Mike Johnson says he doesn’t think House Ethics Committee should release Gaetz report
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(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Friday that he does not think the House Ethics Committee should release the findings of its investigation into Matt Gaetz, now that the Florida Republican is no longer a member of Congress.
“I believe it is very important to maintain the House’s tradition of not issuing ethics reports on people who are no longer members of Congress,” Johnson said. “I think it would open a Pandora’s box.”
Johnson weighing into the issue is extremely rare as House speakers traditionally stay out of the committee’s investigations and business.
Just two days ago, Johnson said the following about the report: “As far as the timing of the release of a report, or something, I don’t know. The speaker of the House is not involved in that, can’t be involved in that.”
It’s unclear what the bipartisan panel will do now with its report. There are growing calls from senators on both sides of the aisle for the report to be released.
The House Ethics Committee, which sources said was preparing to meet this week to deliberate over whether to release a final report, was now not expected to meet on Friday, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Gaetz stepped down from the House shortly after being tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be attorney general — a choice that shocked some Republican lawmakers and many Justice Department officials. Gaetz will need to be confirmed by the Senate to serve in the role.
Asked on Friday if he spoke to Trump about the ethics investigation, Johnson sidestepped.
“I’m not talking to anybody about what I have said to Trump,” he said.
Johnson also claimed he was responding to public reports about the panel’s findings and had not been briefed on the investigation.
“The speaker has no involvement or understanding of what’s going on with the Ethics Committee or what they’re investigating or when,” Johnson added.
“What I am saying is someone who is no longer a member of Congress. You’re not in the business of investigating and publishing a report,” he concluded. “I would encourage the House Ethics Committee to follow that tradition. I think it’s important.”
(WASHINGTON) — There were many mistakes made on the day of the July assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump by the Secret Service, but an independent review by the Department of Homeland Security revealed systemic issues within the organization and found that without reforms to the agency, “another Butler can and will happen again.”
In the aftermath of the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assigned a panel of four former law enforcement and national security officials to examine what went wrong, and how they recommend the Secret Service moves forward after the attempt on former president’s life.
“The Secret Service does not perform at the elite levels needed to discharge its critical mission,” the letter addressed to Secretary Mayorkas said, which was included in the report. “The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved.”
On the independent panel are former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, former Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, former Maryland State Police Superintendent David Mitchell and former Deputy National Security Adviser Fran Townsend.
The scathing 35-page report from the independent panel said the findings illustrated “deeper concerns” within the U.S. Secret Service.
“The Panel has observed that many of the Secret Service personnel involved in the events of July 13 appear to have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions, or opportunities for improvement,” the report said. “July 13 represents a historic security failure by the Secret Service which almost led to the death of a former president and current nominee and did lead to the death of a rally attendee.”
The panel said that even a “superficial” level of reflection would have been meaningful.
Plaguing the Secret Service are “corrosive cultural attitudes” regarding resourcing events – a “do more with less” attitude, according to the report.
The report also found there was a troubling “lack of critical thinking” by Secret Service personnel “before, during and after” the assassination attempt.
“A prominent instance of this is the fact that personnel had been read into significant intelligence regarding a long range threat by a foreign state actor against former President Trump, but failed to ensure that the AGR building was secured despite its proximity to the rally stage and the obvious high angle line of sight issues it presented,” the report found.
Other instances “revealed a surprising lack of rigor in considering the specific risks posed to particular individual protectees.”
The report said, for example, Trump, though not formally the Republican nominee at the time, had essentially clinched it months before and thus the Secret Service’s approach was formulaic “rather than an individualized assessment of risk.”
The failure to take ownership of planning the Butler rally and the lack of cohesion with state and local law enforcement during the planning of events, a lack of experienced agents to perform “certain critical security tasks,” a lack of auditing mechanisms to learn from mistakes in the field, a lack of training facilities, and a lack of agents feeling comfortable to speak up.
In particular, the operational tempo for younger agents who came up during the COVID-19 pandemic was slower than most election years, and thus those agents did not get as much experience in the field as agents would normally get.
The panel is calling for new leadership at the Secret Service – saying the agency needs a change with people from outside the agency.
“Many of the issues that the Panel has identified throughout this report, particularly regarding the Panel’s “deeper concerns,” are ultimately attributable, directly or indirectly, to the Service’s culture,” the report said. “A refreshment of leadership, with new perspectives, will contribute to the Service’s resolution of those issues.”
Among the other recommendations the panel made are a restructuring of the agency’s protective office, new training initiatives, new communication technologies that are more reliable and an evaluation “of the Secret Service’s method for how it resources protectees to ensure that it is risk-based, and not overly formulaic or reliant on a protectee’s title for making resource determinations.”
