Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to fundraise for Trump in Atlanta on Thursday: Sources
(WASHINGTON) — Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is expected to headline a fundraiser for former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in Atlanta on Thursday alongside first lady Marty Kemp and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, multiple sources told ABC News.
It’s a signal of how Kemp is working to reelect Trump despite their public feud, and though Kemp voices his commitment to working to elect the entire Republican ticket, he previously revealed he didn’t vote for Trump during the state’s presidential primary.
Kemp’s anticipated participation in the fundraiser, first reported by ABC News, comes after Trump last week publicly praised the Republican governor after watching an interview he did on FOX News following months of criticizing Kemp and his family for Kemp’s refusal to give in to the former president’s alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“Thank you to #BrianKempGA for all of your help and support in Georgia, where a win is so important to the success of our Party and, most importantly, our Country,” Trump wrote on X last Thursday.
Before the praise, Trump spent much of his last Georgia rally lambasting Kemp for not doing enough to work towards his reelection campaign in the state, even going after Kemp’s wife for previously saying that she would write in Kemp’s name instead of voting for Trump.
“He’s a bad guy, he is a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor. Little Brian. Little Brian Kemp. Bad guy…and all he had to do is sign something where the senate would like to look at election integrity,” Trump said at his campaign rally in Atlanta earlier this month.
“Think of the wife. ‘We can never repay you for what you’ve done, sir. We could’ve never won.’ And now she said, two weeks ago, that ‘I will not endorse him because he hasn’t earned my endorsement.’ I haven’t earned her endorsement? I have nothing to do with her,” Trump continued.
The fundraiser, taking form as a cocktail party, was originally scheduled to be headlined by Pompeo, but Kemp and his wife were added as co-headliners after Kemp’s supporters attending the fundraiser invited him and urged him to attend.
A source familiar with how Kemp’s participation in the fundraiser came about told ABC News that multiple governors have expressed that Kemp had a “very supportive tone” of Trump and “getting support to those key states” at a recent Republican Governors Association meeting in Aspen.
“There is a lot of excitement in Georgia knowing that President Trump and Gov. Kemp have agreed to work together as they have in the past to achieve victories that are important for the future of the country and the future of Georgians,” the source said.
The fundraiser is hosted and co-hosted by former Trump State Department official Ulrich Brechbuhl, former Ambs. Duke Buchan and Ed McMullen and former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who have all been actively raising money for Trump’s campaign this election cycle.
(JACKSONVILLE, FL) — There’s a political storm brewing on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, just outside of Jacksonville.
A voter guide falsely purporting to show a slate of endorsements by the local Republican party hit mailboxes in St. John’s County, sowing confusion just as the primary was about to kick off this month.
The latest salvo in what many say is already an overheated election cycle, the incident has brought attention to an intra-party slugfest being waged inside the local GOP, amid a fight for the future of how — and how fast — development should proceed in the area around historic St. Augustine.
“I saw the card, and I’m like, this is a real issue,” St. John’s County GOP Chair Denver Cook told ABC News. “I was in shock. I’m dealing with one of probably the most flagrant frauds on voters — the day before early voting. It became an instant train wreck.”
On the eve of the first ballots being cast last Friday, as the mysterious mailers began spreading, Cook said his phone began blowing up with perplexed messages.
According to Cook, the glossy handout had a thickness, color scheme and font like the official voter guides put out by the local Republican party in June. And though it purported to be the “official 2024 membership-approved endorsements” of the county Republican party, it had a very different list of candidates from the ones the party had announced support for.
The new mailers also lacked any legal disclaimers explaining who paid for them, Cook said. And in pictures of the envelope that one of the fake mailers came in, which were reviewed by ABC News, the postmark was dated Aug. 7 — timed to arrive just in time for Aug. 10th’s early voting.
Cook, who is also running for St. John’s clerk of courts and comptroller, didn’t know how widely the phony cards were sent, but one thing was clear: In this predominantly Republican area, whoever won the primary would likely be the victor in November.
“That’s why there’s such a fight,” Diane Scherff, president of local political action committee “Trump Club of St. John’s County” said.
“It is the battle for the soul of St John’s County,” said Scherff, whose PAC endorsed a list of candidates in the spring that bucks the local GOP’s.
So, the urgent question: Where did this pamphlet come from?
‘I wish I knew’
“I never thought anyone would go that far in the dirty trick universe,” Cook told ABC News. “When we’re talking about tight races, any illegal mailer like this claiming to be from the county party could alter elections.”
Cook says he has asked law enforcement to investigate the fraudulent pamphlets — and that he would pursue legal action against those responsible.
“Whoever did this knows the rules,” Cook said. “There’s a level of sophistication to this that isn’t cheap.”
Florida’s Republican party chairman, Evan Power, said in a statement that they “are taking this matter very seriously and are investigating.”
