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    Trump wants the FCC to take CBS’s license away. This is a dark omen | Dennis Aftergut and Austin Sarat

    Donald Trump’s 10 October attack on CBS for editing its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris – a normal television process – is pure distraction. It is designed to draw our attention away from the fact that he was afraid to give the news magazine its traditional interview with both political candidates. Trump’s statement that the Federal Communications Commission should “take away” CBS’s broadcast license betrays his ignorance of the fact that the FCC does not license networks and foreshadows a full-on assault on free speech and freedom of the press if he becomes president.History is clear that dictators move early to take control of the media in order to censor information unfavorable to their people. Our safety requires preventing that control, as Thomas Jefferson wrote two centuries ago: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.”Only Rumpelstiltskin would fail to grasp how much Trump cannot tolerate criticism from the press or anyone. Attacking mainstream media is his way of desensitizing us to the important role of the press in a free society.If you want a preview of how first amendment rights will disappear if Trump is elected president, look to his home state of Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis, his Maga copycat, runs that government in a way Trump would like to bring to the whole nation. On 9 October, we saw one of the governor’s lackeys try to carve away freedom of speech and the press, along with reproductive rights.John Wilson, the general counsel to the state’s department of health, threatened the state’s broadcast stations with prosecution unless they removed a campaign ad promoting amendment 4. It’s the ballot measure to add abortion rights to the state’s constitution.The amendment 4 ad featured Floridian Caroline Williams saying that she would be dead had the state’s six-week ban on abortion been in effect when her health required one in 2022. The irony of the Florida government trying to quash the ad is rich. Here we have a bare-knuckles attempt at censorship from the party that purports to oppose the “cancel culture”.That’s not the end of the irony. The health department’s letter alleged that the pro-amendment 4 ad violated the state’s “sanitation nuisance” statute. This ground for government censorship, based as it is on a statute designed to prohibit overflowing septic tanks or unclean slaughterhouses, fails the laugh test, much less the constitution.Still, don’t miss what’s going on here: people’s rights are not removed in one fell swoop but rather in steps. The first stage is eroding people’s expectations that freedoms are sacred and will be respected. By getting us thinking we can live with this or that little invasion of someone else’s rights, autocrats normalize those intrusions and then expand them to cover all of us. Diminishing the media’s and the public’s rights to criticize a leader is how dictatorships get started.That’s why American law – at least in its current state – forbids what Wilson was threatening. Campaign ads are core political speech, entitled to the highest level of first amendment protection. That means that content-based restrictions on such speech must promote a compelling government interest and be the least intrusive way to promote that interest. Specifically, even false statements in the context of abortion law campaigning – and Williams’ statements in the ad were not false – must survive such strict scrutiny.A Florida crocodile’s tears would be more compelling than Wilson’s description of Florida’s interest in protecting women from the ad’s purported “danger” – that it suggests that they need to go to other states or find unlicensed abortionists if they do not have access to an abortion in Florida. That danger arises from the statute, not the ad.If the department of public health is so concerned about women’s safety, why not issue a regulation clarifying that doctors will not be prosecuted if, in their professional judgment, they believe that a woman has “pregnancy complications posing a serious risk of death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment”?Without that assurance, a doctor’s decision to perform an emergency abortion is so chilled that, in effect, there is no exception to Florida’s six-week ban. Interviews with Florida doctors establish their understandable unwillingness to risk their liberty given the prospect of a district attorney second-guessing their judgment.But whatever the ban’s impact on the practice of medicine, Wilson and DeSantis’s effort to stop groups from promoting their point of view puts all of us in jeopardy.George Washington captured that danger at the beginning of the republic. As he put it: “The freedom of Speech may be taken away – and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, 250 years later, are sending us a clear message that our lives and our freedoms are on the ballot.

    Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy

    Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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    Kamala Harris to release health report saying she is fit for presidency – aide