“The Panel also recognizes the bravery and selflessness exhibited by Secret Service agents and officers who put themselves in harm’s way to protect their protectees, including in Butler after Crooks fired at former President Trump and others. However, bravery and selflessness alone, no matter how honorable, are insufficient to discharge the Secret Service’s no-fail protective mission.”
Specific to July 13, the panel’s findings are in line with the Secret Service’s mission assurance review that came out last month.
Some of the findings are an absence of law enforcement to secure the AGR building where Thomas Matthew Crooks eventually fired from, the failure to mitigate the line of site from that building, having two communications rooms, the failure of anyone to encounter Crooks despite spotting him 90 minutes before Trump took the stage, the failure to inform the former president’s detail and the drone detection system not working.
The panel recommends the Service has integrated communications, a mandatory situation report when a protectee arrives, better counter-drone technologies and an advanced line of site mitigations.
A footnote in the report says the second assassination attempt against Trump didn’t impact the panel’s work but might’ve reinforced the report.
The panel recommends the Service implement the Butler reforms no later than March 31, 2025, and the broader reforms by the end of 2025.
(NEW YORK) — Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is among those pushing back on past comments made by President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the next defense secretary, who was critical of women being allowed to serve in combat units.
“I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles,” Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, said in a recent podcast interview that aired last week.
“It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated,” he said on the “The Shawn Ryan Show”.
Hegseth’s comments have raised concerns among former servicemembers with first-hand experience serving in integrated units, and from the former Defense Secretary Panetta, who in 2013 lifted the Pentagon’s ban on women serving in ground combat units.
“Those kinds of comments come from a past era and I think it’s important for him to take the time to really look at how our military is performing in an outstanding fashion,” Panetta told ABC News in an interview.
“We’ve got the best military in the world, and the reason is because we have the best fighting men and women in the world who are part of it,” he added.
“I just think that anybody who takes the time to really look at how women are performing in combat will come around and say that that’s exactly where they belong,” he said.
In the podcast interview, Hegseth said that the decision to allow women to serve in ground combat units has lowered the physical standards for those wishing to serve in those units.
Panetta recalled that in the lead-up to his decision, he pushed back on the notion that allowing women to serve in combat units would lower physical standards.
“We shouldn’t lower the standards. We should require that women have to meet exactly the same standards as men do, and that’s what they do,” he says he argued at the time. “They wouldn’t be in those positions if they weren’t able to be able to meet the standards that are required.”
Panetta said, “The mere fact that that has just not become an issue at all in terms of how the military has performed, is a reflection that the simple reason is because both men and women are living up to the same standards when it comes to fighting for America.”
Of the more than one million active-duty military personnel, 17.5% are women according to the Pentagon’s latest statistics.
The process of integrating women into combat units was a gradual one that began in 1993 when Defense Secretary Les Aspin issued an order that allowed women to fly in combat.
But women were not allowed to serve in ground combat units until 2013, when Panetta rescinded the ban that was subsequently enhanced in 2015 by Defense Secretary Ash Carter who cleared the path for women to serve in the jobs that were still limited to men, including some in special operations.
By 2019, more than 600 female Sailors and Marines were serving in combat arms units previously restricted to men, while more than 650 women held Army combat roles and over 1,000 had accessed Army combat specialties.
Currently more than 2,500 women serve in previously closed ground combat jobs, 152 women have passed the elite Ranger School test, and 10 of them serve as Rangers in the 75th Ranger Regiment, according to a review of military personnel information compiled by Retired Army Col. Ellen Haring, with the Service Women’s Action Network.
Haring points out that the full integration of women into combat units actually occurred during President Trump’s first term and that standards have never been lowered to accommodate women.
“Women have been serving in combat jobs for almost 10 years now and there is absolutely no evidence that women have harmed combat units,” she told ABC News. “In fact, many standards had to be established when they were considering admitting women because they had previously been loosely defined.”
“Those who claim they have been lowered have no actual knowledge of the training requirements or how women have been held to the exact same requirements,” she said. “If they think standards have changed or are different for women then I challenge them to go to Fort Moore today and watch the execution of training.”
Twenty years ago, Allison Jaslow headed a convoy security unit in Iraq that regularly came under smalls arms fire and was exposed to explosions from roadside bombs.
“Women have not only been in combat for some time, but many are tougher than many of their male counterparts. Need proof? Look at the women who’ve graduated from Ranger School, which is so grueling that around half of the men who enter it fail out,” said Jaslow in a statement issued in her role as the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
“Those women deserve a Secretary of Defense who is aware of that reality and also ensures that the culture in the military embraces that reality – especially as we still continue to confront a recruitment crisis,” she added.
