Category: Politics

(WASHINGTON) — The race for the White House remained essentially a dead heat on Friday — with 11 days to go until Election Day.

Kamala Harris was headed to Texas to highlight abortion access and Donald Trump was set to appear on Joe Rogan’s highly-popular podcast.

McConnell, Johnson rebuke Harris for calling Trump ‘fascist’

In a rare joint statement, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell strongly condemned Harris calling Trump a “fascist” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

The two Republican leaders say Harris’ remarks have “only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus. Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over. The Vice President’s words more closely resemble those of President Trump’s second would-be assassin than her own earlier appeal to civility.”

McConnell and Johnson say they have been briefed on the “ongoing and persistent threats to former President Donald Trump.”

Harris quickly seized on John Kelly’s comments to The New York Times this week that he believed Trump fit the description of a fascist. Kelly served as Trump’s chief of staff and is a retired general.

Trump has claimed for months that Harris is a “fascist” or “communist” or “Marxist.”

-ABC News’ Lauren Peller

Virginia judge strikes down voter purge that impacted 1,600 people

A federal judge issued a partial ruling finding that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order to conduct a daily voter purge process violated the National Voting Rights Act of 1993.

A total of 1,600 voters removed from the rolls since August must be added back within the next five days.

The judge said the process left no room for individualized inquiry, which violated the act’s requirement that “when in the 90-day provisional, it must be done on an individualized basis.”

-ABC News’ Beatrice Peterson

Trump zeroes in on ‘blue wall’ states

Trump will embark on a rigorous schedule making his final pitch to voters. The former president is focusing on the “blue wall” states this weekend and early next week, specifically targeting Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

After stops in Michigan and Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump will culminate his weekend campaigning with a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, in which the former president has coined as a “celebration of the whole thing” with his nine years of campaigning coming to close.

-ABC News’ Kelsey Walsh, Lalee Ibssa and Soorin Kim

Americans accused of noncitizen voter fraud face doxxing

Eliud Bonilla, a Brooklyn-born NASA engineer born to Puerto Rican parents, was abruptly purged from the voter rolls as a “noncitizen.”

Bonilla later voted without issue, but the nuisance soon became a nightmare after a conservative watchdog group published his personal information online after obtaining a list of the state’s suspected noncitizen voters.

“I became worried because of safety,” he told ABC News, “because, unfortunately, we’ve seen too many examples in this country when one person wants to right a perceived wrong and goes through with an act of violence.”

Bonilla’s story highlights a real-world impact of aggressive efforts to purge state voter rolls of thousands of potential noncitizens who have illegally registered. Many of the names end up being newly naturalized citizens, victims of an inadvertent paperwork mistake or the result of a clerical error, experts say. Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Read more about Bonilla’s story and a fact check of noncitizen voting claims here.

Half of Americans see Trump as fascist, Harris viewed as pandering: POLL

A new poll from ABC News and Ipsos found half of Americans (49%) see Trump as a fascist, or “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.”

A majority of voters (65%) also said Trump often says things that are not true.

But Harris also faces perception headwinds, though far fewer Americans (22%) said they viewed her as a fascist.

Fifty-seven percent of registered voters said Harris is making proposals “that just are intended to get people to vote for her,” not that she intends to carry out. Just more than half (52%) said the same about Trump.

Read more takeaways from the poll here.

Trump to appear on Joe Rogan podcast in play for young male voters

Former President Donald Trump sits down with podcast host Joe Rogan for the first time Friday, appearing on the highly popular “The Joe Rogan Experience,” as he reaches out to an audience of mostly young males as potential voters.

The podcast, which boasts approximately 15.7 million followers, a Spotify representative confirmed to ABC News, is greater than the population of any of the seven election battleground states.

Read more here

-ABC News’ Brittany Shepherd and Emily Chang

Harris heads to Texas to highlight abortion access

Vice President Kamala Harris was headed to Houston Friday to speak on one of her top issues — reproductive freedom.

Her campaign says she chose Texas because of the state’s restrictive abortion law – which bans abortion in almost all circumstances.

