Attorney General Merrick Garland informs Congress special counsel’s Donald Trump investigation has concluded
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(WASHINGTON) — Attorney General Merrick Garland informed Congress in a letter Wednesday that special counsel Jack Smith has concluded his investigations into President-elect Donald Trump.
Garland informed members of Congress — as required by internal department regulations — that at no time did he interfere in to overrule Smith during the process of his investigation, according to the letter released by the Department of Justice.
Garland also acknowledged in the letter that at this time he is currently barred by district Judge Aileen Cannon from releasing the report outside of the Justice Department, but intends to make Volume One of the report regarding Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election available to the public once he is “permitted to do so” by the courts.
Garland further confirmed he plans to make available the volume of the report pertaining to Trump’s classified documents case available to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees for closed-door review as soon as the 11th Circuit permits him to do so.
Volume Two will not be released as of yet due to ongoing court proceedings against Trump’s co-defendants.
“Consistent with local court rules and Department policy, and to avoid any risk of prejudice to defendants Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, whose criminal cases remain pending, I have determined, at the recommendation of the Special Counsel, that Volume Two should not be made public so long as those defendants’ criminal proceedings are ongoing,” Garland wrote.
He continued, “I have determined that once those criminal proceedings have concluded, releasing Volume Two of the Report to you and to the public would also be in the public interest, consistent with law and Department policy.”
The letter was addressed to Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
(GEORGIA) — With early voting underway in the key battleground state of Georgia, a top election official in the state forcefully pushed back Wednesday on false claims of voting machine fraud — a debunked conspiracy theory that proliferated after the 2020 presidential election and has now been revived by some prominent Republican figures.
“[There is] zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote,” said Gabriel Sterling, a top official on the Georgia secretary of state’s office. “That claim was a lie in 2020 and it’s a lie now.”
Sterling, in his comments, called out “certain congresspeople” — appearing to reference Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently pushed an unsubstantiated allegation that a Georgia resident’s early vote had been switched by a voting machine.
Greene, in an interview and social media post, shared an unidentified Whitfield County voter’s claim that a voting machine had printed their ballot with a different selection than the one they had made on the machine — a claim that local officials said was simply a case of human error.
“Humans make mistakes. They’re called mistakes for a reason,” Sterling wrote in a post on X. “This issue is human/user error, always will be. Whitfield Co. handled it & voter voted.”
In her tweet about the alleged incident, Greene told her followers to “please double check your printed ballot” before turning it in, and noted that “we vote on Dominion voting machines” — a reference to the voting machine company that was the target of numerous false conspiracy theories in 2020.
Greene pushed the same claims in an interview last week with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, according to a clip posted online, claiming the machine “kept on switching the votes” of that voter.
“It sounds similar to what we heard in 2020,” Greene said of the incident, which occurred in her district, again noting Georgia’s use of Dominion machines.
X owner Elon Musk — who, like Greene, is a supporter of former President Donald Trump — made similar conspiracy theory claims while speaking at a town hall in Pennsylvania last week.
Dominion, in the wake of the 2020 election, filed a series of defamation lawsuits after it became the center of a false conspiracy theory that voting machines had rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden. Last year the company settled its landmark defamation suit against Fox News for a $787 million. The other suits are still ongoing.
In a statement, Dominion pushed back on Greene’s new claim.
“The false claim that voting machines can switch votes has been repeatedly debunked,” a Dominion spokesperson said. “As both state and local election authorities have confirmed, the issue in Whitfield County was due to voter error. The county provided the voter with an opportunity to mark and print a new ballot with their correct choices and the issue was quickly resolved.”
In a press release, the Whitfield County Board of Elections said there was no issue with the voting machine, and that this was “the only incident among over 6,000 ballots cast.”
“If we had reason to suspect that the machine was in error, we would have immediately taken the machine out of service,” the statement said. “No machines have been taken out of service.”
The statement noted that Georgia law allows voters to void their printed ballot “if they make the wrong selection on the ballot marking device.”
Greene, responding to a separate Facebook post by the election board, thanked the poll workers for “resolving the issues” and defended their work, writing that it is “not their fault.”
