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    Liz Cheney campaigns with Harris and urges voters to reject Trump’s ‘cruelty’

    Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s most prominent conservative critics, appealed to the millions of undecided Americans who could decide the outcome of the 2024 election, asking them to “reject the depraved cruelty” of the former president.A former representative from Wyoming, Cheney cast the stakes in November as nothing less than the future of American democracy as she appeared alongside Kamala Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, on Thursday, the symbolic birthplace of the modern Republican party.The daughter of Dick Cheney, the Republican former vice-president, said she had never voted for a Democrat before, but would do so “proudly” to ensure Trump never holds a position of public trust again. Her father will join her in casting his ballot for Harris.“I know that the most conservative of conservative values is fidelity to our constitution,” Cheney said, speaking from a podium adorned with the vice presidential seal. The crowd broke into a chant: “Thank you, Liz!” A large sign looming over them declared: “Country over Party.”Harris praised Cheney’s “courage” for being willing to cross party lines to endorse – and campaign alongside – the Democratic nominee. During the event, a remarkable joint appearance that would have been unimaginable in the pre-Trump era, Cheney pitched Harris as a unifying leader who will safeguard American institutions.Cheney and Harris agree on little politically – only that Trump should not be allowed to serve a second term. But their union is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to win over Republican voters who, like Cheney, believe in “limited government” and “low taxes” but are repelled by Trump and his Maga movement.“No matter your political party, there is a place for you with us and in this campaign,” Harris said. “I take seriously my pledge to be a president for all Americans.”Harris touts a growing collection of endorsements from prominent Republican leaders and ex-Trump administration officials, including Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House who testified against him in the January 6 House hearings, as well as Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director, and Stephanie Grisham, a former press secretary.Adam Kinzinger, a former Illinois representative and the only other Republican to serve on the January 6 committee, also is backing Harris, and forcefully denounced Trump in a speech at the Democratic national convention in August.In a reprisal of her role as the vice-chair of the House select committee investigating the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Cheney on Thursday methodically recounted for the crowd how Trump had refused for hours to intervene on January 6, instead watching the violence unfold on television.“After the Capitol had been invaded, he praised the rioters. He did not condemn them. That’s who Donald Trump is,” she said. Cheney rebuked Republicans who have sought to “minimize what happened” that day.“Do not let anyone lie about what happened and what they did,” she said, adding: “Violence does not and must never determine who rules us. Voters do.”Cheney was effectively exiled from her own party after she broke forcefully with the former president. But on Thursday, she said it was Trump, thrice chosen as the Republican nominee, who was failing to uphold the founding ideals of the “party of Lincoln”. With a dash of arch humor, she added: “I was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning.”Harris’s appearance with Cheney came one day after a judge unsealed new evidence in a federal case against Trump for his attempt to cling to power in 2020. In the court filing, federal prosecutors allege that he amplified false claims of voter fraud and “resorted to crimes” in his failed bid to overturn the results of an election he lost.At a rally in Michigan earlier on Thursday, Trump repeated the false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.“We won. We won,” Trump said in Saginaw, a swing county in the midwestern battleground. “We have to be too big to rig.”Harris will travel to Michigan on Thursday night, and campaign in Detroit on Friday, as the candidates battle for votes in the trio of “blue wall” swing states seen as the clearest path to the White House.Leaving the White House on Thursday, Joe Biden said he was hardly surprised by the razor-thin margins.“It always gets this close,” he told reporters. “She’s going to do fine.”He also praised her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, for his performance against JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, during Tuesday night’s debate in New York. Near the end of the 90-minute exchange, Walz turned to the subject of the 2020 election: had Trump lost? he asked Vance.Vance replied that he was “focused on the future”.“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz replied, adding that Vance’s loyalty to Trump above all else was the reason he and not the former vice-president, Mike Pence, was there on stage that night. The response was clipped and immediately re-packaged by the Harris campaign into a television ad.On January 6, as protesters chanted: “Hang Mike Pence,” the then vice-president resisted pressure from Trump to reject the votes of the electoral college and returned to the Capitol after it was breached to certify Biden’s victory.On Thursday, Cheney claimed Vance, in Pence’s shoes, would have “thrown out the votes of the people of Wisconsin” because they had voted to elect Biden as president in 2020. “That is tyranny, and that is disqualifying,” she said.Cheney effectively ended her own political career by voting to impeach Trump over his role in stoking a mob of supporters that attacked the Capitol on 6 January 2021. She was one of just two Republicans willing to serve on the House select committee investigation into the attack that sought to hold Trump – and his Republican enablers – accountable for the sprawling effort to overturn his defeat.She lost a 2022 Republican primary, but has remained a vocal critic of the former president. Before Biden stepped aside, Cheney said she was mulling a third-party bid.But on Thursday, she made clear there was no other alternative to Trump. Cheney quoted from a letter that John Adams, the nation’s second president, wrote to his wife on the first night he spent in the White House: “May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”“Now I am confident,” she said, her smile widening, “that John Adams meant women, too.” More

