Politics

Former President Donald Trump has lashed out on social media against the U.S. Justice Department after it stopped supporting his claim that the presidency shields him from liability against a defamation lawsuit.

Veterans resign as force established as civilian disaster relief becomes ‘militaristic’ and ‘abusive’

She claims that the decision that allowed a Colorado web designer not to be forced to create a site contrary to her beliefs extends to her view that only heterosexual couples should be married.

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Most of DeSantis' money came from donors who “maxed out” and can’t give again, as small donations have been a struggle for Trump's GOP challengers.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tapped out top donors and burned through $7.9 million in his first six weeks as a presidential candidate, according to an NBC News analysis of his new campaign finance disclosure.

The numbers suggest, for the first time, that solvency could be a threat to DeSantis’ campaign, which has touted its fundraising ability as a key measure of viability. They reflect the broader reality that DeSantis stalled after his launch: polling ahead of the Republican primary pack but far behind former President Donald Trump.

The irony for DeSantis is that he raised a total of $20.1 million between mid-May and the end of June, easily ahead of other Republican candidates — with the possible exception of Trump, who has yet to reveal how much money his campaign raised in the second quarter.

But more than two-thirds of DeSantis’ money — nearly $14 million — came from donors who gave the legal maximum and cannot donate again, NBC’s analysis shows. Some of those donors gave the $3,300 limit for both the primary and general elections, boosting DeSantis’ totals with cash that can’t be used to try to defeat Trump.

DeSantis finished June with more than $12.2 million in the bank, but his filing indicates that $3 million of that can only be used in the general election.

At the same time, DeSantis spent about 40 percent of what he raised, in part by paying salaries to 92 people. That gives him by far the biggest staff footprint of any of Trump’s Republican challengers, but also leaves him with the question of how he can sustain his payroll — or anything close to it — without finding new sources of revenue. Already, he is struggling to keep high-profile supporters on board.

DeSantis does have a financial edge no one else can match in the form of his super PAC, which can accept donations of unlimited size and already took in $130 million. But keeping a campaign humming on smaller donations can be a different matter entirely.

More broadly, Saturday’s second-quarter campaign finance filing deadline showed the challenge that each of Trump’s rivals has in trying to wrest the nomination from him at a time when about half of GOP primary voters say he is their top choice.

No other Republican raised more than $6 million from donors into their campaign account, with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy exceeding that number only by tapping their own personal wealth.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s campaign raised almost $5.9 million, while former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s campaign raised $5.3 million. And two candidates who waited until June to jump in posted lower numbers: former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie raised $1.7 million and former Vice President Mike Pence raised $1.2 million.

Their reports show a presidential field largely reluctant to invest in staffing and other major campaign costs, candidates having trouble tapping small-dollar donors for big returns, and a handful of candidates already in danger of missing the Republican National Committee’s first debate. Here’s what else we saw in the second-quarter finances.

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Small campaign staffs stand out in the early going

DeSantis stands out among those who have filed their reports in having the largest campaign staff — by a mile. His 92 staffers on payroll are more than double the next-largest campaign so far.

Scott reported 54 campaign staffers while Ramaswamy reported 27 and Haley had 22 staffers. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson had six people on staff.

Other campaigns were operating on a shoestring budget. Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder had one campaign staffer, while former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Texas GOP Rep. Will Hurd and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez did not list anyone on their payroll as of June 30.

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Debate qualification already looking tricky for some

The reports also show how difficult it may be for many of the lower-polling candidates to hit the Republican National Committee’s 40,000-donor threshold to qualify for the party’s first debate in August — let alone the polling threshold too.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who raised just $580,000, said in a statement that his campaign had just 3,928 unique donors in the second quarter, as well as another 2,516 in the first 13 days of July. He needs six times that many to hit the threshold.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’s reports names just 352 unique donors, and he raised less than $29,000 from unitemized donors who gave less than $200. Even if every single unitemized dollar was raised from a different unique donor (which is unlikely), Suarez still wouldn’t have hit the debate threshold through June.

