Sen. Bob Menendez to resign next month following conviction in federal corruption trial
(WASHINGTON) — New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez will resign his office on Aug. 20 following the conviction in his federal corruption trial, according to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.
Murphy, who will select an interim replacement, said Tuesday afternoon he has received Menendez’s resignation letter.
In the resignation letter to Murphy, obtained by ABC News, Menendez said he intends to appeal the verdict but does not want the “Senate to be involved in a lengthy process that will detract from its important work.”
“Furthermore, I cannot preserve my rights upon a successful appeal, because factual matters before the ethics committee are not privileged. This is evidenced by my Committee’s Staff Director and Chief Council being called to testify at my trial,” he stated in the letter.
Menendez said in his letter that the Aug. 20 date will “give time for my staff to transition to other possibilities, transfer constituent files that are pending, allow for an orderly process to choose an interim replacement, and for me to close out my Senate affairs.”
Staff members were informed of the senator’s decision earlier Tuesday, multiple sources told ABC News.
A Manhattan federal jury found the New Jersey Democrat guilty on all charges, including bribery, fraud, acting as a foreign agent and obstruction, on July 16 following a two-month-long trial. Federal prosecutors said he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and more in exchange for the senator’s political clout.
Menendez was not required to resign due to the conviction.
Following the guilty verdict, several political leaders called for Menendez’s immediate resignation, including Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Schumer said at the time.
Sen. Cory Booker, Menendez’s New Jersey counterpart, and Murphy had also joined in the calls for his immediate resignation. Murphy said at the time that he would call on the U.S. Senate to expel him if the senator refused to resign and make a temporary appointment in the event of a vacancy.
Menendez is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 29 and faces decades in prison.
Following the verdict, he vowed to appeal his conviction. He told reporters he was “deeply disappointed” by the jury’s decision while maintaining his innocence.
“I have never violated my oath,” Menendez said outside the courthouse following the verdict. “I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never, ever been a foreign agent.”
He added that the jury’s decision would “put at risk every member of the United States Senate in terms of what they think a foreign agent would be.”
Menendez, who served as senator for New Jersey since 2006, became the first sitting member of Congress to be charged with conspiracy by a public official to act as a foreign agent.
He refused to resign following the initial indictment in September 2023 despite calls from a majority of Democrats to do so, though he did step down as the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In June, he filed a petition to get on the U.S. Senate ballot in New Jersey as an independent candidate.
(WASHINGTON) — The largest prisoner exchange with Russia since the Cold War took months of detailed negotiations that directly involved the president, government officials told ABC News.
The deal, which freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, involved several nations and included key exchanges by President Joe Biden, according to the officials. The deal also freed Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Muza, a legal permanent resident of the U.S.
“In the context of the war against Ukraine and the overall degradation of our relations with Russia, securing the release of Americans detained in Russia has been uniquely challenging,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Thursday.
Biden said at a press conference on Thursday, “If anyone questions if allies matter, they do, they matter.”
Negotiations gained traction in last 2 weeks: Sources
Even on the day he announced he was no longer seeking re-election, Biden, who was recovering from COVID-19, was on the phone working to secure this deal, a senior administration official told ABC News.
“The hour before he released that statement – literally an hour before he released that statement – he was on the phone with his Slovenian counterpart urging them to make the final arrangements and get this deal over the finish line,” the official said.
“This exchange is not by accident. It really is the result of a heck of a lot of leadership by President Biden and by the strength of relationships,” a senior administration official said.
Alexei Navalny’s death affected negotiations
Sullivan revealed Thursday that the U.S. and its allies were working on a prisoner deal that would have included the release of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was arrested by Russian officials in 2021.
Russian authorities announced Feb. 16 that Navalny had died while in prison.
The U.S. negotiation team “felt like the wind had been taken out of our sails in terms of efforts to get Paul and Evan back home,” upon learning of Navalny’s death, a senior administration official told ABC News.
