Defense Secretary Austin tells Congress 6-month funding stopgap would be ‘devastating to our readiness’
(WASHINGTON) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a weekend letter to Congressional appropriators urging them to pass government funding bills after the election in the “vulnerable time around transitions” to “uphold the bipartisan tradition of funding our nation’s defense prior to the inauguration of a new president,” a source in the department told ABC News.
In his letter to bipartisan committee chairs on government funding, Austin urged lawmakers to avoid a six-month stopgap funding measure, calling a regular funding bill for the Pentagon “the single most important thing that Congress can do to ensure U.S. national security.”
Speaker Mike Johnson has proposed the six-month continuing resolution to fund the government beyond the inauguration of a new president. The government funding deadline is September 30.
Austin’s letter does not signal opposition to a one-month stopgap – but he urges “action immediately after the election.”
“The repercussions of Congress failing to pass regular appropriations legislation for the first half of FY 2025 would be devastating to our readiness and ability to execute the National Defense Strategy,” Austin writes.
The defense secretary points out to Congressional leaders that a six-month continuing resolution “would represent the second year in a row, and the seventh time in the past 15 years” the Pentagon has been stalled until midyear in receiving its funding orders from the legislative branch.
“I am fully aware of the political pressures that will challenge the Congress from fulfilling its duty before our national elections conclude,” he writes. “No matter who wins this election, there will be a Presidential transition. I urge you and your colleagues to take up action immediately after the election to limit damage to our national security during this vulnerable period around transitions and uphold the bipartisan tradition of funding our nation’s defense prior to the inauguration of a new President.”
(WASHINGTON) — As Vice President Kamala Harris continues to search for her 2024 running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is receiving some new buzz.
Walz, a veteran and former public school teacher now in his second term as governor, is making a name for himself in the veepstakes conversation as he stumps for Harris on the campaign trail and in cable news hits on CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News.
Clips of him at an event for Harris in St. Paul on Saturday clad in a simple gray T-shirt and camouflage baseball hat have gone viral online, as are his comments describing Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as “weird” people.
While he hasn’t said if he’s received vetting materials from the Harris campaign, Walz said on Sunday it was “certainly an honor” to be mentioned as a possible pick.
“I put him pretty low, as most of us did, as a candidate for vice president but he’s absolutely everywhere at this point and he’s getting a really good bounce,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in Minnesota.
Walz, 60, served in the Army National Guard and was a high school social studies teacher and football coach before he was elected to Congress in 2006. He served for six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing a rural area of the state that had typically leaned conservative.
As governor, with the help of a narrow Democratic majority in the state legislature, he’s implemented a bevy of progressive policies including: paid family leave, universal school breakfast and lunch, legalization of recreational marijuana use, state codification of abortion rights and gun control measures like universal background checks and red flag laws.
“He’s good at articulating the argument for the Democratic Party’s agenda and he himself can say, ‘Look, I’m an example. My state is an example of what happens when you elect Democrats,'” said Schultz.
“He seems to have some buzz with some progressives, with some younger voters at this point,” he added. “He’s been able to check the box with a lot of critical constituencies in terms of where he stands on a variety of issues.”
One vocal supporter of Walz in recent days has been David Hogg, the co-founder of March for Our Lives — one of the country’s largest youth-led movements. The group made its first-ever presidential endorsement in support of Harris last week.
Hogg has said Walz would make an “incredible VP” and praised the governor as “so down to earth and such an excellent communicator.”
Others online have shared similar views, saying Walz “talks like a human” and comes across as “authentic.”
“Governor Walz has caught fire not because of one viral interview but because he talks to voters like they’re his neighbors,” said Tim Hogan, a Democratic strategist who was the communications director for Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 presidential campaign.
“He speaks in a way that is real, and the more voters learn about him, the more they like him,” Hogan said. “With a slim majority in Minnesota, he lowered costs for families and improved health care. It’s a Prairie Populist agenda that has worked in the Midwest, and he’s now bringing it to the national stage.”
As a surrogate for Harris, Walz has praised her for reenergizing the party and has defended her record against Trump’s attacks claiming she is “ultra-liberal.”
“He’s going to roll it out, mispronounce names, you know, to try and make the case,” Walz said of Trump attacking Harris during an appearance Sunday on CNN. “The fact of the matter is where you see the policies that Vice President Harris was a part of making, Democratic governors across the country executed those policies and quality of life is higher, the economies are better, all of those things, educational attainment is better.”
Walz’s communication style, Midwest bonafides and blue-collar background could make him an attractive pick for Harris.
Still, there are things working against him when it come to what Harris may be seeking in a running mate, Schultz said.
Unlike other contenders, such as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly or Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Walz doesn’t represent a key 2024 swing state battleground.
And his record, while a boon for Democrats, could be fodder for Republicans to tag a Harris-Walz ticket as too progressive.
“By Minnesota standards, Walz is center-left,” Schultz said. “If you look at the critical swing states across the United States, like Georgia and Pennsylvania, he’s absolutely liberal in those states.”
