‘Important moment’: Biden to speak at Democratic National Convention, White House says
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden will speak at the Democratic National Convention next week in Chicago, the White House said on Monday.
“He’s looking forward to, as he tends to do, speak directly to the American people,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “talk about the moment that we’re at, what’s at stake, and continue to talk about an issue that is incredibly important to him, which is unity, making sure that we’re unified and we continue to do the work that the president has been successful in doing in the past three and a half years.”
Jean-Pierre said Biden will spend time over the next few days focusing on his upcoming remarks.
“I think you can expect this president to take this moment,” she said. “He understands this is an incredibly important moment … He’s still very much the leader of the party, right? And he takes that very seriously. And he’s also very proud of his vice president.”
Sources had told ABC News that Biden, former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are all tentatively slated to speak at the DNC.
The convention will take place from Aug. 19 through Aug. 22. Vice President Kamala Harris, who quickly rallied the party to her side after Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed her, was officially certified as the Democratic Party’s nominee last week.
Sources said the working speaking schedule, which can change, has Biden giving a speech on Monday night, as well as Hillary Clinton; Obama speaking on Tuesday, vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz and Bill Clinton speaking on Wednesday, and Harris speaking on Thursday.
Little over a month ago, it was all but certain Biden would be on stage at the DNC to accept the nomination. But after a poor debate performance against Donald Trump set off a firestorm of doubt among Democrats about Biden’s age and fitness to serve a second term, Biden announced he was exiting the race on July 21.
In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS, Biden elaborated on his decision not to run for reelection.
The president first cited calls from his Democratic colleagues, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who were worried about how it might impact down-ballot races. He said he worried questions about his viability would be a “real distraction.”
He also said he considered himself as a transitional figure and that beating Trump was the most important thing for him.
“Number two, when I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” he said. “I can’t even say how old I am, it’s hard for me to get out of my mouth. And, but things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen. And the combination was that I thought it was a critical issue for me still, it’s not a joke, maintaining this democracy.”
“But I thought it was important because although it’s a great honor being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — Climate change may not be a top concern for voters for the 2024 presidential election, but that hasn’t stopped many Republicans from making misrepresentations about environmental and energy policy – a departure from the previous tactic of majority climate change denial, according to experts on environmental politics who spoke with ABC News.
Debates around energy policy, specifically regarding renewable energy versus fossil fuels, are inherently connected to climate change, in large part because fossil fuels are the largest contributor to climate change, according to the United Nations, accounting for more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90% of carbon dioxide emissions.
In recent years, Republicans have been finding opportunities to condemn green energy, like in February 2021, when a historic freeze caused widespread power outages in Texas, affecting more than 4.5 million people and killing hundreds. At the time, some Republican politicians used the crisis to make false claims about renewable energy, claiming that it was unreliable and the cause of the outages. However, a failure to adequately winterize power sources – particularly the state’s natural gas infrastructure, which “represented 58 percent of all generating units experiencing unplanned outages, derates or failures to start” during the outage – is what caused the grid failure, according to a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released the following November.
While many Republicans previously denied the science that human-caused emissions exacerbated climate change, experts on environmental politics say the conversation has evolved to focus less on the climate science.
“There’s been a real shift in the rhetoric in the past few years,” according to Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School, whose research has focused on the history of climate science and climate denialism. “We’ve seen this shift in rhetoric from denying the reality of climate change to maybe kind of problematizing some of the major solutions that are on the table, like wind and solar energy in particular.”
The effects of climate change are worsening in every part of the U.S., according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a breakdown of the latest in climate science coming from 14 different federal agencies, published in November.
Even so, climate change policies are not among the top of concerns for Republican voters, according to January 2024 polling from the Pew Research Center. While 54% of Americans overall view climate change as a major threat, just 12% of Republicans and those who lean Republican say dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.
While denying climate change no longer resonates with some GOP voters as strongly as it once did, the policies that are required to transform the energy economy in the U.S. and around the world to address climate change are still unfavorable to a lot of them – hence the change in messaging, according to David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
“It’s very difficult for Republicans to reconcile any interest in addressing climate change along with messaging and a commitment to maintain reliance on fossil fuels,” Konisky told ABC News.
In the end, the widespread opposition to climate policy reform has little to do with disputing climate science and more to do with objections to the monetary cost of addressing it, according to Aseem Prakash, a professor of political science at University of Washington and director of the Center for Environmental Politics.
