Kamala Harris’ super PAC launches first campaign ad targeting Trump over Roe v. Wade
(WASHINGTON) — EMILY’s List, an abortion-rights political organization, is set to launch a new 30-second TV and digital ad that both publicly supports Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly launched presidential campaign and attacks former President Donald Trump over the fall of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights.
The ad, titled “Kamala Harris for President: The Time Is Now,” is the first effort by the organization to publicly support Harris’ campaign.
The ad, first obtained by ABC News, was paid for by the EMILYs List super PAC, Women Vote. The super PAC, which launched in March, aimed to strategically combat what EMILY’s List called “sexist and racist attacks” against women.
Women Vote will be the official super PAC for Harris’ bid for the White House, aiming to raise $20 million in the next 18 weeks, sources told ABC News.
The ad touches on Roe v. Wade as abortion access remains a critical issue for voters in an election year.
In the ad, a narrator highlights Harris as a candidate and includes clips of Trump taking credit for the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade.
“Kamala Harris won’t back down,” the narrator says, later adding “With so much at stake, we don’t have time to waste. Resilient, relentless, fighter. The time is now.”
On Sunday, EMILYs List President Jessica Mackler endorsed Harris for president, saying in a statement that “she is the most qualified and most prepared candidate to meet this unprecedented moment and lead the country.”
“In a moment when Republicans have launched a full-scale attack on our reproductive rights, an issue that will be the driving force for Democratic wins, Vice President Harris is our most powerful advocate and messenger on this issue,” Mackler added.
EMILY’s List has supported Harris throughout her career, from her time as San Francisco’s district attorney to when she made history as the first woman to serve as California’s attorney general and again when she made history as the second Black woman in the Senate.
The group’s former president, Sen. Laphonza Butler, is expected to speak to EMILY’s List donors on Monday afternoon, a source told ABC News. Butler is the junior senator from California — a role Harris held just four years ago.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Vice President Kamala Harris and her newly announced presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are slated to make their first campaign appearance together on Tuesday evening in Philadelphia, before a large crowd.
Hundreds of supporters were waiting in lines outside the Liacouras Center at Temple University for the event, which is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. ET.
Walz and Harris are expected to highlight their contrasts to former president Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance.
Vance held a rally in the city earlier in the day.
Tuesday’s Harris-Walz event kicks off a five-day campaign road trip that will visit seven crucial swing states.
The vice president and Walz are scheduled to visit Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; Durham, North Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Las Vegas this week.
(WASHINGTON) — In the hours after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, allies of former President Donald Trump rushed to denigrate the Minnesota Democrat, seizing on criticism of his handling of the riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020.
“He allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, said Tuesday.
But at the time, Trump expressed support for Walz’s handling of the protests, according to a recording of a phone call obtained by ABC News — telling a group of governors that Walz “dominated,” and praising his leadership as an example for other states to follow.
“I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump told a group of governors on June 1, 2020, according to a recording of the call, in which he also called Walz an “excellent guy.”
“I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim,” Trump continued. “You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”
Trump also suggested on the call that it was his encouragement that sparked Walz to call in the National Guard: “I said, you got to use the National Guard in big numbers,” Trump said. A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign said Wednesday that was untrue.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said Trump lauded Walz only after the governor heeded his advice to enlist support from the National Guard.
“Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump’s offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal Mayor of Minneapolis,” Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News. “In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city.”
Trump’s contemporaneous approval of Walz’s decision-making in the wake of George Floyd’s murder undermines one of Republicans’ most vocal lines of attack against the vice presidential nominee. Critics have accused Walz of stalling the mobilization of the National Guard to quell rioters who set fire to 1,500 buildings, caused some $500 million in property damage, and were linked to at least three deaths.
Walz, himself a 24-year veteran of the National Guard, ultimately summoned more than 7,000 guardsmen to the Twin Cities. But that decision came 18 hours after Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey initially asked the governor to activate military personnel.
“This hesitation cost Minnesotans their lives, communities, and livelihoods,” according to an investigative report compiled by Republicans in the state Senate.
At the time, Walz condemned the Republicans’ report — which was published just weeks before his 2022 reelection — as a political hit job that was “unhelpful.” More recently, Walz brushed aside scrutiny of his handling of the protests.
“It is what it is,” he recently told reporters. “And I simply believe that we try to do the best we can.”
Inside the aftermath
In the days after the murder of George Floyd, as agitators set fires and laid siege to a police precinct, city officials scrambled to contain the unrest.
Floyd, a Black man, was killed by Officer Derek Chauvin on Monday, May 25, 2020. By Wednesday evening, the city’s police “had expended all available resources,” according to a copy of the written request for the National Guard prepared by police officials.
At 6:29 p.m. that Wednesday, Frey called Walz to request the National Guard, he later told the Star-Tribune. That verbal communication was followed up hours later, at 9:11 p.m., with a written request from city police officials. A copy of the written request obtained by state senators indicated that the city would need 600 guardsmen to help with area security, transportation assistance and logistical support.