And former Texas Rep. Will Hurd’s report names just 193 unique donors, along with another $54,000 from unitemized donations.

Small dollar donor struggles
One of Trump’s campaign strengths has long been his appeal to small-dollar donors. The flip side of that: His challengers are not getting much small-donor help themselves right now.

DeSantis, who raised the most of Trump’s challengers in the second quarter, only saw about 14% of his total fundraising haul coming from small-dollar donors, for about $2.9 million.

Haley and Scott, who spent millions building up small-donor fundraising infrastructure before launching presidential campaigns, raised only 16% ($870,000) and 21% ($1.2 million) of their second-quarter totals from small donors, too.

Among the field of Trump challengers, former Gov. Chris Christie took in the biggest share of his total from small donors: just below 35%. But that still worked out to only about $571,000 of his $1.6 million haul.

The conflict between a restaurant and conservative neighbors is tearing at the fabric of The Plains, Va., population 250.

"If left to their own devices, Republicans would gleefully take public education to the graveyard," said Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

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Kennedy said “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people,” but not “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He later denied saying that, despite video evidence.

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At an off-the-rails event Tuesday in New York City, notable anti-vaxxer and longshot 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. parroted what has been characterized as a white supremacist COVID-19 conspiracy theory.

“In fact, COVID-19, there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” Kennedy told a room full of press in a video obtained by the New York Post. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and Black people. The people that are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

The Anti-Defamation League and other organizations have previously identified those claims as one iteration of a baseless anti-semitic and sinophobic conspiracy theory voiced by white nationalists.

Jewish advocacy groups on both the right and left have torn into the Kennedy family scion for his unhinged remarks. The ADL said in a statement that Kennedy’s claim “feeds into sinophobic and anti-semitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”

The Post also quoted an infectious disease expert, who said, “I don’t see any evidence that there was any design or bioterrorism that anyone tried to design something to knock off certain groups.”

In a Twitter post on Saturday, RFK Jr. insisted—despite video evidence—that he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews.” Rather, he argued that he was simply pointing out that COVID-19 is “least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews,” during a conversation about how “the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons.”

“In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons,” Kennedy wrote. “I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”

Kennedy was also peeved that the Post exposed what he called an off-the-record conversation.

Squeezed between other attendees at a packed dinner table, Kennedy went on to expound on other outlandish theories that have helped form the basis of his conspiracy-fueled bid for the Democratic nomination.

“We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons,” Kennedy said. “They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”

Former chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon spent "months" encouraging anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run against President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, according to a report from CBS News.

People familiar with the matter told the outlet that Bannon hoped Kennedy could serve as a "useful chaos agent" in the election while also spreading "anti-vaccine sentiment around the country," according to CBS News' Robert Costa.

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Note from OP: Tagging this as a rumor due to incomplete sourcing, but the article has a good breakdown on RFK's campaign and his anti-vax efforts.

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher (the Nanny) schools the AMPTP in historic pro-labor speech.

#politics

Legislation backed by Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, would create a review board to declassify documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena across the government.

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Donald Trump declared to his supporters earlier this year that "I am your retribution" and his base's appetite for that promised vengeance hasn't waned

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Donald Trump has told supporters not to just see him as a candidate but as "your retribution."

In his comeback bid for the White House, the former president -- twice impeached but twice acquitted and now twice indicted -- has vowed that if reelected, he will wield his power to personally remake parts of the federal government to a degree that historian Mark Updegrove said was unprecedented. Trump has promised to hamstring perceived enemies, including in the Department of Justice, which is currently investigating him, and target Republican bogeymen like President Joe Biden.

He swore in June to appoint a special prosecutor to "go after" the Bidens and that he would "totally obliterate the deep state," referring to a conspiratorial view of how the government operates.

"This is the final battle. ... Either they win or we win," he said in March.

Among Trump's policy proposals is reviving an executive order from the final months of his presidency, revoked by Biden, that observers say would let him essentially turn broad swaths of federal workers into at-will employees whom he could fire and replace -- rather than terminating them only for cause, such as bad performance, and after satisfying certain employment protections.

