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      Kamala Harris will announce VP pick in ‘next six, seven days’, Democrat says

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      Kamala Harris will announce her running mate for the US presidential election against Donald Trump and JD Vance “in the next six, seven days”, an influential Democratic campaign co-chair said.“I would imagine we’ll know who her running mate is, and we’ll get ready for the convention,” Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, told CBS on Monday, referring to Democrats’ national gathering in Chicago next month.Whitmer also said she was not under consideration herself.“I have communicated with everyone, including the people of Michigan, that I’m going to stay as governor until the end of my term at the end of 2026,” Whitmer said.Harris is widely reported to have narrowed her field of possible picks to three – all white men from states expected to play key roles in the November election. On Sunday, a new poll said the navy pilot and astronaut turned Arizona senator Mark Kelly was seen most favourably by voters.According to ABC News and Ipsos, 22% of respondents saw Kelly in a favourable light against 12% who did not, giving him a net favourability of +10.The two other men widely reported to be in the final reckoning are the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania. In the ABC/Ipsos poll, Walz scored -1 for favourability, Shapiro +4.Strikingly, Kelly’s favourability rating was a striking 25 points better than that of Vance, the Ohio senator whose first steps in support of Trump have been beset by controversy and Democratic attacks, leading to reports of doubts among senior Republicans.Under fire for misogynistic comments including disparaging leading Democrats as “childless cat ladies”, and widely shown to have said he despised Trump before changing his tune, Vance’s favourability rating in the ABC/Ipsos poll was -15, a poor score surpassed only by Trump himself, at -16.Lest Kelly supporters get too confident, the ABC/Ipsos poll also noted that he and most other potential Democratic picks “remain unknown to large sections of the American public”. Among all possible Democratic nominees for vice-president, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg (+4 favourability), and the governor of California, Gavin Newsom (-12), were the best-known to voters.Harris was seen favourably by 43% of voters and unfavourably by 42%. Among possible picks who might help boost that rating, Kelly represents a border state, central to the fight over immigration, and is married to Gabby Giffords, a former congresswoman who survived a shooting and campaigns for gun control reform.Shapiro governs a rust belt state that proved pivotal in 2016, when Trump won it, and in 2020, when it went for Joe Biden.Walz’s state, Minnesota, has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election since 1976 but Trump has targeted it this year, trumpeting polling gains before Biden dropped out of the race.Biden, 81, withdrew from his re-election campaign amid polling that showed most Americans thought him too old to be president. That means that, at 78, Trump is now the oldest candidate ever to run for the White House.Whitmer told CBS she expected a “convention of happy warriors” in Chicago. Harris advisers are reportedly placing emphasis on potential running mates’ ability to take the fight to Vance, who they want to portray as too inexperienced to step up should Trump fail to serve a full term.Now 39, Vance was a US marine, a bestselling author and a venture capitalist before winning a US Senate seat in 2022.On Monday, Mitch Landrieu, a Harris campaign co-chair, called Vance “one of the most unprepared people … ever put up to hold the vice-presidency of the United States”.Landrieu told CNN: “He’s never run anything. And he’s about to be one heartbeat away from the largest entity in the world, and the one that’s the most important.“So it’s a fair question to ask: ‘How would we know whether you have the capability to run domestic and national security policy for the most powerful country in the world, which you may be called to do on a moment’s notice?’”Kelly, 60, was elected to the Senate in 2020. Walz, 60 and a former teacher and national guard sergeant, was a US congressman for six terms from 2006 before being elected governor of Minnesota in 2018. Shapiro, 51, sat in the Pennsylvania state house before becoming state attorney general in 2017, then governor in 2023.CNN quoted “a Harris adviser” as saying the running-mate selection process would be informed by Harris’s own experience.Now 59, Harris was a former California attorney general and US senator when she was picked by Biden in 2020. Her four years as vice-president have generated reports of struggles but also effective displays on key campaign issues, particularly threats to abortion rights.“She knows the challenges of this world in a way that you have to have somebody who has a deep amount of resilience,” the unnamed adviser told CNN.A campaign spokesperson, James Singer, told the same network Harris would “select a vice-president who is qualified and ready to serve the American people, protect their freedoms, and fight for their future”.All three men reportedly under closest consideration have chosen their words with care.“This is not about me,” Kelly told reporters. “But always, always when I’ve had the chance to serve, I think that’s very important to do.”Walz said: “Being mentioned is certainly an honour. I trust Vice-President Harris’s judgment … I would do what is in the best interests of the country.”Shapiro said Harris would “make that decision when she is ready, and I have all the confidence in the world that she will make that decision, along with many others, in the best interests of the Amercian people”. More