    Kamala Harris on Saturday planned to release a report on her health and medical history which finds that “she possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if voters elect her in November, according to a senior aide on her campaign.The aide said the vice-president’s advisers viewed the release of the health report and medical history as an opportunity to call attention to questions about the Republican White House nominee Donald Trump’s physical fitness as well as mental acuity. The 78-year-old Trump has also not released any information about his health, though he would be the oldest president elected if Americans give him a second term in the Oval Office.As Guardian US reported earlier in October, Trump has been becoming increasingly incoherent at campaign rallies. He has been slurring, stumbling over his words, hurling expletives – and showing signs of cognitive decline consistent with someone approaching his 80s, according to medical experts.Recent speeches have seen him rant about topics ranging from his purportedly “beautiful” body to “a million Rambos” in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Harris campaign aides pointed to Trump’s backing out of an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that the vice-president granted and his refusal to debate her again after their 10 September faceoff. They argue that the former president is “avoiding public scrutiny” and giving voters “the impression … that he has something to hide and may not be up for the job”.“Contrast her age and vitality with his,” the senior aide to Harris, 59, said early on Saturday.Questions over whether he was too enfeebled forced Joe Biden to halt his bid for re-election to the presidency during the summer. The 81-year-old Democrat dropped out of a rematch with Trump on 21 July and endorsed Harris to succeed him.Recent national polling averages show Harris with a nearly four-point edge over Trump in the 5 November race for the presidency. But key swing states remain too close to call, and most experts expect a competitive election.The Republican party chose Trump as their nominee despite his being convicted in May of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who claimed an extramarital sexual encounter with him about a decade before his successful run for the presidency in 2016. Among other legal problems, he is grappling with criminal charges that he tried to illicitly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election.Trump, for his part, has maintained that Biden “became mentally impaired”. He also said that Harris “was born that way” while struggling to pronounce the vice-president’s name.At a town hall in Las Vegas for a group of undecided voters on Thursday, Harris said “using language that’s belittling … [is not] healthy for our nation”.“I don’t admire that,” Harris said. “And in fact, I’m quite critical of it coming from someone who wants to be president of the United States.” More

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    US election briefing: Trump escalates anti-immigrant rhetoric as Harris promises bipartisan council

    Donald Trump doubled down on his anti-immigrant and xenophobic messaging at a rally in Colorado, calling for the death penalty for migrants who kill US citizens and announcing a sweeping plan to deport Venezuelans.“The invasion will be stopped. The migrant flights will end and Kamala’s app for illegals will be shut down immediately within 24 hours,” he said in the city of Aurora, which he claims has been overrun by Venezuelan gang members, despite pushback from local officials, including Republicans.Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was focusing on a more positive message, telling an event in Phoenix that if elected president she would create a bipartisan council of advisers to provide her feedback on her policy initiatives and appoint a Republican to her cabinet.“I love good ideas wherever they come from,” said Harris, who is making a push to get Republicans with doubts about Trump to support her.Here is what else happened on Friday:

    Harris landed her second US Vogue cover on Friday with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that reads: “The candidate for our times.” “Only rarely are individuals summoned for acts of national rescue, but in July, vice-president Kamala Harris received one of those calls,” the glossy magazine, which has previously endorsed the candidate, said on X. “With President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, the world looked to Harris with hopes and doubts.”

    Trump’s team reportedly asked for officials to provide him with a dramatic array of military protections as the presidential campaign wraps, including travel in military aircraft and vehicles. Trump’s campaign has also requested ramped-up flight restrictions around his residences and rallies, and “ballistic glass pre-positioned in seven battleground states” for his team’s use, the Washington Post reported, citing internal emails and sources familiar with the requests, adding that they were both “extraordinary and unprecedented”.

    The longtime Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage by an undercover journalist. The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president’s legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.

    The US justice department said on Friday it was suing the state of Virginia for violating the federal prohibition on systematic efforts to remove voters within 90 days of an election. On 7 August, Republican governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order requiring the commissioner of the Department of Elections to certify that the department was conducting “daily updates to the voter list” to remove, among other groups, people who are unable to verify that they are citizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

    Harris will next week highlight her economic policies that benefit Black men, hoping to energize a voting bloc that some of the Democratic presidential candidate’s advisers fear has embraced Republican rival Trump in large numbers, three sources familiar with the plans told Reuters. The report comes a day after former president Barack Obama questioned Black men’s unwillingness to vote for Harris at an event in Pennsylvania.

    Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Harris next month and return to power. “He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”

    JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, again refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election over Trump, evading the question five times in an interview with the New York Times, the newspaper reported on Friday. The Ohio senator repeated the response he used during his debate against Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, saying he was “focused on the future”.

    The criminal trial of two rural Arizona county supervisors who initially refused to certify election results in 2022 will not occur before this year’s elections after it was again delayed. Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, two of the three supervisors in the Republican-led Cochise county, face charges of conspiracy and interfering with an election officer. Despite the county’s typically low profile, the trial is being watched nationally as elections experts anticipate a potential wave of local officials refusing to certify results if Trump loses. The red county, set on the US-Mexico border, has a population of about 125,000.

