Sen. Bob Menendez to resign next month following conviction in federal corruption trial
(WASHINGTON) — New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez will resign his office on Aug. 20 following the conviction in his federal corruption trial, according to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.
Murphy, who will select an interim replacement, said Tuesday afternoon he has received Menendez’s resignation letter.
In the resignation letter to Murphy, obtained by ABC News, Menendez said he intends to appeal the verdict but does not want the “Senate to be involved in a lengthy process that will detract from its important work.”
“Furthermore, I cannot preserve my rights upon a successful appeal, because factual matters before the ethics committee are not privileged. This is evidenced by my Committee’s Staff Director and Chief Council being called to testify at my trial,” he stated in the letter.
Menendez said in his letter that the Aug. 20 date will “give time for my staff to transition to other possibilities, transfer constituent files that are pending, allow for an orderly process to choose an interim replacement, and for me to close out my Senate affairs.”
Staff members were informed of the senator’s decision earlier Tuesday, multiple sources told ABC News.
A Manhattan federal jury found the New Jersey Democrat guilty on all charges, including bribery, fraud, acting as a foreign agent and obstruction, on July 16 following a two-month-long trial. Federal prosecutors said he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and more in exchange for the senator’s political clout.
Menendez was not required to resign due to the conviction.
Following the guilty verdict, several political leaders called for Menendez’s immediate resignation, including Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Schumer said at the time.
Sen. Cory Booker, Menendez’s New Jersey counterpart, and Murphy had also joined in the calls for his immediate resignation. Murphy said at the time that he would call on the U.S. Senate to expel him if the senator refused to resign and make a temporary appointment in the event of a vacancy.
Menendez is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 29 and faces decades in prison.
Following the verdict, he vowed to appeal his conviction. He told reporters he was “deeply disappointed” by the jury’s decision while maintaining his innocence.
“I have never violated my oath,” Menendez said outside the courthouse following the verdict. “I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never, ever been a foreign agent.”
He added that the jury’s decision would “put at risk every member of the United States Senate in terms of what they think a foreign agent would be.”
Menendez, who served as senator for New Jersey since 2006, became the first sitting member of Congress to be charged with conspiracy by a public official to act as a foreign agent.
He refused to resign following the initial indictment in September 2023 despite calls from a majority of Democrats to do so, though he did step down as the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In June, he filed a petition to get on the U.S. Senate ballot in New Jersey as an independent candidate.
(WILMINGTON, Del.) — Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, will face sentencing for his three-count felony conviction on Nov. 13, just one week after the presidential election.
Biden was found guilty in June by a Delaware jury of violating the law when he obtained a firearm in 2018, at a time when he was addicted to drugs. For the three felony convictions, Hunter Biden could face up to 25 years in prison — though legal experts believe he will not serve time as a first-time and nonviolent offender.
Hunter Biden had sought a new trial in the case, saying his “convictions should be vacated” because trial commenced before a circuit court formally issued a mandate denying one of his many pretrial appeals. But last month, his attorneys withdrew their bid for a new trial, conceding in court papers that the motion misunderstood a technicality in the district court’s capacity to carry out a trial.
He had tried several times to get the federal charges tossed before the trial began, but to no avail.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly pledged to not pardon his son, including in an interview with “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir.
While the trial was still ongoing, Biden was asked if he would respect the outcome, to which he responded, “Yes,” and if he would rule out a pardon for Hunter Biden. Again, he responded, simply, “Yes.”
Hunter Biden faces a separate criminal trial in September on federal tax charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
(CHICAGO) — Democrats have made conservatives’ controversial Project 2025 and its education agenda a weapon in their attacks against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention.
Dismantling the Department of Education is a key issue for conservatives this election season and is mentioned in the 922-page playbook for the next conservative president. And while Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, it aligns in many ways with his Agenda 47 platform.
President Joe Biden slammed the Republican vision for education as he addressed the Democratic National Convention on Monday night.
“Donald Trump, and his Republican friends, they not only can’t think, they can’t read very well,” Biden said, adding,”Seriously, think about it. Look at their Project 2025. They want to do away with the Department of Education.”