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      ‘Good for Joe’: Scranton residents back Biden’s decision to quit race

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      The Central Scranton Expressway, the road which leads into Scranton from the I-81 highway, was renamed in 2021 as the President Joseph R Biden Jr Expressway.The road drops down into the center of Scranton, the Pennsylvania city where the president was born, where it meets up with Biden Street – renamed in the same 2021 city council vote.There is no indication yet that Scranton, a former coal and manufacturing hub home to about 80,000 people, intends to change its name to Bidenton, but the message here is clear: this is Joe Biden country.“​​Let me start off with: we’re very proud of Joe Biden. We love Joe Biden. The fact that he’s a local guy, and all that,” said James Ferguson, 81.Ferguson was sitting with his brother, John Ferguson, 77, on a bench on Biden Street on Thursday afternoon. It was a blow for both when the president, who moved to Delaware from Scranton aged seven but who speaks often of his Scranton upbringing, decided to drop out of the race in mid-July, but the fondness for Biden remains.“I think Joe Biden showed the character that he is. He is a very good man, and he put the country first. It’s not how good he is, or whether he is smart or not. It was perception. The perception was bad for Joe, and he knew it and he dropped out. Good for Joe,” the elder Ferguson said.But with Trump leading Biden in the polls and posing an existential threat to the US, there is an acceptance that Biden had to go.“We can’t afford to lose this election, I think. So yeah, we were disappointed. We voted for him, we would vote for him again. But I think this is better for the party, better for the country,” John Ferguson said.“He’s a realist. I think he finally was convinced that he couldn’t take the risk. We’ve got to stop Trump from winning. We can’t let Trump get in. That is a terrible man. He’s an insult to the human race, that man.”Biden dropped out on Sunday, bringing to an end a painful, weeks-long pressure campaign that began with a dreadful debate performance and saw an ever-increasing number of Democratic politicians call for him to resign.Behind the scenes senior party figures, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, had also made the case to Biden that he couldn’t win, despite the president comfortably – albeit in the face of very little opposition – clinching the Democratic primary earlier this year.“His age was a concern for a lot of voters and he was slipping in the polls. And I was very worried about that. So I mean, I’m thankful of all he’s done, I think he’s done good work, and I think he did the honorable thing that really should be valued,” said Angela Miller, a civil engineer.“I never wanted him to run again. He never said he was going to, do you know what I mean? From the beginning he said he was going to be a transitional president. I felt like he kind of went back on that.”Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2020, defeating Trump by 80,000 votes. He comfortably won Lackawanna county, the north-east Pennsylvania district where Scranton is based, but not everyone in the city is an admirer.View image in fullscreen“He wasn’t really on the ball I don’t think. It was kind of like having the senile grandpa in the White House office,” said Phil Fleming, 61, as he watching his friend unpack a guitar at a bandshell in downtown Scranton.Fleming had the opposite geographic journey to Biden. He grew up in Delaware, where Biden moved with his family aged 10, and then moved to the Scranton area later in life. But Fleming has no particular affection for the president.“I always said Joe would do for the country what he did for Delaware: nothing,” he said.Biden endorsed Kamala Harris for president within minutes of pulling out of the race on Sunday. Harris has since all but secured the Democratic nomination, and if she wins in November she would become the country’s first woman president.“I’m excited about it. I think it would be awesome to have a female run the country, to see what she could bring and try to unite the country a little bit more,” said Kelly, 34.Kelly, who asked not to use her last name, was walking her dog through the Green Ridge area of Scranton, where Biden’s three-storey childhood home is now marked by a small plaque.“It’s definitely a cool thing to say that the President of the United States grew up in your neighborhood, you can’t really say that too often. So it’s a little fun fact that we have here,” she said.Few cities can claim to have a president on their books – Quincy, in Massachusetts, can lay claim to two: father and son duo John Adams and John Quincy Adams. For Scranton, Biden may no longer be in the race, but he will remain a presence.“I think he really put all his heart and soul into this country, and I just feel like maybe now it’s time to step out, and let the next generation come in and serve the same way he did,” Kelly said. More