Walz has also responded to criticisms that he may be viewed as too liberal.
“What a monster!” Walz quipped on CNN. “Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn and women are making their own healthcare decisions … So, if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”
There are about 12 people being considered for Harris’s running mate, a source familiar with the matter told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce. Harris is expected to make her announcement by Aug. 7.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris has enough Democratic Party delegate votes in a virtual roll call to 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 and Will McDuffie contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Two dozen prisoners from seven countries were freed in a historic swap on Thursday, including several wrongfully detained American citizens held in Russia.
President Joe Biden called the deal, the largest of its kind since the Cold War, “a feat of diplomacy and friendship.”
Among those released were two wrongfully detained American citizens held by Moscow — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan — as well as Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Muza, a legal permanent resident of the U.S.
Alongside the celebration and relief of the prisoners returning home, the exchange of innocent Americans for Russian criminals raised the debate of whether this would encourage foreign adversaries to target and wrongfully detain Americans to use as leverage.
“It’s a plausible critique,” ABC News contributor Elizabeth Neumann, a former Homeland Security official, said. “Are we actually feeding the beast by doing this prisoner swap, making it more likely that they are going to actually go and unlawfully detain more people so that they have bargaining chips so that we will in the future release whoever we might arrest that is important to Putin?”
Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the message the prisoner swap sends to others “is something that any White House official or government official would ask.”
“You do the best you can to try to limit the possibility of creating incentives to seize other Americans instead,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s modus operandi is to round up Americans on false charges to then get his “henchmen” who are imprisoned abroad back, Neumann said.
A key player for Russia in this historic swap is Vadim Krasikov, according to retired Marine Col. Stephen Ganyard, a former deputy assistant U.S. secretary of state. The convicted assassin had been serving a life sentence in Germany for a 2019 killing. In a February interview with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, Putin signaled that Russia was willing to swap Krasikov for Gershkovich.
“The Russians held out until they could get access to this KGB assassin,” Ganyard said. “Putin will bring his KGB agents home.”
Russia can be expected to continue to detain Americans to achieve that goal, he said.
“It’s pretty standard procedure for the Russians to have a number of us folks held under charges that are clearly manufactured as a way to make sure that they always have some sort of negotiating leverage or reasoning for the U.S. to want to talk to them,” Ganyard said.
Graham said at this time it does not appear there are a lot of Russians in American prisons who the Kremlin wants back.
“I think the deal has minimal implications for anything that the Russians might do as far as seizing Americans is concerned at this point,” he said.
For Neumann, prisoner swap negotiations are steeped in this dilemma when countries are dealing with hostile nations, though are often the only way to bring unlawfully detained citizens home.
“I think that is always a struggle when you are doing these negotiations, of recognizing that you are creating an incentive structure,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve heard a plausible argument that the alternative is, ‘No we’re not going to negotiate at all, we’re just going to let these people die in a Russian prison.'”
“That’s not how we take care of our citizens,” she continued.
Referencing former President Theodore Roosevelt’s quote on critics — that the “credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena” — she said it is easy to question prisoner swap negotiations from the sidelines.
“But until you actually get into the arena and do the fight, you don’t actually appreciate how difficult these decisions are,” she said. “It is a pretty stereotypical critique. It’s also one in which nobody has ever come up with a plausible alternative to meet our obligation to take care of our American citizens that are unlawfully detained.”
National security adviser Jake Sullivan addressed that obligation during a White House briefing Thursday.
“It is difficult to send back a convicted criminal to secure the release of an innocent American,” he said, calling it one of the “hard decisions” involved in these exchanges. “And yet sometimes the choice is between doing that or consigning that person basically to live out their days in prison in a hostile foreign country or in the hands of a hostile power.”
He said the U.S. assessed and analyzed that risk in this case and found that the benefit outweighs the risk. He also noted that Americans have been unjustly detained in times when the U.S. did engage in prisoner exchanges and during times when they did not.
In the face of that risk, the U.S. government has attempted to warn American citizens.
After the release of basketball star Brittney Griner in a prisoner swap in 2022, Biden “strongly” urged all Americans to take precautions when traveling abroad and to review the State Department’s travel advisories, including warnings about the risk of being wrongfully detained by a foreign government. Russia currently has a Level 4 Do Not Travel warning from the State Department, the highest level possible.
“He was very clear about that warning, because what’s going to happen next is over time, we’ll see the Russians take in people on trumped-up charges so that they have negotiation leverage, or at least discussion leverage with the U.S. at some point in the future,” Ganyard said.
When asked Thursday during remarks on the prisoner swap how to prevent such incentives in the future, Biden responded, “I’m advising people not to go certain places, tell them what’s at risk, what’s at stake.”
Graham said he does not think Russia picks up just anybody because they need someone to trade.
“It’s people who have violated their laws,” he said, pointing to Griner, who pleaded guilty to drug charges, as an example. “Americans need to recognize, particularly if traveling in Russia, that the laws there are different from those in the United States and are much more severe in prosecuting certain things.”