But Sullivan, who happened to have a meeting scheduled with Evan’s family that day, felt differently, according to the official.
“He still saw a path forward, he thought it was going to be a little bit more of a rocky path, and it might take us a little bit longer than we thought,” the official said.
“He gathered the team together and he told him to not let Navalny’s death totally torpedo our opportunities to get these folks out,” the official said. “And he instructed them to come up with some additional options to make it politically viable, particularly politically viable to the Germans.”
Germany played key role in release
One key sticking point, according to Sullivan, was that Russia “would not agree to the release of these individuals without an exchange that included Vadim Krasikov,” who was in German custody for allegedly gunning down a Kremlin opponent in Germany.
“That required extensive diplomatic engagement with our German counterparts, starting at the top with the President himself, who worked this issue directly with Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz. We are deeply grateful to Germany for their partnership,” Sullivan said.
To get the German’s on board, a senior administration official credited not only Sullivan’s work to get a proposal in place, but also Biden’s relationship with German Chancellor Scholz.
“All culminated, really, in a call by President Biden to Chancellor Scholz, and then a follow-on visit by Chancellor Scholz in February, where, basically, Chancellor Scholz responded to the president saying, ‘For you, I will do this.’ The president then turned to Jake and said, Get it done,'” the official said.
The administration official stressed that “nobody’s turning a blind eye” to the crimes of Krasikov, or his connection to Russian intelligence service, but said “tough decisions” needed to me made to get these four innocent people back home and to their families.
Swap won’t affect Russian-US relations
There should be no expectation of improved U.S.-Russia relations going forward, according to a senior administration official.
This official said the administration has shown it can hold Russia accountable for its aggression on the world stage while “compartmentalizing out” the work on securing the release of Americans that are wrongfully detained.
“I would be cautious and would counsel anyone to be cautious in surmising from this that it’s some sort of breakthrough in the relationship and it portends some détente with Russia or an easing of the tensions in our relationship.”
This official said Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, pressure on NATO allies and across Europe, and the “burgeoning defense relationship” Putin is forming with China, North Korea and Iran are “of significant concern.”
“We will not see a policy change by President Biden and the administration when it comes to standing up to Putin’s aggression.”
ABC News’ Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Republican calls are mounting for sharper focus by former President Donald Trump on inflation and immigration, worried that his penchant for personal attacks and scattered stances on social issues could serve as distractions in his quest to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
In key down-ballot races, however, Republicans are still fighting on the culture-war battlefields.
Red- and purple-state Republican Senate challengers are leaning on issues such as transgender rights and “wokeism” to define battle-hardened Democratic incumbents as too liberal and chip away at longstanding brands among their electorates.
The dynamic serves as a recognition that while Trump needs to win over swing voters in purple states, a Republican Senate majority hinges on GOP strongholds like Montana and Ohio, where boiling the race down to a conservative-versus-liberal matchup allows those states’ partisan bents to take over.
“If you’re running against a Democrat who’s running underneath Trump [on the ballot] in a state where Trump’s going to win overwhelmingly, then you have every reason to try to drive a shirts-and-skins election,” said GOP strategist Scott Jennings. “Get everybody into their corners, don’t let them think that ticket splitting is a good idea or something they should even consider.”
Republicans are bullish on their opportunities to unseat Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. They’re also hoping to expand a future majority by winning seats in purple states such as Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and they’re not just relying on kitchen-table issues to do it.
Senate Leadership Fund, the top GOP Senate super PAC, released ads in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania Tuesday knocking Democratic incumbents there for what they said was support for allowing “biological men” to compete in “women’s sports.”
Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee to take on Tester, also knocked Democrats in his opening ad over “drag queen story time on our military bases” and said he was running “to get this woke crap out of our military.” At his speech at this summer’s Republican convention, Sheehy started his speech by saying, “My name is Tim Sheehy. Those are also my pronouns.”