    A solid majority of Hispanic women have a positive opinion of Harris and a negative view of Trump, but Hispanic men are more divided on both candidates, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

    X was “alert” to any platform manipulation attempts, the Elon Musk-owned site told Agence France-Presse on Friday, following a report that hundreds of apparent pro-Russian bot accounts were amplifying US election misinformation. In a study shared exclusively with AFP earlier this week, the Washington-based American Sunlight Project said it found nearly 1,200 accounts on X that pushed pro-Kremlin propaganda, content favoring Trump and misinformation about Harris. More

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    Trump intensifies nativist message with sweeping proposal to deport immigrants

    Donald Trump intensified his politics of nativism and xenophobia on Friday by announcing a sweeping plan to deport Venezuelans he claimed have “infected” a once-peaceful city in Colorado.The Republican presidential nominee held a campaign rally in Aurora on a stage adorned with posters displaying mugshots of people in prison-orange uniforms with descriptions including “illegal immigrant gang members from Venezuela”.Trump told the crowd: “I’m announcing today that, upon taking office, we will have an ‘Operation Aurora’ at the federal level to expedite the removals of these savage gangs.” He pledged to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any non-citizen from a country that the US is at war with.“We will send elite squads of Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], border patrol and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country,” he continued as the crowd roared approval.If they return to the US, Trump said, they will serve an automatic 10 years in prison without parole. “I’m hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer. With your vote, we will achieve complete and total victory over these sadistic monsters. It’s going to go very quickly,” he said.The rally represented a detour for Trump, since Colorado is not a battleground state and looks certain to vote for his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. But recent events offered him an opportunity to exploit a swirl of local rumours to push his anti-immigrant message.Aurora, a city of about 340,000 people near Denver, hit headlines in August when a video circulated showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan immigrants. Trump amplified the story and falsely portrayed the city as overrun by members of the Venezeulan gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA.Authorities say the incident happened in a single block and the area is again safe, noting that the local crime rate is actually declining. Aurora’s Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, called Trump’s claims “grossly exaggerated” and insisted: “The narrative is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination.”TDA traces its origins back more than a decade to a notorious prison. In July, the Biden administration issued a sanction against the gang, placing it alongside MS-13 from El Salvador and the mafia-styled Camorra from Italy on a list of transnational criminal organisations, and offering $12m in rewards for the arrests of three leaders.At Friday’s rally, Trump played a series of news clips, accompanied by dramatic music, describing TDA’s crimes and the murder of US citizens by undocumented immigrants, as well as some seemingly evasive answers by Harris, the vice-president, whom Trump branded a “criminal” and the “worst border tsar” in the country’s history.“My message today is very simple,” he said. “No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can ever be allowed to become president of the United States.”The former president promised that 5 November, when the election is held, will be “liberation day”, prompting chants of “USA! USA!” from the crowd.“I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered. These towns have been conquered and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them out of our country and we will be very, very effective in doing it. It’s going to happen very, very fast. Gonna get them the hell out of our country,” he said.Trump added later: “We’re talking a lot about Venezuela, because Aurora is really infected by Venezuela, but they’re coming from all countries.”The remark recalled past dehumanising language in which Trump claimed undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and, earlier this week, suggested that those suspected in homicide cases “have bad genes”.View image in fullscreenIn similar fashion on Friday, Stephen Miller, a former top aide who is expected to take a senior role in the White House if Trump wins, pointed to the posters on stage as he addressed the crowd before Trump’s appearance.“Look at all these photos around me,” Miller said. “Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors that you want in your city?” The crowd roared “no” in reply.The ex-president has long made immigration his signature issue and promised to stage the biggest deportation operation in US history if he returns to the White House. In recent months, he has targeted specific smaller communities that have seen significant arrivals of immigrants, with tensions flaring locally over resources and some longtime residents expressing misgivings about sudden demographic changes.More than 40,000 immigrants have arrived in the Denver metro area over the past two years, including many Venezuelan families fleeing poverty and violence. But Colorado’s Democratic leaders accuse Trump and other Republicans of overstating problems in Aurora.Representative Jason Crow told the Associated Press: “What is occurring is minimal and isolated. And to be clear, it’s never acceptable, right? We never say any level is acceptable. But it’s not a surge. It’s not a change. There is no takeover of any part of this city, of any apartment complex. It has not happened. It is a lie.”Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, also have spread falsehoods about a community in Springfield, Ohio, where they said Haitian immigrants had been stealing and eating pets. The disinformation campaign led to bomb threats, school closures and forced evacuations.Trump has said he would revoke the temporary protected status that allows Haitians to stay in the US because of widespread poverty and violence in their home nation.Democrats have condemned Trump for tanking a border security bill negotiated in the Senate by both parties because it could have neutralised immigration as an issue. Harris told a Univision town hall in Nevada on Thursday: “He would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.” More