Harris will be joined, her campaign says, by women who have suffered because of lack of abortion access and related medical care.

She will also be joined by celebrities, including Beyonce and Willie Nelson.

-ABC News’ Gabriella Abdul-Hakim

More than 31 million have voted as of Friday morning

As of Friday morning, more than 31 million Americans had voted early, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.

Of the total early votes numbering 31,402,309, in-person early votes accounted for 13,687,197 ballots and mail-in ballots numbered 17,715,831.

This means that more than 16 million people have voted since Monday.

-ABC News’ Emily Chang

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(PHOENIX) — President Joe Biden was in Arizona on Friday to apologize to Native Americans for the federal government forcing Indian children into boarding schools where the White House said they were abused and deprived of their cultural identity.

Departing the White House Thursday, Biden said he was going to Arizona “to do something that should have been done a long time ago.”

He said he would make “a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years.”

The White House called his trip to Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix — his first to Indian Country as president — “historic.”

Officials said he will discuss the Biden-Harris administration’s record of delivering for tribal communities, including keeping his promise to visit the swing state, which is happening close to Election Day.

“The president also believes that to usher in the next era of the Federal-Tribal relationships we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past,” the White House said. 

“For over 150 years, the federal government ran boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native children from their homes to boarding schools often far away. Native children at these schools endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and, as detailed in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report by the Department of the Interior (DOI), at least 973 children died in these schools,” the White House said.

“The federally-run Indian boarding school system was designed to assimilate Native Americans by destroying Native culture, language, and identity through harsh militaristic and assimilationist methods,” it said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump is denying he praised Adolf Hitler as having done “some good things,” as his former chief of staff and retired Marine general John Kelly was reported to have said this week.

“Never said it,” Trump said, answering reporter questions as he campaigned in battleground Nevada on Thursday.

Kelly told The New York Times in an extensive interview that Trump spoke positively of Hitler while in office. Kelly expressed overall concern that Trump would act more like a dictator if elected to another four years in the White House and said, in his view, the former president fit the definition of a “fascist.”

“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,'” Kelly said of Trump.

Kelly’s comments came after The Atlantic reported that Trump once said he wanted generals like Hitler had.

Trump also denied saying the comments attributed to him in The Atlantic story.

“No, I never said that. I never said that. It’s a rag that’s made-up stories before. He’s done it before,” Trump said.

“Right before the election. It’s just a failing magazine,” Trump continued.

Vice President Kamala Harris and other top Democrats have seized on the reporting as they ramp up their criticisms of Trump as a threat to democracy in the final stretch of the 2024 campaign.

Harris pointed to Kelly’s comments as she campaigned alongside former President Barack Obama in Georgia on Thursday night.

“Take a moment to think about what that means, that Trump said, quote, ‘Hitler did some good things,’ and that Trump wished he had generals like Hitler’s, who would be loyal to Trump and not to America’s Constitution,” Harris said.

Obama also hit Trump over the reported remarks.

“The interesting thing is, he acts so crazy, and it’s become so common, that people no longer take it seriously,” Obama said of Trump. “I’m here to explain to you just because he acts goofy does not mean his presidency wouldn’t be dangerous.”

“Now, I happen to know John Kelly and Mark Milley,” Obama added (Milley was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). “They served under me when I was commander in chief. These are serious people … They are people who have never in the past even talked about politics because they believe that the military should be above politics,” he said. “But the reason they’re speaking up is because they have seen that in Donald Trump’s mind, the military does not exist to serve the Constitution or the American people.”

During a pull-aside interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump lashed out at Harris for calling him a “fascist,” saying “everyone knows that’s not true.”

“I’ve never seen anybody so inept at speaking. I mean, I thought she her performance was horrible,” he said about Harris’ CNN town hall appearance.

“But she did call me a fascist, and everyone knows that’s not true. They call me everything until, you know, something sticks,” he said.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The race for the White House remained essentially a dead heat on Friday — with 11 days to go until Election Day.

