Tag Archives: election 2020

Prosecutor: Proud Boys attacked ‘heart’ of democracy on 1/6

January 13, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four lieutenants led a coordinated attack on “the heart of our democracy” in a desperate attempt to keep Donald Trump in the White House, a federal prosecutor said Thursday at the start of their seditious conspiracy trial.

Jurors heard attorneys’ opening statements for the trial more than two years after members of the far-right extremist group joined a pro-Trump mob in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough said the Proud Boys knew that Trump’s hopes for a second term in office were quickly fading as Jan. 6 approached. So the group leaders assembled a “fighting force” to stop the transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden, McCullough said. Tarrio saw a Biden presidency as a “threat to the Proud Boys’ existence,” the prosecutor said.

McCullough showed jurors a video clip of Trump infamously telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first presidential debate with Biden in 2020, a moment that led to an explosion of interest in the group.

“These men did not stand back. They did not stand by. Instead, they mobilized,” the prosecutor said.

Defense attorneys said there is no evidence that the Proud Boys plotted to attack the Capitol and stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.

“They’re trying to build this conspiracy that does not exist,” said one of Tarrio’s lawyers, Sabino Jauregui.

Jurors are expected to hear testimony from prosecutors’ first witness on Friday.

The trial comes on the heels of the seditious conspiracy convictions of two leaders of the Oath Keepers, another far-right extremist group.

The case against Tarrio and his four associates is one of the most consequential to emerge from the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The trial will provide an in-depth look at a group that has become an influential force in mainstream Republican politics.

Tarrio’s lawyer said authorities have used the former Proud Boys national chairman as a scapegoat. Jauregui accused prosecutors of deceptively stitching together offensive online messages and said Tarrio actually tried to keep his Proud Boys out of fights by talking to police before rallies.

Jauregui acknowledged Tarrio and other self-described “Western chauvinists” in the Proud Boys shared “offensive” messages, but said it was Trump who unleashed the mob that attacked the Capitol.

“It’s too hard to blame Trump,” Jauregui said. “It’s easier to blame Enrique as the face of the Proud Boys.”

Nicholas Smith, attorney for Ethan Nordean, a Proud Boys chapter president from Auburn, Washington, said other members have repeatedly told federal authorities that the group didn’t have a plan for Jan. 6.

“Even the government’s own cooperating witnesses have said that,” Smith added.

The other co-defendants are Joseph Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, a self-described Proud Boys organizer; Zachary Rehl, who was president of the Proud Boys chapter in Philadelphia; and Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boys member from Rochester, New York.

McCullough, the prosecutor, said Proud Boys leaders recruited new members “to help them achieve their goals.” On Jan. 6, they gathered at a pre-arranged spot and began to advance on the Capitol before Trump finished his speech.

“The time for action had arrived,” the prosecutor said.

Rehl’s lawyer said he came to Washington with other Proud Boys members to exercise his First Amendment free speech rights, not to riot.

The trial will lay out private communications between the defendants, their public statements, their coordinated actions at the Capitol and their celebrations of the riot before they tried to cover their tracks.

A message that Tarrio posted on social media before Jan. 6 said, “Lords of War” with the hashtag “#J6” and a photo of Pezzola.

“These lords of war joined together to stop the transfer of presidential power,” McCullough said.

Tarrio’s lieutenants were part of the first wave of rioters to push onto Capitol grounds and charge past police barricades toward the building, according to prosecutors.

Jurors saw a video of Pezzola using a stolen riot shield to smash in a window, allowing rioters to pour into the Capitol. His lawyer argued that a different rioter broke the window first.

Tarrio, who’s from Miami, wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6 because he was arrested two days before the riot and charged with vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December 2020. He was ordered to leave the capital, but prosecutors say he remained engaged in the extremist group’s planning for Jan. 6.

Monitoring the riot from afar, Tarrio posted a message urging Proud Boys to stay at the Capitol.

“Make no mistake,” he wrote. “We did this.”

A day after the attack, Tarrio wrote a message that said, “God didn’t put me there for a reason.”

“We would still be there,” he added.

The Justice Department has charged nearly 1,000 people across the United States over the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, and its investigation continues to grow. Among those are Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs, who were convicted of conspiring to block the transfer of presidential power from Trump, a Republican, to Biden, a Democrat. Three other Oath Keepers were acquitted of the charge. They were, however, convicted of other serious charges.

The Proud Boys’ trial is the first major trial to begin since the House committee investigating the insurrection urged the department to bring criminal charges against Trump and associates who were behind his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

While the criminal referral has no real legal standing, it adds to political pressure already on Attorney General Merrick Garland and the special counsel he appointed, Jack Smith, who’s conducting an investigation into Jan. 6 and Trump’s actions.