Shortly after being indicted in New York in April on felony charges of falsifying business records, which he denies, related to money paid to an adult film actress during his 2016 campaign, Trump exhorted Congressional Republicans via social media to "DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES."

He's also directed ire at longtime nonpartisan institutions, deriding national security and intelligence workers as "corrupt," and he's crassly attacked both the special counsel who is investigating his alleged mishandling of government secrets -- and the prosecutor's family.

Experts says all of this is stretching -- maybe snapping -- the boundaries of how past presidential candidates have criticized the very government they hope to lead.

"Time and time again, we have seen Donald Trump attempt to remake our government in his image, not based on our country’s ideals and traditions, but based on a personal agenda," said Updegrove, a presidential historian and ABC News contributor.

But conversations with GOP insiders and attendees at recent Trump campaign events confirm the base's appetite hasn't waned for the revenge he promises. According to FiveThirtyEight, early polls show Trump is the clear front-runner for his party's nomination, with his support not stifled by either of his two historic indictments, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

"It makes me more supportive and more prone to help him in any way I can," Larry Miller from Merrimack, New Hampshire, told ABC News earlier this month at an event Trump held in New Hampshire.

Another attendee at that event, Krisia Santiago, said she was a two-time Trump voter who was sticking with him. She spoke bluntly: "They're scared because he can finish this war. … If you believe in him, you're gonna be a supporter no matter what."

Many of Trump's attacks against the FBI and DOJ at best stretch the truth -- with no evidence suggesting wrongdoing by the current president or by special counsel Jack Smith in bringing the recent federal indictment against Trump over his handling of classified information while out of office. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Smith have defended their work.

"This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida, and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged," Smith said last month.

The support from Trump loyalists for a complete overhaul of parts of the government has set off a chicken-or-the-egg debate over whether he has convinced his voters to turn against bodies like the FBI -- or if he's exacerbating a sentiment they already feel, given the myriad legal troubles and investigations Trump has faced.

"He has persuaded people that the FBI and the DOJ are at least enemies of Donald Trump" asserted veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

"He gets the people who care about him to care about people who are standing in his way. And the agencies of law enforcement ... he's declared war on them, and his followers will believe what he says," Ayres continued.

A Fox News poll released last month showed that 40% of registered voters have a lack of confidence in the FBI. And even intraparty critics of the former president concede how much his suspicions of law enforcement and his anti-government messaging have seeped into the broader GOP.

"The deep distrust and dislike that these people have and feel about these institutions just comes through so strong when you talk to these voters. Trump's message is in line with how the voters are thinking about these institutions. They don't trust them at all," said Gunner Ramer, the political director of the Republican Accountability PAC, which conducts focus groups with GOP voters.

"I think that this is very much about what Donald Trump has been able to really activate within the Republican Party base," Ramer said. "When you ask these Republican primary voters, 'How do you feel about Trump's campaign promise of investigating the Bidens?' It's near unanimous support for that."

Trump has so far survived a slew of legal problems since launching his political career, including a probe of his 2016 campaign's alleged links to Russia and two subsequent impeachments while he was in office. (While the Senate acquitted him in both cases, with fewer than two-thirds of the chamber voting against Trump, a bipartisan group of senators did vote to convict in both trials. )

Now, facing the indictments over hush money payments to a porn star and his handling of classified information after leaving office, Trump and his allies have turned their ire toward the president's son Hunter Biden, who recently reached a plea deal on tax and gun charges that will likely see him avoid prison time.

There's no evidence that Hunter Biden received preferential treatment in his deal, and the White House says it is actually proof of accountability -- but Republicans insist otherwise, claiming it as the latest evidence of what New Hampshire Trump voter Larry Miller called a "two-tiered justice system" that treats people differently according to politics.

The Hunter Biden investigation was conducted by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was appointed by Trump, remained in his position under President Biden and has said he was never "denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction."

"For many voters, both base Republicans and independents who see very clearly what's going on, this has been something that they've been following for years," claimed one Trump adviser, who like some others in this story asked not to be quoted by name in order to speak candidly.

