Politics

FLINT TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — A woman who was a public official in a Flint-area community admitted Wednesday that she broke a seal on a ballot box to ensure that votes could not be recounted in her 2020 race, prosecutors said.

Kathy Funk, 59, pleaded no contest to misconduct in office, a felony, under an agreement that includes no time in jail.

Funk, a Democrat, was the Flint Township clerk in 2020 with responsibility over elections. She was accused of sabotaging a ballot box after the August primary that year, an act that would make those ballots ineligible for a recount.

Funk had won the race by just 79 votes out of about 5,300. A recount was not conducted.

Election officials who “undermine the very foundation of our democracy and will be held accountable,” Attorney General Dana Nessel said.

Funk quit her township post in 2021 for a bigger job as elections supervisor for Genesee County. She was dismissed last year.

After the August 2020 election, Funk contacted state police to report a break-in at Flint Township Hall and that a seal on a ballot cannister had been damaged, the Flint Journal reported, quoting the police report.

Manya Triplett, who narrowly lost that race, now is the township clerk.

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Someone scammed U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran’s reelection campaign out of $690,000 by getting the Kansas Republican’s accounting firm to wire the money to fraudulent bank accounts, his office said Monday.

Moran’s campaign treasurer, Timothy Gottschalk, notified the Federal Election Commission by electronic letter Dec. 8 of “fraudulent activity by a third-party cyber-criminal.” The letter said that after the campaign notified a local sheriff’s office on Nov. 16, eight days after the general election, the case was forwarded to the FBI and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

The letter said the campaign received two fraudulent invoices that appeared to be from SRCP Media Inc., a Washington area company hired to handle Moran’s broadcast advertising. The letter said the campaign organization wired $345,000 on Oct. 25 and another $345,000 on Nov. 9.

“As soon as a discrepancy was realized, it was reported to law enforcement,” Moran spokesman Tom Brandt said in an email Monday. “We are currently pursuing all avenues available to recover the money and there is an ongoing investigation with the FBI.”

The campaign’s electronic letter to the FEC said that as of Dec. 8, the campaign had recovered $168,184. The letter was first reported by the RawStory website last week.

The FBI does not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, said Bridget Patton, its spokesperson in Kansas City, Missouri. Representatives of the KBI and SRCP did not immediately return telephone and email messages seeking comment.

Moran won his third six-year term in the Senate in November with 60% of the vote against Democrat Mark Holland, a former Kansas City, Kansas, mayor. His reelection campaign raised more than $7.3 million and spent more than $5.1 million through Nov. 28, according to a finance report it filed with the FEC, also on Dec. 8.

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Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna

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WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans renewed their investigation Wednesday into the art dealings of Hunter Biden, pushing for details on who is purchasing his work as part of the party’s long-promised probe into President Joe Biden and his family.

Rep. James Comer, new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, asked for a transcribed interview with Georges Bergès, the art dealer who has been showcasing Hunter Biden’s work in New York and Los Angeles galleries since 2021. He requested communications between the gallery and the White House, citing Republican concerns the younger Biden is trading in on his father’s name.

“Despite being a novice artist, Hunter Biden received exorbitant amounts of money selling his artwork, the buyers’ identities remain unknown, and you appear to be the sole record keeper of these lucrative transactions,” Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said in a letter to Bergès.

The White House counsel’s office and a representative for Hunter Biden did not immediately return requests for comment.

The Oversight request comes as Comer and Republicans ramp up their investigation into members of the Biden family and their business dealings. The Republicans have requested information from Bergès before, but those requests were ignored when the GOP was in the minority.

Biden aides have derided Republicans’ focus on Hunter Biden, who has never held a position in the White House or presidential campaign, as hypocritical. They point to the president’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who had a daughter and son-in-law working for him in the White House and often spent taxpayer dollars at his own properties.

The Biden White House said it established an arrangement in the early days of the presidency that allows Hunter Biden to sell his artwork without knowing the identity of the purchaser. Officials said it would avoid any potential ethical entanglements with the sales.

Under the arrangement, a private art gallery owner sets prices for Hunter Biden’s work and handles all bidding and sales, but does not share any information about buyers or prospective buyers with Hunter or anyone in the administration. Bergès also agreed to reject any offer that he deemed suspicious or that came in over the asking price.

