Politics

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein announced a bid for governor in 2024 on Wednesday, with the Democrat pledging to focus on public education, economic advancement and equality, and to provide a sharp contrast with a potential Republican opponent.

“We’ll build a better and brighter North Carolina by standing up for what’s right, fighting to fix what’s wrong and doing right by every single North Carolinian, no matter who you are,” Stein said in a video released by his campaign.

Stein, the state’s top law enforcement officer since being first elected in 2016, was always considered a likely candidate to attempt to succeed Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who is term-limited from seeking reelection. Cooper was attorney general for four terms, and Stein served under him for several years as head of the Department of Justice’s consumer protection division.

Stein’s early announcement — 14 months before primary elections — could make others think twice before entering the Democratic field. He unveiled what his campaign called 150 endorsements from current and former officials, from former four-term Gov. Jim Hunt to nearly all Democrats in the legislature, as well as ex-Supreme Court justices, big-city mayors and members of Congress.

Cooper stopped short of an endorsement in a separate statement Wednesday, and said he’s focused now on his final two years as governor. But he said Stein has “been an excellent Attorney General for North Carolina.”

Figuring prominently in the campaign video is Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has said it’s extremely likely that he’ll enter the gubernatorial race, too.

The video included snippets of Robinson’s speeches for which he’s been criticized, in particular for some about sex education in schools that critics say disparaged LGBTQ people. In one segment, Robinson calls abortion a “scourge that needs to be run out of this land.”

“Robinson wants to tell you who you can marry, when you’ll be pregnant and who you should hate,” Stein said. “I’m running for governor because I believe in a very different North Carolina, one rooted in our shared values of freedom, justice and opportunity for everyone.”

Robinson campaign adviser Conrad Pogorzelski said in a written statement that “it should be clear that Stein is scared of a primary” and that he hopes to avoid one by “creating the narrative that it is him against Robinson.” State Treasurer Dale Folwell, a Republican, has also been considering a gubernatorial run.

Stein has been a prolific fundraiser, and had $3.4 million in his attorney general campaign coffers at the end of June. But he narrowly won both of his general elections in 2016 and 2020 — by less than 25,000 votes in a state that, save for gubernatorial contests, has been leaning slightly rightward.

The 56-year-old Stein is the son of civil rights attorney Adam Stein and grew up in Chapel Hill. He went to Dartmouth College and later Harvard University, where he received a law degree. He was campaign manager for John Edwards in his successful U.S. Senate bid in 1998. Stein also served in the state Senate, representing a Wake County district, before running for attorney general.

As AG, Stein has been known for his involvement in a national opioid settlement and for a landmark legal settlement that forced electronic cigarette giant Juul Labs Inc. to pay $40 million to North Carolina and take more action to prevent underage use and sales. Stein has co-led a task force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice initiated by the governor and is a strong abortion-rights supporter.

But the attorney general at times has taken criticism from left-leaning advocates, saying he has fallen short on protecting civil rights, particularly within the criminal justice system.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University not related to the governor, said Stein’s early entry in the race was “strategically smart” and could freeze out other Democrats considering bids.

But his lifetime spent largely in urban centers diverges from the paths of victorious Democratic governors of the past 50 years who came from or lived in small towns or rural areas, from where they attracted needed electoral support, according to Cooper.

“He appears to play to Democratic strengths, but it’s hard for me to understand how he would open up the map for Democrats,” Cooper said.

Stein had what he called a “minor stroke” last spring that prompted doctors to remove a small blood clot. There have been no signs of lingering effects.

The AG also has a pending legal fight with the Wake County district attorney over her office’s probe and potential prosecution of Stein and his aides for a 2020 campaign ad through a little-used state law. Stein’s campaign sued last summer to overturn the law. An appeals court is weighing whether to block enforcement while the lawsuit goes to trial.

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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who now serves as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Tuesday sent out seven letters to members of the administration reminding them of previous times they have ignored requests for either communications or documents.

Among those receiving a letter from chairman Jordan was White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.  The letter documented that GOP members “have made several requests for information and documents concerning the Biden Administration’s misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings,” with the subsequent letter repeating the request for such information.

In the letter, Jordan made clear that Republicans “are prepared to resort to compulsory process, if necessary, to obtain this material.”