Michelle Obama touched on the subject in her speech the following night: “Shutting down the Department of Education, banning our books — none of that will prepare our kids for the future.”
Trump reiterated his plan for education in his wide-ranging X Spaces interview last week with Elon Musk.
“I want to close up the Department of Education [and] move education back to the states,” Trump told Musk’s more than one million listeners, claiming that the U.S. had fallen to the bottom of rankings among other countries and that states do a better job educating their children without federal mandates.
The U.S. is not ranked at the bottom, as Trump claimed, but due to historic learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is close to the bottom half in subjects like math in the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Nearly a third of U.S. students also ended last school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject, according to new data released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
It’s unclear whether the former president would close the agency and redistribute its funding to states or stop funding it and close it altogether. ABC News has reached out to the Trump campaign but didn’t receive a response by time of publication.
Critics of the plan say it would hurt mostly small, rural school systems, many of them in red states.
In an interview with the nonprofit More Perfect Union, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said he would defend public education against defunding because it would exacerbate the “haves and the have-nots.” An Education Department official warned that if the agency were shuttered, states would lose a “large chunk” of funding from the feds and state and local governments — on average about 10%. State and local governments make up roughly 90% of public school funding.
Education finance expert Jess Gartner said school districts with the “highest need” students could take a devastating blow if the federal agency’s funding was cut because funding for school districts isn’t always equally distributed.
“Those targeted funds were being targeted for a reason,” Gartner said.
‘I can’t find the word ‘education’ in [the Constitution]’
House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., is one of the most vocal opponents of the department. She raises caregivers’ and local school board members’ concerns that they shouldn’t have to “co-parent” with the government.
Conservatives also reject what they characterize as bureaucrats infusing culture war topics into their kids’ school curriculums.
Foxx argued it’s unconstitutional for the government to handle state education issues in the first place.
“I can’t find the word ‘education’ in there [the Constitution] as one of the duties and responsibilities of Congress or the federal government,” Foxx told ABC News.
That ideology gives way for Trump to work with Foxx and congressional Republicans to pass a department closure if he wins the White House and Republicans maintain control of the House and take over the Senate in November, according to Arnold Ventures Director of Higher Education Clare McCann.
“Congress created the Department of Education,” McCann told ABC News, adding, “Congress could uncreate it if they wanted.”
In theory, McCann said, Trump could make the shift with congressional approval but it’s unlikely it would happen immediately. There would need to be a support system to dole out the money to states, but that’s something the department would be equipped to do.
“There’s a reason the Department of Education was created and it was to have this kind of in-house expertise and policy background on these issues,” McCann said. “The civil servants who work at the Department of Education are true experts in the field,” she added.
Arkansas moves against ‘indoctrinating’ students
Former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Sanders has pushed for conservative education reform since becoming the first woman elected as the state’s governor in 2022. Last year, she signed into law the state’s LEARNS Act, which calls for raising minimum teacher salaries, introducing universal pre-K, banning teaching on “gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual reproduction” before fifth grade and banning curriculum that would “indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory.”
It also instituted a universal voucher program for so-called “school choice,” which is also similar to plans in Trump’s Agenda 47 and Project 2025.
Superintendent of the Little Rock School District Jermall Wright said abolishing the Department of Education would be “catastrophic.”
Wright, who cited friction with the school board in announcing last week he was stepping down from his position after two years on the job, said such an action would hinder title and grant funding meant to supplement state funding. He also fears it would strip states of Title I funding for low-income and disadvantaged students as well as McKinney-Vento funds, which includes support for the unhoused and transient populations.
“We rely on those additional funds to provide, you know, an array of services and supports for students and families,” Wright told ABC News. “The face of homelessness has changed. It’s not just, you know, people who are living on streets. We have extremely mobile families. They move from apartments to apartments, hotels, motels, etc. We have children who may live with family members that are not their biological parents. All those types of situations.”
Before Little Rock, Wright led the Mississippi Achievement School District — which encompasses two smaller districts totaling about 5,000 students in the rural Mississippi Delta. He said he saw firsthand the amount of federal aid some districts in the poorest state in the nation rely on.