The prices for Hunter Biden’s art, according to Comer, range from $55,000 to $225,000 a piece at the SoHo gallery where his latest collection debuted earlier this month. His paintings often depict abstract flowers and trees with the use of a mixture of ink and acrylic on metal.

“It is concerning that President Biden’s son is the recipient of anonymous, high-dollar transactions — potentially from foreign buyers — with no accountability or oversight (other than you),” Comer wrote in the letter. “The American people deserve transparency regarding certain details about Hunter Biden’s expensive art transactions.”

Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business work are already under federal investigation by a federal grand jury in Delaware. And his membership on the board of a Ukrainian energy company and his efforts to strike deals in China have long raised questions about whether he traded on his father’s public service.

Joe Biden has said he has never spoken to his son about foreign business. There are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The debate around raising the debt ceiling sounds eerily similar: Newly elected House Republicans, eager to confront the Democratic president in the White House, refused to raise the debt limit without cuts to federal spending.

Negotiations over the debt ceiling consumed Washington in 2011, a high-stakes showdown between the Obama White House and the new generation of “tea party” House Republicans.

“Now we’re getting down to the real hard stuff: I’ll trade you my bicycle for your golf clubs,” the chief negotiator, Vice President Joe Biden, said at the time.

But weeks of tense talks between Biden and the House Republicans collapsed that summer, sending Washington careening toward a fiscal crisis. When Republicans in Congress refused to raise the debt ceiling, the government risked a catastrophic default and suffered a devastating credit downgrade, a first in the nation’s history.

Lessons learned from the debt ceiling standoff more than a decade ago are rippling through Washington, as the White House and Congress brace for another fiscal showdown — one that appears headed toward a very similar outcome. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to budge.

“The whole debate is a façade,” said William Gale, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution who wrote “Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future,” a book on the U.S. debt.

“That was the height of the ‘tea party’ stuff and they wanted to flex their muscles, but it’s just such a stupid way to try to do it — because you don’t really want to risk the good credit rating of the United States government,” Gale said. “I suspect most of these guys already knew it.”

The Treasury Department has notified Congress that it’s time to again raise the nation’s debt ceiling, now at $31 trillion, to allow more borrowing to pay off the country’s accumulated bills. Treasury said it has started taking “extraordinary measures” to keep paying the bills, but the money will run out by June.

Raising the nation’s debt ceiling had been a routine matter historically, a final task after Congress had authorized federal spending and appropriated the money needed to pay for the country’s various programs and services.

But that all changed when the Republican tea party came to town after the 2010 election.

Saying Americans were “taxed enough already,” the tea party House Republicans arrived promising to slash federal spending, using the debt ceiling vote as their political leverage.

Debt had doubled during the George W. Bush presidency and the post-9/11 wars overseas, and it skyrocketed under President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the Great Recession, teetering around $15 trillion.

At one point, Republicans were seeking $1-for-$1 tradeoffs — a dollar of spending cuts for every dollar of new borrowing. They also wanted a “cut, cap and balance” approach that would eventually curb deficits.

“We met for months,” Republican Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader tasked by Speaker John Boehner to negotiate with Biden, recalled in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “We all sat down. But this year, this time, President Biden is now refusing negotiate.”

In the end, House Republicans could not agree on a deal with the Obama White House.

When the August 2011 deadline came to raise the debt ceiling, only an eleventh-hour agreement with Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell and some Democrats tasking a “Super Committee” to recommend further federal reductions ensured there would be no debt default.

Spooked by the political crisis in Washington, the credit markets downgraded the nation’s credit ranking for the first time, upping the costs of future borrowing.

The Biden White House appears to have drawn the conclusion that it’s not worth negotiating with new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won a slim GOP majority in last November’s midterm elections and who may — or may not — be able to deliver the votes on any debt ceiling deal.

“Look, lowering the deficit has always been a top priority,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday at the White House.

She said Biden, a Democrat, has “always said he is happy to talk to anyone who wants to deal with that in a responsible way.”

“But preventing the default,” she said, “is a separate matter.”

Biden is scheduled to meet Tuesday with Democratic congressional leaders at the White House and is planning to invite McCarthy in the future.

McCarthy has been trying to push Biden to the table. “I think it’s arrogance to say, ‘Oh, we’re not going to negotiate anything,’” the speaker told the AP recently at the Capitol.

McCarthy has already shown how hard it will be to lead his majority — it took 15 ballots just to make him the House speaker in the face of resistance from right-flank Republicans.