Jury selection in the case took two weeks as a slew of potential jurors said they associated the Proud Boys with hate groups or white nationalism. The Capitol can be seen in the distance from parts of the courthouse, where a second group of Oath Keepers is also currently on trial for seditious conspiracy, which carries up to 20 years behind bars upon conviction.

Tensions bubbled over at times as jury selection slowed to a crawl and defense lawyers complained that too many potential jurors were biased against the Proud Boys. Defense attorneys challenged jurors who expressed support for causes such as Black Lives Matter, saying that could indicate prejudice against the Proud Boys.

Lawyers and the judge clashed during sometimes chaotic pretrial legal wrangling to the point where two defense attorneys threatened to withdraw from the case. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, lashed out after defense lawyers repeatedly interrupted and talked over him on Wednesday, warning that he would find them in contempt if it continued.

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Richer reported from Boston.

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For full AP coverage of the Capitol riot, go to https://www.apnews.com/capitol-siege.

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Dems move to make South Carolina, not Iowa, 1st voting state

December 3, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.

The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for five decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.

Discussion on prioritizing diversity drew such impassioned reaction at the committee gathering in Washington that DNC chair Jaime Harrison wiped away tears as committee member Donna Brazile suggested that Democrats had spent years failing to fight for Black voters: “Do you know what it’s like to live on a dirt road? Do you know what it’s like to try to find running water that is clean?”

“Do you know what it’s like to wait and see if the storm is going to pass you by and your roof is still intact?” Brazile asked. “That’s what this is about.”

The committee approved moving South Carolina’s primary to Feb. 3 and having Nevada and New Hampshire vote three days later. Georgia would go the following week and Michigan two weeks after that.

The move marks a dramatic shift from the current calendar, which has had Iowa holding the first-in-the-nation caucuses since 1972, followed by New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary since 1920. Nevada and South Carolina have gone next since the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats last did a major overhaul of their primary calendar.

The changes will still have to be approved by the full DNC in a vote likely early next year, but it will almost certainly follow the rule-making committee’s lead.

The revamped schedule could largely be moot for 2024 if Biden opts to seek a second term, but may remake Democratic presidential cycles after that. The president has said for months that he intends to run again, and White House aides have begun making staffing discussions for his likely reelection campaign, even though no final decision has been made.

The DNC also plans to revisit the primary calendar again before 2028 — meaning more changes could be coming before then.

Biden wrote in a letter to rules committee members on Thursday that the party should scrap “restrictive” caucuses altogether because their rules on in-person participation can sometimes exclude working-class and other voters. He told also told party leaders privately that he’d like to see South Carolina go first to better ensure that voters of color aren’t marginalized as Democrats choose a presidential nominee.

Four of the five states now poised to start the party’s primary are presidential battlegrounds, meaning the eventual Democratic winner would be able to lay groundwork in important general election locales. That’s especially true for Michigan and Georgia, which both voted for Donald Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020. The exception is South Carolina, which hasn’t gone Democratic in a presidential race since 1976.

The first five voting states would be positioned to cast ballots before Super Tuesday, the day when much of the rest of the country holds primaries. That gives the early states outsize influence since White House hopefuls struggling to raise money or gain political traction often drop out before visiting much of the rest of the country.

Scott Brennan, a rules committee member from Iowa, said “small, rural states” like his “must have a voice in the presidential nominating process.”

“Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in the heart of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party in newer generations,” Brennan said.

The Republican National Committee has already decided to keep Iowa’s caucus as the first contest in its 2024 presidential primary, ensuring that GOP White House hopefuls — which include Trump — have continued to frequently campaign there.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s lone congressional Democrat and one of Biden’s top supporters in Congress, said the president called him Thursday to inform him of his push to move his state up.

“I didn’t ask to be first,” Clyburn said. “It was his idea to be first.”

Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden in 2020 boosted the candidate’s flagging presidential campaign just ahead of South Carolina’s primary, which he won big. That helped Biden shake off early losses in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and eventually take the White House.

“He knows what South Carolina did for him, and he’s demonstrated that time and time again, by giving respect to South Carolina,” Clyburn said.

Still, the vote by the rules committee has faced serious pushback, with some states vowing to ignore the changes altogether. That’s despite the panel approving language saying states could lose all of their delegates to the party’s national convention if they attempt to violate new rules.

Iowa and New Hampshire have said laws in their states mandate them going before others, and they intend to abide by those, not DNC decrees. Only committee members from Iowa and New Hampshire objected to the proposal that passed Friday, with everyone else supporting it.