“In those small rural districts, the majority of our funding came from federal funds, which I’d never experienced that a day before in any place that I had worked,” he said, adding, “Those districts wouldn’t be able to survive, let alone, you just can’t function.”
Wright also said the federal agency plays an essential role in overseeing states’ civil rights issues.
An impact on vulnerable students
That’s a concern in other states like California, where education advocates worry abolishing the department would have an impact on vulnerable students and students with disabilities as well as general learning outcomes for students and teachers.
“There’s a critical role for the U.S. Department of Education to support states in thinking about how to meet the needs of student groups who either have been marginalized, underserved, or for whom we really haven’t had the opportunity to think about how best to meet their needs,” said Sarah Lillis, California executive director for Teach Plus.
Gartner, the education finance expert, said much of this conversation is dependent on economic opportunity, not location.
“There are very wealthy districts in California and there are very poor districts in California [and everywhere else],” Gartner told ABC News. “Wealthy districts aren’t going to be impacted very much by their Title I money being cut. They’re going to go out and pass a bond and raise that money – and then some – locally in two days. It’s the poor, rural district that’s going to be devastated by that and have no recourse to fill that gap.”
Due to their emphasis on local control, states like Texas with strong economies would virtually be unaffected, according to state policy experts.
Others say they don’t need the feds’ help.
Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Debbie Critchfield said the state doesn’t look to the U.S. Department of Education for guidance on education policy. She told ABC News that she’s fine with abolishing the agency.
“We are making decisions about education focused on our own state,” Critchfield told ABC News, adding, “It is very rare that we’re reaching out to the federal government to help us know what initiatives and goals we want to have here for our kids in Idaho.”
Critchfield believes shuttering the department would have “little impact” on her state.
“We don’t look to them [the Department of Education] to say what should we be working on,” Critchfield said. “I’m talking to leaders in the state, local school boards, parents in our state, they’re the ones telling me what I should be focused on. Outside of [the Department of Education] watchdogging, the influence on outcomes just isn’t there.”
(WASHINGTON) — After more than three years supporting President Joe Biden’s policy agenda as his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris must articulate her own agenda for her presidential campaign — and the first term that could follow.
Since Biden announced on Sunday that he was leaving the 2024 race, Harris has secured commitments from enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee if they all honor their commitment when voting, according to ABC News reporting.
Now Harris — who ran well to the left of Biden during her unsuccessful presidential primary campaign in 2020, but has since become a loyal advocate of the administration’s policies — is taking on the challenge of establishing her own path forward and stance on key issues that matter most to voters as the November election approaches.
Her 2020 platform and some remarks from during her vice presidency offer a glimpse of a Harris presidency that could prove more progressive than Biden’s in several key areas.
Israel-Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, with Harris — who, as vice president, customarily presides over such proceedings — noticeably absent.
While Harris’ team has said her absence is merely the result of a scheduling conflict and the vice president will meet one-on-one with Netanyahu later this week, she has in recent months signaled that she may take a more stern approach to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Harris was initially a strong supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas — knocking down a suggestion that the Biden administration might condition aid to the country in November, saying “we are not going to create any conditions on the support that we are giving Israel to defend itself.”
But by December, Harris began wading deeper into Middle Eastern diplomacy during a trip to Dubai for a United Nations climate conference where she also met with leaders from the region. During the trip, she took a more forceful tone with Israel than many other senior administration officials had done at the time, declaring “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and saying the administration believes “Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.”
In a March address in Selma, Alabama, marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Harris called out Israel again — saying its government “must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid — no excuses” and calling on Israel to open border crossings and ensure humanitarian workers were not targeted.
In an interview published earlier this month in The Nation, Harris said young Americans protesting the war in Gaza are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be” and that while she “absolutely rejects” some of their statements, she understands “the emotion behind it.”
And she’s been vocal in her support of an at least temporary cease-fire, saying during her March speech in Selma that “given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate cease-fire” for at least six weeks.