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      ‘Oh thank God’: Democratic swing state voters feel relief after Biden drops out

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      For many Democratic swing state voters, Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election came as a relief.“Oh thank God,” said Cathy Gramze, a retired nurse who lives in the suburbs of Detroit. “My diagnosis has for a long time been that he cannot run again and I am not entirely sure that he should finish his term in office.”Gramze had worried about Biden’s fitness long before the debate. His 27 June performance merely confirmed what she had long feared. “A lot of the time he is the president we need, but some of the time he isn’t.”Kamala Harris, who Biden endorsed on Sunday and who has earned the endorsement of most prominent Democratic elected officials, “needs to be the presidential nominee”, Gramze said.For more than a year, voters across the political spectrum have been saying they feel Biden, who is 81 years old, is too old to run for re-election. Those anxieties crescendoed in the wake of his first debate with Donald Trump, in which Trump lied repeatedly about a range of issues and Biden struggled to push back or even answer questions coherently. Following the debate, more than 30 Democrats in Congress called on Biden to end his presidential campaign, with the powerful former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly ratcheting up the pressure on Biden to drop out of the race last week.In the last few weeks, polling has increasingly shown Biden lagging in critical swing states, with large majorities of Democratic party voters indicating they believe he should not renew his campaign. Recent national polls also show Trump losing to the vice-president, whose path to victory, like Biden’s, will involve winning the critical states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.Not only Democrats welcomed the announcement. Dan Rose, who has long supported Trump, said he was glad Biden pulled out of the race.“He doesn’t have the caliber we need in a president,” said Rose, who said he worries about the economy. Rose, who is from De Pere, Wisconsin, said he will still support Trump but felt Biden had made the right choice in ending his campaign. “The Democrats might be in a pickle now,” he added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf the Democrats are in a pickle, few grassroots party members expressed concern following Biden’s announcement.“How courageous and brave of him to do that,” said Chris Fleming, who is retired and volunteers for a group organizing rural Democratic voters in Wisconsin. This year, Fleming’s husband had $15,000 in student debt cancelled by the Biden administration – which she said left her feeling grateful for Biden. “I have nothing but respect for him,” she said.Jake Knashishu, an attorney from Decatur, Georgia, said Biden’s departure from the race “relieved, for the most part, concerns about him being able to really present himself as an effective alternative to Trump”. Biden’s withdrawal gives Democrats a better shot at Georgia, Knanishu said.He had spoken with a neighbor on Sunday who “saw Joe Biden as kind of Ruth Bader Ginsburg 2.0 – holding on and refusing to pass the torch and maintain stability”, said Knashishu. “She just feels relieved, because she knows that at least we’re not going to have that happen again.” More

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      Hundreds mourn Pennsylvania man killed in Trump assassination attempt