“They don’t make the Georgia state election laws and they are just doing their jobs,” Greene said of the poll workers.
Speaking at the press conference on Wednesday, Sterling said the “main situation” they have encountered includes “elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it.”
“Anyone claiming machines are flipping votes are lying or don’t research,” Sterling wrote in a post on X last week.
(PALM BEACH, Fla.) — Former President Donald Trump called his rally at Madison Square Garden a “lovefest” on Tuesday as backlash continues over racist and crude comments made by some speakers at the iconic New York City venue.
Trump spoke about the rally near the end of remarks at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday that were largely focused on swiping at Vice President Kamala Harris’ record ahead of her speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where she’ll make a closing argument to voters.
“It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest,” Trump said. “It was my honor to be involved.”
“I don’t think anybody’s ever seen what happened the other night at Madison Square Garden, the love, the love in that room — it was breathtaking, and you could have filled it many, many times with the people that were unable to get in,” Trump said.
Trump did not address specific comments made on Sunday that prompted criticism, most notably comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke that Puerto Rico was an “island of floating garbage.”
Trump told ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott earlier Tuesday that he didn’t know the comedian and hadn’t seen his comments despite them dominating the airwaves the past two days.
“I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” Trump told ABC’s Scott.
When asked what he made of the comments, Trump didn’t take an opportunity to denounce them and repeated his claim that he hadn’t heard them.
His campaign has said the comedian’s comments don’t reflect the views of Trump or the campaign.
Trump did not take any questions from reporters during the event at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday.
The former president touched on a variety of familiar campaign themes as he hit Harris over her record on immigration and the economy.
With Harris expected to highlight the violence that happened on Jan. 6 during her speech in D.C. on Tuesday evening, Trump focused on immigration, using anti-immigrant rhetoric as he was standing next to people who have lost their family members to undocumented crime.
Trump had very low energy as he spent most of the press conference repeating his usual stump speech on border security, economy, foreign policy and other topics, but ended his remarks with a promise to “fight like hell” in the final week of the election and once he’s elected.
“We’re going to fight like hell for the next seven days and then hopefully…” Trump said.
“Hopefully, and most importantly, we’re going to be fighting even harder for the next four years because we’re going to turn this around and we’re going to make this country,” he concluded.
He also began his remarks by repeating falsehoods about the election, claiming Democrats “stole” it when President Joe Biden stepped aside and Harris was nominated as the party’s nominee. He also suggested there were “bad spots” in Pennsylvania, a battleground state considered crucial to the election outcome.
“There are some bad spots in Pennsylvania where some serious things have been caught, or are in the process of being caught, but the election itself is going very well,” Trump said.
(WASHINGTON) — The election will not only decide who will occupy the White House for the next four years, but also which party controls both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 seats in the Senate are up for grabs.
Republicans currently control the House while Democrats retain a narrow majority in the Senate.
See how the balance of power is playing out as election results come in:
Significant shifts and what to watch in the Senate race
Jim Justice is projected to win the Senate seat in West Virginia, which flips the state from Democrat to Republican. Incumbent Joe Manchin decided not to run for reelection, putting Justice against Democrat Glenn Elliot and Libertarian Party candidate David Moran.
ABC News also projects that former President Donald Trump will win in West Virginia. As Dan Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote for ABC News’ live election coverage, “In most years, a Senate where every state votes for the same party for Senate and president is a Senate where the Democrats fall short of a majority.”
Another Democratic seat was lost in Ohio, where Republican nominee Bernie Moreno is projected to take the Senate position previously held — for three terms — by Sherrod Brown, the Democratic incumbent. The presumed victory makes a large Republican majority in the Senate seem all the more likely.
In Maryland, Democratic Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks is projected to win against former Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican. She is expected to replace Sen. Ben Cardin, also a Democrat, who did not run for reelection, putting the state’s Democratic Senate seat at risk in a year where the party had none to lose if they hoped to retain their narrow majority.
Alsobrooks currently serves as the first woman elected to a county executive position in Maryland, and she now seems positioned to become the state’s first Black senator. She would also be making history, as Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester are projected to be the first two Black women to serve on the Senate at the same time.