Harris doesn’t have a long-standing relationship with Netanyahu in the same way Biden does, but she met with Israel’s Benny Gantz at the White House while he was serving on the country’s war cabinet in March. She also met with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog earlier this year on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Abortion
Already the administration’s lead messenger on the central campaign issue of abortion rights, Harris has been consistently more boldly outspoken on the issue than Biden.
Before running for president in 2020, she went after crisis pregnancy centers as California attorney general and went viral for a line of questioning with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, where she pressed him to name a single law that polices what men can do with their bodies.
Her 2020 platform included a proposal to pass a Reproductive Rights Act that would have taken affirmative steps to enforce Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court later overruled in 2022.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision affecting Roe, Harris has toured the country as bans went into place. She made history by being the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic in March — a move that demonstrated how loudly supportive of abortion rights she is — and delivered a fiery speech on then-GOP presidential candidate Ron Desantis’ home turf in Florida this spring when a six-week ban went into effect there.
She made it clear in her first rally on Tuesday that abortion rights would continue to be a central issue for her as a presidential candidate.
“We who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman’s right to choose because one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do,” Harris said in a rally in Indiana on Wednesday, addressing the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.
That’s not to say Biden didn’t also make abortion rights a central tenet of his administration and campaign, said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at University of California, Davis and abortion historian. However, she said, he was constrained by generational and religious differences that made Harris “the much more effective, passionate messenger on reproductive issues.”
Should Harris win in November, “I think there would be some differences in substance, really significant differences in tone, and then, maybe or maybe not, differences in outcome,” Ziegler said.
Outcomes — such as codifying Roe vs. Wade into law, going even further to also protect birth control or in-vitro fertilization, or pursuing further legal challenges to protect abortion rights — would depend primarily on how Democrats perform down the ballot in November and whether Harris has the opportunity to confirm any more justices to the Supreme Court.
Health care
In her remarks to campaign staff Monday, Harris said that her campaign will “fight to build a nation where every person has affordable health care.”
The Medicare for All plan that Harris proposed in 2020 would have covered all medically necessary services, including emergency room visits, doctor visits, vision, dental, hearing aids, mental health and substance use disorder treatment, and comprehensive reproductive health care services. The plan had a 10-year transition period.
Under Harris’ plan, Americans would have had a choice between the public Medicare for All plan and plans from private insurers that would have had to adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits.
To pay for the program, she proposed charging an additional premium to households making above $100,000 per year, with a higher income threshold for those in higher-cost-of-living areas.
In 2020, Biden called for a less ambitious “Medicare for all who want it” public option plan. However, according to Roll Call, he hasn’t mentioned that public option since December of 2020 — before he took office.
Biden also previously suggested he would veto a Medicare for All bill, arguing that it would raise taxes for the middle class.
But the vice president’s past policy differences with Biden may not mean all that much for a Harris presidency.
“I wouldn’t expect it to change at all [from Biden’s agenda],” David Barker, a professor of government at American University, said. “Until there’s some indication that that’s politically realistic, I don’t think anybody’s going to even try.”
Barker added that smaller changes, similar to the $35 price cap on insulin for seniors on Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the way they’ll continue” in a Harris administration.
Criminal justice
While Harris faced sharp criticism from the left during the 2020 primary for her background as a prosecutor, her platform that year contained a slate of ambitious reforms to the criminal justice system aimed at ending mass incarceration and fighting racial inequities.
Harris’ platform advocated to legalize marijuana and expunge some marijiuana-related convictions; end cash bail and mandatory minimums; eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine; and stop the use of private prisons and the death penalty.
Her criminal justice plan also sought to increase the Department of Justice’s oversight of police departments and limit them from acquiring certain kinds of military equipment. In a clip that has been circulated by Republicans, she also advocated for restoring the right of formerly-incarcerated people to vote and automatically expunging non-serious, non-violent offenses after five years.
The Biden administration’s most significant action on criminal justice came when it took action on marijuana, reducing federal criminal penalties for offenses relating to the drug and pardoning those with criminal charges for simple possession of marijuana.
While Harris’ 2020 platform went well beyond Biden’s on criminal justice, her recent remarks make no indication that it will be a major theme of her campaign. The issue went unmentioned in her speech at the campaign’s Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters on Monday.