Nevada, with its heavily Hispanic population, initially balked at sharing the second-place slot with New Hampshire, a state 2,500 miles away. Nevada committee member Artie Blanco’s voice cracked as she argued against the change.

“If we want to build a strong relationship with Latinos,” Blanco said, “then Nevada must stand alone on a date and not have to share that date.”

After more discussion, Blanco said later that she would support the new calendar. It was “not ideal” for her state to go the same day as another, she said, but “we accept what the will of the president is.”

Harrison said the new slate of five early voting states will need to show they are working toward moving their primaries to those dates by early next year or risk losing their place. Some state legislatures set primary dates; others have their secretaries of state or the directors of their state parties do it.

The DNC chair choked up after the vote as he talked about South Carolina once having been the site of the first attack of the Civil War and now being in line to lead off his party’s primary.

“This proposal reflects the best of our party as a whole, and it will continue to make our party and our country stronger,” Harrison said.

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Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard contributed from Columbia, S.C.

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AP sources: Biden tells Dems he wants SC as 1st voting state

December 2, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Thursday that Democrats should give up “restrictive” caucuses and prioritize diversity at the start of their presidential primary calendar — dealing a major blow to Iowa’s decadeslong status as the state that leads off the process.

In a letter to the rule-making arm of the Democratic National Committee, Biden did not mention specific states he’d like to see go first. But he has told Democrats he wants South Carolina moved to the first position, according to three people familiar with his recommendation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The president’s direction comes as the DNC rules committee gathers in Washington on Friday to vote on shaking up the presidential primary calendar starting in 2024. Members now expect to approve new rules putting South Carolina first, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on the same day a week later.

Georgia and Michigan would move into the top five as new early states, and each would hold primaries in subsequent weeks, committee members say. The two battlegrounds were critical to Biden’s 2020 victory over then-President Donald Trump, who had won both states in his 2016 White House campaign.

Much of the rest of the country would vote as part of Super Tuesday soon afterward.

Such changes are set to come after years of calls from many top Democrats for the voting calendar to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse base than mostly white Iowa, which holds the country’s first caucus, and New Hampshire, which holds the first primary. The new calendar would still have to be approved by the full DNC in a vote likely to come early next year, but the DNC will almost certainly heed the rule-making panel’s recommendations.

The proposed order of the early states was first reported by The Washington Post.

“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote in a letter on personal stationery that did not carry the White House seal. “We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”

He said caucuses were “restrictive and anti-worker” because they require voters “to spend significant amounts of time” on one night gathering to choose candidates in person, “disadvantaging hourly workers and anyone who does not have the flexibility to go to a set location at a set time.”

The changes could be implemented as soon as 2024 but would be rendered largely meaningless until 2028 if Biden opts to seek a second term. The president has said for months that he intends to run again, and White House aides and Biden allies have begun staffing and structural discussions for his likely 2024 bid while refraining from overt steps while the president weighs a final decision.

Such a shakeup would nonetheless be seismic given that Iowa’s caucus has led off the Democratic voting calendar since 1976. Still, it would come two years after a series of technical glitches so marred party results that they prevented The Associated Press from declaring a 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus winner.

On the current Democratic calendar, Iowa has been followed by New Hampshire, which has held the nation’s first primary since 1920. Nevada and South Carolina have gone next since the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats last did a major primary calendar overhaul.

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has already decided to keep Iowa’s caucus as the first contest in its 2024 presidential calendar, ensuring that GOP White House hopefuls — which include Trump — will continue campaigning there frequently.

South Carolina holds special relevance to Biden. His victory in the state’s first-in-the-South primary in 2020 kickstarted his presidential campaign after poor finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire on his way to winning the Democratic nomination.

Dick Harpootlian, a longtime Biden ally, fundraiser and former South Carolina Democratic Party chair, said Thursday that he and Biden discussed South Carolina’s possible advancement the night of Biden’s 2020 primary victory there. Harpootlian said he’d impressed upon Biden that the state was a better place than Iowa to hold an even earlier presidential voting contest — to which Harpootlian said Biden was receptive.

“I think he agreed that this was a much more dynamic process,” Harpootlian said. “Iowa was just a nightmare.”

The DNC rules committee has been discussing reordering the early calendar for months, touching off a fierce battle among many states to go first. In a joint statement Thursday night, Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes and U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell said, “We have always said that any road to the White House goes through the heartland and President Biden understands that.”

But Biden’s wishes sparked anger in New Hampshire, where state law calls for holding the nation’s first primary and where officials had for months threatened to simply move up their election regardless of what new rules the DNC approves. Other states have previously tried to violate party rules and jump closer to the front, only to be threatened with having their delegates not count toward their chosen candidate clinching the party’s nomination.