“No Florida voter should be misled by anonymous, phony groups pretending to speak for the GOP,” Power said.
Long before the mailers appeared, the St. John’s primary had already stirred up bad blood over the question of who truly champions Republican policies and principles. At issue: the speed of local land development in one of the nation’s fastest-growing and most influential areas, awash in campaign cash and high-dollar real estate deals.
Some local party Republicans criticize others for being in developers’ pockets; the other Republicans say their opponents are faux-conservative and accuse them of being Democrats in GOP clothing.
“Our local party has been taken over by Democrats, and Republicans using Democrats help to take a shortcut,” said Jamie Parham, vice chair of the St. John’s GOP board of directors. “If they’re MAGA, they should be supporting the people that Trump supports.”
Cook pushes back against jabs like that.
“I am a Republican, I support President Trump’s campaign, I have supported his past campaigns, and as chair of the St. John’s County GOP I continue to fight for the platform of our party,” he said.
While local party officials had thrown their weight behind a slate of candidates that included several challengers to the current incumbents, the Trump Club of St. John’s mostly endorsed the incumbent candidates.
Then Trump himself, in an early morning Truth Social post last week, endorsed three incumbent county commission members from the Trump Club’s list.
It was recognition that Scherff said she’d been seeking for years.
“I was so happy, after all the work I’ve done,” said Scherff. “I thought that would be all we needed.”
But the fake voter guides, printed with the official GOP banner, threw the race into turmoil: The guide’s endorsements were nearly identical to the slate of candidates endorsed by groups like the Trump Club.
Scherff said the resulting controversy enveloped the race — and that she had no idea where the bogus guides came from.
“I wish I knew, because then I could say to people, stop blaming me,” she said, worrying that the controversy has cast doubt on Trump’s support and undermined any momentum her group had.
“It’s been taken away,” she said. “As quick as I got it, it’s gone.”
On Saturday, the last day of early voting, Trump reiterated his support for the same candidates in another Truth Social post.
‘Freedom to speak out’
The back-and-forth has grown so contentious that at one point a sitting county commissioner faced criminal prosecution for raising the upcoming election at a meeting.
Krista Joseph, the county commissioner for St. John’s District 4, describes herself as an often-lone dissenting voice on the five-person governing body.
“I’m definitely a thorn in their side. I’ve voted with them when I think it’s right, but I don’t look at this as winning and losing. I’m representing,” Joseph said. “It’s not that I’m anti-development; I’m anti what they’re doing to develop.”
Joseph is not up for reelection this year — but last November, at a commissioners’ board meeting, she wanted to remind everyone who was.
Joseph told members of the public that if they’re “sick of the traffic” and “overcrowding in schools” and if they’re concerned that that “developers are controlling the boards,” they had a choice coming up.
“There’s hope,” Joseph said from the dais. “Less than nine months, we have an election.”
Several commissioners whose seats would be up were sitting with Joseph as she spoke.
In a 4-1 vote less than a month later, the board censured Joseph, led by two of the incumbents who would go on to seek reelection — both of whom would be endorsed by the Trump Club, and Trump.
Outside counsel decided Joseph had violated election law by speaking out during a meeting, and noted the matter could be referred to local prosecutors for possible criminal charges, according to court documents.
After a monthslong legal battle, U.S. District Judge Harvey Schlesinger ruled in Joseph’s favor, finding her First Amendment right to free speech was protected, even at a county meeting.
“Simply because a person is an elected official, such as a County Commissioner, this rightful freedom to speak out so as to inform the electorate cannot be restricted,” Judge Schlesinger wrote in his July 10 decision granting a preliminary injunction. “The threatened prosecution is chilling Commissioner Joseph’s political speech in the last months of the primary election when this speech is most meaningful.”
‘Different factions’
“The local Republican party has been splitting off into different factions,” explains incumbent commissioner Christian Whitehurst.
Whitehurst, who has been endorsed for reelection by the Trump Club and the former president, said he wants to make sure local government can keep up with all the development.
“It’s virtually impossible to stop all the growth,” Whitehurst said. “We have a lot of people moving into not just St. John’s County but the state of Florida. Of course with the sharp increase in growth comes the challenge to keep up in terms of infrastructure and services.”
His primary challenger, Ann-Marie Evans — who was endorsed by the local GOP — criticizes Whitehurst on her campaign website as overseeing “the most overdeveloped area” and “STILL approving new homes by the thousands.”
“I am not opposed to all growth; I am opposed to exponential growth that does not keep pace with the need for infrastructure,” Evans’ site says.
Whitehurst says characterizing him as in cahoots with developers is unfair. “We have voted to deny many projects,” he said.
Whitehurst said he does not know who was behind the fake voter guides, and condemned “any attempt to mislead anybody.”