Kamala Harris was headed to Texas to highlight abortion access and Donald Trump was set to appear on Joe Rogan’s highly-popular podcast.

 

Americans accused of noncitizen voter fraud face doxxing

Eliud Bonilla, a Brooklyn-born NASA engineer born to Puerto Rican parents, was abruptly purged from the voter rolls as a “noncitizen.”

Bonilla later voted without issue, but the nuisance soon became a nightmare after a conservative watchdog group published his personal information online after obtaining a list of the state’s suspected noncitizen voters.

“I became worried because of safety,” he told ABC News, “because, unfortunately, we’ve seen too many examples in this country when one person wants to right a perceived wrong and goes through with an act of violence.”

Bonilla’s story highlights a real-world impact of aggressive efforts to purge state voter rolls of thousands of potential noncitizens who have illegally registered. Many of the names end up being newly naturalized citizens, victims of an inadvertent paperwork mistake or the result of a clerical error, experts say. Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Read more about Bonilla’s story and a fact check of noncitizen voting claims here.

Half of Americans see Trump as fascist, Harris viewed as pandering: POLL

A new poll from ABC News and Ipsos found half of Americans (49%) see Trump as a fascist, or “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.”

A majority of voters (65%) also said Trump often says things that are not true.

But Harris also faces perception headwinds, though far fewer Americans (22%) said they viewed her as a fascist.

Fifty-seven percent of registered voters said Harris is making proposals “that just are intended to get people to vote for her,” not that she intends to carry out. Just more than half (52%) said the same about Trump.

Read more takeaways from the poll here.

Trump to appear on Joe Rogan podcast in play for young male voters

Former President Donald Trump sits down with podcast host Joe Rogan for the first time Friday, appearing on the highly popular “The Joe Rogan Experience,” as he reaches out to an audience of mostly young males as potential voters.

The podcast, which boasts approximately 15.7 million followers, a Spotify representative confirmed to ABC News, is greater than the population of any of the seven election battleground states.

Read more here

-ABC News’ Brittany Shepherd and Emily Chang

Harris heads to Texas to highlight abortion access

Vice President Kamala Harris was headed to Houston Friday to speak on one of her top issues — reproductive freedom.

Her campaign says she chose Texas because of the state’s restrictive abortion law – which bans abortion in almost all circumstances.

Harris will be joined, her campaign says, by women who have suffered because of lack of abortion access and related medical care.

She will also be joined by celebrities, including Beyonce and Willie Nelson.

-ABC News’ Gabriella Abdul-Hakim

More than 31 million have voted as of Friday morning

As of Friday morning, more than 31 million Americans had voted early, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.

Of the total early votes numbering 31,402,309, in-person early votes accounted for 13,687,197 ballots and mail-in ballots numbered 17,715,831.

This means that more than 16 million people have voted since Monday.

-ABC News’ Emily Chang

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(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.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — With the economy the top issue for many voters in the home stretch of the election, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce record lending from the federal government to small business owners on Thursday, according to a White House fact sheet shared exclusively with ABC News.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) provided a record $56 billion in loans to small businesses from October 2023 through September 2024, the fact sheet said, with more than 100,000 small businesses receiving the loans — the highest number in 16 years — while lending to Black-owned businesses has tripled in the past four years.

The SBA lends money to small businesses as a way for them to get off the ground, expand or rebuild — especially when other financing options might not be available — and companies must meet eligibility requirements, such as being based in the United States or only having a certain number of employees, to qualify for the loans.

“Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. And we know that small business owners need access to capital to hire more employees, grow their businesses, and advance innovation,” Harris said in a statement to ABC News. “Today I am proud to announce that the U.S. Small Business Administration has made record lending to over 100,000 small businesses in the last year, the most by the agency in over 15 years. When small businesses thrive, our local economies thrive.”

The agency has been under pressure after the White House said last week that its disaster loan program, which provides low-interest lending to disaster survivors, ran out of funds in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

The announcement from Harris comes as she seeks to dispel voters’ doubts over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economy and inflation. Polls consistently show former President Donald Trump outranks Harris in handling the economy.