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    Trump campaign asks for more security amid fears of Iran assassination attempt

    Donald Trump’s team has asked for officials to provide him with a dramatic array of military protections as the presidential campaign wraps, including travel in military aircraft and vehicles, according to reports.Trump’s campaign has also requested ramped-up flight restrictions around his residences and rallies, and “ballistic glass pre-positioned in seven battleground states” for his team’s use, the Washington Post reported, citing internal emails and sources familiar with the requests. The New York Times first reported on these requests.The demands were both “extraordinary and unprecedented”, the Post noted, as not a single recent presidential nominee has been shuttled in military aircraft before an election. A source told the Times that these sorts of high-level, classified military resources are used solely for sitting presidents.Trump’s asks followed intelligence provided to his campaign staff that Iran is seeking to assassinate him and after his team expressed worry about drones and missiles targeting him. Trump was shot during a failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on 13 July, and a man was arrested in an alleged assassination attempt on 15 September; neither gunman is believed to have had Iranian ties.Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager, reportedly emailed Secret Service head Ronald L Rowe Jr in recent days, expressing displeasure with the agency’s handling of safety. Wiles claimed in a missive that Trump had had to cancel a campaign rally at the last minute due to a “lack of personnel”, resulting in him being placed in a small room with journalists.Wiles claimed that campaign planning efforts were being stifled over threats, and said that Trump intended to host many additional events as the race nears its end. She further said that officials had not managed to give thorough enough plans to keep Trump safe.Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican representative and Trump supporter, also wrote to the Secret Service requesting military aircraft for Trump, or ramped-up safeguards for his private airplane, the Post said.Asked about reports that Trump’s campaign had requested additional safety measures such as military assets, the Secret Service said in a statement that Trump was receiving “the highest levels of protection”.“Assistance from the Department of Defense is regularly provided for the former president’s protection, to include explosive ordnance disposal, canine units and airlift transportation,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesperson.Guglielmi also said the Secret Service was placing short-term flight restrictions “over the former president’s residence and when he travels”, and “additionally, the former president is receiving the highest level of technical security assets which include unmanned aerial vehicles, counter unmanned aerial surveillance systems, ballistics and other advanced technology systems”.Kamala Harris, Trump’s presidential rival, is provided protection from the US marines as vice-president. She travels on Air Force Two, which is a military plane.The Trump campaign has already begun taking increased precautions with traveling. This has included sometimes splitting his motorcade, and placing him in airplanes that do not bear his name.Sources told the Post that some of Trump’s counselors believe, despite a dearth of evidence, that the two attempts on his life were Iran-backed.A Pakistani man was charged in August with allegedly wanting to hire assassins to kill an unidentified US politician. The man has ties to Iran, per reports.US intelligence officials said in September that Iranian hackers stole information from Trump’s campaign and sent it to media outlets, as well as Joe Biden’s one-time campaign. Documents unsealed in September alleged that three Iranian nationals had participated in a broad, multiyear hacking effort against Trump that also targeted one of his lawyers, one-time CIA members and an ex-US ambassador, the Post said.Additional campaign officials have been apprised that they too were targeted by Iranian hackers, per the newspaper. Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.When asked about the reports during a White House press conference on Friday, Biden said that he had told his administration to provide Trump “all that he needs”.“I’ve told the department to give him every single thing he needs,” the president said. Biden also said that when it comes to security, Trump should be treated “as [if] he were a sitting president”.“Give all that he needs, if it fits within that category, that’s fine,” Biden said. “But if it doesn’t, he shouldn’t.”Biden did offer a humorous quip when asked about Trump’s requests. “As long as he doesn’t ask for F-15s,” Biden said – before following up with: “No, I’m being facetious.” More

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    Roger Stone calls for ‘armed guards’ at polling spots in leaked video