"Whenever he speaks to himself as a victim, he is providing focus and color to the picture that they already recognize," added a former campaign official who remains in touch with the president's current team.

The ceaseless attacks from Trump have raised speculation over how far he would go if elected to a second term -- including if he would indeed launch investigations into Hunter Biden or others, like Hillary Clinton.

He has backed off of past promises of prison for his rivals, including Clinton. "She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways, and I am not looking to hurt them at all," he told The New York Times in 2016, weeks after beating her in the presidential election, when he often rallied voters with chants of "lock her up!"

"I would not be surprised that if any Republican takes over -- not just Trump, any Republican -- that you would see a further politicization-slash-weaponization of the Justice Department and less of the courtesy that they used to give former elected officials," one former Trump adviser who's still in contact with his campaign said.

"Everything's on the table," this person said, adding, "I think everybody needs to be put on notice ... I don't think that courtesy that Trump gave Hillary would exist the second time around."

A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Marc Lotter, the director of strategic communications on Trump's 2020 bid and now with the America First Policy Institute, said the 2024 strategy builds off of Trump's 2016 pitch, when he channeled voter frustration over trade and Barack Obama's presidency into a surprise win.

"He captured this feeling of people who are tired of being lied to, tired of being lied to by politicians and officeholders of both political parties," Lotter said. "And they were sick and tired of another poll-tested Washington creation politician. ... I think he taps into that, and he has been able to keep that going."

To be sure, Trump vowed broad changes to the government when he first ran in 2016, epitomized by his "drain the swamp" slogan that left critics, even other Republicans like current primary challenger Ron DeSantis, saying he didn't follow through.

Samara Klar, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies political attitudes and behavior, said that she "optimistically" thinks "our institutions will remain strong" in the face of Trump's attacks on the government. However, she conceded her belief is not universally held among her colleagues, some of whom she said think Trump could pose a more existential risk.

Democracy experts have previously spoken to ABC News about how they worried Trump was corroding crucial institutional trust.

"For the election system to work, our entire democracy to work, depends on trust in the election system. That is the reason why there is and has always been a peaceful transition of power after elections in the United States," Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said last year.

According to the GOP operatives and outside experts who spoke to ABC News for this story, Trump's continued assault on the federal government's legitimacy will likely be a mainstay of his 2024 campaign and return him to comfortable and controversial territory -- urging supporters to embrace him even if it means rejecting everyone else.

"There are very few Americans -- and frankly, probably very few people worldwide at this point -- who don't have a pretty crystallized attitude about Donald Trump. I don't think he can appeal to uncertain voters," Klar said. "At this point, his best strategy is to garner as much enthusiasm among the people that already like him."

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The Department of Education on Friday will forgive the debts of 804,000 people, an effort to fix what it calls "administrative failures" that denied student loan borrowers relief they were eligible for under their repayment plans.

Those 804,000 borrowers are people who have been paying their loans back through income-driven repayment plans, which allow debts to be forgiven once they've been paid for 20 or 25 years, depending on the plan.

But because of errors in tracking payments, officials said, many borrowers have been left paying well beyond their payment end-dates.

"For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement Friday.

"By fixing past administrative failures, we are ensuring everyone gets the forgiveness they deserve, just as we have done for public servants, students who were cheated by their colleges, and borrowers with permanent disabilities, including veterans," Cardona said.

Though there are multiple types of income-driven repayment plans offered by the Department of Education, they all have the same goal: set a borrower's monthly payment based on their income and cancel any remaining loans after 20 to 25 years of payments.

Friday's debt relief for over 800,000 people acknowledges that the second part of the plan -- cancellation -- often isn't happening, an issue that has also been well-documented by government watchdogs.

In 2022, the Government Accountability Office wrote that "the Department of Education has had trouble tracking borrowers' payments and hasn't done enough to ensure that all eligible borrowers receive the forgiveness to which they are entitled."

"We found thousands of borrowers still in repayment who could be eligible for forgiveness now," the GAO, a nonpartisan watchdog, wrote in its report.