To win over the holdouts, McCarthy promised his detractors he would fight to bring federal spending back to fiscal 2022 levels — an 8% reduction, or 17% if defense military spending is spared.

In pushing McCarthy to drive a hard bargain in debt talks, House Republicans may be taking a lesson from the tea party era that one way to force their leadership’s hand is to threaten his ouster if he caves.

During his campaign to become speaker, McCarthy also agreed to the hard-right demand to reinstate a House rule that allows a single lawmaker to file a “motion to vacate the chair,” essentially a House vote to oust the speaker.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., all but dared McCarthy on Monday to put the GOP’s proposed spending reductions on the table. “If Republicans are talking about draconian cuts, they have an obligation to show Americans what those cuts are, and let the public react,” he said.

But it’s not clear if the proposed fiscal 2022 spending cuts, or any, would win over McCarthy’s hard-right flank to raise the debt ceiling.

One major difference compared to 2011 is that “Republicans have not coalesced” around a unified position, said Rohit Kumar, who was an aide to McConnell during that showdown.

“At this point, I think it’s unclear what could get 218 Republican votes in conjunction with a debt limit increase, even just as an opening bid,” said Kumar, now an executive with the tax services firm PwC, referring to the tally of votes typically needed to pass House legislation.

McConnell again is expected to play a pivotal role in easing the debt ceiling standoff, and some have pointed to bipartisan Senate legislation that would review spending, much the way the failed Super Committee was tasked with finding cuts after the 2011 debt ceiling showdown.

“Forget the Super Committee,” Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., the GOP whip, said in a recent AP interview. “What a ridiculous outcome.”

Many House Republicans were not in Congress during the 2011 debt ceiling showdown. Said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., one of the McCarthy holdouts: “I’m certainly not focused on what happened 10 years ago.”

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Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to name Jeff Zients, who ran the administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of Biden’s term, as his next chief of staff, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Biden’s current top aide, Ron Klain, is preparing to leave the job in the coming weeks.

Since serving as COVID-19 response coordinator, Zients has returned to the White House in a low-profile position to work on staffing matters for the remainder of Biden’s first term.

The two people familiar with the matter were not authorized to publicly discuss Biden’s plans before an official announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Washington Post first reported on Zients’ expected appointment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The change at the highest levels of senior staff comes as Biden passes his two-year mark in office and pivots to a defensive stance against a House Republican majority hungry to investigate his administration’s actions and his family. The White House remains mired in controversy over discoveries of classified documents at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at his former institute in Washington, with the latest tranche of found records disclosed Saturday evening.

Biden, 80, is also preparing to launch his reelection campaign in the coming weeks.

The president’s main sphere of advisers, in addition to Zients, on politics and legislation will continue to include presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti, senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, legislative affairs director Louisa Terrell, and Jen O’Malley Dillon and Bruce Reed, who are deputy chiefs of staff.

Klain will remain in Biden’s political orbit, according to a person familiar with his plans — not unlike the role played by Cedric Richmond, who was the president’s first director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and now is a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee.

The outgoing chief of staff was also known to be friendly with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But some liberal critics of Zients swiftly went on the attack against the appointment even before it was official, highlighting in particular his private-sector ties.

Jeff Hauser, the founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive group that advocates for liberal appointees in government, said Sunday that the selection of Zients as the top White House aide did not jibe with Biden’s “Scranton Joe” political image.

“Unfortunately, Zients is a veteran of private equity, rapacious health care providers, and Big Tech, which sets up a fundamental question that could determine Biden’s political future: Will a Zients-led executive branch pursue the unpopular misconduct of people like Jeffrey Zients?” Hauser said. “It would be against Zients’ character to pursue corporate lawbreaking, but it is also the only way Biden can retain the mantle of populist against the likes of (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis and Trump.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts was sworn in as the newest member of the U.S. Senate on Monday, replacing Republican Sen. Ben Sasse as the Senate returns from several weeks of recess to begin a new session of closely-divided government.

Ricketts is bringing the Senate back to its “full 100-person strength,” said Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who welcomed Ricketts on the Senate floor after he was sworn into office by Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Republican is joining the Senate as Democrats navigate a 51-49 majority, having gained one seat in last year’s election and with newly-Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema accepting committee assignments from Democrats. Ricketts replaces Sasse, who took a job as the president of the University of Florida two years into his second term.