That evening, Frey’s office crafted a draft press release announcing that the National Guard had been called in, but did not disseminate it, according to records released by the city and reported by local outlets. Instead, city aides would have to wait another 15 hours before Walz would formally mobilize the National Guard.
In text messages released by the city, a member of the mayor’s staff asked, “What’s happening? As far as the Guard,” around 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday night. Another staffer replied that Frey “said Walz was hesitating.”
“According to Minneapolis officials, the governor’s office responded that they would consider the request, but the city did not receive any follow-up until much later,” according to an after-action report commissioned by the state.
On Thursday afternoon, Walz imposed a curfew on city residents and formally mobilized the National Guard. The first troops arrived within hours, and by that weekend, the unrest had largely been quelled.
On Friday, Walz told reporters he had spoken with Trump the day before and that Trump had “pledged his support in terms of anything we need in terms of supplies to get to us.”
Days later, on the June 1 phone call with governors, Walz thanked Trump and accepted his praise before making comments of his own — expressing support for peaceful protesters and suggesting that governors who might otherwise hesitate to call in the National Guard could do so delicately, and frame them as “not an occupying force,” but instead as “neighbors, teachers, business owners.”
“That’s a really effective method,” Walz said.
Trump agreed, but added his own spin on the role of guardsmen.
“It got so bad a few nights ago that the people wouldn’t have minded an occupying force,” Trump said. “I wish we had an occupying force in there.”
An ‘unproductive’ spat
A pair of after-action reports commissioned by the city and state cited private miscommunications and public disputes between Walz and Frey as impediments to effectively handling the protests. At one point, Walz characterized the city’s response as an “abject failure.”
“Several interviewees blamed the Mayor and Governor for their public disagreements about the response to the protests and expressed that this was unproductive,” according to the report commissioned by the city, which was released in March 2022.
The state-commissioned report arrived at a similar conclusion: “Other state officials claim that the request became complicated when elected officials became involved (i.e., the Minneapolis mayor, the governor’s office).”
Another complicating factor, those after-action reports indicated, was the failure of city officials to articulate their needs. The requests made on May 27 “initially lacked clarity and that more information and time was needed for [the state’s emergency management office] to develop the necessary details of the mission to activate the Minnesota Guard,” one report said.
For his part, Walz initially argued that mobilizing thousands of National Guardsmen requires time.
“The average person maybe assumes that there’s soldiers waiting in helicopters to drop in like they do in movies,” Walz said that Tuesday, May 26. “Actually, they’re band teachers and small business owners. They’re folks working in a garage in Fergus Falls who get a call that says you’ve got 12 hours to report to your armory.”
Days later, however, Walz told a reporter that “if the issue was that the state should have moved faster, that is on me.”
Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, the director of the Minnesota National Guard at the time, later testified before state senators that, had the National Guard been deployed sooner, the protests might not have been so destructive.
“If we had done things differently on Tuesday, as it relates to numbers, as it relates to tactics, could we have avoided some of this? My unprofessional opinion as it relates to law enforcement is ‘yes,'” Jensen said. “My professional military opinion is ‘yes.'”
(NEW YORK) — In her second move since resuming control over Donald Trump’s federal election interference case, Judge Tanya Chutkan denied the former president’s motion to dismiss the case based on selective and vindictive prosecution.
Chutkan found “no evidence” that prosecutors abused their authority or behaved vindictively when bringing their case against the former president.
In denying Trump’s motion, Chutkan criticized what she called Trump’s “improper framing” that the allegations against him are a “theory…that it is illegal to dispute the outcome of an election and work with others to propose alternate electors.”
“At this stage, the court cannot accept Defendant’s alternate narrative,” Chutkan wrote.
Before the federal case was frozen for more than half a year, defense attorneys attempted to have the case thrown out by arguing that Trump was selectively prosecuted and unfairly targeted “to prevent him from becoming ‘the next President again.'”
“After reviewing Defendant’s evidence and arguments, the court cannot conclude that he has carried his burden to establish either actual vindictiveness or the presumption of it, and so finds no basis for dismissing this case on those grounds,” Chutkan wrote in a 16-page order.
Chutkan found that Trump failed to provide evidence for either prong of the two-part test to prove selective prosecution – that he was singled out for prosecution or that the case was motivated by a discriminatory purpose.
“Finding no evidence of discriminatory purpose in the sources Defendant cites, the court is left only with his unsupported assertions that this prosecution must be politically motivated because it coexists with his campaign for the Presidency,” Chutkan wrote.
Earlier in the day, Chutkan set a hearing for Aug. 16 at 10 a.m., which Trump is not required to attend.
This will be the first time in seven months the parties will appear in Chutkan’s courtroom. Chutkan also denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the case on statutory grounds.
Trump last year pleaded not guilty to charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election by enlisting a slate of so-called “fake electors,” using the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations,” trying to enlist the vice president to “alter the election results,” and promoting false claims of a stolen election as the Jan. 6 riot raged — all in an effort to subvert democracy and remain in power.
The former president has denied all wrongdoing.
Trump originally faced a March 4 trial date before his appeal effectively paused the proceedings.