New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen issued a statement blasting “the White House’s short-sighted decision,” while fellow New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan said, “I strongly oppose the President’s deeply misguided proposal.

“But make no mistake,” Hassan said in a statement. “New Hampshire’s law is clear and our primary will continue to be first in the nation.”

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Kinnard reported from Columbia, S.C. Associated Press writer Steve Peoples in New York contributed to this report.

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Trump criminal probes will proceed — even as he’s candidate

November 17, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s early announcement of his third White House bid won’t shield the former president from the criminal investigations already confronting him as an ordinary citizen, leaving him legally and politically exposed as he seeks the 2024 Republican nomination.

The Justice Department is pushing ahead with its probes. And with the midterm elections now mostly complete and the 2024 presidential campaign months away from beginning in earnest, federal prosecutors have plenty of time to continue their work even as Trump hits the campaign trail.

“I don’t think the department is going to hesitate as a result of Trump nominating himself and anointing himself as the first candidate in the 2024 election,” said former Justice Department prosecutor Michael Weinstein. “I just think they will see that as him trying to game the system as he’s done very successfully in the courts,” and they’re prepared for his “blowback.”

Trump enters the race facing federal investigations related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and into the hoarding of top-secret government documents at his Florida estate — plus a separate s tate probe in Georgia. The Mar-a-Lago investigation has advanced especially swiftly, with prosecutors this month giving a close Trump ally immunity to secure his testimony before a federal grand jury. Justice Department lawyers in that probe say they have amassed evidence of potential crimes involving not only obstruction but also the willful retention of national defense information.

It remains unclear if anyone will be charged, as does the timetable for a decision. But former officials say the best way to ensure the outcome is seen as above reproach is to conduct a by-the-book investigation showing no special favor or ill treatment because of Trump’s former high office.

“The public will have the most faith in what you’re doing, and you will get the most successful results, if you treat Donald Trump like any other American,” said Matthew Miller, who served as Justice Department spokesman under former Attorney General Eric Holder.

Current Attorney General Merrick Garland has suggested as much, saying last summer in response to questions about Trump and the Jan. 6 investigation that “no person is above the law.” Asked in a July television interview how a potential Trump candidacy might affect the department, Garland replied: “We will hold accountable anyone who is criminally responsible for attempting to interfere with the transfer — legitimate, lawful transfer — of power from one administration to the next.”

Investigating any elected official, or candidate for office, almost always invites political speculation. Justice Department protocol cautions prosecutors against taking overt action in the direct run-up to an election, but that’s more a standard convention than a hard-and-fast rule. And the 2024 presidential contest is two years away.

Still, it’s not easy to investigate a former president or current candidate. That’s especially true in the case of Trump, who spent his presidency assailing his own Justice Department and haranguing attorneys general he himself had appointed. He has already lambasted the FBI for searching Mar-a-Lago in August, using the episode to raise funds from supporters.

Now, with his candidacy official, he and his supporters will try to reframe the narrative of the investigation as political persecution by a Democratic administration that fears him for 2024.

In fact, one risk for Democrats is that Trump — who during his announcement Tuesday declared himself “a victim” — could galvanize his supporters anew with that argument. On the other hand, the results of last week’s midterm elections suggest he may be more politically vulnerable than many had thought, including in his Republican Party.

What about past investigations of a presidential candidate? There is a recent precedent, though under different circumstances.

In 2016, the Obama administration’s Justice Department investigated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Despite the efforts of the law enforcement officials who worked the investigation to remain above the fray, the probe became repeatedly mired in presidential politics — in ways that may not have been foreseen when it began.

Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch expressed regret over a chance encounter she had with Bill Clinton in the final days of the investigation. Former FBI Director James Comey was blamed for harming Clinton’s candidacy by making a detailed public explanation of why the bureau was not recommending charges and then for reopening the probe 11 days before the election.

David Laufman, who supervised that investigation for the Justice Department as chief of the same section now running the Mar-a-Lago probe, said there’s a “surreal disconnect” between the political maelstrom that accompanies politically freighted investigations and the heads-down mentality of a prosecutor determined to just do the work.

“Here we were, conducting a criminal investigation with national security undertones in a way that was practically splashed on the front page of every newspaper every fricking day,” Laufman said. “And all we could do was to continue to do what we knew had to be done — to obtain all the relevant facts needed to make judgments about whether it was appropriate to recommend criminal charges.”

He said he believed the investigators working Mar-a-Lago have been the same way, praising their professionalism amid pressure from the public and even concerns about their personal safety.

In the Clinton case, Comey has said he considered recommending a separate special counsel to direct the investigation, though he ultimately did not. The option of a specially appointed prosecutor who would report to Garland exists here as well, just as the Trump-era Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to lead the investigation into potential coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

It’s not clear how seriously Garland would consider that. A department spokesman declined to comment.