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    Trump falsely claims Helene victims had no federal help despite Biden-Harris sending $20m in aid – live

    As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.Donald Trump repeated lies about the Biden administration’s hurricane response, going so far as to claim that the president and vice-president were “stealing” Fema funds to give to immigrants.“They stole the Fema money like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” he said.Trump and his allies have been repeatedly claiming that Fema is out of money because it allocated funds to help communities receiving an influx of immigrants at the border.Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, did warn that Fema is underfunded for the remainder of hurricane season. That’s in part because the stop-gap government funding bill did not contain enough funding for Fema, which is facing a $2bn deficit.Fema’s Shelter and Services Program allocated $300m during the 2024 fiscal year to help communities “offset the costs of providing food, shelter and other supportive services after receiving an influx of migrants”. That’s a small fraction of the agency’s overall budget. For 2025, it has requested a total of $33.1bn.At his rally, Trump also claimed he “had the best four years with hurricanes”.During his tenure …

    Trump imposed a hiring freeze at the National Weather Service, resulting in more than 200 of vacancies within the agency that predicts and oversees extreme weather warnings. The Washington Post reported in 2017: “Some of those Weather Service vacancies listed in the document, obtained by the Sierra Club through a Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Washington Post, were in locations that would be hit by the major hurricanes that barreled through the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.”

    Trump falsely claimed that Hurricane Maria’s death toll was being inflated by his Democratic rivals. In fact, studies suggest that far more people died than the official death toll suggested at the time. A report by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimates up to 4,600 people were killed.

    In 2021, a report by the housing department’s office of the inspector general found that Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

    An internal report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency also found that it failed to properly prepare for hurricane season.
    In a review of Trump’s record responding to natural disasters, E&E also found a discrepency in aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which primarily affected Florida; and Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
    On March 9, 2019, Trump signed an order directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of most disaster costs in Florida. As a result, FEMA paid roughly $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s intervention, according to an E&E News analysis.
    But less than two months earlier, Trump threatened to veto a disaster-aid measure in Congress that would have FEMA pay 100 percent of all disaster costs in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria killed more than 3,000 people.
    According to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s book, Trump said: “They love me in the Panhandle … I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”The voting habits of residents did play into Donald Trump’s decision-making about disaster relief when he was president, reports E&E News.The outlet interviewed Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, who revealed that the former president refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018.From E&E:
    But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
    ‘We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,’ said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
    California’s governor Gavin Newsom, reacted to the report on Twitter/X, calling it a “glimpse into the future” if Trump is re-elected.Joe Biden, meanwhile, wrote: “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you. It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.“His competition that night? He cannot be president. He cannot be president of the United States,” Donald Trump said of JD Vance’s vice-presidential opponent, Tim Walz.“How good did JD Vance do the other night?” Trump added, praising his running mate as the crowd descended into a cheers of “JD! JD!”“I drafted the best athlete,” Trump continued.Donald Trump pledged to bring back drilling in the Alaska arctic wildlife refuge if he becomes president.Trump said:
    We would have supplied the entire Asian continent. We would have supplied Asia. We would have supplied everybody. But we’ll have it redone very quickly … I actually got it approved in Congress as part of …the biggest tax cuts in history for this country. I got that approved in Congress. We got ANWR [Alaska National Wildlife Refuge] so they didn’t kill it in Congress, and I don’t think they ever could. So we’ll get it back very quickly. It’s going to be back very fast.
    Trump added:
    And it would have been great for Alaska but it would have also … been great for our country but we’ll have it approved very quickly.
    In 2021, Trump’s administration auctioned off portions of ANWR to oil drillers but failed to attract much bidders.Donald Trump has switched his attacks on Joe Biden, calling him “the worst foreign policy president”.The former president then went on to say: “We have to be too big to rig” before going on to repeat the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.The crowd, highly energized, descended into a chant of “Trump! Trump! Trump!”Donald Trump has walked on stage to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.“We’re going to make America great again,” Trump said in his opening remarks before launching into a tirade against Kamala Harris, calling her a slew of names including “Lying Kamala”.Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally shortly in Saginaw, Michigan.Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates.Here are some images coming through the news wires of Hurricane Helene and its aftermath across the country:The Biden administration has provided nearly $4m directly to individuals and families in need of critical financial assistance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said onboard an Air Force One gaggle as the president was en route to Tallahassee, Florida.She went on to add:
    Yesterday, we announced that the president approved 100% federal cost share for emergency response activities in Florida and Georgia, as well as Tallahassee [Tennessee] and North Carolina. This means that the federal government will cover 100% of the costs associated with things like debris removal, first responders, search and rescue, shelters, and mass feeding.
    This latest announcement builds the president’s previously approved requests for major disaster declarations from the governors of Florida and Georgia, which unlocked additional assistance for residents on their road to recovery. More