Ricketts was appointed by his successor and political ally, Republican Gov. Jim Pillen, and will have to run in a special election in 2024 to fill out the rest of Sasse’s term. If he wins, he would then run again in 2026 for a full six-year term.

The former governor was congratulated by Republicans and Democrats on the Senate floor. As is tradition, he was accompanied by Republican Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska as he walked down the main aisle and stood at the Senate dais to take the oath of office.

Sasse was a fiercely independent Republican senator who often kept to himself and was a harsh critic of former President Donald Trump, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Sasse was one of seven Republicans who voted to impeach the president shortly afterward, and Trump frequently lashed out at him.

Even though he was easily re-elected in 2020, Sasse spoke of “ups and downs” of his Senate career in a December farewell speech, saying his tenure “felt like a noogie and a slap and a head butt and a hug all at once.”

Ricketts also has a complicated relationship with the former president, who has criticized him and his family for supporting Republican candidates who he opposed, including Pillen. Trump backed one of Pillen’s primary opponents, Charles W. Herbster.

Nominating Ricketts earlier this month, after Sasse’s departure, Pillen said that 111 people applied for the vacant seat and nine Republicans were interviewed. He said he chose Ricketts based on their shared conservatism and Ricketts’ promise that he would later run to be elected to the seat.

“I don’t believe in placeholders,” Pillen said. “Placeholders don’t have any accountability to the people.”

While the new GOP senator’s politics reflect his conservative constituents, some politicians in both parties raised questions about his appointment. Ricketts, who has put his own net worth at about $50 million, contributed more than $100,000 of his own money to Pillen’s campaign.

Ricketts and his family members have used their fortunes to both push their political agendas and to get allies elected to key political seats. Ricketts’ father, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, is worth an estimated $4 billion.

McConnell praised Ricketts’ service in Nebraska and said the wealthy investor has “applied private sector savvy to the work of public administration with great effect.”

“The people of Nebraska chose wisely in electing and re-electing Gov. Ricketts by huge margins, and their new governor chose wisely in sending his predecessor here to this chamber.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s decision allowing the FBI to search his home in Delaware last week is laying him open to fresh negative attention and embarrassment following the earlier discoveries of classified documents at that home and a former office. But it’s a legal and political calculation that aides hope will pay off in the long run as he prepares to seek reelection.

The remarkable, nearly 13-hour search by FBI agents of the sitting president’s Wilmington home is the latest political black eye for Biden, who promised to restore propriety to the office after the tumultuous tenure of his predecessor, Donald Trump.

But with his actions, Biden is doing more than simply complying with federal investigators assigned to look into the discovery of the records. The president is aiming to show that, unlike Trump, he never intended to retain classified materials — a key distinction that experts say diminishes the risks of criminal liability.

White House spokesman Ian Sams said Monday that Biden’s own attorneys invited the FBI to conduct the search. “This was a voluntary proactive offer by the president’s personal lawyers to DOJ to have access to the home,” he said, adding that it reflected “how seriously” Biden is taking the issue.

Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department national security official, said, “If I was a lawyer and I represented the president of the United States and I wanted to show, ’I am being fully cooperative, and I do care to be projecting transparency to the American public, and I do take this seriously,’ I think this is the advice I would give as well.”

That’s not to say she approves of his handling of the documents.

“I think it’s wrong that he had those documents there,” she said. “It shows lapses at the end of the administration,” when Biden was completing his time as vice president under Barack Obama.

Biden’s personal attorneys first discovered classified materials on Nov. 2, a week before the midterm elections, as they were clearing out an office Biden had used at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. Since that initial discovery, Biden’s team has adopted an accommodating approach to the investigation, even if they haven’t been completely transparent in public.

The White House has cited the “ risk” of sharing information “that’s not complete” potentially interfering with the probe to justify not revealing more information to the public.

They didn’t acknowledge the first discovery before the elections, though they swiftly notified the National Archives, returned the documents the day after they were found and coordinated subsequent searches and discoveries with the Department of Justice.

They also are not standing in the way of interviews of staff, including Kathy Chung, Biden’s executive assistant when he was vice president, who helped oversee the packing of boxes that were taken to the Penn Biden Center.

She feels some responsibility but had “absolutely” no knowledge of classified documents being packed, according to a person familiar with her thinking. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Biden himself has said he was surprised the documents were in his possession. Last Thursday, frustrated at all the focus, he told reporters: “There’s no there there.”