Politics aside, in making the decision whether to bring an indictment, much will ultimately depend on the strength of the Justice Department’s case.

“If the government’s case is exceptionally strong, I think the rule of law will have a predominant weight in the attorney general’s calculus,” Laufman said.

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Follow Eric Tucker at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

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More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

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Leading Republicans try to ignore Trump campaign launch

November 17, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Leading Republican officials on Wednesday sought to ignore Donald Trump’s formal step into the 2024 presidential contest, insisting there were more pressing priorities as GOP leaders grappled with the fallout of a major midterm disappointment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said it was much too early for Republicans to focus on the next presidential election when asked about a brewing GOP divide during a news conference the morning after Trump’s announcement. Declining to say the former president’s name, DeSantis, a potential Trump rival in 2024, said he was focused instead on Georgia’s upcoming Senate runoff and his governing priorities in Florida.

“We just finished this election. People need to chill out a little bit on some of this stuff, I mean seriously,” DeSantis said. The 44-year-old Republican governor continued: “At the end of the day, it’s been a long election, we’ve got the Georgia runoff, but for me it’s like, OK, what more do we need to do to continue to make Florida lead the way? We’re going to be focusing on that.”

The sentiment was echoed by leading Republicans across Ohio, New Hampshire and Washington as the GOP grappled with rising internal tensions and questions about its future following a deeply disappointing midterm cycle. History suggested the Republicans should have celebrated massive gains last week, but the sweeping victory party leaders predicted did not materialize as Trump loyalists were defeated across several swing states.

Democrats held the Senate, while Republicans won a razor-thin House majority Wednesday.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine deflected a question about Trump’s announcement at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Orlando on Wednesday.

“It’s a little early to be commenting on the presidential race,” DeWine said as he walked into a forum on “The Future of the GOP.”

“We are still trying to analyze what happened a week ago,” said DeWine, who won his reelection by 25 points after refusing to embrace Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

Trump won’t make it easy for his party to ignore 2024, however, even with the opening contests of the next presidential primary season likely more than a year away.

Trump launched his third presidential bid Tuesday night before an audience of several hundred supporters in a chandeliered ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago club. That’s even as the political parties have yet to set their primary voting calendars.

“America’s comeback starts right now,” Trump said.

The former president, who sparked a deadly insurrection after losing his 2020 reelection bid, hoped to launch his 2024 campaign in the glow of resounding GOP midterm victories. Instead, he entered the race in a moment of deep political vulnerability following a series of stringing losses that many party leaders blamed on him.

High-profile Republican candidates for the Senate and governor across Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who parroted Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election were defeated.

DeSantis, meanwhile, won his reelection by nearly 20 points in what has historically been a swing state. With party activists openly encouraging DeSantis to seek the presidency, Trump has been increasingly critical of the Florida governor in recent weeks — even unveiling a new nickname: Ron DeSanctimonious.

Asked about Trump’s barbs on Monday, DeSantis quipped, “Check out the scoreboard.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, increasingly a Trump critic, declined to weigh in on the early 2024 debate when asked, although he acknowledged that the GOP “turned off a lot of these centrist voters” in the 2022 midterms.

“The way I’m gonna go into this presidential primary season is to stay out of it. I don’t have a dog in that fight,” McConnell said.

On the other side of the Capitol, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Trump loyalist who hopes to become the House speaker should the GOP seize that chamber’s majority, walked away from reporters on Wednesday when asked whether he would support Trump’s 2024 bid.

Still, a handful of Republican elected officials have already endorsed Trump’s nascent campaign — House Republican Conference Chair, Rep. Elisa Stefanik, R-N.Y., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., among them.

In New Hampshire, which is in line to host GOP’s opening presidential primary election in 2024, Gov. Chris Sununu predicted that few would pay attention to Trump’s announcement in the short term.

“He won’t clear the field,” Sununu told Fox News, declining to rule out a 2024 presidential run of his own.

Sununu, a Republican, won his reelection by more than 15 points after pushing back against Trump’s election lies. At the same time, New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc, a Trump loyalist, lost by 9 points.

“You could make the argument he’s never been weaker politically,” Sununu said of Trump. “It’s really an announcement from a defensive position. Therefore, I think it’s going to make a little bit of news and we’re all going to move on. There’s still going to be a lot of folks that enter this race — probably not until late ’23.”

Conservative media has also been cool to Trump’s 2024 political ambitions.

The New York Post, one of Trump’s favorite hometown newspapers, marked Trump’s campaign launch with only this line on the very bottom of the front page: “Florida man makes announcement.”