    The longtime Donald Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage by an undercover journalist.The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president’s legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.“We gotta fight it out on a state-by-state basis,” said Stone. “We’re already in court in Wisconsin, we’re already in court in Florida.”When the journalist, posing as a member of a rightwing voter turnout organization, pressed Stone for details on efforts to make sure Trump wins in 2024, Stone told him that the campaign has to “be ready”.“When they throw us out of Detroit, you go get a court order, you come in with your own armed guards, and you dispute it,” said Stone. In Detroit in 2020, there was a chaotic scene at a ballot counting center when GOP vote challengers pounded on the walls of the center and demanded to be let in.Filmed at an August event in Jacksonville, Florida, called A Night with Roger Stone, the footage also reveals Stone’s lasting anger toward former attorney general Bill Barr, who he calls “a traitorous piece of human garbage”.While in office, Barr acted as a staunch Trump ally, even pushing for a lighter sentence for Stone, when the operative was found guilty of witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection with a congressional inquiry into Russian interference during the 2016 election. Barr lost favor with the former president when he declined to publicly back Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, drawing outrage from Trump’s closest allies.“Once we get back in, he has to go to prison,” Stone exclaimed. “He has to go to prison, he’s a criminal.”Stone’s apparent lust for legal retribution echoes Trump’s own vow, which he has stated repeatedly to the press and at his rallies, to prosecute his political opponents. It is a promise that Trump could more likely make good on, given the supreme court’s rulings this year to expand the powers of the president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe journalist in the video was posing as someone involved with Lion of Judah, a rightwing effort to recruit election-skeptical Christians to enlist as poll workers in swing states in order to collect evidence of voter fraud.Joshua Standifer, who leads Lion of Judah, describes the effort as a “Trojan horse” strategy to get Christians in “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers”. In the video, Stone appeared unfamiliar with Standifer or his work. More

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    Harris accuses Trump of ‘playing politics’ with hurricane disaster relief

    Kamala Harris has accused Donald Trump of “playing politics” with disaster relief amid growing criticisms that the former president has tried to exploit Hurricanes Helene and Milton with a flurry of lies and disinformation as he bids to gain the edge in the race for the White House.The US vice-president’s comments came amid increasing evidence that the two storms, which have left a trail of death and destruction in several southern states, are threatening to upset the calculus for next month’s presidential election.Asked at a town hall meeting in Las Vegas organized by Univision, the US Spanish-language TV network, to address complaints about the federal government’s response, Harris aimed pointed comments at Trump, although without naming him.“In this crisis – like in so many issues that affect the people of our country – I think it so important that leadership recognises the dignity [of those affected],” she said.“I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” she added, as she campaigned in the swing state of Nevada on Thursday.Harris’s comments followed a full-frontal attack on Trump – who has falsely accused the White House and Harris of, among other things, deliberately withholding aid from Republican areas and diverting funds to illegal immigrants – from Joe Biden.The US president accused Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, of spreading “outright lies”.“They’re being so damn un-American with the way they’re talking about this stuff,” Biden told journalists at the White House on Thursday. Addressing Trump specifically, he said: “Get a life, man. Help these people.”Trump and his running mate, the US senator for Ohio JD Vance, have maintained a drumbeat of criticism of Biden and Harris accusing them of deliberately engineering an inadequate response to Hurricane Helene in Republican voting areas, after the storm ripped through Georgia and North Carolina – two swing states vital to the outcome of the 5 November election – even while fellow Republican politicians have praised the recovery effort.The former president has called the rescue operation worse than the response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005 – killing 1,400 – and left an indelible stain on the presidency of George W Bush.“This hurricane has been a bad one, Kamala Harris has left them stranded,” he told a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin. “This is the worst response to a storm or a catastrophe or a hurricane that we’ve ever seen ever. Probably worse than Katrina, and that’s hard to beat, right?”Harris has taken some time away from the campaign trail this month to participate in White House situation room conferences and meet staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which has led the response to the hurricanes. Helene was the deadliest since Katrina.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Democratic strategists have voiced fears that the need to respond to the twin storms is depriving Harris of vital time in her quest to defeat Trump as the campaign enters its final weeks.Deanne Criswell, Fema’s director, has called the onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories “absolutely the worst I have ever seen” and warned that it is hindering relief efforts.With polls showing the election race tighter than ever, Trump has focused particular attention on Harris. “She didn’t send anything or anyone at all. Days passed. No help as men, women and children drowned,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania.He has put special emphasis on North Carolina, where polls show the two candidates neck-and-neck and which has a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Some Republican politicians have condemned the spread of misinformation but generally without naming Trump.Harris also told CNN on Wednesday. “It is dangerous – it is unconscionable, frankly, that anyone who would consider themselves a leader would mislead desperate people to the point that those desperate people would not receive the aid to which they are entitled,” she said. More