The Democratic and Republican divide concerning environmental issues began during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, according to Aronowsky. However, the politics of climate have changed a lot in recent years, according to Prakash. For example, Republicans rarely use the term “climate change” anymore – “it’s become a trigger word,” Prakash said – and instead are framing the subject as “renewable energy” and the problems they claim could arise from policies implementing it.
During a rally in South Carolina in September 2023, former President Donald Trump lambasted offshore wind turbines, claiming that the “windmills are driving [whales] crazy” and are causing an increase in the number of dead whales washing ashore – one of many false claims the former president has made about wind power. During a Republican fundraising dinner in 2019, Trump also claimed that noise from the wind turbines causes cancer, and that they are a “graveyard for birds.”
The rhetoric has surfaced in local politics, too, according to the experts. A protest against offshore wind turbines that took place in February 2023 in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, featured several local Republicans, including the mayors of New Jersey’s Seaside Park and Point Pleasant Beach, and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith.
Despite the claims, there are “no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Many Republicans are also talking about oil in new ways, touting domestic oil as cleaner and more pristine than imported oil, though supporting data has been absent. Trump has vowed to boost U.S. oil production if elected to a second term, promising to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the costs of energy. Yet data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration in March showed that the United States “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time, according to our International Energy Statistics, for the past six years in a row” – 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023, during the Biden administration, breaking the record set in 2019 of 12.3 million during the Trump administration.
Playing into those politics are gasoline prices, which have become a partial barometer of economic security, Matt Huber, a professor in Syracuse University’s geography and environment department, told ABC News. He also noted that that the oil and gas industry has history of funding research that contradicts climate science.
The state of modern American politics includes heavy investment by the fossil fuel industry into the Republican Party and its candidates, Konisky said: “I think that has become almost religious doctrine for many in the Republican Party … whatever the U.S. energy future looks like, it must rely heavily on fossil fuels.”
Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, received $354,937 in funding from the oil and gas industry as of March 2023, according to Open Secrets, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. While the vice-presidential hopeful spoke publicly about the country’s “climate problem” as recently as 2020, he changed his position in 2023 after he was elected to the Senate, championing fracking and decrying clean energy ever since, Politico reported.
Neither the Republican National Committee nor the Trump/Vance campaign responded to an ABC News request for comment.
Other established Republican senators have received much more funding from oil companies than Vance has. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney has received nearly $8.7 million from the oil and gas industry. Texas Sen. John Cornyn has received $5.1 million, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has received more than $5 million, according to Open Secrets.
Another explanation for the Republican departure from climate denial is that it’s becoming an increasingly untenable position to assert that climate change is not real, Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist who has researched how climate change has affected people’s psychological health, told ABC News.
The main reason is that the effects of climate change are now happening in people’s backyards, she said. Those effects include extreme wildfires, drought, a higher frequency of major hurricanes, and sea level rise.
(WASHINGTON) — With Tim Walz joining Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the campaign trail as her newly selected running mate, critics are blasting the Minnesota governor for what they claim was his failure to prevent a massive COVID-19 fraud scheme that has ensnared the state government.
According to federal charges filed over the past couple of years, at least 70 people were part of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that exploited two federally-funded nutrition programs to fraudulently obtain more than $250 million in one of the largest COVID-era fraud schemes anywhere in the nation.
The defendants allegedly used a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future to avoid tough scrutiny from the Minnesota Department of Education, which was supposed to be conducting oversight of the programs.
On Tuesday, shortly after Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper published a story saying the case was one of the leading “vulnerabilities for Walz.” By then, the pro-Trump group MAGA Inc. had already blasted out an email calling Walz “an incompetent liberal” for, among other things, “allow[ing] one of the largest fraud schemes to happen under his watch.”
“Governor Walz and the people he directly hired and oversaw lost half a billion dollars to fraud in a few short years as governor,” Joe Teirab, a pro-Trump Republican and former federal prosecutor running for Congress in the Minneapolis suburbs, posted to X on Monday night, just hours before Harris picked Walz. “Imagine fraud at that scale nationwide.”
So far, more than 20 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted for their roles in the fraud scheme. None have been sentenced yet. Two of those charged were found not guilty, and most are still awaiting trial.
