Harris campaign says it did not use Trump campaign materials sent from Iranian hackers
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said on Thursday that it did not use any materials that the FBI said Iranian hackers gathered from email accounts associated with former President Donald Trump’s campaign and sent to President Joe Biden’s campaign before he left the race.
Trump’s campaign on Wednesday demanded more information from Harris’ campaign including that it disclose the materials it received and whether it was used.
A Harris campaign official told ABC News that “the materials were not used.” The campaign declined to comment on whether or not they would comply with the Trump campaign’s request to disclose what they received.
Over the summer, Iranian hackers sent unsolicited emails to individuals associated with then-candidate Biden that “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to information released by the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies on Wednesday.
The contents of those excerpts are not yet clear.
The FBI said there was no information indicating that the recipients of the information replied to the hackers’ messages.
The White House said Biden only learned Wednesday about the Iranian hackers sending what the FBI called “stolen” information from the Trump campaign to individuals associated with his campaign.
“We learned about the statement yesterday, and the president has been made aware of it now,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday. “You’ve seen us take actions to hold accountable those who week to undermine confidence in our democracy, and we will continue to do so.”
Harris’ campaign said Wednesday that it has cooperated with law enforcement and the investigation into the messages and said it was “not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign.”
“A few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said in a statement Wednesday.
Trump’s campaign said hackers are interfering to help Harris and Biden “because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror.”
Iran’s Mission to the United Nations called the intelligence agencies’ findings “fundamentally unfounded, and wholly inadmissible.”
ABC News’ Selina Wang, Jack Date and Luke Barr contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — As former President Donald Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, faces renewed scrutiny over his previous comments criticizing childless individuals, an unearthed 2021 interview shows the Ohio senator advocating for higher taxes on Americans without children.
The comments came in a 2021 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show podcast, where Kirk, the CEO of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, was discussing how Republicans could shift public perception of certain conservative ideas from “unthinkable” to accepted policy.
“So JD … what are you going to do to change this conversation? Everything we have to do should be about moving ideas from unthinkable, to sensible, to popular, to policy,” said Kirk, according to a video of the interview obtained by ABC News.
In response, Vance, who at the time had not yet officially launched his 2022 Senate campaign, suggested that the country needed to “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad” — before suggesting that individuals without children should be taxed at a higher rate than those with children.
“So, you talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good,” Vance said in the interview, which is no longer public on Kirk’s channel. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.”
In response to Vance’s comments, Vance spokesperson William Martin told ABC News, “The policy Senator Vance proposed is basically no different than the Child Tax Credit, which Democrats unanimously support.”
Vance made the comments during a March 2021 appearance on Kirk’s show, but the YouTube page for the episode now reads, “This video has been removed by the uploader,” and the interview is also no longer accessible on Kirk’s podcast Rumble account or on other podcast services.
The video appeared to be public as recently as February of this year, but it was no longer accessible by Wednesday, according to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. ABC News located an audio version of the interview that remained online, but not on a website run by Kirk.
A spokesperson for Kirk told ABC News that earlier this year, multiple long-form videos on Kirk’s channel were removed due to a reorganization of the page and that the removal of Vance’s 2021 interview had nothing to do with his selection as vice president.
In recent days, Vance has faced criticism over other previous public comments he’s made, including comments made in 2021 in which he questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ leadership due to her not having biological children — despite Harris having two stepchildren.
“We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats” who are “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said in the 2021 interview on Fox News.
As examples, Vance cited Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who adopted twins in 2021.
In response to criticism over his “childless cat lady” comment, Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk said the senator’s words have been “twisted.”
“Once again, the leftwing media have twisted Senator Vance’s words and spun up a false narrative about his position on the issues,” Van Kirk said. “The only childlessness we should be talking about are the childless parents who lost their kids to the murderous thugs and deadly fentanyl coming across Kamala’s southern border.”