Letters were also sent out to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, ATF Director Steven Dettelbach, and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.

As the letter to Klain references how parents protesting at school board meetings were regarded, so do the letters to Mayorkas and Cardona.

Separately last week Jordan launched an investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents.

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Republican Rep. Jim Banks, a combative defender of former President Donald Trump, announced on Tuesday that he is running for the U.S. Senate seat from Indiana being vacated by GOP Sen. Mike Braun.

Banks is the first candidate to formally enter the Senate race since Braun said in December that he would forgo a 2024 reelection bid and run instead for Indiana governor. Banks’ announcement comes days after Donald Trump Jr. and the Washington-based anti-tax Club for Growth began attacking former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels as insufficiently conservative while Daniels ponders whether to also seek the Senate seat.

Banks criticized current Senate Republicans for cooperating too much with the Biden administration and allowing passage of a massive $1.7 trillion spending bill just before Christmas.

“I just believe now more than ever that we need conservatives in the Senate who are going to fight back against radical Democrat policies instead of going along with it,” Banks told The Associated Press. “Republican primary voters are looking for a conservative fighter, someone to go to Washington and fight for Hoosier family values and against the radical, socialist and woke agenda that Democrats are pushing in Washington.”

Banks released a campaign video announcement that invokes disputes over transgender girls’ sports, blames China for COVID-19 and claims that “anti-Americanism” is being pushed in schools and the military, saying “the radical Democrats and the spineless Republicans are going to do everything that they can to stop me.”

Banks, 43, was first elected to Congress from a heavily Republican district in northeastern Indiana in 2016, the year after he returned from an eight-month military deployment to Afghanistan with the Navy Reserve.

He has since become a frequent Fox News Channel guest and Trump ally who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s presidential election victory after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., months later rejected Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s pick of Banks as the top GOP member on the committee investigating the deadly Capitol insurrection, citing the need to protect the review’s “integrity.”

Banks backed McCarthy throughout his fight to become House speaker this month and has kept up ties with Trump, visiting with him since he left the White House and joining him on a 2021 trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. Banks said that last week he told Trump — who won Indiana by wide margins in 2016 and 2020 — of his decision to enter the Senate race.

“I told him I’d like to have his support, hope he comes to Indiana and campaigns with me,” Banks said. “I was proud to fight alongside him for the America First policies and agenda that he pushed when he was president and believe strongly we need to go back to that.”

Banks’ announcement could be the start of a competitive race for the Republican nomination in the GOP-dominated state, with one potential candidate being Ukrainian-born Rep. Victoria Spartz, who has been critical at times of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began last February.

But the biggest factor could be whether Daniels decides to enter the race. The 73-year-old Daniels completed two terms as governor in early 2013 with high approval ratings and finished a decade as the high-profile president of Purdue University at the end of December.

Not waiting for Daniels’ decision, the conservative Club for Growth released an ad last week reaching back to his time as President George W. Bush’s budget director to criticize him for increasing the federal debt. It calls Daniels an “old guard Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days.”

Club for Growth President David McIntosh, who was an Indiana congressman in the 1990s, said the deep-pocketed group is “ready to spend what it takes to make sure Hoosiers have a conservative in that Senate seat.”

The group said Tuesday it was endorsing Banks in the race.

“We think very highly of Jim Banks,” McIntosh said. “He is that type of new, young Republican leadership that people are looking for.”

Mark Lubbers, a longtime Daniels friend and adviser, said the Club for Growth helped push failed Republican candidates as the party fell short of recapturing the Senate in last year’s election.

“Sad to see that Jim Banks has thrown in with them,” Lubbers said. “And apparently they think it’s political genius to poke the bear with a sharp stick. We’ll see how that works out.”

Banks, who was 31 when he was first elected to the state Senate in 2010 while Daniels was governor, has been eager to pull at political divides.

His congressional office Twitter account was suspended for a couple weeks in 2021 after he responded to a post about Biden administration official Dr. Rachel Levine becoming the first transgender four-star officer in the U.S. uniformed services by writing: “The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.”

Banks also lined up last year against Republican Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s veto of a bill banning transgender females from competing in girls’ school sports. He urged state lawmakers, who later overrode the veto, to “send a message to the rest of the nation that Indiana values women.”