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      Hundreds of people who gathered to remember the former fire chief fatally shot at a weekend rally for former president Donald Trump were urged to find “unity” as the area in rural Pennsylvania sought to recover from the assassination attempt.Wednesday’s public event was the first of two to memorialize and celebrate Corey Comperatore’s life. The second, a visitation for friends, was planned for Thursday at Laube Hall in Freeport.Outside the Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, where the vigil was held for Comperatore, a sign read “Rest in Peace Corey, Thank You For Your Service” with the logo of his fire company.On the rural road to the auto racing track – lined with cornfields, churches and industrial plants – a sign outside a local credit union read: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the Comperatore family.”View image in fullscreenComperatore, 50, had worked as a project and tooling engineer, was an army reservist and had spent many years as a volunteer firefighter after serving as chief, according to his obituary.He died on Saturday during the attempt on Trump’s life at the rally in Butler. Comperatore spent the final moments of his life shielding his wife and daughter from gunfire, officials said.A statement issued on Thursday by Comperatore’s family described him as “our beloved father and husband, and a friend to so many throughout the Butler region”.“Our family is finding comfort and peace through the heartfelt messages of encouragement from people around the world, through the support of our church and community, and most of all through the strength of God,” the statement said.Vigil organizer Kelly McCollough told the crowd on Wednesday that the event was not political in nature, adding that there was no room for hate or personal opinions other than an outpouring of support for the Comperatore family.“Tonight is about unity,” McCollough said. “We need each other. We need to feel love. We need to feel safe. We need clarity in this chaos. We need strength. We need healing.”Dan Ritter, who gave a eulogy, said he bought Comperatore’s childhood home in 1993, sparking a friendship that grew with their shared values of family, Christian faith and politics.“Corey loved his family and was always spending time with them,” Ritter said. “This past Saturday was supposed to be one of those days for him. He did what a good father would do. He protected those he loved. He’s a true hero for us all.”Jeff Lowers of the Freeport fire department trained with Comperatore and said at the vigil that he always had a smile on his face.Afterward, Heidi Powell, a family friend, read remarks from Comperatore’s high school economics teacher, who could not attend the vigil.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What made Corey truly extraordinary was his indomitable spirit, unyielding courage, his unflappable optimism,” the teacher, Mark Wyant, wrote.Comperatore’s pastor, Jonathan Fehl of the Cabot Methodist church, said the family “has been humbled by the way this community has rallied around them”, and by the support they have received from people around the world.The vigil concluded with people in the crowd lighting candles and raising cellphones, glow sticks and lighters as Comperatore’s favorite song – I Can Only Imagine, by the Christian rock band MercyMe – played while pictures of him and his family were shown on a screen.Two other people were injured at the rally: David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township. As of Wednesday night, both had been upgraded to serious but stable condition, according to a spokesperson with Allegheny Health Network.Joseph Feldman, an attorney for Copenhaver, said on Wednesday that he had spoken with Copenhaver by phone.“He seems to be in good spirits, but he also understands the gravity of the situation,” Feldman said. “And he’s deeply saddened about what has occurred, and he’s deeply sympathetic” to the other victims and their families.Feldman said Copenhaver suffered “life-altering injuries”, declining to go into detail. He said Copenhaver’s priority is to “keep up with the medical treatment he’s receiving and hopefully be released at some point”.In a statement, Dutch’s family thanked the “greater western Pennsylvania community and countless others across the country and world” for the incredible outpouring of prayers and well wishes.Trump suffered an ear injury but was not seriously hurt and has been participating this week in the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. More

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      Focus on Bethel Park as classmates describe suspected Trump gunman

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      In Bethel Park, where the man who is suspected of opening fire at a Donald Trump campaign rally on Saturday lived with his mother and sister, the houses are small and built of brick, Walmart and Target form central social hubs, and moms watch over their children at a junior league baseball park next to a tributary of the Allegheny River.The attempted assassination of the Republican former president just 45 miles north has put a focus on Bethel Park, as investigators attempt to establish the motivations of the 20-year-old shooter.Authorities on Sunday identified the suspect as Thomas Matthew Crooks. Officials said they believe Crooks acted alone. But so far, they have not been able to uncover a motivation that drove the young man to unleash a hail of bullets at Trump, wounding the former president and killing a former fire chief who was shielding his daughters.The FBI said it would continue to investigate the attack as an attempted assassination and an act of domestic terrorism.“The information that we have indicates that the shooter acted alone,” said Kevin Rojek, supervisory special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office. “At present, we have not identified an ideology associated with the subject, but I want to remind everyone that we’re still very early in this investigation.”The FBI said Crook had not been on their radar. Since his identification, a fragmentary portrait has emerged, almost by virtue of its omissions. He was employed as a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The nursing home’s administrator Marcie Grimm said Crooks “performed his job without concern and his background check was clean”.View image in fullscreenNor have there been significant clues found in his political affiliations. He had registered Republican but had also donated $15 to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on Joe Biden’s inauguration day. He had no past criminal cases against him, according to public court records.Claire, a young woman who had known Crooks through his elder sister and who did not provide a last name, said she could not quite believe the boy she had once knew had attempted to assassinate a US president.“He’s so young to want to go do that,” she said.She said Crooks had had a difficult time socially. “He wasn’t the most attractive-looking and I don’t think he did sports that can add appeal,’” she said.Former classmates who spoke to other news outlets filled in other memories. Some described Crooks as smart and shy. Others spoke of a long history of being bullied. An unnamed former classmate told the New York Post that Crooks was “a loner”. He said: “He probably had a friend group, but not many friends.”View image in fullscreenJameson Myers said that Crooks had tried out for the school rifle team but had not made the roster. “He didn’t just not make the team, he was asked not to come back because how bad of a shot he was, it was considered, like, dangerous,” Myers told ABC News. Jameson Murphy told the Post that Crooks was “a comically bad shot”.Max R Smith said to the Philadelphia Inquirer that Crooks “definitely was conservative”. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate,” Smith said.With a nation on edge, establishing Crook’s motives is seen as a key to unlocking larger issues of deep political discord.“We’re looking into his background, his day-to-day activities, any writings and social media posts that might help us identify what led to this shooting,”, the FBI’s Rojek said. “We have not seen anything threatening at this time”. More