Speaking at a conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2021, Vance also argued that parents should have the ability to cast additional votes on behalf of their children.
“A lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons … there are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons that can’t have children — the target of these remarks is not them,” Vance said, prefacing his argument.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” Vance argued.
“Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice,” he said.
Vance, who was announced as Trump’s running mate last week, has three children with his wife Usha.
(CHICAGO) — As the nation anticipates Vice President Kamala Harris’ address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, attendees told ABC News what they hope to hear from the presidential hopeful.
“The more I hear about her, the more I want to go knock on doors, make phone calls and talk to anyone I can about getting her elected,” a delegate from Colorado said of Harris.
A transgender delegate from Nebraska told ABC News that Harris accepting the Democratic nomination comes with the responsibility to lead for all Americans.
“I want to hear the vision that she has for the future for all Americans,” they said, referencing the LGBTQ+, Hispanic and Asian Pacific communities.
“We need somebody who is going to look out for all of us because we are a collective society,” they added. “We are a country of everyone, and we need to have somebody who’s going to come out and express that.”
Another DNC attendee told ABC News a Harris presidency will usher in a “new generation” of politics into America.
“New faces, new people, women, transgender, gay and lesbian people. People of color. It’s time,” they said.
A member of the Potawatomi Nation Tribal Council told ABC News he hopes Harris will let her voters and supporters know she’s thankful for the hard work being done in support of her candidacy.
“What I’d like to hear from her is, letting all the voters and supporters know that she’s thankful for them and that she knows that everybody’s working hard and she accepts everybody from all races and all working environments and establishments,” he said.
The theme of “freedom” has been constant throughout the DNC in Chicago this week and a member of the LGBTQ+ caucus told ABC they hope that’s felt in Harris’ remarks Thursday.
“It’s not just about freedom in the Democratic ideal, it’s about freedom that we all are able to be [our] true, authentic self and represent [ourselves] to America,” they said.
(PHILADELPHIA) — During the presidential debate Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump doubled down on the false claim that migrants from Haiti are stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said.
These baseless rumors have spread widely online in recent days — amplified by right-wing politicians, including vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance — after a series of social media posts have gone viral claiming Haitian migrants were abducting people’s pets in order to eat them.
A spokesperson for the city of Springfield told ABC News these claims are false, and that there have been “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals in the immigrant community.”
“Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic,” the spokesperson added.
According to the Springfield News-Sun, the Springfield Police Department has not received any reports of pets being stolen and eaten. The city even created a webpage debunking some of the claims.
Migrants have been drawn to the region because of low cost of living and work opportunities, the city says on its site. The city estimates there are around 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants living in the county, and that the rapid rise in population has strained housing, health care, and school resources. But the city also says that the migrants are in the country legally and that many are recipients of Temporary Protected Status from the federal government.
The false claim that immigrants are targeting people’s pets stemmed from a social media posting originally from a Springfield Facebook group that went viral, where the poster wrote that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat. The poster went on to make an unsubstantiated claim of Haitians allegedly taking the cat for food.
The post was picked up by people on social media, including rightwing activist Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA and Elon Musk.
One of the most prominent images circulating online, which depicts a man holding a dead goose, was taken two months ago not in Springfield, but in Columbus, Ohio. The resident who took the photo told ABC News he was surprised to see his image used to “push false narratives.”
Prominent Republicans have boosted this falsehood on social media. An AI-generated image, which showed Trump holding cats and ducks, was shared by the House Judiciary GOP account on X.
Vance, in particular, has magnified the debunked claim.
In a post on X, Vance published a video of himself at a July Senate Banking Committee hearing, reading a letter from Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck about the city’s challenges in keeping up with housing for the growing Haitian immigrant population.
In the post, Vance pushed the false claim that Haitian immigrants are kidnapping and eating people’s pets in Springfield.
“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” Vance wrote on X. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he asked, a term that Republicans have attempted to tag Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris with, although she has denied holding that role.