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    Major US firefighter union declines to endorse Trump or Harris for president

    The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) has declined to endorse a candidate ahead of next month’s US presidential election, despite efforts by both the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns to court the union.“This decision, which we took very seriously, is the best way to preserve and strengthen our unity,” the IAFF said in a statement.The union, which has almost 350,000 members, was a key part of the coalition built by Joe Biden – and the first union to back the president’s run for election in 2020.It is the second leading trade union to refrain from endorsing either Harris or Trump as tens of millions of Americans prepare to cast their votes. The Teamsters International, a US transportation workers union that represents more than 1.3 million workers, also announced it would not back a candidate.Both campaigns had sought the IAFF’s support, with Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, and JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, addressing the union’s convention in August.Walz claimed in his speech that he had signed “the most comprehensive firefighter legislation in the nation” as governor of Minnesota. Vance, who grappled with boos from the audience, claimed that he and Trump represented a “new kind of Republican party” and would “never stop fighting” for first responders.On Thursday, the IAFF said its executive board had voted by a margin of 1.2% to not endorse a presidential candidate. “We encourage our members – and all eligible voters – to get out and make their voices heard in the upcoming election,” said Edward Kelly, the union’s president.It is not the first time the IAFF has refrained from backing a candidate. While it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, it reportedly shelved plans to publicly support Hillary Clinton, the Democrat presidential candidate in 2016. More

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    JD Vance takes victory lap and mocks Tim Walz over debate gaffe

