Acting Secret Service director to testify before Senate with more details about Trump assassination attempt security
(WASHINGTON) — Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe is set to testify before a joint Senate panel on Tuesday, and offer more detail about the Secret Service’s communications at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a man tried to assassinate Trump.
Rowe is expected to offer details about the security arrangements that were put in place for Trump’s rally on July 13.
Rowe is prepared to tell Senators, that Secret Service leadership was communicating directly with the Butler Emergency Services Unit (ESU) or their equivalent of a SWAT team. The Service says they have uncovered text messages that have been reviewed and interviews they’ve conducted with officials there on site that give them a fuller picture of what took place. The text messages, according to a source, are with a senior official from the Butler ESU team; they detail the Butler official describing the personnel that was available and some information about deployments, according to the source.
The Butler ESU was responsible for helping to put together the security package outside the Secret Service bubble.
The source confirmed that the Secret Service never had direct communications with police from Beaver County, as ABC News reported on Monday morning.
The source said the Secret Service was communicating with Butler and that the Beaver County team was providing mutual aid or support to Butler.
Rowe was named acting director when Director Kim Cheatle resigned. Formerly, he was number 2.
(PHOENIX) — Before Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly emerged as one of the lead contenders for vice president on the Democratic ticket, the former NASA astronaut earned more than a million dollars on the speaking circuit by regaling companies and colleges with tales of his triumphs in space.
Kelly, who was a U.S. Navy attack pilot before spending a decade as a NASA Space Shuttle pilot, earned more than $1.7 million in speaking fees over the two years before he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2020, financial disclosures show.
The senator, who has been floated as one of the possible candidates to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, earned additional income from book deals and business consulting, according to the disclosures.
The $1.7 million came from 62 public speaking engagements from 2018 to 2019 — during which time Kelly sometimes delivered multiple speeches per day in different states, records show. On Nov. 18, 2018, for example, Kelly made $72,250 from three separate speeches in California, Minnesota, and Oregon.
Among those that paid Kelly for speeches were the American Society of Dermatological Surgery, which paid him $25,500, Chobani, the yogurt company, which paid him $58,250, and the Sexual Medicine Society of North America, which paid him $29,750.
Kelly later returned $55,250 that he made from a speech for Pink Tank, a Dubai-based consulting company, after it was made public that the event was sponsored by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. At the time, a spokesperson for Kelly’s Senate campaign said Kelly’s speech was “focused entirely on Mark sharing experiences in space and discussing our countries’ space programs.”
In 2019, the Arizona senator also reported $1.5 million in income from Kelly Aerospace Consulting LLC, an Arizona limited liability company he registered in 2017, along with other income he earned from board member positions and from consulting.
The financial disclosures from that year show that Kelly held 16 positions for which he was compensated, including a position with Space X, the spacecraft manufacturer owned by Elon Musk.
According to disclosures from 2020 to 2022, Kelly stepped away from most of his board member positions and stopped doing paid public speaking engagements.
Since 2020, Kelly’s income has mostly come from his investments and stocks, and from royalties and advances from his several books.
In 2021, Kelly reported six royalty agreements for books he has written or co-written, which include several children’s books as well as the book “Gabby,” a book written with his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, that recounts the 2011 mass shooting that left her partly paralyzed and with difficulty speaking.
Kelly’s most recent financial disclosures are from 2022. He requested an extension to file his disclosures for 2023.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris has enough Democratic Party delegate votes in a virtual roll call to officially earn the party’s nomination when the roll call ends Monday, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison announced Friday.
“I am so proud to confirm that Vice President Harris has earned more than a majority of votes from all convention delegates and will be the nominee of the Democratic Party following the close of voting on Monday,” Harrison said during a campaign update video call on Friday.
“You returned your nomination petitions at lightning speed. You made your voices heard. And what you said was clear: We are not going back. We have to send Kamala Harris to the White House,” Harrison said to the delegates in a call plagued by audio issues. “You demonstrated your dedication and your commitment to this process.”
Convention delegates have been virtually voting by email or phone since 9 a.m. ET on Thursday in a virtual roll call set up by the Democratic National Committee. Delegates still have until Monday at 6 p.m. ET to vote in the nomination process, and Harris — who joined the call — highlighted that she would officially accept her nomination then, after the voting period is closed.
“I am honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States,” said Harris, who the DNC deemed the presumptive nominee on Tuesday after she emerged from a process, laid out by the party’s Rules Committee, as the only qualified candidate.
“As your future president, I know we are up to this fight, and when we fight, everyone will say, we win,” she later added.