It all fits a theme: Biden and his aides maintain the document mishandling was not intentional. As far as Biden’s possible legal exposure goes, the question of intention is critical: Federal law does not allow anyone to store classified documents in an unauthorized location, but it’s only a prosecutable crime when someone is found to have “knowingly” removed the documents from a proper place.

Still, welcoming the FBI search could backfire depending on what else might be found. Agents last week took possession of an additional round of items with classified markings, and some of Biden’s handwritten notes and materials from his tenure as vice president and senator.

That’s in addition to the documents already turned in by Biden’s lawyers. Agents could also choose to search the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s other home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, as the probe continues. Sams declined to say whether Biden would sign off on additional searches, referring the matter to the DOJ — which has asked the White House not to publicize searches in advance.

Criticism of Biden’s handling of the matter has come from Democrats as well as Republicans. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the president should be “embarrassed by the situation.”

“I think he should have a lot of regrets,” added Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. Even Biden’s own attorneys have called it a “mistake.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have sought to use their new-found powers in the House, where they regained the majority this month, to investigate Biden’s handling of the documents and hope to capitalize on the investigation, even as they have said investigating the documents retained by Trump is not a priority.

“It is troubling that classified documents have been improperly stored at the home of President Biden for at least six years, raising questions about who may have reviewed or had access to classified information,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., wrote in asking for visitor logs to Biden’s residence.

Responding to Comer’s requests for copies of the documents taken from Biden’s home, the White House counsel’s office on Monday said it no longer had possession of them. It said the White House would “accommodate legitimate oversight interests,” while also “respecting the separation of powers and the constitutional and statutory obligations of the executive branch generally and the White House in particular.”

“This is not ‘legitimate’ transparency from President Biden who once claimed he’d have the most transparent administration in history,” said Oversight Committee spokesperson Jessica Collins, who added that the panels Republicans would use “all possible tools” to get answers.

Trump and some of his supporters have been outspoken, claiming Biden is guilty of worse mishandling of classified documents than the Democrats sanctimoniously accuse Trump of being. The former president is sure to press that accusation vigorously as he campaigns to regain the White House.

The investigation of Trump also centers on classified documents that ended up at a home. In that case, though, the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the return of documents that Trump had refused to give back, then obtained a warrant and seized more than 100 documents during a dramatic August search of his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. Federal agents are investigating potential violations of three federal laws, including one that governs gathering, transmitting or losing defense information under the Espionage Act.

In 2016, when the FBI recommended against criminal charges for Hillary Clinton over classified emails she sent and received via a private server when she was secretary of state, then-FBI Director James Comey said the Justice Department —in choosing which cases to bring over the past century — has looked for evidence of criminal intent, indications of disloyalty to the U.S., retention of vast quantities of classified documents or any effort to obstruct justice.

It’s not clear whether agents in the Biden investigation have progressed beyond the question of intent. The White House has not answered key questions, including how classified information from his time as vice president could have ended up inside his Delaware home. But Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to head the probe given the sensitive politics around it.

Garland declared on Monday, in answer to a question: “We do not have different rules for Democrats or Republicans. … We apply the facts under the law in each case in a neutral and nonpartisan manner. That is what we always do and that is what we are doing in the matters you are referring to.”

One key test of the limits of Biden’s strategy revolves around the question of whether the president will agree to an interview with federal investigators if he is asked. White House officials thus far have refused to say whether or under what terms he would do so.

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REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. (AP) — White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who has spent more than two years as President Joe Biden’s top aide, is preparing to leave his job in the coming weeks, according to a person familiar with Klain’s plans.

Klain’s expected departure comes not long after the White House and Democrats had a better-than-expected showing in the November elections, buoyed by a series of major legislative accomplishments, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a sweeping climate, health care and tax package that all Republicans rejected.

The personnel change is also a rarity for an administration that has had minimal turnover so far. No member of Biden’s Cabinet has stepped down, in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s White House, with frequent staff turmoil and other crises.

The person familiar with Klain’s plans was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm the development, which was first reported by The New York Times.

The White House did not return calls or emails seeking comment on Klain’s expected exit. Spending the weekend in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Biden did not respond to shouted questions about when his chief of staff is expected to depart.