    JD Vance took a self-proclaimed victory lap after his vice-presidential debate against the Democrat Tim Walz, appearing on Wednesday at a campaign rally in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.Vance told supporters in Auburn Hills that he thought the debate went “pretty well” on Tuesday, as snap polls showed viewers considered it to be a tie between the two vice-presidential candidates.Departing from the generally civil tone of the debate, Vance mocked Walz over his biggest gaffe of the night, in which the Democratic governor said he was friends with school shooters. (Walz seemingly meant to say he was friends with victims of school shootings.)“That was probably only the third or fourth dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance said. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel a little bad for Governor Walz. And the reason I feel bad for him is because he has to defend the indefensible, and that is the record of Kamala Harris.”In his prepared remarks, Vance did not touch on his weakest moment in the debate, when he refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential race. But when Vance took questions from the media after his speech, a reporter did ask him about the exchange, and he again sidestepped the question.“The media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office and get back to commonsense economic policies,” Vance said.Vance then pivoted to discussing the issue of non-citizen voting, which has become a rallying cry among Trump and his supporters. Research has uncovered little evidence to substantiate Republicans’ concerns, as voting in a federal election is already illegal for non-citizens.“We’re going to talk about election integrity because I believe that every vote ought to count, but only the legally cast votes, and that’s why we fight for election integrity,” Vance said in Michigan.Vance focused most of his remarks on attacking Harris over her economic policy proposals, blaming her for the high inflation seen earlier in Joe Biden’s presidency and accusing her of avoiding tough questions about her record. Echoing comments he made during the debate, Vance referenced his background growing up in a low-income family in Ohio to relate to Americans struggling to pay their bills.“She’s afraid of interviews, so she doesn’t talk to people, and she doesn’t realize that her economic policies are making it harder on American families,” Vance said. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to afford a good life for your family, and that’s what Donald Trump and I are going to fight for every single day for the next four years.”Vance then linked Trump’s economic policies to his proposals on immigration, as the former president has called for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. An analysis released on Wednesday by the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, concluded that Trump’s mass deportation program could cost the federal government as much as $88bn a year on average.“The American media – and especially Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – they don’t want to talk about how this illegal immigration crisis is a theft of the American dream from American citizens,” Vance said. “Here’s the Donald Trump plan, and here’s the Donald Trump message to illegal aliens in this country: in six months, pack your bags because you’re going home.”Despite rehashing some of Trump’s most divisive talking points, Vance made a point to reach out to Democrats who may still be undecided in the election. Trump will probably need some of those voters’ support to carry Michigan, a state that Biden won by 3 points in 2020.“As a person who was raised by a couple of working-class, blue-collar Democrats, I want to say to every Democrat who’s watching at home [and] every Democrat who’s in this room: you are more than welcome in Donald Trump’s Republican party,” Vance said. “We’re the party of common sense. We’ve got a big tent, and you’re welcome in our movement.”And yet, when asked by a reporter how he and Trump would work to unite Americans in the face of political division if they win the election in November, Vance again lashed out against Harris.“Why do we have so much division, and why do we have so much rancor in this country’s political debate? It’s because Kamala Harris and her allies are trying to silence the American people rather than engage with them,” Vance said. “When you try to censor your fellow citizens, when you try to shut them up, you breed division and hatred.”Given Trump’s tendency to deploy personal insults and degrading nicknames against his political opponents, that explanation may not sit well with voters. Trump now has just one month left to convince Americans that he deserves another four years in the White House. More

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    JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense | Moira Donegan

    Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.Perhaps Vance’s quintessential moment of the night came early, when he was attempting to further his smears of the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio, whom he had previously targeted with lies that they eat pets. Vance was cut off by the moderators, but talked over them insistently. “Margaret. Margaret. Margaret. Margaret”, he said repeatedly, trying to strong-arm one of the women into letting him talk. As they corrected his misstatements, he whined to the women: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, reportedly told Kamala Harris when he was being vetted for the job that he does not consider himself a good debater. Going in, expectations for him were low. And indeed Walz had an uneven night, sometimes appearing flustered or nervous. An early answer on foreign policy, in particular, was confused and unconvincing. But Walz visibly gained confidence throughout the debate, issuing more forceful answers, attacking Trump and Vance’s record, and emphasizing himself, often successfully, as a homespun purveyor of goodwill and common sense.He was most convincing on what seems to be, for him, the most morally animating issues: healthcare and abortion. Walz named Amber Thurman, a woman killed by an abortion ban, as someone whose life could have been saved were it not for Trump’s policies; he spoke with passion and clarity of how Trump’s plan to reverse the Affordable Care Act would kick millions off their insurance.But perhaps Walz’s best moment came near the end of the debate, in a conversation about democracy, when he pointedly asked JD Vance to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance dodged.“That’s a damning non-answer,” Walz said. It could have summarized Vance’s whole performance.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    ‘Show me the money’: how Eric Adams made it to the top – and fell back down