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Peoples reported from New York. AP writers Mike Schneider in Orlando, Farnoush Amiri and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed.

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The AP Interview: Pence says voters want new leadership

November 17, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

NEW YORK (AP) — Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday that voters are “looking for new leadership” following the disappointing midterm elections for Republicans, who are now openly debating whether his onetime boss, Donald Trump, should maintain a leading role in the party.

In an interview with The Associated Press just hours after Trump announced another White House run, Pence declined to say whether the thinks the former president is fit to return to his old job. But he implicitly positioned himself as a potential alternative for Republicans seeking conservative leadership without the chaos of the Trump era.

”I think we will have better choices in 2024,” Pence said. “I’m very confident that Republican primary voters will choose wisely.” He said that he and his family will gather over the holidays “and we’ll give prayerful consideration to what our role might be in the days ahead.”

Asked whether he blamed Trump for this week’s Republican losses, he said, “Certainly the president’s continued efforts to relitigate the last election played a role, but … each individual candidate is responsible for their own campaign.”

Pence, while considering a presidential campaign of his own, has been raising his profile as he promotes his new memoir, “ So Help Me God,” which was released on the same day that Trump made official his long-teased White House bid. If Pence moves forward, he would be in direct competition with Trump, a particularly awkward collision for the former vice president, who spent his four years in office defending Trump, refusing to criticize him publicly until after Jan. 6, 2021.

That’s when a mob of Trump’s supporters — driven by Trump’s lie that Pence could somehow reject the election results — stormed the Capitol building while Pence was presiding over the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. The vice president was steered to safety with his staff and family as some in the mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Still, Pence on Wednesday remained largely reticent to criticize Trump beyond the insurrection. That hesitance reflects the reality that the former president remains enormously popular with the GOP base that Pence would need to win over to be competitive in primary contests.

“It wasn’t exactly the style of presidency that I would have advanced had I been the first name on the ballot,” Pence said of his unlikely partnership with Trump. “But it was his presidency and I was there to support him and help him. And until that fateful day in January 2021, I sought to do just that.”

Pence said he hadn’t watched Trump’s full announcement speech on Tuesday, but made the case that voters are looking for a new, less contentious direction.

“You know, the president has every right to stand for election again,” he said. But after traveling the country campaigning with midterm candidates, “I have a genuine sense that the American people are looking for new leadership that could unite our country around our highest ideals and that would reflect the respect and civility the American people show to one another every day, while still advancing the policies that we advanced during those years of service,” he said.

Trump’s campaign launch comes as Republicans grapple with fallout from elections in which they failed to wrest control of the Senate and are on track to win only the narrowest majority in the House. Those results came despite voters’ deep concerns over inflation and the direction of the country under Democrat Biden.

Trump endorsed a long list of candidates in competitive states including Pennsylvania and Arizona who then lost their general election races. While Pence said he was pleased Republicans were taking the House, he acknowledged the election “wasn’t quite the red wave that we all had hoped for.”

“My conclusion,” he said, “is the candidates that were focused on the future, focused on the challenges the American people are facing today and solutions to those challenges did quite well.” But those still questioning the 2020 results — as Trump demanded — “did not do as well.”

In his new book, Pence writes in detail about his experience on Jan. 6, and he expounded on that Wednesday.

“I’ll never forget the simmering indignation that I felt that day, seeing those sights on the cellphones as we gathered in the loading dock below the Senate chamber. I couldn’t help but think not this, not here, not in America,” he said.

In the interview, he recalled his reaction to Trump’s tweets “that criticize me directly at a time that a riot was raging in the Capitol hallways.”

“The president’s words were reckless, and they endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol building,” he said. “The president had decided to be a part of the problem. I was determined to be a part of the solution.”

Asked what consequences Trump should face for his actions, however, Pence punted.

“That’s up to the American people,” he said he believes. “I truly do. And look, I’ll always be proud of the record of the Trump administration for four-and-a-half years. President Trump was not just my president. He was my friend. And we worked closely together to advance the policies that we’d been elected to serve.”

“It didn’t end well,” he acknowledged, in an understatement. “And that tragic day in January will always be a day of great sadness for me, a sadness about what had happened to our relationship, to the bad advice the president was accepting from a group of lawyers that, as I write in my book, should never have been allowed on the White House grounds, let alone in the Oval Office. ”

Pence and Trump were always an odd couple — a pugilistic, crude New York celebrity and a staid Midwestern evangelical who once wrote an essay on the evils of negative campaigning and who, as a rule, says he will not dine alone with a woman who is not his wife. Asked why he so rarely spoke up when Trump launched deeply personal insults against figures such as the late Sen. John McCain, Pence said, in effect, that that was what he had had signed up for.