The latest report from the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small businesses nationwide, found uncertainty among its members is at an all-time high ahead of the election.

Last month, Vice President Harris unveiled a proposal to increase the tax deduction for new small businesses ten-fold, from $5000 to $50,000.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, says she wants Americans to cherish their democracy as they prepare to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

“I would say to American voters, don’t take everything like granted,” Navalnaya told ABC’s The View in an interview airing Thursday. “You are still living in democratic country and I still believe in American institutions and just make the right choice.”

Navalnaya spoke to The View for the launch of a memoir written by her late husband, Russia’s most famous pro-democracy campaigner and President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest opponent. He died in prison in February and the book, titled “Patriot,” was mostly written while he was detained.

You can watch The View interview with Yulia Navalnaya on ABC at 11 a.m. ET on Thursday, Oct. 24.

Navalnaya did not express a preference for Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump to win the election. However, her husband expressed alarm about the possibility of a second Trump presidency in a letter written from prison.

“Trump’s agenda and plans look truly scary. What a nightmare,” Navalny wrote to his friend, the photographer Yevgeny Feldman, who shared the letter from December 2023.

Navalny died suddenly in a prison camp in the Russian Arctic in February. Russian authorities claimed the 47-year-old died from natural causes, but his family and supporters accused the Kremlin of murdering him.

In September, independent Russian investigative news outlet The Insider said it obtained the police report into Navalny’s death. It reportedly stated that, in the minutes before he died, Navalny had suffered a “sharp pain” in his stomach, vomiting and convulsing on the floor.

In the final version of the police report, the description of Navalny’s symptoms as described in the initial report — all strongly suggestive of a possible poisoning — had been left out, according to The Insider.

Navalny was imprisoned in January 2021 after deciding to return to Russia, despite his near-fatal poisoning with a nerve agent months earlier. He was arrested on arrival at the airport in Moscow and sentenced to 19 years, on charges widely condemned as politically motivated.

Married to Navaly for 24 years, Navalnaya worked closely with him before his death but largely remained out of sight. Since his death, she has stepped forward to fill his place as an opposition leader. She leads his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and campaigns internationally for greater efforts to punish Putin’s regime.

“When he was killed, it was very important for me to show that even they are ready to kill the person, to kill our opposition leader. He wasn’t just my husband, he was very close friend,” she told The View. “He was leader whom I supported and it was very important for me to show that we’ll continue our fight. And to remind the world about him.”

Navalnaya also told the panelists that she’s certain the full story of how her husband died will be revealed, noting that the Anti-Corruption Foundation was working to make it happen.

She was unable to attend her husband’s funeral in March — which was held under intense restrictions in Moscow — because she faced possible detention. A Russian court in July ordered her arrest on extremism charges.

Navalnaya is undeterred by possible threats to her well-being , she told The View panelists.

“I hope it never happens, but if something will happen with me, there will be other people, and there will be people who [will be] fighting with Putin’s regime for many years,” she said.

Despite the dangers to him, Navalnaya said they both wanted Navalny to return to Russia, hoping to encourage people in their country to “not be afraid.”

“There are a lot of people in Russia against Putin’s regime,” she said. “Of course, it was an option to stay somewhere abroad in exile. But when I think about it, I’m thinking that he would be unhappy.”

In his book, Navalny expressed his belief that he would never be released while Putin’s regime remained and that authorities would likely poison him.

He also wrote about the harsh conditions in prison and his conviction that returning to Russia was worthwhile despite his imprisonment. He also recounted one of Navalnaya’s visits in the early days of his time in prison, during which they accepted that he would likely die in detention.

“It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you. Where else could I ever have found someone who could discuss the most difficult matters with me without a lot of drama and hand-wringing?” he wrote. “She entirely got it and, like me, would hope for the best, but expect and prepare for the worst. I kissed her on the nose and felt much better.”

Navalnaya told The View that the thing she misses most in the wake of her husband’s death is coming home and spending evenings talking with him.