    Last week, on a grey September morning, the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, was struggling to get ahead of federal prosecutors.News had already leaked that Adams, a former police officer who won in 2021 with a law-and-order message, was about to become the first mayor in city history to be indicted on federal corruption charges.Just minutes before the US attorney for the southern district of New York – an office known for taking on white collar criminals and the mafia – formally announced charges of bribery, wire fraud and the solicitation of campaign contributions from foreign nationals, Adams held his own press conference, in which he painted himself as the victim of a 10-month-long campaign of “leaks”, “commentary” and “demonising”.“We are not surprised,” Adams said solemnly, standing at a small wooden podium. “We expected this.”Behind the mayor stood a line of Black clergy members, an obvious gesture suggesting Adams was part of the long lineage of courageous Black leaders targeted by the white power structure.View image in fullscreenBut as one heckler in the audience that morning made clear, Adams – who had attempted to cut school budgets, raised rents for rent-stabilised tenants and cozied up to the city’s largely white corps of business leaders – might have a harder time projecting himself as a victim of the deep state.“This is not a Black thing. This is a you thing,” the protester shouted, as Adams grinned awkwardly.“You are a disgrace to all Black people in this city,” the heckler continued. “The things that you have done are unconscionable. You hurt our schools. Our streets are dirty. Our children are harassed by the police.”After a few minutes, Adams was able to speak and took questions from reporters, who had just got their hands on the freshly unsealed indictment against the mayor.The sprawling, 57-page filing alleged that for years in the run-up to his mayoral election Adams knowingly sought out and accepted illegal campaign contributions funneled to him by people part of or close to the Turkish government – not to mention luxury hotel stays and more than $100,000 worth of free or discounted flights going everywhere from France to Sri Lanka to China.The day after the indictment’s release, Adams had to go to court. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.This was not the future Adams had imagined for himself three years before when it became clear he was going to become the mayor of the US’s largest city by population.Back then, the candidate’s greatest support seemed to come from beyond.View image in fullscreenGod had previously told Adams, he recalled, that he was “going to be the mayor”, and, indeed, in 2021, right before the pivotal Democratic primary, everything seemed to fall into place for the once obscure Brooklyn politico.New York City’s progressive camp cannibalised itself. One of Adams’s top centrist rivals collapsed in the polls due to decades-old harassment allegations. And after months of protests over the police killing of George Floyd and a temporary rise in shootings, Adams rode a tough-on-crime backlash into office, eking out a victory over a former garbage commissioner with less campaign cash and little name recognition.“Look at me and you’re seeing the future of the Democratic party,” Adams told supporters at the time. “If the Democratic party fails to recognise what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election.”And it wasn’t just Adams who was predicting big things.A chorus of national political columnists, consultants and analysts heralded his coming reign. Even the political forecaster Nate Silver had high hopes for the former Republican cop turned mayor.“It’s probably foolish to think a NYC mayor will successfully translate into being a national political figure, but I still think Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden’,” Silver tweeted a few days after Adams took office.Today, as he faces federal charges, historically bad polls and a growing pool of mayoral challengers smelling blood, Adams looks more like a future one-term mayor than the future of the Democratic party.This was not an outcome that national commentators predicted. But former Adams staffers, aides, local lobbyists and elected officials – the kind of people who know how the Empire state runs – say they’re not surprised.Adams came to power through the backrooms of New York machine politics, a seedy but powerful subculture built more on favour-trading and loyalty than any strong ideological convictions. Over two decades, Adams attached himself to influential state lawmakers and party bosses from Brooklyn, cultivated some of the borough’s top real estate and legal titans, and developed a close-knit coterie of advisers and staffers who rose with him for years from the fringes of Brooklyn politics.View image in fullscreen
