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New York prosecutors urge judge to uphold Trump hush-money conviction – live
Prosecutors have asked a judge to reject Donald Trump’s appeal of his conviction in New York on charges related to falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments, the Associated Press reports.Lawyers for the former president earlier this month appealed his conviction, saying a recent supreme court decision shielding presidents from prosecution for official acts applies to his conviction in the case brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.In a response filed today, prosecutors said that was not the case. Here’s more, from the AP:
The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing that the high court’s opinion “has no bearing” on the hush money case and does not support vacating the jury’s unanimous verdict or dismissing the case.
Prosecutors said Trump’s lawyers failed to raise the immunity issue in a timely fashion and that, even so, the case involved unofficial acts — many pertaining to events prior to his election — that are not subject to immunity.
Lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee are trying to get the verdict — and even the indictment — tossed out because of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision. It gave presidents considerable protection from prosecution.
The ruling came about a month after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records to conceal a deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. At the time, she was considering going public with a story of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, who says no such thing happened. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Here’s more on what the former president’s lawyers are arguing:Kamala Harris is now meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the vice president’s ceremonial office.Harris did not take questions from reporters ahead of their meeting, but told Netanyahu:
I look forward to our conversation. We have a lot to talk about.
“We do indeed,” Netanyahu replied.Family members of American hostages being held captive in Gaza said they held “productive and honest” discussions with Joe Biden and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the White House today.Relatives said they “came today with a sense of urgency” and emphasized the need to reach a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that could result in the release of their loved ones, AP reported. They said:
We got absolute commitment from the Biden administration and from prime minister Netanyahu that they understand the urgency of this moment.
They added that they were more optimistic about a deal than they have been in months.Nikki Haley, in the CNN interview, criticized Republicans who have referred to Kamala Harris as a “DEI” candidate. “It’s not helpful,” the former South Carolina governor said.
There’s so many issues we can talk about when it comes to Kamala Harris that it doesn’t matter what she looks like. It matters what she’s said, what she’s fought for, and the lack of results that she’s had because of it.
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, offered no apologies for the “tough things” she said about Donald Trump during the Republican primary race, but said she did not doubt her decision to support the former president in the November election.Haley, in her first interview since endorsing Trump, told CNN that she was not surprised by Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race. “I didn’t take happiness in it,” Haley said.
There is an issue we have in DC, where people will go into office and they won’t let go. And then their staffers and their family keep propping them up, and it’s a problem for the American people.
She argued that the Democrats’ decision to put forward Kamala Harris as their nominee would give them “the weakest candidate they could put in”.Harris “is much more progressive than Joe Biden ever was”, Haley said, adding:
The fact they put in Kamala Harris – kudos for putting in someone younger – the fact that you put in one of the most liberal politicians you probably could have put in, it’s going to be an issue.
Elena Kagan, a member of the three-justice liberal minority on the supreme court, said she would support creating an enforcement mechanism for its recently adopted code of ethics, Bloomberg Law reports.The nation’s highest court last year adopted a code setting out “rules and principles that guide the conduct of members of the court” following media reports of connections between conservative justices and parties with cases before the judges. However, the code was criticized for having no enforcement mechanism, leaving the judges to essentially enforce it on themselves.According to Bloomberg Law, Kagan told a judicial conference in California that if chief justice John Roberts creates “some sort of committee of highly respected judges with a great deal of experience and a reputation for fairness” to enforce the code, she would approve.In the months since the code was adopted, conservative justice Samuel Alito was reported to have flown flags connected to rightwing causes at his property, sparking further uproar over the court’s impartiality.Here’s a look back at when the ethics code was originally created:Joe Biden greeted Benjamin Netanyahu this afternoon at the White House, the day after the Israeli prime minister addressed Congress in a speech boycotted and criticized by many of the president’s fellow Democrats:“We’ve known each other for 40 years, and you’ve known every Israeli prime minister for 50 years. So, from a proud Zionist Jew to a proud Zionist Irish American I want to thank you for 50 years of public service and 50 years of support for the State of Israel. I look forward to discussing with you today thank you,” Netanyahu told Biden in the Oval Office.He was the first foreign leader to meet the US president since he abandoned his bid for a second term.The two leaders then met in private with the families of Americans taken hostage by Hamas in the 7 October attack. Kamala Harris is scheduled to meet separately with Netanyahu this afternoon.In addition to catching up to Donald Trump in polls of voters nationwide, the Guardian’s Melissa Hellmann reports that Kamala Harris is much more trusted than the former president among African Americans:A vast majority of Black Americans trust Kamala Harris and distrust Donald Trump – 71% compared to 5% – according to the largest-known survey of Black Americans since the Reconstruction era. The survey of 211,219 Black people across all 50 states showed that the presumptive Democratic nominee may have a higher chance of winning over Black voters than the Republican candidate.At a virtual press conference on Thursday afternoon, the Black-led innovation thinktank Black Futures Lab, revealed findings from its 2023 Black Census, which was conducted with the help of 50 Black-led grassroots organizations and national partners across the country from February 2022 to October 2023. The latest survey garnered seven times the respondents from the first census in 2018, which received 30,000 responses. Two-thirds of the respondents were women, a majority were from the south, and nearly half were from 45 to 64 years old. Black Futures Lab believes that the census results will help inform voter mobilization efforts ahead of presidential and local elections.“For us to be powerful in politics, we must control the agenda,” said Black Futures Lab’s field director Natishia June at the press conference. “This is why the Black Census is crucial.”Prosecutors have asked a judge to reject Donald Trump’s appeal of his conviction in New York on charges related to falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments, the Associated Press reports.Lawyers for the former president earlier this month appealed his conviction, saying a recent supreme court decision shielding presidents from prosecution for official acts applies to his conviction in the case brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.In a response filed today, prosecutors said that was not the case. Here’s more, from the AP:
The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing that the high court’s opinion “has no bearing” on the hush money case and does not support vacating the jury’s unanimous verdict or dismissing the case.
Prosecutors said Trump’s lawyers failed to raise the immunity issue in a timely fashion and that, even so, the case involved unofficial acts — many pertaining to events prior to his election — that are not subject to immunity.
Lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee are trying to get the verdict — and even the indictment — tossed out because of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision. It gave presidents considerable protection from prosecution.
The ruling came about a month after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records to conceal a deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. At the time, she was considering going public with a story of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, who says no such thing happened. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Here’s more on what the former president’s lawyers are arguing:In remarks to reporters as she deplaned after returning to Washington DC, Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of trying to cancel the second presidential debate, which is scheduled for 10 September.“I’m ready to debate Donald Trump. I have agreed to the previously agreed upon September 10 debate. He agreed to that previously,” the vice-president said.“Now, here he is backpedaling and I’m ready and I think the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on a debate stage. And so, I’m ready to go.”The polls published by the New York Times and Siena College over the past year have been among the most talked about surveys in US politics – perhaps because they have typically shown Joe Biden struggling to match Donald Trump’s support.In an analysis of their latest batch of data, which is the first with Kamala Harris as the Democratic contender, Nate Cohn, the Times’s chief political analyst, writes that this poll is much different than those that came before it. Here’s why:
Mr. Trump hits a high in popularity. Overall, 48 percent of registered voters say they have a favorable view of him, up from 42 percent in our last poll (taken after the debate but before the convention and assassination attempt). It’s his highest favorable number in a Times/Siena poll, which previously always found his favorable ratings between 39 percent and 45 percent.
Ms. Harris is surging. In fact, her ratings have increased even more than Mr. Trump’s. Overall, 46 percent of registered voters have a favorable view of her, up from 36 percent when we last asked about her in February. Only 49 percent have an unfavorable view, down from 54 percent in our last measure. As important, her favorable rating is higher than Mr. Biden’s. In fact, it’s higher than his standing in any Times/Siena poll since September 2022, which so happens to be the last time Mr. Biden led a Times/Siena national poll of registered voters.
The national political environment is a little brighter. The share of voters who say the country is on the “right track” is up to 27 percent – hardly a bright and smiley public, but still the highest since the midterm elections in 2022. Mr. Biden’s approval and favorable ratings are up as well. The ranks of the double haters have dwindled: With both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump riding high, the number of voters who dislike both candidates has plunged to 8 percent, down from 20 percent in Times/Siena polls so far this year.
He concludes with:
With all of these underlying changes in the attitudes about the candidates, there’s no reason to assume that this familiar Trump +1 result means that the race has simply returned to where it stood before the debate. For now, these developments have mostly canceled out, but whether that will still be true in a few weeks is much harder to say.
New polling indicates Kamala Harris has re-engaged voters turned off by Joe Biden’s candidacy, and is vying closely against Donald Trump in crucial swing states.While it’s unclear if the vice-president has the overall advantage, the data is a reversal of fortune for the Democrats, who had grown nervous after months of polling had showed Biden at best tied, or at worst trailing, Trump nationally and in the states along the Great Lakes and in the southern Sun belt whose voters are set to decide the election.The closely watched New York Times/Siena College poll found that among likely voters nationwide, Trump has only a one-point lead. In their previous survey following the Trump-Biden debate, the former president led by six points:Emerson College found that Trump leads in most swing states, albeit narrowly and with Wisconsin tied:However, that data was far better than Biden’s numbers in those states the last time Emerson polled voters on his candidacy.“Harris has recovered a portion of the vote for the Democrats on the presidential ticket since the fallout after the June 27 debate,” said executive director of Emerson College Polling Spencer Kimball. “Harris’ numbers now reflect similar support levels to those of Biden back in March.”Some Democratic and labor leaders from battleground states joined the DNC press call today, and reported genuine and widespread enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.“There’s a lot of excitement on the ground,” said Yolanda Bejarano, chair of the Arizona Democratic party. “We are seeing just a lot of folks coming out, trying to find out what they can do to volunteer, to help get Vice-President Harris elected.”Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, described the environment in the battleground state as “electric” and echoed Harris’s message that Americans “won’t go back” to a time of fewer rights.“Trump was devastating to the auto industry and auto workers here in Michigan. They are not going to go backwards. We’re moving forward,” Bieber said.“President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been the biggest supporters of union workers and the auto industry here in Michigan, and people are fired up. I’ve been doing this stuff a long time now, and I’ve never seen the energy and excitement as I am right now.”The Democratic national committee held a press call today to attack Donald Trump and JD Vance for their “anti-worker” agenda, after Republicans spent much of their convention pitching themselves as economic populists.“It’s more of that trickle-down economic fairytale that has never worked. It has gutted so much of our economy. It’s hurt working people; it’s hurt the labor movement,” said Congressman Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania.“It’s been great for big corporations and billionaires and Wall Street. It is fiscally irresponsible, and we can’t let it happen again.”Touting the legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, Deluzio argued Kamala Harris would continue the president’s pro-labor record if she wins in November.“We’re going to take more strong action to bring home offshore jobs, to bring home more manufacturing, to defend the ability and the freedom for folks to form and join the union,” Deluzio said. “That’s the backbone of the union way of life.”Republican congressman and former White House doctor Ronny Jackson accused the FBI director, Christopher Wray, of making a “politically motived move” when he told Congress that it was not yet clear if the former president was hit by a bullet or shrapnel after a gunman opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania.Following the assassination attempt, Jackson issued a memo offering some details of the wound Trump suffered. Before we get into what he said about the FBI director, it’s worth noting that Jackson denied that Trump had contracted Covid-19 back in 2020, before being refuted by an official in the then-president’s administration.Anyway, here’s the tweet: More - in US Politics
Bill Barr complicit in misleading voter fraud statement’s release – watchdog
The former attorney general Bill Barr was personally involved in a decision to release an unusual and misleading justice department statement on the eve of the 2020 election suggesting there may have been voter fraud in Pennsylvania, according to a new inspector general’s report that was released on Thursday.The 76-page report from the justice department’s Office of the Inspector General focused on the department’s handling of an investigation into nine military ballots that were found discarded in the trash in Luzerne county, Pennsylvania. Barr briefed Trump on the ballot issue before it was public and the president subsequently disclosed it in a radio interview. David Freed, the US attorney overseeing the matter, also released a statement and letter detailing the investigation.The announcement was highly charged because it came at a time when Trump was warning the election would be rigged because of mail-in ballots. It was also highly unusual – justice department policy does not allow employees to comment on ongoing investigations before charges are filed, except in limited circumstances. Separate guidance instructs department employees that they should be “particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and nonpartisanship”.Federal law enforcement officials were notified of the discarded ballots on 18 September 2020 and investigators quickly became aware that evidence might not exist to support criminal charges. The seasonal employee who discarded the ballots appeared to have a mental disability, FBI agents noted on 22 September, and was “remorseful”, “felt horrible” and “never voted/doesn’t vote/didn’t pay attention to it”. The suspect, who was quickly fired, reportedly believed incorrectly the military ballots were fraudulent and discarded them without telling anyone.Nonetheless, Barr briefed Trump on the matter and later called Freed to discuss releasing a public statement.“Nearly every DOJ lawyer we interviewed – both career employees and Trump Administration political appointees – emphasized how ‘unusual’ it would be for the department to issue a public statement containing details about an ongoing criminal investigation, particularly before any charges are filed,” the inspector general report said. “As one then US Attorney told us: ‘If [we] don’t have a charge, we don’t say anything about an investigation; we just don’t do that.’”Barr’s behavior “was certainly not consistent” with that guidance, the report said. Barr did not agree to a voluntary interview and the inspector general does not have the power to subpoena testimony from former justice department employees.“Providing this information to the President, who was not bound by the Department’s policies prohibiting comment on ongoing investigations and who had a political interest in publicizing the investigation, created the risk that the President would use the Department’s non-public investigative information to advance his own political aims,” the report said. “A risk that was in fact realized when President Trump referenced the ballots on a national radio show the next morning.”Freed and other justice department employees considered releasing a statement in late October 2020 when they decided to close the investigation without charges. The department’s public integrity section had wanted to issue a press release to correct the false public impression about the possibility of fraud, but ultimately the department did not. It was not until 15 January 2021 – well after election day – that the Department of Justice released a statement saying it was closing the investigation.Freed, who was the US attorney for the middle district of Pennsylvania at the time, violated justice department policies on not commenting on ongoing investigations and a requirement to consult with the department’s public integrity section before making a statement.“I handled this investigation properly from start to finish and my public statements were explicitly approved by the AG or his senior staff,” Freed said in a statement to CNN.While highly critical of their conduct, the inspector general said it could not conclude either had committed misconduct “because of ambiguity as to the applicability of Barr’s authority to approve the release of the statement”. It also said that justice department policy did not specifically proscribe what Barr could tell the president.The inspector general’s report details how other senior justice department employees were horrified when they saw that Freed had released information. “It’s appalling. We don’t do this,” the director of the department’s election crimes branch told investigators. “There wasn’t even a charging document. I mean, they ended up declining it. There’s no – I’ve never seen anything like this … I’m appalled. This is crazy.” More
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Netanyahu is presiding over a sharp decline in the US’s pro-Israel consensus
Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of the House and Senate may look like a political victory: the prime minister of a foreign country speaking before Congress, only interrupted by multiple standing ovations. But the political events serving as a backdrop for the speech reveal Netanyahu’s political career, and the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in the US, in sharp decline.At home in Israel, it’s virtually unthinkable that Netanyahu could have found such a supportive audience. A staggering 72% of Israelis want him to resign over failures that permitted the 7 October attacks by Hamas to succeed.And 72% of Israelis also support a deal to release hostages over the destruction of Hamas. Despite saying he is doing everything he can to “bring all our hostages home”, Netanyahu appeared to outright reject a hostage deal in his speech to Congress, declaring Israel “must retain overriding security control [in Gaza] to prevent the resurgence of terror, to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel”, a war goal the Israeli military says is unachievable and terms to which Hamas will not agree.Indeed, blatant falsehoods were scattered throughout his speech. He claimed “practically no civilians were killed in Rafah” (daily reporting shows women and children dead from Israeli air strikes on Rafah and surrounding areas), downplayed the role of Israel in creating famine conditions for much of Gaza’s population, and claimed that Israel helps “keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East”, conveniently omitting the 4,492 US service members who died in the Iraq war, a war Netanyahu lobbied Congress to undertake in 2002.While the speech was Netanyahu’s fourth address to Congress, the political landscape in Washington has shifted beneath his feet, creating a far less welcoming American public than the applause might suggest. Around half of House and Senate Democrats boycotted the speech while thousands of protesters demonstrated outside the Capitol building, revealing the steep drop in support for Israel’s war on Gaza over the past nine months.Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, 38% of voters said they were less likely to vote for him due to his handling of the war on Gaza. “Many core constituencies – including independents, swing state likely voters, and Democratic party activists – are angry at Biden’s unqualified support for the Israeli assault on Gaza,” said a report from the Century Foundation, the thinktank that commissioned the poll.While sentiments towards Israel are warmer within the Republican party – Israeli flags were visible on the floor of the Republican convention last week and Republican members of Congress led many of the standing ovations for Netanyahu’s speech – that support has increasingly coincided with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Republicans by the world’s richest Israeli, Israeli-US dual national Miriam Adelson, who alongside her late husband, Sheldon Adelson, topped the list of Republican donors since the late 2000s, raising questions about whether support for Israel is an issue of deep concern to the Republican base or simply a transaction required for campaign contributions.The election wins of Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky and Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from West Virginia (both Republican critics of US aid to Israel), suggest an appetite, or at least an acceptance, of a more balanced US-Israel relationship within Republican voters.Netanyahu’s trip to Washington, planned before Biden ended his campaign for re-election, is now set against the political uncertainty of how Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, will approach the relationship with Israel. The administration of which she is still a part of bled dangerous levels of support from its own base, particularly in vital swing states like Michigan, where 100,000 Arab and Muslim voters expressed their dissatisfaction with Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza by submitting “uncommitted” ballots in their Democratic primary.Pressure is building on the vice-president to distance herself from Biden’s “bearhug” strategy of Netanyahu and utilize the leverage the US holds over Israel: threatening to turn off the spigot of munitions necessary for Israel’s war to drag on.The speech may have looked like a victory for an embattled Israeli prime minister but the real test of Netanyahu’s political gambit will only become clear as Harris sets the foreign policy agenda for her presidential campaign.If the boycott of the speech by Democrats, polling showing dissatisfaction with ongoing support for the war on Gaza, and protesters outside the Capitol were any sign of the political tides within the Democratic party, Harris may conclude that the time has come for greater daylight between the US and Netanyahu, distancing the US from the nearly 40,000 casualties suffered by Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military, and a conditioning of US military aid to Israel on an end to the war on Gaza and Israeli participation in a deal to release hostages held by Hamas. Such a move would cast Netanyahu’s speech as a symbolic, and highly visible, breaking point in the bipartisan US support he has enjoyed for his entire political career.
Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and investigative journalist at large at Responsible Statecraft More
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Israel and Hamas closer than ever to ceasefire deal, White House says
White House officials said Israel and Hamas were “closer now than we’ve been before” to reaching a ceasefire deal as Benjamin Netanyahu met Joe Biden on Thursday to discuss an end to the nine-month conflict in Gaza.The talks at the White House came amid unprecedented political turmoil in the US and domestic pressure on the Israeli prime minster to rescue the dozens of hostages still being held captive after Hamas’s 7 October attack. Netanyahu was also expected to meet the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, who is likely to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate for November’s election.“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Biden said when he welcomed Netanyahu to the Oval Office. “From a proud Jewish Zionist to a proud Irish-American Zionist, I want to thank you for 50 years of public service and 50 years of support for the state of Israel,” Netanyahu told Biden at the start of their meeting.The president thanked Netanyahu and noted that his first meeting with an Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, was in 1973, soon after he was elected to the Senate.Biden was expected to put pressure on Netanyahu to commit to at least the first stage of a three-part deal that would see some hostages released in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. A senior administration official said that a framework for the deal had been agreed upon but that “serious implementation issues … still had to be resolved.“I don’t expect the meeting to be a yes or no,” the official said. “It’s a kind of like, ‘How do we close these final gaps?’”At a press conference while the two leaders were meeting, the White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said gaps in the ceasefire deal could be overcome. “We need to get there soon,” he said. “We are closer now than we’ve been before. Both sides have to make compromises.”The State Department spokesperson, Matt Miller, said: “I think the message from the American side in that meeting will be that we need to get this deal over the line.”More than 39,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed in the conflict, and the international criminal court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The US does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction.Harris was expected to meet Netanyahu separately as she began her late campaign to challenge Donald Trump in November’s presidential vote. The vice-president must prove her mettle as a negotiator in one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.She has spoken forcefully about the need for a ceasefire and about the plight of Palestinian civilians in the conflict, and there is a possibility that she could win back some Democratic voters who believe that the Biden administration has done too little to end the conflict or limit sales of arms to Israel.Harris – the presiding officer of the Senate – did not attend Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday but released a careful statement saying that her absence should not be interpreted as a boycott of the event.A senior administration official told the Associated Press there was “no daylight between the president and vice-president” on Israel.On Thursday, Harris issued a statement forcefully condemning pro-Palestine protesters who had demonstrated against Netanyahu’s speech in Washington.She said: “Yesterday, at Union Station in Washington DC we saw despicable acts by unpatriotic protesters and dangerous hate-fuelled rhetoric.“I condemn any individuals associating with the brutal terrorist organisation Hamas, which has vowed to annihilate the state of Israel and kill Jews. Pro-Hamas graffiti and rhetoric is abhorrent and we must not tolerate it in our nation.”The vice-president added: “I condemn the burning of the American flag. That flag is a symbol of our highest ideals as a nation and represents the promise of America. It should never be desecrated in that way.“I support the right to peacefully protest, but let’s be clear: antisemitism, hate and violence of any kind have no place in our nation.”Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet Trump on Friday at his residence in Mar-a-Lago. The two men have had a strained relationship since Netanyahu congratulated Biden on his victory in the 2020 elections, a vote that, Trump has claimed without evidence, was manipulated.Netanyahu promised “total victory” in the Gaza war in a raucous speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, saying that there were “intensive” efforts to bring the hostages home but giving little detail about how that would be achieved.About 40 Democratic lawmakers – including the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi – boycotted the speech, and only half of congressional Democrats attended.“Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States,” Pelosi wrote on X.Thousands protested on the streets of the capital, with both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups saying Netanyahu was using the conflict as cover for his own political problems at home.He did not mention the word “ceasefire” or the negotiations with Hamas once during the speech, instead he called for expedited deliveries of US arms to “help us finish the job faster”.“I will not rest until all their loved ones are home,” said Netanyahu during the speech. “All of them. As we speak, we’re actively engaged in intensive efforts to secure their release, and I’m confident that these efforts can succeed. Some of them are taking place right now. I want to thank President Biden for his tireless efforts on behalf of the hostages and for his efforts to the hostage families as well.”It is unclear whether Biden’s recent decision to end his presidential campaign will allow him to use greater leverage to convince Netanyahu to sign on to a deal.“The framework of the deal is basically there,” said a senior administration official. “There are some very serious implementation issues that still have to be resolved, and I don’t want to discount the difficulty of those … There are some things we need from Hamas, and there are some things we need from the Israeli side, and I think you’ll see that play out here over the course of the coming week.” More
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Democratic delegates on Biden’s exit – and Harris’s rise: ‘We’re awestruck’
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and the emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee seems to have been absorbed by Democratic delegates faster than a spill in a napkin commercial.Delegates to the Democratic national convention seem to have been poised for a pivot. In conversations since Biden’s decision, many say they’ve moved from fear to relief to a kind of euphoria almost instantly.“People are excited,” said Michael Kapp, a Democratic National Committee member and delegate from California. “We’re awestruck with the decision that President Biden made. It was entirely selfless. He put country above self. And I think it makes an incredible contrast with what we see out of Donald Trump and Maga Republicans.”Within hours of Biden’s withdrawal and the president’s endorsement of Harris, Kapp began circulating a group letter calling on delegates to back the vice-president as nominee. Over the course of the next day, he found no actual resistance to the idea among the hundreds of delegates he spoke with, he said. The only challenge was getting people on the phone.“I think this was one of those situations where long-term donors and grassroots Democrats were entirely aligned,” Kapp said. “We’ve all seen the polling, certainly in the last three-and-a-half weeks … It was clear that voters were looking for something else.”Any competing candidate would have to overcome a fundamental financial challenge, said Brenda López Romero, a former state representative and current delegate in Georgia. Harris “would be the only one that could access the funds that were raised by the Biden-Harris campaign. There is no way that I can see anyone else mounting some multimillion-dollar – close to a billion dollars in funds – needed overnight to be able to successfully run an election in the remaining 100 days.”Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, had been talking up Biden’s candidacy at a statewide party meeting in south Georgia only the day before Biden’s announcement, Romero said. “I definitely think that at the ground level, there wasn’t this chatter about any suggestions of not continuing with Biden,” she said.The next day, the pivot to Harris was on. “What’s been happening in the political world these last two weeks is like a year has gone by,” Romero said. “But the reality is that for me personally, there is now more clarity, with Biden making the decision.”Democrats have repeatedly told voters this year that democracy is on the ballot, citing Trump’s pledge to be a “dictator” on the first day of his term if elected, the threats to electoral norms posed by the conservative Project 2025 plan and a recent supreme court ruling largely immunizing ex-presidents from criminal accountability.Delegates juxtapose those concerns against the small-D democratic matter of Harris’s accession to potential leadership without facing a competitive primary.“We did have 15 million voters casting a ballot,” said Chuck Enderlin, a pilot from Newnan, Georgia, and Democratic convention delegate, referring to the 2024 primaries. Voters chose Biden and Harris then, he said. “We knew that Vice-President Harris was there to step in for President Biden in official duties in official capacity. We didn’t necessarily expect this scenario, obviously. But having her there, she was chosen by the voters already to be the vice-president. And that’s why I think the process is going so smoothly right now and why everybody is pulling right behind her. We already made our choice.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIncumbents generally defeat challengers, and strong challenges to a sitting president are rare. Biden had two primary challengers: the representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the writer Marianne Williamson. (Neither appears to have won any delegate support since Biden’s withdrawal.) But for the most part, Biden sailed through the primaries uncontested.“If someone’s mad that they don’t get to run right now, well, they should have filed to run a long time ago,” Enderlin said.His wife, Jenny Enderlin, is also a Democratic delegate and a state senate candidate running against a Republican who was implicated in the election interference case in Georgia. The two were on the phone when the news broke, she said.“Everywhere, texts and phone calls were flying back and forth,” she said. “Everybody’s guessing who’s going to be the VP. That’s the number one thing on everybody’s mind. But what was never a question was who’s going to be the top pick. That has been Harris, because we voted for her.”The president’s decision to withdraw from the race was like flipping a light switch. The Pennsylvania state representative Arvind Venkat, a Democratic delegate from suburban Pittsburgh, was knocking on doors in his district when the news broke, he said. His neighbors weren’t exactly stunned, he said. They were engrossed by the news, instantly shifting from anxiety to curiosity.“I’m glad that that’s what’s happening, moving forward,” he said. “I think there’s energy that is going on around this change because we are going to get back to an election conversation that is going to debate ideas and what is the vision for the United States.” More
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FBI director questions whether Trump was hit by bullet or shrapnel in shooting
Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has raised questions about whether Donald Trump was actually shot by a bullet during the assassination attempt against the former president earlier this month or whether he was instead struck by shrapnel.During a hearing on Wednesday in Washington, before the House judiciary committee, Wray told lawmakers that it was not clear what precisely caused the injury to Trump’s ear during the shooting at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month.The burst of gunfire from a shooter on a roof with a sightline to the stage and crowd killed one rally-goer and left others wounded.“There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray testified. “As I sit here right now, I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.”Shortly after the shooting, Trump said in a statement on Truth Social that he had been shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of his right ear.“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” the former president wrote. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”After the shooting, Trump released a memo about his recovery from Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor and current Republican representative, but the former president has not allowed the medical professionals who treated him to talk publicly about his condition.On Thursday, Jackson responded to Wray’s testimony in a post on X, calling Wray’s comments to lawmakers “absolutely irresponsible” and “politically motivated” against Trump.“What little credibility he may have left is GONE after recklessly suggesting Trump might not have been hit from a bullet,” Jackson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was a bullet,” he added. “I’ve seen the wound!”Wray also testified to lawmakers on Wednesday that the shooter who had attempted to assassinate Trump, and was then shot dead himself by government snipers, had searched online for information about the 1963 assassination of former president John F Kennedy. More