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Two years since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, a series of drive-by shootings targeting Democrats in New Mexico is a violent reminder that the false claims about a stolen election persist in posing a danger to public officials and the country’s democratic institutions.

While no one was hurt in the Albuquerque attacks, this latest outburst of political violence underscores how election denialism has become deeply embedded across much of the country and how it is driving grievance-filled anger over the nation’s politics and officeholders.

Over the past year, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was seriously injured in an attack in his home by an assailant who said he was sick of the “lies coming out of Washington D.C.,” election workers were intimidated and harassed, and prosecutors won convictions in a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor.

Further sign of the unrelenting threat came this week when authorities arrested a Republican candidate for the New Mexico House who had refused to accept his loss in last fall’s election. Police said Solomon Peña hired four people to shoot at the homes of four Democratic lawmakers.

“I think we are really entering a new era where political rhetoric has gotten so heated and people with mental health issues or extreme conspiratorial viewpoints on the world have resorted to political violence,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who took office Jan. 1, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

He wants the Legislature to address political violence and said he plans to talk with the secretary of state’s office about ways to shield some information about elected officials or candidates from public disclosure.

Torrez noted that other countries have become destabilized when extremists use threats and intimidation rather than work through the institutions of government. He said such violence is destabilizing and needs to be dealt with forcefully.

“It is a threat to the very fabric and foundation of a democratic republic,” he said.

Lies by former President Donald Trump and his allies about the 2020 presidential election led to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as threats and harassment against state and local election officials. The insurrection in Washington also contributed to a drop in confidence in election results among Republicans.

Some election deniers ran last year for offices that oversee elections, as well as for governor and attorney general — all losing in battleground states. The turn to violence in New Mexico suggests the lasting impact of the campaign by Trump and his allies to discredit the 2020 race he lost and sow doubt about how elections are run.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the allegations “horrifying and shocking,” adding the Biden administration has “emphasized the dangerous ways in which conspiracy theories and disinformation can lead some individuals to violence.”

A large segment of Republicans, 58%, still believe Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was not legitimate, according to an October poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Peña, a 39-year-old felon and self-proclaimed “MAGA king,” faces multiple charges in the Albuquerque-area attacks on the homes of two state lawmakers and two county officials, including one house where a 10-year-old girl was asleep. Peña had refused to accept his landslide loss in November when he won just 26% of the vote in a state House race in Albuquerque against the longtime Democratic incumbent, Rep. Miguel P. Garcia.

Peña parroted Trump’s rhetoric, claiming without evidence that the House race had been “rigged” against him. There has been no evidence of fraud or widespread problems in New Mexico’s election.

Peña, who is being held without bond, appeared briefly in court Wednesday on charges that include multiple counts of shooting at a home, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, conspiracy and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He spent nine years behind bars after his arrest in April 2007 for stealing electronics and other goods from several retail stores as part of what authorities described as a burglary crew. He was released from prison in 2016, and had his voting rights restored after completing five years probation in April 2021, corrections officials said.

Peña did not speak at the hearing, and a message to his attorney was not immediately returned.

The New Mexico Republican Party said in a statement that Peña should be prosecuted “to the full extent of the law” if he is found guilty.

There also was no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines in the 2020 election, and Biden’s win was affirmed after exhaustive reviews in the states where Trump disputed his loss. Dozens of judges — including some appointed by Trump — rejected lawsuits by Trump and his allies challenging the outcome, and Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said the fraud claims were bogus.

Despite that, the conspiracy theories surrounding the presidential election have prompted a surge in threats and harassment of state and local election officials.

Cases like the one in New Mexico might seem random but are not, said John Farmer Jr., director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University and a former New Jersey attorney general.

“They are the logical endpoint of this culture of challenging the legitimacy of our democratic processes,” he said.

Farmer said curbing that kind of political violence depends in part on filing the most serious charges possible and aggressively prosecuting cases.

David Levine, a fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a former elections official in Idaho, said extremism fueled by anti-democratic figures and conspiracy theories is an acute threat. He advocated for better information-sharing among intelligence and law enforcement agencies as well as changes to state laws to remove provisions that could be exploited by those seeking to spread election misinformation.