    This political network and Adams’s own unceasing work ethic helped the candidate build a campaign war chest that proved large enough to get him past the finish line in 2021 – a fact he well understood.“You win the race by raising money. Have to raise money. Everything else is fluff,” Adams texted a close supporter ahead of the election, according to messages cited in the indictment. “I have a 7 million dollar race. I have a clear plan to raise it and each night we are out executing the plan.”But it was this exacting drive, prosecutors allege, that caused him to cross ethical and legal lines in the pursuit of campaign cash and the power that comes with it.In the indictment, former Adams staffers, who appear to have cut deals with prosecutors as they built their case, claimed that their boss personally solicited illegal donations from foreign businessmen and approved of “straw donor” schemes, which used American residents as pass-throughs to mask the money’s true origin. One text message exchange cited in the indictment shows Adams personally pushing a staffer to seek “help” from a Turkish businessman, now accused of funneling him straw donations.Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for Adams, did not provide the Guardian with a comment for this story. Vito Pitta, Adams’s campaign counsel, and Alex Spiro, Adams’s criminal defence attorney, did not respond to requests for comment.Last Friday, after Adams formally pleaded not guilty, he stood outside federal court with Spiro, his attorney, who predicted the charges would be dismissed and accused prosecutors of bringing the case because they were excited by the “spectacle”.How aware, how involved the mayor was in these alleged schemes, may soon be left up to a jury to decide. But for years before the mayor was summoned to stand before a federal judge in lower Manhattan, political insiders say, there were signs that Adams was unafraid to skirt up to the edge of the law on his way to the top.The racetrack scandalWhen Adams first became a state senator from a working-class part of Brooklyn in the mid-2000s, he had a reputation as a reformer.During his early days as a cop, the Queens native publicly clashed with the department’s white ethnic brass. As a young lawmaker, Adams marched with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and spoke out against the NYPD’s notorious “stop-and-frisk” program, an initiative that pushed cops to search young Black and Latino men en masse in the off-chance that they had a knife or a gun.But while his rhetoric as a press-hungry lawmaker could at times be progressive, Adams – whose long-term ambition was always to become mayor – showed more interest in cultivating alliances than passing landmark pieces of legislation.And some of the causes he did champion were obviously in his self-interest. In 2007, Adams, then a moustachioed freshman lawmaker, stood on the Senate floor and shouted about the need for lawmaker raises. “Show me the money,” declared Adams, wagging his finger to the chamber. “Show me the money. That’s what it’s all about.”Two years later, Adams found a way to raise more in campaign funds, if not personal ones.In 2008, Adams helped broker a deal that made his good friend, the state senator John Sampson, chair of the chamber’s Democratic majority – one of three positions at the time that in effect dominated the New York legislature, which was then considered by some to be a finishing school for political corruption.The following year, as chair of the senate racing and wagering committee, Adams got to work with Sampson to decide which company they would recommend for a multibillion-dollar video slot machine contract at a state-owned thoroughbred racetrack in Queens.New York’s inspector general later concluded that the selection process was tainted by favouritism.Investigators found that Sampson, for example, leaked “one or more confidential internal senate analyses of the competing bids” to a lobbyist working for AEG, the company that eventually landed the contract.View image in fullscreenAnd Adams and Sampson both met New York’s then governor David Paterson over dinner and pushed him to approve the contract for a company called AEG, Patterson later told investigators.The same month, Adams received more than $6,000 from AEG-linked contributors.Adams would later insist to investigators that he did not meet for dinner, contrary to the claims of the governor and his good friend Sampson. Adams said he just so happened to momentarily bump into the governor, Sampson and an AEG representative at the restaurant.“I just said hello to them and I moved on,” he told investigators, a claim that they said strained “credulity”. Four days after the contract was awarded to AEG, Adams and Sampson decided to attend a $1.5m “victory celebration” at the home of the company’s lobbyist.After the scandal came to light, the contract was rescinded. But federal prosecutors never brought any charges against Adams, who insisted long after that he upheld the “highest” of ethical standards throughout the episode. Sampson, who was also not charged for the AEG scandal, was subsequently indicted on embezzlement charges stemming from a separate incident a few years later. In the years after he was released from prison, the former lawmaker benefited from his association with Adams, as the Guardian previously reported.