“I probably miss evenings. When you come back home,” she said. “I’m sitting here speaking with you and I want to come back home and to share this with him and to discuss it. And all these, you know, very ordinary things, of course I miss a lot.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — More than a dozen 911 calls from the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler County, Pennsylvania, were released on Wednesday, reflecting moments of fear and confusion after a gunman opened fire at the outdoor rally.

“They just tried to kill President Trump,” a 911 caller reported.

“We have an emergency. We’re at the Trump rally,” another caller said.

The 15 recordings, some of which capture the sounds of chaos in the background, were released by Butler County.

The first call came in at 6:12 p.m., about a minute after shots rang out. Trump was eight minutes into his speech when the shooting began, according to officials.

“We’re at the Trump rally — gunshots,” a woman shouts above loud crowds.

“Yep, the police are on their way,” the dispatcher responds.

“You better get over here quick!” the woman says.

The gunfire killed Corey Comperatore, 50, and critically injured two other attendees, Jim Copenhaver and David Dutch.

“I have a woman on the line, her husband was shot at the Trump rally,” a dispatcher from neighboring Allegheny County reported.

Another call came from a woman who was trying to locate her husband, who, she told the call taker, had been shot and taken by paramedics.

Trump was left with a bloodied ear before a Secret Service sharpshooter killed the suspected gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.

The bipartisan House task force investigating the assassination attempt outlined the security failures of the U.S. Secret Service and lack of coordination with local law enforcement in an interim report released earlier this week.

The report revealed that there was “inadequate planning and coordination by the Secret Service with state and local law enforcement before and during the July 13 rally.”

The preliminary findings are based on 23 transcribed interviews with local law enforcement officials, thousands of pages of documents from local, state and federal authorities as well as testimony from a public hearing on Sept. 26, according to the task force.

The task force concluded that the attempt on Trump’s life was “preventable.”

Trump returned to the Butler site earlier this month for a rally marked by enhanced security measures around the fairground, during which he thanked the first responders and the community that rallied behind him in the wake of the assassination attempt.

ABC News’ Lauren Peller contributed to this report.

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(NASHVILLE, Tenn.) — An unexpected challenge in Tennessee’s first week of voting involved touchscreens in the state’s two largest counties resulted in no recorded irregularities and an unlikely fix: coffee stirrers that allow voters to choose with precision their preferred candidate, local officials told ABC News.

The stirrers, which since 2020 have been doled out to voters to use as styluses, were ditched for environmental reasons – then readopted after the first days of early voting led some Tennesseans to accidentally select their undesired candidate because of small boxes next to the candidates’ names.

Some voters in Davidson and Shelby County, home to Nashville and Memphis, respectively, tried to pinprick that small box with their thumb or pointer finger, but – it being so near to the name of an opponent on a line above – they hit another candidate’s name.

The county has not experienced “any issues” in the last few days since poll workers reinstituted the stirrers and reminded voters they should check they’ve chosen their preferred candidate before printing their ballot – and a second time before scanning and submitting it, Davidson County Administrator of Elections Jeff Roberts told ABC News.

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(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — The Justice Department has sent a letter to tech billionaire Elon Musk’s America PAC warning that his $1 million sweepstakes giveaway to registered voters in swing states may violate federal law, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News Wednesday.

The letter from the Election Crimes Branch of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section was sent to Musk’s PAC in recent days, the source said.

Musk, who has been campaigning for former President Donald Trump, announced the lottery-style giveaway over the weekend, pledging to give away $1 million a day to a randomly selected swing-state resident who agrees to sign his PAC’s petition supporting the First and Second amendments.

To qualify, the person must be a registered voter — leading experts to question whether the lottery could violate federal law that bars individuals from paying people to register to vote.

As of Tuesday, Musk had given away three $1 million checks.

It’s unclear whether the Justice Department has determined that the giveaway is outright illegal.

The independent news site 24Sight News was first to report news of the letter Wednesday.

Officials with the Justice Department declined to comment to ABC News.

Representatives for Musk and his America PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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