Congressional proposals to increase penalties for threatening election officials failed to advance last year, leaving state officials looking to their legislatures for support. Seven bills have been introduced so far in five states to protect election workers and their staff, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks voting-related legislation in the states.

In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Democratic legislative leaders announced plans this week for several election-related bills, including ones to increase penalties for threatening, harassing or revealing private information about election workers and for pressuring election officials to act illegally.

“We must do more to protect the people who protect democracy,” Benson, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Concerns of political violence have been growing in recent years.

Last month, the co-leader of the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer before the 2020 election was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Whitmer, a Democrat, was not harmed. Prosecutors said the defendants were upset about restrictions related to the COVD-19 pandemic and perceived threats to gun ownership.

In California, prosecutors said the assault of Paul Pelosi was part of a plot to kidnap the Democratic congresswoman and that the suspect also planned to target other politicians.

Members of Congress have seen a sharp rise in threats in the two years since the insurrection. In Kansas, a trial began this week for a man prosecutors say threatened to kill a Republican congressman.

New Mexico House Speaker Javier Martínez of Albuquerque, whose home was among those targeted in the recent shootings, said he was relieved by the arrest.

“These are the things that can happen when the rhetoric gets out of hand,” he told reporters on the opening day of the Legislature. “Anyone who takes the plunge to participate in our democracy, to get into the process, should never have to encounter that type of violence and have that kind of fear.”

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Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan and Morgan Lee in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Colleen Long in Washington, D.C.; and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this report.

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SRN NEWS- When news broke that Joe Biden had been illegally keeping classified documents at the Penn Biden Center, many Republicans asked when will the FBI raids would begin. Then more classified documents were discovered, including one in the president’s garage. Still no raid and no FBI produced photos of the documents.

This is against the backdrop of  direct FBI involvement when dealing with former president Donald Trump. In mid-2022, his Florida home was raided to recover supposedly classified documents, complete with embarrassing leaks showing them strewn all over the floor

Despite the classified materials, Biden’s lawyers have still been allowed to run the show, conducting the searches and giving the final word on what was or wasn’t found.

Republicans took to Twitter to ask about what they consider a double standard.

“Where’s the raid of Biden’s garage?” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise  tweeted at the FBI, referring to the August raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla.

“Now, we learn that Biden kept additional classified materials at his home in Delaware in his GARAGE. Yet there was no raid. No ransacking of Biden’s home. Nothing,” Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw said on Twitter.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy labeled the situation as “another faux pas by the Biden administration” by “treating law differently based upon your political beliefs.”

“Treats one President Trump one way but treats President Biden a whole different way,” McCarthy told reporters on Thursday. “That’s why we had to provide a new entity from our Church-style [committee] to look after the weaponization of what’s gone on that you want an equal playing of the law to all Americans.”

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ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland Gov. Wes Moore was sworn in as the state’s first Black governor on Wednesday, pledging to work for greater inclusion and economic equity while also focusing on improving education, fighting crime and climate change.

Moore, after being introduced by Oprah Winfrey in front of the Maryland State House, noted that the state is one of the wealthiest in the nation, but he also described it as “asset-rich and strategy poor.”

“It is time for our policies to be as bold as our aspirations — and to confront the fact that we have been offered false choices,” Moore said. “We do not have to choose between a competitive economy and an equitable one.”

The 44-year-old Democrat, who won in a landslide in November, also committed to fighting violent crime. Many Maryland residents have grown weary in their faith in government’s ability to keep them safe, he said.

In Baltimore, Maryland’s largest city, homicides surpassed 300 for the eighth year running last year. Gun violence remains high, despite repeated promises from elected officials and new anti-violence initiatives.

Moore said the state can build a police force “that moves with appropriate intensity and absolute integrity and full accountability, and embrace the fact that we cannot and will not militarize ourselves to safety.”

“We do not have to choose between being a safe state and a just one,” Moore said. “Maryland can, and we will, be both.”

Moore, who has not held public office before now, won a crowded Democratic primary in July before going on to win the general election by more than 30 percentage points against Republican Dan Cox, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Moore is a best-selling author and former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty nonprofit. He also is a Rhodes scholar and a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan.