‘A true friend of Turkey’Since he was an NYPD officer in the mid-nineties, Adams had quietly harboured ambitions to become mayor, and, in 2013, he took the next step towards his goal, becoming borough president of Brooklyn. The position had few major responsibilities, but it served as an excellent launching pad for his long-planned mayoral bid.Once in office, Adams began using the post to boost his profile. He hung a large banner of himself on the columns at the front of borough hall. He plastered his image on advertisements for free concerts his office was organising. And soon he began flying to countries around the world – cultivating relationships with foreign government officials and business leaders, which frequently preceded suspicious clusters of campaign donations from members of those nations’ diasporas back in New York City.In his second year in the new post, Adams found time to take two trips to Turkey, arranged by a Turkish government official and businessmen with ties to the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to federal prosecutors.In 2016, the Turkish government official connected Adams to a manager at Turkish Airlines, which is partially state-owned. And in the years that followed, prosecutors allege, the airlines provided Adams and members of his inner circle more than $100,000 worth of free or discounted airfares to India, France, China, Hungary, Ghana and Turkey, where the borough president enjoyed free dinners, a boat tour of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara and a Turkish bath at a seaside hotel, among other perks. In 2021, with Adams at this point officially running for mayor, the Turkish government official personally helped him harvest illegal campaign cash, according to the indictment. In one case, a New York City-based Turkish construction owner, acting at the behest of the Erdoğan official, held a fundraiser for Adams, prosecutors allege. The government official sent his driver to deliver campaign checks to the event, and the construction owner had several of his employees act as straw donors each giving $1,250 to Adams, having received the exact same lump sums earlier from their boss.Two months later, Adams won New York City’s Democratic primary, in effect making him the mayor-in-waiting.That September, the Turkish official, having cultivated Adams for almost six years, asked his friend for help, prosecutors allege.Erdoğan’s was visiting New York City for a United Nations meeting, and the Turkish consulate needed to ensure the president’s trip would coincide with the opening of a $300m glass skyscraper, slated to serve as the headquarters of multiple Turkish diplomatic missions, according to prosecutors. But the building still had numerous fire safety defects, which Turkish officials feared would prevent their leader from being able to preside over its inauguration.So the Turkish government official began reaching out to Adams’s eastern Europe Muslim countries liaison, the federal indictment alleges, telling her that Turkey had supported Adams and now it was “his turn” to support Turkey.View image in fullscreenThe next day, Adams sent his liaison a message saying he would contact the fire department, prosecutors allege. And in the days that followed, Adams repeatedly contacted the fire commissioner to fast-track the process, even as one department employee warned higher-ups that the site’s fire alarm system had “major issues”, according to messages cited in the filing.“In my opinion, this document does not take any liability that we would be comfortable with,” wrote the department official on 9 September, referring to a letter from a consulate contractor describing the state of the alarm system, according to an email included in the indictment. “I believe it actually tells us this building is not safe to occupy.”The next morning, Adams pushed the fire commissioner for an inspection, messages cited in the indictment show. “They really need someone … by today if possible,” Adams wrote. That afternoon after additional department outreach from Adams, one of the commissioner’s direct subordinates told the agency’s fire prevention chief that if he did not clear the bureaucratic hurdles for the Turkish consulate, they would both lose their jobs, prosecutors allege. The fire prevention chief then bypassed standard department procedure and issued a letter clearing the way for the building to open, an action he later described as “unprecedented”, according to prosecutors.At 2.17pm, Adams got word and messaged the Erdoğan official minutes later, according to an exchange cited in the indictment: “From the commissioner: Letter being drafted now. Everything should be good to go Monday morning.”“You are Great Eric, we are so happy to hear that 🙏🙏,” the Turkish government official wrote, the legal filing states. “You are a true friend of Turkey.”At a press conference last Thursday, federal prosecutors said the investigation into Adams’s ties to Turkey remained ongoing. (Federal authorities are also currently investigating another longtime Adams liaison linked to separate clusters of alleged straw donations, first revealed by the Guardian US in collaboration with the news sites The City and Documented.)The same morning, outside in the rain, Adams watched as protesters repeatedly interrupted his own press conference, calling him a “disgrace” and an “embarrassment”.Between their shouts, Adams asked the public to withhold judgement.“Everyone that knows me knows that I follow campaign rules and I follow the law,” he said. “That is how I live my life. I don’t see coming into the 60s at my age to all of a sudden change what I’ve done all the time.” More