“As his vice president, I believed it was my role to be loyal to the president,” he said. “And so every step of the way, the way I squared it was I believe that I had been elected vice president to support the presidency that Donald Trump had been elected to advance.”

Indeed, Pence in the book writes that even after Jan. 6, the two men “parted amicably when our service to the nation drew to a close.”

“And in the weeks that followed, from time to time, he would call me and to speak and check in,” Pence said in the interview. “But when he returned to criticizing me and others who had upheld the Constitution that day, I just decided I’d be best to go our separate ways. And we have.”

Asked why he would part “amicably” with Trump given the president’s actions — including his decision not to call Pence to check in on his safety while the riot was underway — Pence said he believed the president had been genuinely regretful when they met for the first time after the 6th.

“For the balance of about 90 minutes, we sat, we talked. I was very direct with the president. I made it clear to him that I believe that I did my duty that day, and I sensed genuine remorse on his part,” Pence recalled. “The president and I had forged not only a good working relationship, but a friendship over four-and-a-half years. We worked together literally every day. But he was different in that time. I encouraged him to take the matter to prayer.”

As for his plans for the future, as everyone asks whether he plans to run, he and his family will gather over the holidays “and we’ll give prayerful consideration to what our role might be in the days ahead.”

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Shapiro to take office with mandate from Pennsylvania voters

November 15, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor-elect of Pennsylvania, will take office with a decisive mandate from voters, who overwhelmingly rejected a Republican drive to pare back abortion rights and voting laws in the premier battleground state.

Shapiro, the state’s two-term attorney general, scored a massive 14 percentage point win over Republican rival Doug Mastriano in last week’s midterm election, smashed state campaign finance records and became the first candidate since 1966 to succeed a governor of the same party in Pennsylvania.

Democrats in the state also flipped a U.S. Senate seat — just the second time since the Civil War that the state elected two Democrats to the chamber — while winning a majority of the state’s congressional seats and possibly even control of the state House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years.

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said the election results showed voters’ eagerness to protect abortion rights and the sanctity of elections from subversion by far-right Republicans who promoted former President Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud in his 2020 loss.

“In a lot of ways, it was a triumph over extremism as much as anything, and we probably underestimated that in the election,” Casey said.

Set to be sworn in Jan. 17, Shapiro will take the reins in a state riven by bitter partisanship over voting laws and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic by his predecessor, outgoing Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf. That helped drive a record number of vetoes by one governor going back to the 1970s.

Shapiro will likely face battles with Republicans who control the state Senate over the grist of statehouse business, such as budgeting.

And, with the 2024 presidential election looming, big questions remain unresolved over the state’s voting laws after three years of partisan gridlock, ongoing court battles over mail-in voting and Trump’s lies of fraud in the 2020 election that still buffet the state.

Still, Shapiro stressed that crossover support from Republican voters aided his victory against Mastriano, a far-right state senator who spread conspiracy theories, supported a complete ban on abortion and did more than any other gubernatorial candidate in the nation to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

Pledging to manage the state’s affairs with bipartisanship in mind, Shapiro said he has a “mandate” to bring people together and vowed to work with Republicans in the state Capitol.

“I think it’s clear, you know, I’m not going to get everything done that I want, and they’re not going to get everything done they want,” Shapiro said in an interview Friday on WILK-FM in Scranton. “But there’s a lot we can do together and that is what is going to be my focus.”

One conservative advocate, Leo Knepper, political director of the Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, said he worries that Republican lawmakers will shrug off conservative principles because of the size of Shapiro’s victory.

“I think that some of these Republicans are going to have their eye to the fact that he won by a fairly significant margin and what did that margin look like in their districts,” Knepper said.

About 6 in 10 independents backed Shapiro in the election, compared with about 3 in 10 who supported Mastriano, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 3,100 voters in the state.

Shapiro maintains that he will veto any legislation that he views as undermining abortion rights or voting rights. But, in a nod to the potential for Democrats to control the state House of Representatives, he told KYW-AM radio in Philadelphia that it appears that he “won’t have to wield that veto pen much.”

The Associated Press has not called two state House races that will determine which party controls the majority. County election boards are expected to certify results later this week.

Shapiro entered the race as a dominant figure in the state Democratic Party, a powerhouse fundraiser and polished speaker elected twice statewide — someone who even Republicans say is a talented politician.

He unified the Democratic Party, its leaders and its allies behind his candidacy, cleared the primary of challengers and ran to the middle on key issues, including on energy in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas state.

He broke with Wolf’s top climate-change priority, a quest bitterly opposed by Republicans to make Pennsylvania the first major fossil fuel state to impose carbon-pricing.

