JD Vance refuses to say Trump lost in 2020, downplays events of Jan. 6

(WASHINGTON) — As Israel laid the groundwork for a possible ground invasion of Lebanon, the Biden administration on Wednesday was urging diplomacy to resolve the country’s long-simmering conflict with Hezbollah — but growing increasingly resigned to full-blown warfare on a second front in the Middle East, according to multiple U.S. officials.

Two officials told ABC News that the administration has floated at least one draft proposal aimed at temporarily halting the conflict, but at this point Israel has signaled it intends to move forward with battle plans aimed at ending months of tit-for-tat exchanges with Hezbollah across its northern border by decimating the militant group.

“I cannot detail everything we are doing, but I can tell you one thing: we are determined to return our residents in the north safely to their homes,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday, referring to Israelis who have been displaced since Hezbollah began firing rockets shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

One senior U.S. official said that Hezbollah’s firing of a ballistic missile targeting the headquarters of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad near Tel Aviv only intensified the Israeli government’s resolve, even though Israeli forces were able to successfully intercept the missile.

The U.S. also has little leverage over Hezbollah, so it’s unclear whether the group would abide by any such agreement to pause the fighting. The administration could potentially rely on partners with direct ties to Hezbollah to contain the group, but all of its efforts to halt its attacks on Israel over the last year have been unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, senior officials say they are still pursuing “concrete options” for de-escalation, and Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said on Tuesday that Israeli leadership remained “open-minded.”

Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said on Wednesday that it didn’t appear an Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon was in the offing, potentially allowing time for negotiations to make headway.

“Without characterizing Israeli operations and letting them speak to them for themselves, it doesn’t look like anything is imminent,” she said.

The Biden administration is also fervently focused on keeping Iran — a chief military and financial supporter of Hezbollah — on the sidelines through indirect diplomacy.

“We also have to coordinate and work together to deter destabilizing activities by Iran. I urge all of us to use the leverage that we have to press Iran to stop fueling escalation,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a meeting with Arab leaders at the United Nations on Wednesday.

But Israel’s military actions in Lebanon over the course of the last week have put the schism between Israel and the U.S. on full display.

When Israel has struck Hezbollah targets in the past, it has typically given the U.S. advanced notice. However, Biden administration officials say they did not receive any warning before hundreds of communication devices distributed to the groups’ members exploded in an attack widely attributed to Israel.

While Israel has messaged its intention to conduct a ground incursion into Lebanon, it has not shared detailed plans with the U.S. — a dynamic that echoes the early days of the country’s military campaign in Gaza.

The lack of transparency has heightened concerns for Americans in the region. The State Department estimates that over 80,000 U.S. citizens live in Lebanon, but it’s unclear how many heeded the department’s July advisory to leave the country.

In a message to Americans still in Lebanon sent on Wednesday, State Department officials said they would hold a call on the security situation in the country on Friday and urged U.S. nationals to depart “while commercial options still remain available.”

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(PHOENIX) — In the final weeks of a divisive, high-stakes campaign season, state election officials in political battleground states say they are bracing for the unpredictable and emergent threat posed by artificial intelligence, or AI.

“The number one concern we have on Election Day are some of the challenges that we have yet to face,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “There are some uncertainties, particularly with generative artificial intelligence and the ways that those might be used.”

Fontes, a Democrat, said his office is aware that some campaigns are already using AI as a tool in his hotly contested state and that election administrators urgently need to familiarize themselves with what is real and what is not.

“We’re training all of our election officials, to make sure that they’re familiar with some of the weapons that might be deployed against them,” he said.

During a series of tabletop exercises conducted over the past six months, Arizona officials for the first time confronted hypothetical scenarios involving disruptions on Election Day on Nov. 5 created or facilitated by AI.

Some involved deepfake video and voice-cloning technology deployed by bad actors across social media in an attempt to dissuade people from voting, disrupt polling places, or confuse poll workers as they handle ballots.

In one fictional case, an AI-generated fake news headline published on Election Day said there had been shootings at polling places and that election officials had rescheduled the vote for Nov. 6.

“They walk us through those worst case scenarios so that we can be critically thinking, thinking on our toes,” said Gina Roberts, voter education director for the nonpartisan Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission and one of the participants in the exercise.

The tabletop exercise also studied recent real-world examples of AI being deployed to try to influence elections.

In January, an AI-generated robocall mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice was used to dissuade New Hampshire Democrats from voting in the primary. The Federal Communications Commission assessed a $6 million fine against the political consultant who made it.

In September, Taylor Swift revealed on Instagram that she went public to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to, in part, refute an AI-generated deepfake image that falsely showed her endorsing Donald Trump.

There have also been high profile cases of foreign adversaries using AI to influence the campaign. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, says it shut down a secret Iranian effort to use its tools to manipulate U.S. voter opinion.

The Justice Department has also said that Russia is actively using AI to feed political disinformation on to social media platforms.