Klain sent an email to White House staff on Friday, which was the second anniversary of Biden’s inauguration. “Although much work remains ahead, as we look back on these two years, I am awestruck at what this team has done and how you have done it,” he wrote in the email, obtained by The Associated Press, and noted that he bought cake to mark the occasion. He added: “These cakes are my small way of adding my personal thanks to those of the President, the Vice President and the country for your service and outstanding achievements.”

Now that Republicans have regained a majority in the House, the White House is preparing to shift to a more defensive posture. GOP lawmakers are planning multiple investigations into the Biden administration, examining everything from the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to U.S. border policy. Republicans are also pledging to investigate the president’s son, Hunter Biden.

Klain’s departure also comes as the White House struggles to contain the fallout after classified documents dating from Biden’s time as vice president were discovered at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at his former institute in Washington. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate the matter. Biden’s lawyer said Saturday that the FBI searched the Wilmington home on Friday, locating six additional documents containing classified markings and taking possession of some of his notes.

Among those on the shortlist to succeed Klain include Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president; Labor Secretary Marty Walsh; former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients; Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser.

Dunn has publicly ruled out interest in the chief of staff job but would be the first woman in the post. She played a leading role in shaping Biden’s political and communications strategy, including the “ultra-MAGA” framing of Republicans that helped Democrats exceed expectations during the 2022 midterms.

Zients has returned to the White House since running the COVID-19 response team in a low-profile role to ensure the administration is appropriately staffed for the remainder of Biden’s first term. Ricchetti, a former lobbyist, followed after Klain and senior adviser Bruce Reed as Biden’s final vice presidential chief of staff.

Walsh, Boston’s mayor before joining the Cabinet, earned praise from Biden as recently as Friday for his job performance. Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, is in his second stint as agriculture secretary after serving in the role for the entirety of the Obama administration. He volunteered for Biden during Biden’s ill-fated 1988 presidential bid in Iowa.

Klain, a longtime Democratic political operative, has overseen a West Wing that has been largely free of the high-stakes drama that permeated the upper echelons of the Trump administration. Klain has been an outspoken proponent of Biden’s agenda via Twitter, where he frequently engages with reporters to defend the president’s record.

His social-media use has run Klain into trouble at times. In October, he was found to have violated the Hatch Act, which bars government officials from political activity when acting in their official capacity, when he retweeted a message from a political group last spring. At the time, the White House said Klain “got it wrong this time” and he promised to be more careful with his Twitter account.

The Indianapolis native has served under Biden for decades, including as chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden was its chairman. Klain also worked on judicial picks in the Clinton White House, helping with the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsberg for the Supreme Court.

“With all due respect to my predecessors, I’m sure this is a higher priority for me.” Klain said in an Associated Press interview last month in which he discussed the importance placed by Biden of seating judges on the federal bench. ”The fact that (the president) makes it such a priority, makes it a big priority for me.”

Klain helped lead then-Vice President Al Gore’s legal team during the 2000 election’s Florida vote recount in the race against Republican George W. Bush. Actor Kevin Spacey portrayed Klain in HBO’s “Recount,” an account of the events that determined the presidency.

He was also tapped during the Obama administration to lead its response to the Ebola crisis — a background that came in handy as the Biden White House took on the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of his presidency.

The father of three is married to Monica Medina, an assistant secretary of state.

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Balsamo and Miller reported from Washington.

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SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — A U.S. congressman from Florida who was seriously injured in a tree-trimming accident in Sarasota said Saturday he has been discharged from the hospital and is recovering at home.

Rep. Greg Steube said in an evening tweet that he remains “endlessly blessed by the prayers and support from our friends, family, and community.”

He added that his office “will provide updates next week on how my recovery will impact my return to Washington.”

On Thursday a tweet posted to the congressman’s official profile said Steube had been“knocked approximately 25 feet down off a ladder while cutting tree limbs on his Sarasota property” the previous day.

A separate tweet said then that he had spent the night in the ICU after sustaining several injuries that were serious but not life-threatening. An individual witnessed the fall and called 911, the account said.

Steube also thanked staffers at Sarasota Memorial Hospital on Saturday “for the excellent care” he received.

Steube, a Republican, was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 and just began his third term. He represents all of Sarasota and Charlotte counties and part of Lee County.

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PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, a liberal firebrand and prominent Latino lawmaker, announced Monday he’ll challenge independent U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in 2024, becoming the first candidate to jump into the race and setting up a potential three-way contest.