He proposed a big corporate income tax cut and opened the door to Republican plans to allow broader state funding of private and parochial schools. And he rejected Wolf’s COVID-19 policies, saying he would not order mask mandates or business shutdowns in a pandemic — even though his office had defended them in court.

In post-election interviews, he stressed that he will focus on his core priorities of improving schools, safety and the economy.

Shapiro also must assemble a Cabinet and name a replacement to finish the last two years of his term as Pennsylvania’s top law enforcement officer.

Shapiro will take office with the state in a stable financial position, thanks to strong tax collections and billions in federal pandemic aid.

Still, the state Supreme Court is considering a legal challenge to how the state funds public schools, a lawsuit that could impose major changes on how the state distributes billions of dollars in school funding.

He will be in the middle of the fight over climate change, facing pressure from environmental advocates to crack down on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, while labor unions — their members work on power plants, pipelines and refineries — say he promised not to block major new gas infrastructure projects.

Shapiro also will have to navigate a partisan fight over updating Pennsylvania’s voting laws, which has dominated the state Capitol the past two years.

Many Republicans on the campaign trail — including Mastriano and nearly every other candidate in the GOP gubernatorial primary — called for the repeal of no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania.

For his part, Shapiro said he will pursue changes to voting laws — Election Day voter registration and automatic voter registration — that have seen no traction in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

With Pennsylvania certain to be a battleground in the 2024 presidential election, the focus on election laws isn’t fading.

On Sunday, Mastriano conceded, issuing a statement that acknowledged his defeat and asked his supporters to give Shapiro the opportunity to lead.

But, he also said work must be done on elections to make them “transparent, secure and more quickly decided.”

“Pennsylvanians deserve to have faith in our elections,” Mastriano said.

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Associated Press reporter Nuha Dolby in New York contributed to this report. Follow Marc Levy on Twitter: twitter.com/timelywriter.

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Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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Suspect in assault at Pelosi home had posted about QAnon

October 29, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

The man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.

David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS Store.

DePape was arrested at the Pelosi home early Friday. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she expected to file multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and elder abuse.

Stepfather Gene DePape said the suspect had lived with him in Canada until he was 14 and had been a quiet boy.

“David was never violent that I seen and was never in any trouble although he was very reclusive and played too much video games,” Gene DePape said.

He said he hasn’t seen his stepson since 2003 and tried to get in touch with him several times over the years without success.

“In 2007, I tried to get in touch but his girlfriend hung up on me when I asked to talk to him,“ Gene DePape said.

David DePape was known in Berkeley as a pro-nudity activist who had picketed naked at protests against local ordinances requiring people to be clothed in public.

Gene DePape said the girlfriend whom his son followed to California was named Gypsy and they had two children together. DePape also has a child with a different woman, his stepfather said.

Photographs published by The San Francisco Chronicle on Friday identified DePape frolicking nude outside city hall with dozens of others at the 2013 wedding of pro-nudity activist Gypsy Taub, who was marrying another man. Taub did not respond Friday to calls or emails.

A 2013 article in The Chronicle described David DePape as a “hemp jewelry maker” who lived in a Victorian flat in Berkeley with Taub, who hosted a talk show on local public-access TV called “Uncensored 9/11,” in which she appeared naked and pushed conspiracy theories that the 2001 terrorist attacks were “an inside job.”

A pair of web blogs posted in recent months online under the name David DePape contained rants about technology, aliens, communists, religious minorities, transexuals and global elites.

An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals.

“Big Brother has deemed doing your own research as a thought crime,” read a post that appeared to blend references to QAnon with George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

In an Aug. 25 entry titled “Gun Rights,” the poster wrote: “You no longer have rights. Your basic human rights hinder Big Brothers ability to enslave and control you in a complete and totalizing way.”

The web hosting service WordPress removed one of the sites Friday afternoon for violating its terms of service.

On a different site, someone posting under DePape’s name repeated false claims about COVID vaccines and wearing masks, questioned whether climate change is real and displayed an illustration of a zombified Hillary Clinton dining on human flesh.

There appeared to be no direct posts about Pelosi, but there were entries defending former President Donald Trump and Ye, the rapper formally known as Kayne West who recently made antisemitic comments.

In other posts, the writer said Jews helped finance Hitler’s political rise in Germany and suggested an antisemitic plot was involved in Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

“The more Ukrainians die NEEDLESSLY the cheaper the land will be for Jews to buy up,” the post said.

In a Sept. 27 post, the writer said any journalists who denied Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election “should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”

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AP Global Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker reported from Washington and Breaking News Investigative Reporter Bernard Condon from New York. Reporters Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles, Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed.