quarter of 2022 than 2021. The same could be said for several cities with Republican mayors at the helm. The reverse also was true in a number of Democratic and Republican-led cities with several showing rises in violent crime rates and murders.

Still, Republicans have effectively convinced voters, in some cases, that Democrats are more to blame.

In June 2021, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that roughly the same number of U.S. adults trusted Democrats and Republicans to handle crime. But in April 2022, the same poll found that 47% trusted the Republican Party to do a better job handling crime, compared with 35% preferring the Democratic Party.

Republican pollster Gene Ulm said the perception that Democrats are weak on crime is pushing swing suburban voters toward the GOP in midterm elections across the country, even if crime is not a defining issue in the campaign.

“The Democrats have basically tattooed themselves with defund the police,” Ulm said. “It’s too late to change it.”

Republicans point to key Senate races in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where they have already begun to attack Democrats on crime, sometimes relying on false charges.

In North Carolina, the Senate Republican campaign arm already launched two ads against Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley, a former state Supreme Court justice, for failing to protect victims of violent crime. The ads were removed by some local television stations for being inaccurate.

“Sheriffs from across North Carolina condemned these dishonest and despicable attacks because they know Cheri’s record: as a judge and chief justice, she partnered with law enforcement to keep North Carolina communities safe and hold violent offenders accountable,” campaign spokesperson Dory MacMillan said. “Washington Republicans are lying.”

Still, the GOP rhetoric is likely to persist. Republicans are also telegraphing weak-on-crime attacks against Wisconsin Democrat Mandela Barnes, a Senate candidate photographed holding a shirt critical of immigration officers; and Pennsylvania Senate nominee John Fetterman, who used his powers as lieutenant governor to help increase the number of pardons.

Campaign spokesman Joe Calvello noted that Fetterman has a history of confronting crime as the chief law enforcement officer of Braddock, Pa., where he served as mayor.

“Under John’s leadership, Braddock went five and a half years without a gun death,” Calvello said. “John not only has worked hand-in-hand with the police, but he knows what challenges our police force face and how to support them.”

Back in San Francisco, Boudin blamed his loss on “right-wing billionaires” who exploited understandable frustration over a pandemic and city government that has failed to deliver on basics.

Former Mayor Willie Brown also warned against reading too much into the recall, given that Boudin won election in 2019 with 36% of first-place votes in San Francisco’s ranked-choice system.

No candidate – Republican or Democrat — can ignore the public’s need to feel safe, Brown said.

“There is an absolute need for people to feel safer, and if they, the public, voter interprets your advocacy as not being sensitive to that component … they will probably not vote for you,” Brown said. “They will vote for somebody that does give them some level of comfort, that safety is as important as all the other factors.”

Beyond San Francisco on Tuesday night, a reform-minded progressive in Contra Costa County was keeping her seat while in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, the progressive favorite heads to a runoff against a long-time prosecutor in November for an open seat being vacated by a more traditional law-and-order district attorney.

Ludovic Blain, executive director of the California Donor Table, which seeks to elect progressive candidates, pointed out that the population of Contra Costa and Alameda counties dwarfs the size of San Francisco, which is under 900,000.

“If we were to look at one election to decide whether Democrats are vulnerable or not, it wouldn’t be the San Francisco one,” he said.

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Peoples reported from New York. AP writers Hannah Fingerhut and Gary Fields in Washington contributed.

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By James Oliphant

(Reuters) -Voters in San Francisco recalled the city’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, a Democrat, in a nationally watched test of frustrations over rising crime that also split Democrats in one of America’s most liberal cities.

With 75% of the estimated votes counted, 60.5% of ballots were to remove Boudin from office, while 39.5% voted no, according to Edison Research, which projected the recall.

Boudin had been the target of a multi-million-dollar recall campaign by residents who say the liberal California enclave has become an increasingly unsafe place to live.

Many of its backers were Democrats in a city where Republicans are a distinct minority. But the election has ramifications beyond San Francisco, with national polls showing Americans increasingly worried about violent crime.

Republicans hope to seize upon that anxiety in their bid to assume control of the U.S. Congress in the November midterm elections. Republican-backed ads are already running in states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin addressing fears of rising crime.

The concerns in San Francisco resemble those in other large cities in the United States, where gun violence spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Boudin was elected in 2019 promising to institute criminal justice reforms designed to keep low-level offenders from jail and spare juveniles from facing long prison terms. His critics blame those policies for an uptick in murders, shootings and property crimes, as well as an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

His defenders say the spike was a function of the pandemic and note that crime is reverting to norms that existed beforehand. They contend the city’s swelling homeless population has distorted some residents’ perceptions of security.

The recall effort is San Francisco’s second this year. In February, voters ousted three members of the city’s school board.

Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, will choose Boudin’s replacement.

Downstate in Los Angeles, public safety and homelessness are also top issues in the city’s mayoral contest on Tuesday.

Rick Caruso, a billionaire Republican-turned-Democrat, was leading Democrat Karen Bass, a top progressive in Congress, with 41% of the vote to 38% with some 40 percent of votes counted. If neither receives a majority of the vote, they would face off in a run-off election in November.

In the primary for California governor, Democratic incumbent Gavin Newsom was easily leading the field with 60 percent of the vote, while Republican challenger Brian Dahle trailed far behind at 15 percent with around half of the estimated votes counted.

(Reporting by James Oliphant and Mary MillikenEditing by Colleen Jenkins and Alistair Bell)

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SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Republicans picked a seasoned TV broadcaster to take on New Mexico’s incumbent Democratic governor, nominating former network meteorologist Mark Ronchetti on his pledges to rein in state spending, shore up policing and unleash already record-setting oil production.

Ronchetti won by a wide margin in a field of five candidates that included state Rep. Rebecca Dow, a prominent voice among Republicans in the Legislature.

The GOP nominee, a family man joined on the victory stage by his wife and school-aged daughters, pledged to back police officers by restoring immunity from prosecution and blasted Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham for a lengthy suspension of in-person teaching and student proficiency testing during the pandemic.

“Now our children are even further behind, and she has no plan to catch them up,” Ronchetti said. “Every at-risk child deserves to know that they have a chance with a great education.”

He added a jab at new social studies standards that increase instruction related to racial and social identity in a heavily Latino and Native American state.

“We’ll focus on teaching them reading, writing, history, science and math. One thing we won’t teach them is how to hate each other,” Ronchetti said.

New Mexico is home to 23 federally recognized Native American tribes and nations, while nearly half the population claims Hispanic ethnicity.

Separately, the Democratic nomination for attorney general went to Raúl Torrez, a second-term district attorney for Albuquerque and its outskirts.

He defeated State Auditor Brian Colón to vie in an open race against Republican attorney and U.S. Marine veteran Jeremy Michael Gay of Gallup.

New Mexico has alternated between Democratic and Republican governors since the early 1980s. An incumbent governor last lost reelection in 1994.

The November election for New Mexico governor will be a test of Democratic resolve in an oil-producing region with enduring currents of Catholicism and a strong culture of gun ownership.

The GOP in 2020 flipped a congressional district along the U.S. border with Mexico with the election of Republican U.S. Rep. Yvette Herrell, a firm defender of former President Donald Trump.

Ronchetti has pledged to deploy 150 state law enforcement personnel to the remote international border with Mexico to combat illegal migration and drug and human trafficking. The proposal echoes National Guard deployments by Republican governors in Arizona and Texas.

In a nod to his days as a TV personality, Ronchetti cracked some jokes on the victory stage. He ridiculed the governor for lavish public spending at the governor’s mansion on premium beef and liquor, contrasting that with his own offer of chips, salsa and a cash bar for supporters on election night.

Lujan Grisham spent much of Election Day surveying recent destruction from the largest wildfire in recorded New Mexico history. President Joe Biden is scheduled to discuss relief efforts during a planned visit Saturday to Santa Fe.

An incumbent governor hasn’t lost election since 1994. And Republicans have faltered in a string of statewide elections, ceding control of every statewide elected office to Democrats, including the five-seat state Supreme Court.

Since taking office in 2019, Lujan Grisham and the Democratic-led Legislature have enacted reforms to ensure access to abortion, expand government oversight of guns and expand police accountability by lifting immunity from prosecution for misconduct.

The incumbent governor has walked a fine line on the environment with climate change initiatives that rein in methane pollution from oilfield infrastructure, phase out coal-fired power plants and mandate new renewable energy investments without restricting oil production. New Mexico last year surpassed North Dakota in 2021 to become the nation’s No. 2 oil producer behind Texas.

Lujan Grisham has harnessed a surge in state government income to underwrite teacher raises, offer free college education to in-state students, expand preschool and bolster Medicaid coverage across a state with high rates of poverty.

In response to inflation, the state is sending out staggered payments of up to $1,500 per household between June and August.

New Mexico’s most recent Republican governor was Susana Martinez, an El Paso native with family ties in Mexico who served as a district attorney before winning an open race to succeed termed-out Gov. Bill Richardson.

First-term congresswomen were seeking reelection to New Mexico’s three congressional districts, without primary challengers.

In the 2nd District of southern New Mexico, Las Cruces City Councilor Gabe Vasquez won the Democratic nomination to challenge Herrell. He defeated rural physician Darshan Patel.

In the 1st District that includes most of Albuquerque and rural communities to the south, the GOP nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury was won by former police Detective Michelle Garcia Holmes.

Holmes ran for the same congressional seat in 2020 and was defeated by Democrat Deb Haaland, now serving as U.S. Interior secretary.

In other statewide races, former Sandoval County Treasurer Laura Montoya won the Democratic nomination for state treasurer, defeating former Magistrate Judge and Treasury official Heather Benavidez. Montoya will compete against former Santa Fe County Commissioner Harry Montoya in an open race to replace termed out State Treasurer Tim Eichenberg.

The Democratic nomination for state auditor went to utilities regulator Joseph Maestas, an elected member of the Public Regulation Commission. He’ll confront Libertarian write-in candidate Robert Vaillancourt in a general election without a Republican contender.

In state legislative races, state Rep. Roger Montoya of Velarde was ousted in the Democratic primary by Joseph Sanchez of Alcalde, who gave up the seat in 2020 to run unsuccessfully for Congress.

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AP writer Susan Montoya Bryan contributed from Albuquerque.

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By Jason Lange and David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, easily won the Republican nomination to seek reelection in November, while a former member of Trump’s cabinet was locked in a tight race in his Montana primary for the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday.

Noem, known for her opposition to COVID-19 restrictions, won her primary with 77% of the vote, while former Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke of Montana was locked in a tight race as he seeks the party’s nomination to return to Congress.

At the other end of the political spectrum, San Francisco’s progressive Democratic district attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled from office by Democratic voters frustrated with spikes in homicides and gun violence, according to Edison Research. With 80% of the expected vote in, 60% of voters opted for Boudin’s ouster.

His fate could ring alarm bells for Democrats, who have been painted by Republicans as being lenient on crime ahead of November’s midterm elections.

With President Joe Biden slumping in the polls and soaring inflation souring voters’ moods, Republicans are expected to win control of the House and possibly the Senate, which would bring Biden’s legislative agenda to a halt and give Republicans the power to launch distracting and possibly politically damaging investigations.

Just 41% of Americans approve of Biden’s performance as president, near the lowest level of his presidency, according to a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll completed on Tuesday.

The poll also showed the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were neck-and-neck in voter preferences ahead of the November congressional elections. Thirty-nine percent said they would vote for a Democrat compared to 37% picking a Republican. The difference was well within the poll’s 4 percentage point credibility interval.

Voters in New Jersey, Iowa, Mississippi and New Mexico also cast ballots on Tuesday in nominating contests that will set the competitive field for Nov. 8’s elections.

In Montana, with about two-thirds of the expected vote counted, Zinke held 41.5 percent of the vote and Al Olszewski, a former Montana state senator, had 39.3%, according to Edison Research. The race was too close to call.

Zinke’s primary came months after an inspector general report accused him of using his position as head of the Interior Department to advance a development project in his hometown and lying to an ethics investigator. He has denied wrongdoing.

South Dakota’s Noem beat former state House speaker Steven Haugaard 77% to 23%.

Noem has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential running-mate if Trump seeks election again in 2024 or as a White House candidate in her own right if he does not.

Republicans are favored to easily win the South Dakota governor and Montana House races in November.

HOUSE CHALLENGERS PICKED

Republicans also nominated candidates to take on embattled House Democrats, setting the stage for contests that will help determine control of that chamber.

New Jersey Republican Tom Kean Jr. won his party’s nomination to challenge embattled Democratic Representative Tom Malinowski in November, as voters cast ballots in primary elections across seven U.S. states, according to Edison Research.

Kean, the son of popular two-time Governor Thomas Kean, had more than 45% of the vote, far ahead any of his field of rivals. Malinowski, who is viewed as one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the country, also secured his renomination.

“I am both humbled and fully committed to flipping this seat in November,” Kean said in a tweet after winning his primary.

In Iowa, former state Senator Zach Nunn outpaced two other Republicans to seize the party nomination to challenge embattled Democratic Representative Cindy Axne.

Nunn, the only Republican contender who has held elective office, boasts a string of endorsements from high-profile party luminaries including Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and several sitting House Republicans.

CALIFORNIA SHAKEOUT

While Boudin lost his fight against a recall in San Francisco, Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer and former Republican, battled U.S. Representative Karen Bass and a host of other liberal candidates in the Los Angeles mayoral election.

Caruso was leading Bass with 41% of the vote to 38% with some 40% of votes counted, signaling they were headed to a run-off election in November.

Caruso, who has spent more than $30 million of his own money in the campaign, made crime the centerpiece of his candidacy in a city where homicides reached a 15-year high in 2021. That forced Bass, a longtime progressive champion in Congress, to move to the center and pledge to put more police on the streets.

A replacement for Boudin will be chosen by San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, a Democrat who has criticized the prosecutor but did not take a stance on the recall.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Additional reorting by Jason Lange, Eric Beech, Kanishka Singh and Richard Cowan; Editing by Scott Malone, Mary Milliken and Alistair Bell)

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