Gallego said he’d fight for normal people struggling to make ends meet and losing faith in politicians. He said he and Sinema both come from “modest to poor means” but have taken different paths in Congress.

“I’m better for this job than Kyrsten Sinema because I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” Gallego told The Associated Press. “I think she clearly has forgotten where she came from. Instead of meeting with the people that need help, she meets with the people that are already powerful.”

Gallego, a 43-year-old military veteran first elected to Congress in 2014, had made no secret of his interest in challenging Sinema, a longtime rival in Arizona politics who has been a roadblock and irritant to Democrats during Joe Biden’s presidency. She left the Democratic Party in December, registering as an independent and saying she doesn’t “fit well into a traditional party system.” She has not said whether she plans to run for a second term.

Although no Republican has entered the race, potential contenders include former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, former U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters and Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb — all of whom are closely aligned with former President Donald Trump. Karrin Taylor Robson, a housing developer who lost to Lake in last year’s primary, and former Gov. Doug Ducey are also possible contenders.

A three-way race, coupled with the risk that Sinema and the eventual Democratic nominee will split the vote, would complicate the party’s already uphill battle to maintain control of the Senate in 2024. Democrats will be forced to defend 23 seats, including Sinema’s and two others held by independents, compared with just 10 seats for Republicans.

With tough and expensive races on the horizon, it remains unclear just how firmly the Democratic establishment and major donors will line up against Sinema, who has voted for most Democratic legislation even as she’s stood in the way of major priorities for the White House, congressional leaders and the progressive movement.

“I’m assuming that they will be with us because we are going to run the winning campaign, and because at the end of the day, if you look at where Arizonans are going to be, they’re going to be with us and not with her,” Gallego told the AP.

A spokesperson for Sinema, Hannah Hurley, declined to comment on Gallego’s announcement.

Gallego, an acerbic presence on social media who is quick to take down rivals from both parties, floated the idea of challenging Sinema to raise money last year and has for weeks been publicly assembling a team of advisers, hiring Democratic campaign veterans with experience working on tough swing-state Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

He announced his campaign with an online video that shows him talking to veterans at an American Legion post in Guadalupe, a Latino and Indigenous community just outside Phoenix. He said his path from humble roots, beating the odds by getting accepted to Harvard University, motivates him to fight to preserve the American dream, first in the military and now in politics.

The son of immigrants from Mexico and Colombia, Gallego was raised in Chicago by a single mother, after his father was imprisoned for dealing drugs. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Reserves while he was on a break from Harvard, where he struggled with culture shock. He wrote in a 2021 book, “They Called Us Lucky,” that he was asked to leave during his sophomore year, when he partied too much, his grades slipped and he broke unspecified rules. He was later allowed to return.

He fought in Iraq in 2005 in a unit that sustained heavy casualties, including the death of his best friend, and he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning. He moved to Arizona to join his Harvard girlfriend, who had become active in Democratic politics in the state. The couple married in 2010 and divorced in 2017, a month before their son was born. His ex-wife, Kate Gallego, is now the mayor of Phoenix.

Gallego was elected in 2010 to the state Legislature, where Sinema also served for one of his two terms. In 2014, he won a bitter congressional primary, toppling a dynastic figure in the Phoenix Latino community. He’s giving up a safe Democratic seat in Congress, a district that includes the Black and Latino neighborhoods of south and west Phoenix.

In Congress, he has focused on veterans and military issues.

Sinema has modeled her political approach on the maverick style of the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who alienated the grassroots of his party by sometimes crossing the aisle to work with Democrats. She’s become a fierce advocate of bipartisan compromise in an era when extreme partisanship has made it much more difficult.

She has been at the center of many of the biggest congressional deals of Biden’s presidency, from a big, bipartisan infrastructure package to a landmark bill to legally protect same-sex marriages. But she’s also become estranged from many Democrats, who blame her for voting down progressive priorities like a minimum wage hike and watering down others, like Biden’s big social spending initiatives. She single-handedly thwarted Democrats’ longtime goal of raising taxes on wealthy investors.

Her support for maintaining the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring 60 of 100 votes to pass most legislation, has made her a pariah among Democrats, who need Republican support to pass most bills despite controlling a majority of seats. The tension reached a head in 2021, when Democrats tried and failed to pass voting rights legislation.

Sinema doubled down on her position last week, telling global elites in Davos, Switzerland, that democracy didn’t collapse in the 2022 election despite her support for the filibuster.

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