The nomination is a historic one — if she wins the general election in November against former President Donald Trump, she would be the first woman to serve as president. Harris is already the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to be vice president.
Friday’s announcement marks a major milestone of Harris’ rapid ascension to the top of the ticket, which comes just 12 days after President Joe Biden ended his campaign for reelection on July 21 — a remarkable show of unity for a party that just weeks ago stood deeply divided over what to do about the president’s candidacy.
With Biden endorsing Harris to succeed him shortly after he announced that he would step aside, support from Democratic donors and elected officials quickly coalesced around the vice president. In the end, Harris was the only competitive candidate that launched a campaign to succeed Biden and the only candidate that received enough delegate signatures to progress to the virtual roll call.
Harris is the first candidate to become the nominee for either major party without winning a single party primary since Hubert Humphrey in 1968. (That year’s convention precipitated reforms that led to the modern primary process.)
The DNC initially decided in May to hold a virtual roll call because of uncertainty over deadlines to get on the ballot in Ohio. The state legislature eventually rectified the issue, but the DNC has argued that Republican lawmakers in Ohio are acting in bad faith and that the Democratic candidate needs to be nominated earlier than the convention to avoid legal issues. Ohio leaders have denied this allegation.
ABC News’ Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Fritz Farrow, Will McDuffie and Sarah Beth Hensley contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — After the supreme leader of Iran signaled a willingness to return to nuclear negotiations with the United States, the Biden administration cast doubt on the likelihood of resuming talks in the near future.
“We will judge Iran’s leadership by their actions, not their words,” a State Department spokesperson said Tuesday.
“If Iran wants to demonstrate seriousness or a new approach, they should stop nuclear escalations and start meaningfully cooperating with the IAEA,” they added, referencing the International Atomic Energy Agency, an intergovernmental watchdog that Tehran has often subverted.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave Iran’s newly installed president, reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, the go-ahead to relaunch talks with the U.S. on Tuesday while warning the country’s government against putting any trust in Washington.
“This does not mean that we cannot interact with the same enemy in certain situations,” Khamenei said, according to the official transcript of his remarks. “There is no harm in that, but do not place your hopes in them.”
The State Department spokesperson said the administration still saw a negotiated solution as the best way to contain Iran’s nuclear program, but that Iran’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA and its escalatory actions made diplomacy impossible.
“We are far away from anything like that right now,” they said.
Members of the administration also largely view the prospect of returning to indirect talks with Iran as a politically unfavorable step that could prove detrimental to Vice President Kamala Harris’ and other Democrats’ chances at winning in November, several officials told ABC News.
The doubtful outlook for resuscitating negotiations in the coming months further diminishes the already low odds of securing a deal with Iran before President Joe Biden’s time in the White House comes to an end, all but pushing his promise to negotiate a “longer and stronger” agreement out of reach.
Khamenei’s comments Tuesday echo the position he took around the time Tehran signed off on the 2015 nuclear pact known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the JCPOA — a landmark accord that granted Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for limiting its nuclear program.
Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018, calling it “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” and reimposing financial restrictions on Iran.
In the years since, Khamenei’s public comments on the matter have oscillated between encouraging negotiations with the U.S. and outright dismissing the possibility of a renewed pact.
Foreign policy observers say the upcoming U.S. presidential election is injecting even more uncertainty into the prospects of reaching another nuclear agreement with Iran.
Trump has previously made unsubstantiated claims that Iran was ready to accept conditions that were highly favorable to the U.S. at the end of his term and that he was “ready to make a deal.” But on the campaign trail, Trump — a sworn enemy of the Iranian regime — has taken an increasingly hawkish stance against the country, which reportedly carried out a cyberattack targeting his campaign and has plotted against him and his former Cabinet officials.
Harris has also promised to take an aggressive approach to curbing Iran’s malign influence in the Middle East, but she supported the JCPOA, as well as the current administration’s efforts to cut a new deal. However, she has not clearly said whether she would attempt to pick up where Biden left off.
Indirect talks with Iran under the Biden administration officially kicked off in April 2021. Despite mediators’ initial optimism, talks eventually sputtered out after multiple rounds of stop-start diplomacy failed to move both sides toward an agreement.
So far, Biden has made good on another of his major promises regarding Iran: his declaration that the country would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.”
However, officials within his administration say Tehran has made substantial progress toward that goal in recent years.
In July, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Iran was likely only “one or two weeks away” from having breakout capacity to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon, and that the U.S. was watching “very, very carefully” to see whether the country would move toward weaponizing its nuclear program, a step the administration says the regime has not yet taken.
The U.S. shutting down the possibility of any renewed talks with Iran right now comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East, including Israel’s preemptive strike Saturday night on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.