And Bernie Moreno, the GOP nominee in Ohio, wrote on his website that he’s running in part to “end wokeness and cancel culture,” and a supportive super PAC had hammered one primary opponent as being untrustworthy for being a “champion for trans equality.”
The tactics are all part of a strategy to tear down in-state images of Democratic candidates — Tester and Brown in particular — as bipartisan dealmakers and instead remake them as nothing more than run-of-the-mill liberals in states where the overall partisan makeup makes such labels untenable. And if they’re successful Republican candidates, can just ride on Trump’s lengthy red-state coattails.
“It’s code for liberal,” one GOP strategist working on Senate races said of the recent ads. “It’s less about the actual trans issue itself and more about what their support for that issue actually says about their overall worldview.”
“Ohio and Montana are the inverse of almost every swing state Senate race of the last three cycles. And what I mean by that is, it’s not a question of, can Republicans reach beyond the Trump base to win over voters who didn’t support Trump? Neither Tim Sheehy nor Bernie Moreno needs a single voter to vote for them who isn’t already voting for Trump,” the person added.
Multiple Republican strategists boasted of poll numbers they’d seen of the popularity of GOP stances on transgender issues. A second operative working on Senate races said it was the “better testing and often the best testing message in surveys” they’d seen, and Brad Todd, another GOP strategist, said two campaign’s he’s working on are planning on releasing ads of their own on the topic.
And for Republican candidates like Sheehy, Moreno and Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, all of whom can’t compete with the name recognition of their multi-term Democratic opponents, social issues offer an avenue to signaling alignment with voters looking to learn more about them.
“You do have to check some boxes with some voters so that they cross that threshold of, ‘Well, is this even someone that is culturally aligned with me enough to consider?’ And that issue right there for a lot of more culturally conservative voters is one that definitely pops,” Jennings said.
The moves mark a stark contrast with the conventional wisdom in the presidential race, where Republicans are pushing Trump to focus on the economy and border security and leave aside issues such as transgender athletes, gender-affirming care for minors and his scattershot stances on some women’s reproductive rights matters. Still, some references to culture-war issues could prove advantageous, according to Republican strategists.
“I do think [in the presidential race], voters look to it more as a wrong track/right track on the economy. They see the president as the person steering the ship of economic state and in charge of sovereignty,” Todd said. “I think because those issues are so closely tied to the president and Republicans have an advantage on both of them, that’s why you don’t see as much discussed there. But they would be fair game.”
To be certain, Republicans are not hinging their Senate prospects solely on red meat, telling ABC News that it’s just one piece of the puzzle and that burnishing their own credentials on kitchen table issues is also critical.
“The type of people could vote for Donald Trump and Jon Tester, Donald Trump and Sherrod Brown, we know those people exist. They’re going to start to say, ‘OK, I get it. Tester is Biden, Brown is Biden. So, what do you got for me? What’s my alternative? Give me something,'” said a third GOP strategist working on Senate races. “You just can’t be generic Republican versus a liberal, because that’s been tried, and that clearly doesn’t work against Tester and Brown.”
Still, the person added, “you got to have more than one arrow in your quiver, and that’s the cultural stuff. There’s a place for it in these races.”
Some Democrats swatted away concerns that Republicans’ messaging was as potent as they claimed.
“Does anyone base their vote on this issue? How many people has this actually happened to?” Democratic strategist and former Senate aide Jon Reinish asked of transgender rights issues. “I’m expecting it is slim to probably none.”
But other Democrats told ABC News that transgender rights and other culture war topics could be potent in red states and made sense as a strategy where simply keeping GOP voters in line could deliver Republican victories — and with them, likely the Senate majority.
“Those are just redder states where I think the culture war stuff just gets more traction and playing to your base can get you over 50%,” one Democratic pollster said. “So, it does not surprise me at all to take that tact in these redder states.”
(WASHINGTON) — Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a sweeping crackdown Wednesday on dueling efforts by the Russian government to influence the upcoming 2024 election through covert networks aimed at spreading disinformation to American voters.