Garrett Jordan, a former Army captain, served in integrated combat units, and counts some of his female classmates at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as among those who are now Army Rangers or have commanded infantry and armor companies.
“Women have served in combat arms units, in both command and enlisted positions, and continue to do so and excel,” he said.
As a former Army officer, Jordan said he is “well aware of the physical endurance, technical competence, and mental fortitude that it takes to serve in a tank unit and to perform the duties and responsibilities as a soldier in a combat arms branch.”
Jordan said women in the training classes he commanded “maintained the standard, just as much as their male counterparts,” he said.
“Ultimately, gender does not determine whether or not someone has the physical strength, or competency to serve in these units,” said Jordan. “There is a standard, and if soldiers, regardless of gender are meeting it, then they should have the opportunity to serve in these units.”
Yulia Navalnaya speaks about her late husband, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navaly, on The View. Via ABC News
(NEW YORK) — Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, says she wants Americans to cherish their democracy as they prepare to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
“I would say to American voters, don’t take everything like granted,” Navalnaya told ABC’s The View in an interview airing Thursday. “You are still living in democratic country and I still believe in American institutions and just make the right choice.”
Navalnaya spoke to The View for the launch of a memoir written by her late husband, Russia’s most famous pro-democracy campaigner and President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest opponent. He died in prison in February and the book, titled “Patriot,” was mostly written while he was detained.
You can watch The View interview with Yulia Navalnaya on ABC at 11 a.m. ET on Thursday, Oct. 24.
Navalnaya did not express a preference for Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump to win the election. However, her husband expressed alarm about the possibility of a second Trump presidency in a letter written from prison.
“Trump’s agenda and plans look truly scary. What a nightmare,” Navalny wrote to his friend, the photographer Yevgeny Feldman, who shared the letter from December 2023.
Navalny died suddenly in a prison camp in the Russian Arctic in February. Russian authorities claimed the 47-year-old died from natural causes, but his family and supporters accused the Kremlin of murdering him.
In September, independent Russian investigative news outlet The Insider said it obtained the police report into Navalny’s death. It reportedly stated that, in the minutes before he died, Navalny had suffered a “sharp pain” in his stomach, vomiting and convulsing on the floor.
In the final version of the police report, the description of Navalny’s symptoms as described in the initial report — all strongly suggestive of a possible poisoning — had been left out, according to The Insider.
Navalny was imprisoned in January 2021 after deciding to return to Russia, despite his near-fatal poisoning with a nerve agent months earlier. He was arrested on arrival at the airport in Moscow and sentenced to 19 years, on charges widely condemned as politically motivated.
Married to Navaly for 24 years, Navalnaya worked closely with him before his death but largely remained out of sight. Since his death, she has stepped forward to fill his place as an opposition leader. She leads his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and campaigns internationally for greater efforts to punish Putin’s regime.
“When he was killed, it was very important for me to show that even they are ready to kill the person, to kill our opposition leader. He wasn’t just my husband, he was very close friend,” she told The View. “He was leader whom I supported and it was very important for me to show that we’ll continue our fight. And to remind the world about him.”
Navalnaya also told the panelists that she’s certain the full story of how her husband died will be revealed, noting that the Anti-Corruption Foundation was working to make it happen.
She was unable to attend her husband’s funeral in March — which was held under intense restrictions in Moscow — because she faced possible detention. A Russian court in July ordered her arrest on extremism charges.
Navalnaya is undeterred by possible threats to her well-being , she told The View panelists.
“I hope it never happens, but if something will happen with me, there will be other people, and there will be people who [will be] fighting with Putin’s regime for many years,” she said.
Despite the dangers to him, Navalnaya said they both wanted Navalny to return to Russia, hoping to encourage people in their country to “not be afraid.”
“There are a lot of people in Russia against Putin’s regime,” she said. “Of course, it was an option to stay somewhere abroad in exile. But when I think about it, I’m thinking that he would be unhappy.”
In his book, Navalny expressed his belief that he would never be released while Putin’s regime remained and that authorities would likely poison him.
He also wrote about the harsh conditions in prison and his conviction that returning to Russia was worthwhile despite his imprisonment. He also recounted one of Navalnaya’s visits in the early days of his time in prison, during which they accepted that he would likely die in detention.
“It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you. Where else could I ever have found someone who could discuss the most difficult matters with me without a lot of drama and hand-wringing?” he wrote. “She entirely got it and, like me, would hope for the best, but expect and prepare for the worst. I kissed her on the nose and felt much better.”
Navalnaya told The View that the thing she misses most in the wake of her husband’s death is coming home and spending evenings talking with him.
“I probably miss evenings. When you come back home,” she said. “I’m sitting here speaking with you and I want to come back home and to share this with him and to discuss it. And all these, you know, very ordinary things, of course I miss a lot.”