“The primary targets of interest are going to be in swing states, and they’re going to be swing voters,” said Lucas Hanson, co-founder of CivAI, a nonprofit group tracking the use of A.I. in politics in order to educate the public.

“An even bigger [threat] potentially is trying to manipulate voter turnout, which in some ways is easier than trying to get people to actually change their mind,” Hanson said. “Whether or not that shows up in this particular election it’s hard to know for sure, but the technology is there.”

Federal authorities say that while the risks aren’t entirely new, AI is amplifying attacks on U.S. elections with “greater speed and sophistication” at lower costs.

“Those threats being supercharged by advanced technologies — the most disruptive of which is artificial intelligence,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last month.

In a bulletin to state election officials, the Department of Homeland Security warns that AI voice and video tools could be used to create fake election records; impersonate election staff to gain access to sensitive information; generate fake voter calls to overwhelm call centers; and more convincingly spread false information online.

Hanson says voters need to educate themselves on spotting AI attempts to influence their views.

“In images, at least for now, oftentimes if you look at the hands, then there’ll be the wrong number of fingers or there will be not enough appendages. For audio, a lot of times it still sounds relatively robotic. In particular, sometimes there will be these little stutters,” he said.

Social media companies and U.S. intelligence agencies say they are also tracking nefarious AI-driven influence campaigns and are prepared to alert voters about malicious deepfakes and disinformation.

But they can’t catch them all.

More than 3 in 4 Americans believe it’s likely AI will be used to affect the election outcome, according to an Elon University poll conducted in April 2024. Many voters in the same poll also said they’re worried they are not prepared to detect fake photos, video and audio on their own.

“In the long term, if you can see something that seems impossible and it also makes you really, really mad, then there’s a pretty good chance that that’s not real,” Hanson said. “So part of it is you have to learn to listen to your gut.”

In states like Arizona, which could decide a razor tight presidential race, the stakes are higher than ever.

“AI is just the new kid on the block,” Fontes said. “What exactly is going to happen? We’re not sure. We are doing our best preparing for everything except Godzilla. We’re preparing for about everything, because if Godzilla shows up, all bets are off.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Against the backdrop of the U.S. Capitol at dusk, freed American Paul Whelan, who just completed a government resettlement program in Texas following his return from wrongful detainment in Russia, thanked the lawmakers who worked to help secure his release.

Whelan praised a “bipartisan effort that brought me home” after spending the day meeting with lawmakers who took up his case from his home state of Michigan and elsewhere.

“The Michigan delegation brought me home here,” he said.

“You know, it was five years, seven months and five days,” he added of his time in Russian custody. “I counted each one of them.”

The former Marine revealed he spent the final five days in the Russian prison in solitary confinement.

“I couldn’t leave my cell,” he said, “but I made it home.”

Whelan wouldn’t preview what’s next for him — offering only that he needs a new car and that suddenly he’s in a place with electric and driverless vehicles — but said he’s involved in discussions over how to support other wrongfully detained Americans around the world.

“We’re coming for you,” Whelan said to those Americans. “The United States is not going to let people like me, Marc [Fogel], Trevor [Reed], Brittney [Griner, who was released in December 2022] languish in foreign prisons. It might take time, but we’re coming for them and everybody else.”

Whelan acknowledged the reporters he recognized by name or face, recalling the precise month he spoke with them via a smuggled phone from prison. He thanked them for reporting on his case.

He also thanked “all of the people that work for agencies that I will never meet, people that I will never know, their staff members, everyone that’s been involved at every level.”

Rep. Haley Stevens, who represents Whelan’s district in Congress, told ABC News she expects to lean on him for the complex policymaking to mitigate foreign detentions like his.

“Well, he might not know it, but I plan to be in touch with him for a very long time to come, as long as he’ll welcome it, because there’s a lot to learn from his experience,” she said.

She noted that Whelan’s case was “the first one” of a series of high-profile detentions in Russia, including Griner and Evan Gershkovich, and it “certainly changed the relationship that the United States had with Russia, even before the war in Ukraine began.”

“Our message to Russia is that when it comes to your shenanigans and your illegal and unjust and unlawful behavior, we, as the United States of America, are united. We will fight for our people,” she said. “We will bring them home, and we will win.”

Whelan returned to the United States on Aug. 2 after five-and-a-half years in a Russian penal colony.

Russian authorities released Whelan, as well as American journalists Gershkovic and Alsu Kurmasheva, in a multi-country deal that freed eight Russian prisoners abroad. The 26-person swap was the largest between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War.

Whelan was arrested in Moscow in 2019 on charges of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Whelan, who frequently visited the city, was deemed as wrongfully detained by the U.S. Department of State.

The former Marine wasn’t the only former Russian captive on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a dual Russian-British national whose release was secured by the U.S., met with lawmakers. Kara-Murza was imprisoned in Russia for two years for his opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

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