“Defendants falsified documents, they lied, and they fraudulently claimed to be feeding millions of meals to children in Minnesota during COVID,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said at a press conference in June, after the first trial in the case concluded. “This conduct was not just criminal. It was depraved, and brazen.”
But it may have also been preventable, according to a state audit released in June.
“[T]he failures we highlight in this report are symptoms of a department that was ill-prepared to respond to the issues it encountered with Feeding Our Future,” said the 103-page report, detailing the findings of a limited “special review” by Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor.
The state agency not only “failed to act on warnings signs known to the department prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to the start of the alleged fraud,” but its “actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud,” the auditor said.
The report said that while officials inside the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) had at times expressed concerns about the nonprofit, they felt hamstrung in acting on their concerns due to “operational challenges” during the pandemic, including limited ability to visit sites in person, and due to a “litigation and public relations campaign” from Feeding Our Future that included allegations of discrimination.
“While we acknowledge these factors created challenges for the department, we also believe MDE could have taken more decisive action sooner in its relationship with Feeding Our Future,” the audit report said.
According to the report, after laundering tens of millions of dollars, the fraudsters allegedly used shell companies to buy luxury cars, boats and jewelry, to travel and pay off debts, and to purchase properties in Minnesota and around the world.
After the report’s release, Walz said his administration can always “do better,” and said, “We certainly take responsibility” for any failures that took place.
The report, which hardly mentions the governor at all, does not find any specific fault with Walz or his immediate office. But Teirab and other critics say Walz still deserves at least some of the blame for the massive fraud.
“He owns what happens within his administration,” said Jim Schultz, a Minnesota business advocate and outspoken Republican who two years ago narrowly lost a race to become the state’s next attorney general.
“There was this massive fraud under his watch,” Schultz told ABC News on Tuesday. “To this day, he has never fired anybody, nobody’s been rebuked.”
Walz has said there have been leadership changes within state government, including at MDE, since the fraud occurred.
Teirab, who says he “helped investigate and prosecute the Feed Our Future fraudsters” when he was still a prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota several years ago, wrote on X last week, “Tim Walz was asleep at the wheel, allowing a quarter-BILLION in fraud.”
A few weeks after five of the defendants were convicted of federal fraud charges in June, the Justice Department indicted five individuals for allegedly trying to bribe a member of the jury in the midst of deliberations, saying they offered the jury member $120,000 in exchange for a not guilty verdict.
One of those who allegedly took part in the bribery scheme was one of the defendants acquitted during the trial.
The Feeding Our Future case is not the only fraud scheme that has impacted Walz’s administration.
In June, another audit found that a second state agency failed to adequately oversee a program to pay frontline workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Auditors reportedly estimated that more than $200 million may have been paid to people committing fraud or otherwise ineligible to receive payments from the program.
“This wasn’t malfeasance,” Walz said in response to both audits in June, according to Minneapolis-St. Paul ABC News affiliate KSTP-TV. “Both of these cases, there’s not a single state employee that was implicated doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should have.”
According to Teirab’s campaign, a number of Medicaid-related programs have also suffered from fraud and waste under Walz.
A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
(CHICAGO) — Vice President Kamala Harris raised $82 million the week of the Democratic National Convention, bringing her total haul since launching her candidacy last month to $540 million, her campaign said.
The sum is buttressed by nearly $40 million raked in during and after Harris delivered her acceptance speech at the convention on Thursday night, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement, which noted the campaign crossed the half-billion-dollar mark moments before she took the stage.
The hour after the vice president’s remarks was the campaign’s best fundraising hour, O’Malley Dillon said.
The total reflects what was raised between the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and their joint fundraising committees.
In addition to growing its financial war chest, a third of which was from new donors last week, the Harris campaign also saw its foot soldiers sign up for nearly 200,000 volunteer shifts during the convention—more than any other week, O’Malley Dillon said, with 90,000 shift sign-ups coming Thursday and Friday.
“We head into September with a virtual army of volunteers ready to do the hard work of talking to their neighbors, friends and colleagues,” O’Malley Dillon wrote in the memo. “Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s battleground infrastructure remains incredibly sparse.”
“The Convention was a galvanizing moment for the Harris-Walz coalition throughout the country, energizing and mobilizing volunteer and grassroots donors alike,” she later added, saying they will use the resources to reach voters “while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums and attacking the voters critical to winning 270 electoral votes.”