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      Biden urges US to reject ‘extremism and fury’ after Trump assassination attempt

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      Joe Biden on Sunday forcefully condemned political violence and appealed to a nation still reeling from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to reject “extremism and fury”.In a primetime address from the Oval Office, Biden said Americans must strive for “national unity,” warning that the political rhetoric in the US had gotten “too heated” as passions rise in the final months before the November presidential election.“There is no place in America for this kind of violence – for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception,” the president said. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”Biden’s plea for Americans to “cool it down” came as Trump said that he would use his speech at the Republican national convention to bring “the whole country, even the whole world, together.”“The speech will be a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” Trump told the Washington Examiner, adding that the reality of what had happened was “just setting in.”Biden ordered an independent review into how a gunman was able to get on to a roof overlooking a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, and fire multiple shots at the former president from an “elevated position” outside of the venue. The FBI warned on Sunday that online threats of political violence, already heightened, had spiked since the shooting.The attack, which is being investigated as an attempted assassination and a potential act of domestic terrorism, left Trump injured at the ear, but it killed a spectator, identified as a former fire chief, and critically injured two others.“We cannot, we must not go down this road in America,” Biden added, citing a rising tide of political violence that included the assault on the US Capitol, the attack on the husband of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.Biden also praised Corey Comperatore, the 50-year-old former fire chief who was killed as he dove to shield his wife and daughter. Comperatore, Biden said, was a “hero” and extended his “deepest condolences” to his family.Investigators were still searching for the motive of the 20-year-old suspect, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.More than 24 hours after the attack, the investigation into how Crooks managed to open fire, reportedly using a AR-15 bought legally by his father, at the rally remained fluid. Investigators have seized several of Crooks’s devices and are starting to piece together his communications before the event. Authorities said they had discovered potential explosive devices in Crooks’s car.Meanwhile, details have begun to emerge about the suspect, who was shot and killed by Secret Service counter-snipers.As a junior in high school, Crooks donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee aligned with the Democratic party, but eight months later he registered to vote as a member of the Republican party.Former classmates described the man as a smart, and quiet student. One former classmate told Reuters that Crooks had not shown a particular interest in politics in high school, and would rather would discuss computers and games.“He was super smart. That’s what really kind of threw me off was, this was, like, a really, really smart kid, like he excelled,” the classmate told Reuters. “Nothing crazy ever came up in any conversation.”Another young man who described himself as a former classmate of Crooks at Bethel Park high school spoke with reporters on Sunday, recalling how his ex-companion “was bullied almost every day” on campus.View image in fullscreenThe president, who was at church in Delaware during the time of the shooting, cut short his weekend and returned to Washington to confront the situation, arriving at the White House after midnight. He and Trump spoke late on Saturday.Biden spoke briefly from the White House earlier on Sunday, delivering a similar message from the Roosevelt room after receiving a briefing on the investigation in the Situation Room.In those comments, Biden asked the public not to “make assumptions” about the shooter’s motives or affiliations, as conspiracy theories and misinformation swirl online.The Republican national convention will begin on Monday in Milwaukee, where Trump is expected to receive a hero’s welcome by the party’s rank and file, rattled but defiant. Trump, who arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday evening, is not scheduled to address the convention until Thursday evening, after he is formally nominated as the party’s nominee.Speaking to the New York Post while en route to Milwaukee, Trump said he was “supposed to be dead”, adding: “The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle.”Biden’s remarks came at a fragile moment in the election, a re-match between the president and Trump already defined by exceptional tumult and deep political polarization.For weeks, the president has been fighting calls from elected officials in his own party to abandon his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate performance last month that underscored concerns about his age and fitness for office. The 81-year-old Biden has insisted he will not be pushed out as the party’s nominee, but has done little to quell the swirl of doubt that he is the best candidate to defeat Trump in November.Trump earlier this year became the first former president to be convicted of felonies, and faces several more legal challenges related to his role in the 6 January Capitol attack and efforts to overturn the results of a lost election. At least one Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, has called for the criminal cases against Trump to be dropped in light of the assassination attempt.In his remarks on Sunday evening, Biden was realistic about the challenge of heeding his words, accepting that national unity was “the most elusive of goals” in an America deeply divided into camps. Already, Republicans were blaming the violence on the president, arguing that Biden’s attempts to portray Trump as a threat to American democracy helped fuel a toxic political environment.Yet the attack has drawn condemnation from Republican and Democratic officials across the country as well as world leaders.“We need to turn the temperature down,” House speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday, in an interview on CNN.The president acknowledged that he and Trump offer drastically competing visions, and that their supporters diverged sharply. In Milwaukee, Republicans would offer sustained critiques of Biden’s record, the president said, while he planned to travel on Monday to Nevada, where he would rally supporters around his agenda. Because of the attack, he postponed a trip to Texas, where he was scheduled to speak at the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B Johnson presidential library.“We debate and disagree. We compare and contrast the character of the candidates, the records, the issues, the agenda, the vision for America,” he said, arguing that the contest should be settled at the “ballot box” and “not with bullets”.After the attack on Saturday night, the Biden campaign reportedly moved to pull down its television ads “as quickly as possible” and pause all “outbound communications”.“Politics must never be a literal battlefield or, god forbid, a literal killing field,” Biden emphasized in his address on Sunday night. He urged Americans to “get out of our silos” and echo chambers where misinformation is rampant.“Remember: though we may disagree,” he said, “we are not enemies.” More