Parham, of the St. John’s GOP board, said it wouldn’t make sense for the current officeholders to be involved.
“It doesn’t benefit the incumbents if they sent it, because then they’re the bad guy for committing election fraud,” he said.
But Parham also decries the official endorsements made by his own local party.
“The Republican Party should not endorse candidates in the primary,” Parham said. “As a voter, you should figure out which group you most identify with, and that should be your voter guide.”
ABC News’ Will Steakin and Soo Rin Kim contributed to this report.
(BEAVER COUNTY, Pennsylvania) — The local SWAT team assigned to help protect former President Donald Trump on July 13 had not had any contact with the Secret Service agents in charge of security before a would-be assassin opened fire, those officers told ABC News.
It was a critical part of the planning and communications failures that ended with a gunman killing one man, critically injuring two more and wounding Trump as he delivered a speech just days before accepting the Republican presidential nomination.
“We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service members whenever they arrived, and that never happened,” said Jason Woods, lead sharpshooter on the SWAT team in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.
“So I think that was probably a pivotal point, where I started thinking things were wrong because it never happened,” Woods said. “We had no communication.”
In their first public comments since the assassination attempt, the SWAT team on the ground that day and their supervisors spoke exclusively with ABC News Senior Investigative Correspondent Aaron Katersky. It is the first time any key law enforcement personnel on-site July 13 have offered first-hand accounts of what occurred.
They explained that they did what they could to try to thwart the attack but now have to live with the failure.
The episode last week led to the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. And, in the wake of the assassination attempt, a series of law-enforcement, internal and congressional probes have been announced – with communications and coordination a key focus of investigators’ attention.
The Secret Service, whose on-site team was supplemented as usual by local, county and state law-enforcement agencies, was ultimately responsible for security at the event.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi declined to respond directly to the comments from Woods and his colleagues. He said the agency “is committed to better understanding what happened before, during, and after the assassination attempt of former President Trump to ensure that never happens again. That includes complete cooperation with Congress, the FBI and other relevant investigations.”
Woods told ABC News he would have expected to have seen more coordination with the Secret Service and to have had greater communication between their team on the ground that day and the agents with Trump’s detail. The first communication between their group and the Secret Service agents on the scene that day, he said, was “not until after the shooting. By then, he said, “it was too late.”
Woods and the rest of the Beaver County sniper team were in position by mid-morning July 13, hours before Trump was set to take the stage at the Butler Farm Show grounds, outside Pittsburgh. The site is studded by a complex of warehouses, some clustered just outside the position where metal detectors were set up that day.
Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, sparked suspicion among the Beaver County SWAT team but was still able to evade law enforcement and take position on the roof of the very building where county snipers had been posted. Though their sniper had taken pictures of Crooks and had called into Command about the suspicious presence — within an hour Crooks opened fire on the former president less than 200 yards from the stage.
Beaver County Chief Detective Patrick Young, who runs the Emergency Services Unit and SWAT team, said collaboration is key when lives are on the line.
“I believe our team did everything humanly possible that day,” Young said. “We talk a lot on SWAT that we as individuals mean nothing until we come together as a team.”
Watch: ABC News’ exclusive first interview with the local SWAT team on the ground during Trump’s assassination attempt, airs in its entirety on “Good Morning America” on Monday, July 29, at 7 a.m. ET.
(WASHINGTON) — After more than three years supporting President Joe Biden’s policy agenda as his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris must articulate her own agenda for her presidential campaign — and the first term that could follow.
Since Biden announced on Sunday that he was leaving the 2024 race, Harris has secured commitments from enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee if they all honor their commitment when voting, according to ABC News reporting.
Now Harris — who ran well to the left of Biden during her unsuccessful presidential primary campaign in 2020, but has since become a loyal advocate of the administration’s policies — is taking on the challenge of establishing her own path forward and stance on key issues that matter most to voters as the November election approaches.
Her 2020 platform and some remarks from during her vice presidency offer a glimpse of a Harris presidency that could prove more progressive than Biden’s in several key areas.
Israel-Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, with Harris — who, as vice president, customarily presides over such proceedings — noticeably absent.
While Harris’ team has said her absence is merely the result of a scheduling conflict and the vice president will meet one-on-one with Netanyahu later this week, she has in recent months signaled that she may take a more stern approach to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Harris was initially a strong supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas — knocking down a suggestion that the Biden administration might condition aid to the country in November, saying “we are not going to create any conditions on the support that we are giving Israel to defend itself.”
But by December, Harris began wading deeper into Middle Eastern diplomacy during a trip to Dubai for a United Nations climate conference where she also met with leaders from the region. During the trip, she took a more forceful tone with Israel than many other senior administration officials had done at the time, declaring “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and saying the administration believes “Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.”