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    JD Vance and Tim Walz keep it civil in policy-heavy vice-presidential debate – US elections live

    Good morning and welcome to the blog as we wake up to reaction to Tim Walz and JD Vance’s vice-presidential debate which offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.It was a debate that was surprisingly civil in the final stretch of an ugly election campaign marred by inflammatory rhetoric and two assassination attempts.The two rivals, who have forcefully attacked each other on the campaign trail, mostly struck a cordial tone, instead saving their fire for the candidates at the top of their tickets, democratic vice-president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump.The most tense exchange occurred near the end of the debate, when Vance – who has said he would not have voted to certify the results of the 2020 election – avoided a question about whether he would challenge this year’s vote if Trump loses.Walz responded by blaming Trump’s false claims of voter fraud for instigating the 6 January 2021, mob that attacked the US Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election.“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, before turning to Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”Vance again sidestepped the question, instead accusing Harris of pursuing online censorship of opposing viewpoints. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.Meanwhile, CNN’s snap poll has viewers split over who won the debate – but Vance narrowly wins. The poll of 574 registered voters saw 51% say that Vance won the debate, with 49% choosing Walz.Polled before the debate, 54% of voters thought Walz was likelier to win.JD Vance refused to say whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and continued to sidestep questions over whether he would certify a Trump loss this fall during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday.The exchange brought out some of the sharpest attacks from Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor, in what was otherwise a muted and civil back-and-forth with the Ohio senator.Walz asked Vance directly whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance responded: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Walz then cut in with one of his most aggressive attack lines of the evening: “That is a damning non-answer.”Vance has previously said that he would have asked states to submit alternative slates of electors to Congress to continue to debate allegations of election irregularities in 2020. By the time Congress met during the last election to consider electoral votes, courts, state officials and the US supreme court had all turned away efforts to block legitimate slates of electors from being sent to Congress.Pressed by CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell on whether he would again refuse to certify the vote this year, Vance declined to answer.“What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square,” Vance said. “And that’s all I’ve said and that’s all that Donald Trump has said.” He later said that if Walz won the election with Harris, Walz would have his support.Trump has warned of a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t win the election. He has also said supporters won’t have to vote anymore if he wins in November. Both the Trump campaign and Republican allies are seeding the ground to contest a possible election loss in November.Donald Trump’s senior aides saw JD Vance as having a slick debate performance over Tim Walz, according to people close to Trump, that made his campaign appear palatable despite the former president’s increasingly caustic threats such as vowing to prosecute his perceived enemies.The campaign aides also believed that Vance reset the narrative over his image and likely came across in a more favorable light to undecided voters after a brutal few months of being hammered for making disparaging remarks about women as “childless cat ladies”.Vance’s favorability issue was perhaps the principal priority for Trump’s senior aides because they saw it as potentially fixable and if so, beneficial to the Trump campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day in what has become a vanishingly close race against Kamala Harris.Afterwards, Trump predictably claimed Vance won the debate, but a CBS News poll confirmed how vice-presidential​ debates matter increasingly less in close elections compared to ground game efforts to drive turnout.In the post-debate poll, 42% of respondents said Vance won the debate, 41% gave the win to Walz, while 17% said it was tied – suggesting the main takeaway remains that it is unlikely to play any material role in which campaign wins each of the seven battleground states in November.Tim Walz and JD Vance took to the stage on Tuesday night for a vice-presidential debate that served up less drama than September’s presidential debate, but offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.Three weeks ago Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had endured a contentious hour-and-a-half, with an emotional Trump being goaded into ranting about the number of people who attend his rallies and declaring the vice-president to be a “Marxist”, before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief polling uptick from that performance.But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, and instead concentrated their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates’, but one with a few gaffes that might overshadow some of the substance in coming days.In a key exchange over abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’s lead in using personal stories.Trump “brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v Wade”, Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who as a child was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant.“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance contested.Walz also criticized the Trump-Vance position that states should decide whether women have access to abortion.“That’s not how this works. This is basic human rights. We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world,” he said.Good morning and welcome to the blog as we wake up to reaction to Tim Walz and JD Vance’s vice-presidential debate which offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.It was a debate that was surprisingly civil in the final stretch of an ugly election campaign marred by inflammatory rhetoric and two assassination attempts.The two rivals, who have forcefully attacked each other on the campaign trail, mostly struck a cordial tone, instead saving their fire for the candidates at the top of their tickets, democratic vice-president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump.The most tense exchange occurred near the end of the debate, when Vance – who has said he would not have voted to certify the results of the 2020 election – avoided a question about whether he would challenge this year’s vote if Trump loses.Walz responded by blaming Trump’s false claims of voter fraud for instigating the 6 January 2021, mob that attacked the US Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election.“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, before turning to Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”Vance again sidestepped the question, instead accusing Harris of pursuing online censorship of opposing viewpoints. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.Meanwhile, CNN’s snap poll has viewers split over who won the debate – but Vance narrowly wins. The poll of 574 registered voters saw 51% say that Vance won the debate, with 49% choosing Walz.Polled before the debate, 54% of voters thought Walz was likelier to win. More