In total, the fixes to the income-driven repayment plans being made by the Department of Education on Friday will result in $39 billion of automatic debt relief.

Borrowers will be notified on Friday by the Department of Education and relief will begin 30 days later, the department said.

If borrowers don't want their debts discharged, they can contact their loan servicers, the department advised. Servicers will be in charge of notifying borrowers once their debt is relieved.

"At the start of this Administration, millions of borrowers had earned loan forgiveness but never received it. That's unacceptable," Department of Education Under Secretary James Kvaal said in a statement on Friday.

"Today we are holding up the bargain we offered borrowers who have completed decades of repayment."

The debt relief announced Friday is part of a wave of fixes to programs that weren't holding up their end of the deal. That includes $45 billion to people enrolled in Public Service Loan Forgiveness who weren't getting the debt relief they were promised, and $22 billion to borrowers who were defrauded by for-profit colleges.

The fixes addressed Friday for people in income-driven repayment plans bring the total debt relief to $116.6 billion, the department said. The relief has reached more than 3.4 million borrowers.

The efforts to fix errors in the Department of Education's loan system come as President Joe Biden's program to cancel debt relief on a massive scale was rejected by the Supreme Court in June.

That program, a Biden campaign promise, would have canceled between $10,00 and $20,000 in loans for people making below a certain income, but it was ruled as beyond the scope of the president's power.

Since then, the White House has announced a new income-driven repayment plan that will lower monthly payments to 5% of a person's discretionary income, down from 10%, and decrease the timeline for forgiveness down to 10 years of payments, from 20 or 25, if the initial loan was less than $12,000.

The Department of Education is also in the rulemaking process to attempt debt forgiveness again through a different law, the Higher Education Act, though it's likely to face legal challenges.

First term Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) referred to Black people as “colored people” Thursday night during a floor debate over an amendment he proposed for the House-passed National Defense Authorization Act…

Investigators from the House Ethics Committee have begun reaching out to witnesses as part of a recently revived investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, focused on allegations that he may have engaged in sexual misconduct, illicit drug use or other misconduct.

Idaho has decided not to participate in a federal program that would have provided $14.8 million to feed low-income students during the summer, a decision that impacts about 123,000 children in need, according to the Food Research and Action Center.

Even in a political era defined by demented characters and strange shit, nothing could have prepared me for this.

We live in the stupidest timeline, y’all.

Campaign groups have written to officials in nine states urging the former president be barred from running for office for allegedly inciting an insurrection.

The money was listed as pay for a “speaking engagement” by Ms. Trump in a new personal financial disclosure by her husband.

The House passed an amendment to the national defense bill that blocks the Pentagon from reimbursing service members who must travel for reproductive care.

Several Republican representatives have proposed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act to try to stop the Pentagon’s electrification. The proposals sound so mind-bogglingly dumb that they look like they were written by 19th-century Luddites or the fossil fuel industry itself.

With the US military operating a fleet of hundreds of thousands of vehicles, including tactical vehicles, it makes the Pentagon the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world.

The entire transportation industry is currently transitioning to electric propulsion, and the US military knows better than to be left behind.

"Why would you pick Ukraine? Why not extend NATO to Russia and make it an anti-China alliance?" the GOP congressman said.

Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi wasn't happy after watching Republicans grill FBI director Christopher Wray in the House Wednesday. While Democrats questioned Wray for ignoring warnings about Jan. 6, Republicans sought answers to a slew of conspiracy theories and culture war grievances that go a...

A year straight of falling inflation has made Republican arguments against 'Bidenomics' way less convincing.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland went to court Wednesday to block Iowa’s six-week ban, a product of a one-day special session marathon on Tuesday Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) had called for the sole purpose of passing abortion restrictions.

Americans learned Wednesday morning the rate of inflation nationally has dropped dramatically, to just 3% annually, down from over 9% one year ago.But not in Florida, which MarketWatch reports “has the highest inflation in the U.S.”For much of the year, even before his presidential campaign official...