In a March address in Selma, Alabama, marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Harris called out Israel again — saying its government “must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid — no excuses” and calling on Israel to open border crossings and ensure humanitarian workers were not targeted.
In an interview published earlier this month in The Nation, Harris said young Americans protesting the war in Gaza are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be” and that while she “absolutely rejects” some of their statements, she understands “the emotion behind it.”
And she’s been vocal in her support of an at least temporary cease-fire, saying during her March speech in Selma that “given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate cease-fire” for at least six weeks.
Harris doesn’t have a long-standing relationship with Netanyahu in the same way Biden does, but she met with Israel’s Benny Gantz at the White House while he was serving on the country’s war cabinet in March. She also met with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog earlier this year on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Abortion
Already the administration’s lead messenger on the central campaign issue of abortion rights, Harris has been consistently more boldly outspoken on the issue than Biden.
Before running for president in 2020, she went after crisis pregnancy centers as California attorney general and went viral for a line of questioning with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, where she pressed him to name a single law that polices what men can do with their bodies.
Her 2020 platform included a proposal to pass a Reproductive Rights Act that would have taken affirmative steps to enforce Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court later overruled in 2022.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision affecting Roe, Harris has toured the country as bans went into place. She made history by being the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic in March — a move that demonstrated how loudly supportive of abortion rights she is — and delivered a fiery speech on then-GOP presidential candidate Ron Desantis’ home turf in Florida this spring when a six-week ban went into effect there.
She made it clear in her first rally on Tuesday that abortion rights would continue to be a central issue for her as a presidential candidate.
“We who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman’s right to choose because one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do,” Harris said in a rally in Indiana on Wednesday, addressing the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.
That’s not to say Biden didn’t also make abortion rights a central tenet of his administration and campaign, said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at University of California, Davis and abortion historian. However, she said, he was constrained by generational and religious differences that made Harris “the much more effective, passionate messenger on reproductive issues.”
Should Harris win in November, “I think there would be some differences in substance, really significant differences in tone, and then, maybe or maybe not, differences in outcome,” Ziegler said.
Outcomes — such as codifying Roe vs. Wade into law, going even further to also protect birth control or in-vitro fertilization, or pursuing further legal challenges to protect abortion rights — would depend primarily on how Democrats perform down the ballot in November and whether Harris has the opportunity to confirm any more justices to the Supreme Court.
Health care
In her remarks to campaign staff Monday, Harris said that her campaign will “fight to build a nation where every person has affordable health care.”
The Medicare for All plan that Harris proposed in 2020 would have covered all medically necessary services, including emergency room visits, doctor visits, vision, dental, hearing aids, mental health and substance use disorder treatment, and comprehensive reproductive health care services. The plan had a 10-year transition period.
Under Harris’ plan, Americans would have had a choice between the public Medicare for All plan and plans from private insurers that would have had to adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits.
To pay for the program, she proposed charging an additional premium to households making above $100,000 per year, with a higher income threshold for those in higher-cost-of-living areas.
In 2020, Biden called for a less ambitious “Medicare for all who want it” public option plan. However, according to Roll Call, he hasn’t mentioned that public option since December of 2020 — before he took office.
Biden also previously suggested he would veto a Medicare for All bill, arguing that it would raise taxes for the middle class.
But the vice president’s past policy differences with Biden may not mean all that much for a Harris presidency.
“I wouldn’t expect it to change at all [from Biden’s agenda],” David Barker, a professor of government at American University, said. “Until there’s some indication that that’s politically realistic, I don’t think anybody’s going to even try.”
Barker added that smaller changes, similar to the $35 price cap on insulin for seniors on Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the way they’ll continue” in a Harris administration.
Criminal justice
While Harris faced sharp criticism from the left during the 2020 primary for her background as a prosecutor, her platform that year contained a slate of ambitious reforms to the criminal justice system aimed at ending mass incarceration and fighting racial inequities.
Harris’ platform advocated to legalize marijuana and expunge some marijiuana-related convictions; end cash bail and mandatory minimums; eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine; and stop the use of private prisons and the death penalty.
Her criminal justice plan also sought to increase the Department of Justice’s oversight of police departments and limit them from acquiring certain kinds of military equipment. In a clip that has been circulated by Republicans, she also advocated for restoring the right of formerly-incarcerated people to vote and automatically expunging non-serious, non-violent offenses after five years.
The Biden administration’s most significant action on criminal justice came when it took action on marijuana, reducing federal criminal penalties for offenses relating to the drug and pardoning those with criminal charges for simple possession of marijuana.
While Harris’ 2020 platform went well beyond Biden’s on criminal justice, her recent remarks make no indication that it will be a major theme of her campaign. The issue went unmentioned in her speech at the campaign’s Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters on Monday.