“This might be his first day as an elected official, but Wes Moore has been a public servant his entire adult life,” Winfrey said. “And there’s so much more to come. He’s just getting started.”

Moore pledged to make the state a leader in addressing the “existential threat” of climate change, which said “is happening now in our communities.”

“Confronting climate change represents another chance for Maryland to lead,” Moore said. “We can and we will be a leader in wind technology, in grid electrification, and clean transit.”

Speaking not far from the nation’s largest estuary, Moore said the state will protect “our jewel,” the Chesapeake Bay, and put Maryland on track to generate “100% clean energy by 2035 and create thousands of jobs in the process.”

The new governor also emphasized his commitment to education, including a state initiative through which high school graduates can volunteer for a year of service.

Moore punctuated his inauguration with references to Black history, beginning with the enslaved people who once arrived by ship at the Annapolis City Dock, which was once a regional slave port and the site of a memorial to enslaved African Kunta Kinte, who arrived there in 1767 and was written about in Alex Haley’s book “Roots.”

Moore was joined by other Black leaders at the wreath-laying ceremony on a bright sunny morning, including Maryland Rep. Kweisi Mfume, Attorney General Anthony Brown, former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who was the nation’s second elected Black governor, in 2006. Virginia’s Douglas Wilder was the first, in 1989, and Moore is the third.

“I feel lifted up and encouraged that Black talent has been recognized and has an opportunity to come forward,” Patrick told The Associated Press after the ceremony.

Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who was Maryland’s first Black candidate elected statewide, called it an exciting day for the state.

“It’s interesting to watch these things unfold in a world in which there’s still resistance to it, but we’re excited here in Maryland and I’m honored to be a part of it today and be a part of that line as well,” Steele said while walking in a procession up the city’s Main Street.

Moore took the oath of office using a Bible owned by Frederick Douglass, a Marylander who escaped slavery on the state’s Eastern Shore before becoming an author and famed abolitionist.

When Moore gave his inaugural speech as Maryland’s 63rd governor, he looked out on a crowded mall in front of the Capitol where there is a statue of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a Baltimore native and the nation’s first Black member of the court.

Moore’s running mate, Aruna Miller, also made history as the first immigrant and first Asian American elected statewide in Maryland.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz raised more money over the last six months of 2022 than her three rivals combined in the pivotal race that will determine majority control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Protasiewicz along with Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell are running as liberal candidates in the race. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Jennifer Dorow and former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly are the conservative candidates.

The top two vote-getters in the Feb. 21 primary will advance to the April 4 election. The winner replaces conservative Justice Patience Roggensack, who is retiring.

Races for the Wisconsin Supreme Court are officially nonpartisan, but candidates for years have aligned with either conservatives or liberals as the contests have become expensive partisan battles. The conservative-controlled court for more than a decade has issued consequential rulings in favor of Republicans, with major cases looming that could determine the future of abortion laws, redistricting and rules of elections.

The candidates and outside interests that have promised to spend millions on the race have been relatively quiet up to this point, more than a month before the primary. But those on both sides have made clear they see the race as crucial in the battleground state, with whoever winning determining ideological control of the court heading into the 2024 presidential race and at least a year after.

Protasiewicz raised just over $756,000, while Mitchell raised nearly $116,000 over the last half of 2022. Mitchell and Protasiewicz were the only two candidates who were raising money during the entire six-month reporting period.

Dorow, one of the conservative candidates, raised nearly $307,000 in just one month after getting into the race in December. Kelly, her conservative rival, raised just over $312,000 between when he got in the race in September and the end of the year.

All of the candidates filed their latest spending reports on Tuesday.

Protasiewicz had nearly $735,000 cash on hand as of Jan. 1. Mitchell had about $72,000 cash on hand. On the conservative side, Dorow had more than $283,000 cash on hand while Kelly had nearly $277,000.

There were several notable contributors.

Democratic Wisconsin Elections Commission member Mark Thomsen gave $5,000 to Protasiewicz and Democratic state Sen. Kelda Roys gave $1,000. Donors who gave the maximum allowed contribution of $20,000 to Protasiewicz included attorney and former Supreme Court candidate Tim Burns and philanthropists Lynde Uihlein, David Lubar, Marianne Lubar and Madeleine Lubar.

Kelly received $20,000 donations from billionaire GOP megadonors Dick and Liz Uihlein.

Fair Courts America, a group funded by Uihlein, plans to spend millions of dollars to back Kelly, the group’s spokesman, Dan Curry, said in November.

Other notable donors to Kelly included Republican Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Don Millis, who gave $5,000, and former Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Rick Graber who gave $2,500.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump will be joined by two high-profile South Carolina supporters — U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Gov. Henry McMaster — at his first public 2024 presidential campaign event in the early voting state later this month.

Trump will be at the Statehouse in Columbia on Jan. 28 and will unveil his South Carolina leadership team, according to a person familiar with the plans. That person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

Trump’s campaign had previously confirmed the South Carolina event but hadn’t provided details.

The event will also include members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation, as well as state lawmakers, according to the person.

U.S. Rep. Russell Fry, who with Trump’s support ousted U.S. Rep. Tom Rice in a primary last year, told the AP on Tuesday that he would be at the rollout, saying Trump “delivered for the American people before and can do so again.”

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, who defeated a Trump-backed opponent in her own GOP primary last year, told AP she would not attend the event, and that she would would wait to endorse a 2024 candidate “once the field is set.”

“Until then, my powder is dry,” she said.

Among remaining Republicans in South Carolina’s U.S. House delegation, Rep. William Timmons’ office said he would attend Trump’s event, Rep. Jeff Duncan’s office said he would not, and a spokesman for Rep. Ralph Norman said his attendance wasn’t certain. A representatives for Rep. Joe Wilson didn’t immediately return a message Tuesday.

According to South Carolina government officials, the Trump campaign has blocked off 3 a.m. to 10 p.m. at a variety of sites inside and outside the Statehouse building, planning for “500 attendees.”

Reservation information shared with AP promotes the event “as an opportunity to exemplify the strong support from elected officials in the state as we approach the one year mark to South Carolina’s Republican Presidential Primary.”

Some operatives and elected officials in South Carolina have been receiving calls from Graham asking for their support for Trump’s reelection bid. At least two of the people asked had turned down the request, according to the person, who spoke with the pair.

Since announcing his latest presidential run in November, Trump has limited his public campaign appearances to events at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida before an invited crowd or in a virtual setting.

Trump’s visit to South Carolina comes as two of the state’s top Republicans mull 2024 bids of their own.

Nikki Haley, a former governor and onetime U.N. ambassador, said she would take the holiday season to consider a White House campaign.

U.S. Sen. Tim Scott has been making visits in other early voting states and launched a political action committee that could become a presidential campaign vehicle. A Scott spokesperson did not immediately comment Tuesday when asked if the senator would attend Trump’s event.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

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CLEVELAND (AP) — Republican state Sen. Matt Dolan said Tuesday that he is again running for U.S. Senate as the GOP tries in 2024 to flip the Ohio seat long held by Democrat Sherrod Brown, who is expected to seek reelection.

Dolan, a centrist Republican from the Cleveland suburb of Chagrin Falls and a member of the family that owns baseball’s Cleveland Guardians, is the first of his party to jump into that race.

He cast himself as tough but pragmatic when he ran for Ohio’s open U.S. Senate seat last year. Though he entered the primary late and lacked the profile of several other candidates, Dolan surged to finish just behind the winner, author JD Vance, and former state treasurer Josh Mandel, who had spent millions and campaigned vigorously for a year. Vance went on to win election in November.

Dolan was the rare candidate in that crowded GOP primary who didn’t espouse the disproven narrative that the 2020 election was either stolen from former President Donald Trump or fraught with fraud or other problems.

“America’s challenges demand the focus of experienced leaders who reject fictional grievances and are ready to do the hard work of getting results to make our future better than the past,” Dolan said in his emailed announcement Tuesday.

The business lawyer and former prosecutor is in his second four-year term representing parts of Cuyahoga County in the state Senate. He previously served three terms in the Ohio House.

Voters first sent Brown to the U.S. Senate in 2007, and he is the only Democrat outside the state Supreme Court to win election statewide in Ohio in the past 16 years.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden offered himself to Americans as a president they wouldn’t have to think about after the tumult of his predecessor. But an excruciating week of awkward disclosures and the appointment of a special counsel to investigate classified records found at his Delaware home and a former office dating to his time as vice president is beginning to strain his claim to competence.

The surprise revelations that on at least four different occasions Biden’s lawyers found improperly stored classified documents and official records evoked the turmoil surrounding Donald Trump’s presidency, a four-year ruckus from which Biden has tried to move the country past. In the latest development, the White House acknowledged on Saturday that Biden’s lawyers had turned up even more such documents at the home than previously known.

It’s an embarrassment to Biden, and the selection of a special counsel to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing in the matter exposes the president to a new, self-inflicted risk.

Further, it complicates the Justice Department’s calculus about whether to bring charges against Trump over his handling of classified material, hands fresh ammunition to newly empowered House Republicans eager to launch investigations and undercuts a central plank of Biden’s pitch to voters just as he looks to launch a reelection bid in the coming months.

“It just won’t be so exhausting,” former President Barack Obama had promised about a Biden presidency in the closing days of the 2020 campaign, adding that voters are “not going to have to think about the crazy things … and that is worth a lot.”

The Biden case is markedly different from Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and official records — not least because Biden’s team voluntarily turned them over to federal officials when they were discovered. Still, it has caused private frustration among Biden allies and some advisers because the president and his team, as billed, were supposed to be better than this.

The current White House explanation, offered by lawyer Richard Sauber, is that the special counsel’s inquiry “will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced” — a “mistake” with the nation’s secrets.

Biden seemingly ignored or forgot about a cardinal rule in politics: Check your closet for skeletons before you complain about someone else’s. His public criticisms about Trump’s “ irresponsible ” handling of classified documents, however different the circumstances, are now coming back to haunt him.

Biden allies say the packing up of his vice presidential office happened swiftly. Biden aimed to run through the tape on his eight years alongside Obama even as aides worked to close down his office before Trump’s inauguration at noon on Jan. 20, 2017.

But that explanation, said Richard Painter, the top ethics official in the George W. Bush administration, suggests behavior that was “incredibly careless and really quite shocking.”

Painter said that while Biden probably would avoid the criminal issues looming over Trump because there is so far no sense that Biden intentionally mishandled classified records, it still merited investigation.

“You never just pack stuff up and cart it out of there,” Painter said. He said aides and lawyers are supposed to carefully sift through what are official records that are property of the National Archives and personal records that may be removed.

“To say nothing of classified documents which have these distinctive markings on them,” Painter said. “It’s still very worrisome. It’s a serious national security breach.”

Beyond all that, the piecemeal way that word of the discoveries became public — more than two months after the first batch of classified documents had been found at the Penn Biden Center in Washington — has drawn bewilderment from crisis management experts.

“The White House can’t let itself be seen as hiding information or be bled to death by investigators’ or others’ leaks,” said Adam Goldberg, who served as special associate counsel to President Bill Clinton from 1996-1999.

It wasn’t until Monday that the White House confirmed that classified documents had been found at Biden’s former office on Nov. 2, days before the midterm elections. Even then, that acknowledgement came only in response to news inquiries.

Not until Thursday did Biden lawyers acknowledge the Dec. 20 discovery of documents in the garage of Biden’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, and inform the Justice Department that another classified record had been found the night before in Biden’s home library.

“If there’s any further bad news out there, they better be the ones to put it out and put it out all at once,” Goldberg said.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had said Thursday that Americans can “assume” there are no more classified documents or government records improperly stored after Biden’s personal lawyers conducted a final search that concluded on Wednesday evening.

She repeatedly deflected questions about the White House’s public disclosures, insisting the president’s team was handling handling the matter the “right way” by deferring to the Justice Department.

A statement from Sauber on Saturday about the latest discovery of classified documents in Delaware did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting.

If Biden’s White House needs to get its messaging back on track after a week of missteps and unforced errors, Trump’s issues go well beyond mere competence.

“On the political front, assuming the White House gets its communications right, I’m not worried about any political fallout,” said Goldberg. “With Trump, competency hasn’t been the issue, intentional misconduct has been. While Republicans will try to muddy this up, there’s just such a big difference between Biden discovering and disclosing these on his own and Trump’s obstruction and lying.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE — White House Correspondent Zeke Miller has covered the presidency for The Associated Press since 2017.

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