For months, the Biden administration has been publicly warning of Russia’s efforts to influence Americans through disinformation and propaganda to sow distrust in the election.
In a meeting Wednesday at the Justice Department, Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray highlighted both foreign and domestic incidents of attempts to influence voters, as well as pervasive and growing threats against those who administer elections.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts, and our investigation into this matter remains ongoing,” Garland said.
The Justice Department alleged that two employees of Russia Today, or RT — a Russian state-controlled media outlet, implemented a nearly $10 million scheme “to fund and direct a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government.”
To carry this out, the attorney general said the two employees — 31-year-old Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, also known as Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27 — allegedly directed the company to contract with social media influencers to amplify Russian propaganda.
“The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants and the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor, but that private investor was a fictitious persona,” Garland said.
Russian entities also created fake websites to allegedly further influence the election, officials said.
“RT has used people living and working inside the U.S. to facilitate contracts with American media figures to create and disseminate Russian propaganda here. The content was pitched as legitimate independent news when, in fact, much of it was created in Russia by RT employees who work for the Russian government,” Wray said. “The second operation reveals even more malign activities by companies working under the direction and control of the Russian government, companies that created media websites to trick Americans into unwittingly consuming Russian propaganda.”
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said they will continue to investigate election threats without fear or favor.
“Russia remains a predominant foreign threat to our elections, and as the intelligence community has publicly reported, and as I have previously warned, Iran also is accelerating its efforts to influence our elections, including the presidential election,” Monaco said.
Wray also delivered a blunt message for Iran and China when asked what the bureau’s response would be to those who intend to meddle in the presidential election: “Knock it off.”
The attorney general said Russia is using new techniques Russia such as artificial intelligence and other cyber techniques.
“They’re now using bot farms in a way that was not possible before, and therefore it’s a bigger threat than it ever was before. I would just say that [the] reality is that Russia has meddled in our society and tried to sow discord for decades,” Garland said.
The DOJ also announced that it’s targeting a Russian disinformation campaign referred to as “Doppelganger.”
The DOJ has seized 32 internet domains it claims have been used by the Russian government and government-sponsored actors to allegedly engage in the Doppelganger influence campaign by spreading propaganda intended to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster support for pro-Russian policies and influence American voters, according to newly unsealed court records.
Garland on Wednesday also highlighted domestic efforts to threaten election officials around the country.
Since March, the Election Threats Task Force has participated in more than 25 engagements, trainings and tabletop exercises, including both with law enforcement partners and partners in the election community, the attorney general said.
Over the next several weeks, task force representatives will be on the ground meeting with election workers and, in early November, both in advance of and after Election Day, the FBI will host federal partners at its headquarters command center to address events, issues and potential crimes related to the elections in real time, Garland said.
“Election officials and administrators do not need to navigate this threat environment alone,” he added.
CNN first reported news of the expected law enforcement actions.
In a statement Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the steps the State Department said it’s taking to “counter Kremlin-backed media outlets’ malicious operations seeking to influence or interfere in the 2024 U.S. elections.”
The measures include introducing a new visa restriction policy to penalize adversaries, designating RT’s parent company and subsidiaries as entities controlled by a foreign government, and offering cash rewards for information on the Russian intelligence-linked hacking group RaHDit under its “Rewards for Justice” program.
“Today’s announcement highlights the lengths some foreign governments go to undermine American democratic institutions. But these foreign governments should also know that we will not tolerate foreign malign actors intentionally interfering and undermining free and fair elections,” Blinken said.
In addition, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said Wednesday that it’s designating 10 individuals — including several RT employees — and two entities as part of the U.S. response to “Moscow’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election.”
The head of a “hacktivist” group RaHDit and two associates were also part of Wednesday’s sanctions, the Treasury Department said in a statement.
ABC News’ Shannon Kingston and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.