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      Donald Trump shooting: authorities attempt to determine motive as suspect’s devices seized

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      FBI officials said on Sunday they were assessing the shooting of Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday as a possible domestic terrorism attack and assassination attempt, as federal investigators executed a flurry of warrants in trying to determine a motive.The officials said there was no evidence that the 20-year-old suspected gunman, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was operating as part of a larger group. But his reasons for scaling the roof of a building overlooking the rally to shoot at Trump remained unclear.By Sunday evening, dozens of federal investigators with the FBI, the ATF and all three US attorney’s offices in Pennsylvania were involved in an expanding investigation that had seized several of Crooks’ devices and started to piece together some of his communications before the rally.The other major development was the discovery of potential explosive devices in Crooks’ car. Former prosecutors suggested that those could indicate Crooks expected to survive the shooting.The devices and the AR-15-style rifle, which officials said was bought legally, were sent to the bureau’s lab in Quantico, Virginia.The ATF identified the owner of the gun through its national tracing center and using business records from a gun dealer. The results of the trace were provided to the FBI within 30 minutes, the agency’s spokesperson Katrina Mastropasqua said.The shooting at the campaign rally has raised the stakes and the significance of Trump’s appearance at the Republican national convention starting Monday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he will formally accept the GOP nomination for president and will unveil his running-mate.It also cast the 2024 presidential race into uncertainty. The campaigns for both Trump and Joe Biden pulled back on political functions over the weekend, as they moved to grapple with the immediate fallout of the situation.View image in fullscreenIn Washington, Biden spoke with Trump on a call described by a source familiar as “brief and very respectful” before receiving a briefing from top US officials including the attorney general, Merrick Garland, the FBI director Christopher Wray, the Secretary for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.In brief remarks to the nation from the White House, Biden called the assassination attempt “contrary to everything we stand for us as a nation, everything. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not American. And we cannot allow this to happen”.Biden said he had demanded a national security review that he would share publicly, and that he had directed the US secret service to review security arrangements for the Republican convention.Later, in a primetime address, the president called for unity. The shooting “calls on all of us to take a step back,” Biden said. “We stand for an America of decency and grace … politics must never be a killing field.”Trump, for his part, huddled with senior advisers at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, keeping to his planned schedule as he prepared for the Republican convention, The Guardian previously reported. Trump’s next appearance is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday in Milwaukee, where he arrived on Sunday evening.“Based on yesterday’s terrible events, I was going to delay my trip to Wisconsin, and The Republican National Convention, by two days, but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or a potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else,” Trump wrote.The assassination attempt placed the secret service under intense scrutiny, with lawmakers from both parties moving to open investigations into the security arrangements and calling for the agency’s director, Kimberly Cheatle, to account for the decisions.At issue remains how a single man with a semi-automatic rifle managed to access a roof 140 yards away from the stage where Trump was speaking at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.The House homeland security committee ordered the secret service’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to produce documents and communications related to the security apparatus for the rally and whether any requests for more resources had been rebuffed. More