The event, at 9 p.m. Eastern in Philadelphia, will offer Americans their most detailed look at a campaign that’s dramatically changed since the last debate in June. In rapid fashion, President Joe Biden bowed out of the race after his disastrous performance, Trump survived an assassination attempt and bothsides chose their running mates.

Harris is intent on demonstrating that she can press the Democratic case against Trump better than Biden did. Trump, in turn, is trying to paint the vice president as an out-of-touch liberal while trying to win over voters skeptical he should return to the White House.

Trump, 78, has struggled to adapt to Harris, 59, who is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. The Republican former president has at times resorted to invoking racial and gender stereotypes, frustrating allies who want Trump to focus instead on policy differences with Harris.

The vice president, for her part, will try to claim a share of credit for the Biden administration’s accomplishments while also addressing its low moments and explaining her shifts away from more liberal positions she took in the past.

The debate will subject Harris, who has sat for only a single formal interview in the past six weeks, to a rare moment of sustained questioning.

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“If she performs great, it’s going to be a nice surprise for the Democrats and they’ll rejoice,” said Ari Fleischer, a Republican communications strategist and former press secretary to President George W. Bush. “If she flops, like Joe Biden did, it could break this race wide open. So there’s more riding on it.”

Tim Hogan, who led Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s debate preparations in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, said Harris, a former California attorney general, would bring a “prosecutor’s instincts to the debate stage.”

“That is a very strong quality in that setting: having someone who knows how to land a punch and how to translate it,” Hogan said.

The first early ballots of the presidential race will go out just hours after the debate, hosted by ABC News. Absentee ballots are set to be sent out beginning Wednesday in Alabama.

Trump plans to hit Harris as too liberal

Trump and his campaign have spotlighted far-left positions she took during her failed 2020 presidential bid. He’s been assisted in his informal debate prep sessions by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who tore into Harris during their primary debates.

Harris has sought to defend her shifts away from liberal causes to more moderate stances on fracking, expanding Medicare for all and mandatory gun buyback programs — and even backing away from her position that plastic straws should be banned — as pragmatism, insisting that her “values remain the same.” Her campaign on Monday published a page on its website listing her positions on key issues.

The former president has argued a Harris presidency is a threat to the safety of the country, highlighting that Biden tapped her to address the influx of migrants as the Republican once again makes dark warnings about immigration and those in the country illegally central to his campaign. He has sought to portray a Harris presidency as the continuation of Biden’s still-unpopular administration, particularly his economic record, as voters still feel the bite of inflation even as it has cooled in recent months.

Trump’s team insist his tone won’t be any different facing a female opponent.

“President Trump is going to be himself,” senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters during a phone call Monday.

Gabbard, who was also on the call, added that Trump “respects women and doesn’t feel the need to be patronizing or to speak to women in any other way than he would speak to a man.”

His advisers suggest Harris has a tendency to express herself in a “word salad” of meaningless phrases, prompting Trump to say last week that his debate strategy was to “let her talk.”

The former president frequently plows into rambling remarks that detour from his policy points. He regularly makes false claims about the last election, attacks a lengthy list of enemies and opponents working against him, offers praise for foreign strongmen and comments about race, like his false claim in July that Harris recently “happened to turn Black.”

Harris wants to argue Trump is unstable and unfit

The vice president, who has been the Biden administration’s most outspoken supporter of abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, is expected to focus on calling out Trump’s inconsistencies around women’s reproductive care, including his announcement that he will vote to protect Florida’s six-week abortion ban in a statewide referendum this fall.

Harris was also set to try to portray herself as a steadier hand to lead the nation and safeguard its alliances, as war rages in Ukraine more than two years after Russia’s invasion and Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza drags on with no end in sight.

She is likely to warn that Trump presents a threat to democracy, from his attempts in 2020 to overturn his loss in the presidential election, spurring his angry supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, through comments he made as recently as last weekend. Trump on social media issued yet another message of retribution, threatening that if he wins he will jail “those involved in unscrupulous behavior,” including lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials.

Harris has spent the better part of the last five days ensconced in debate preparations in Pennsylvania, where she participated in hours-long mock sessions with a Trump stand-in. Ahead of the debate, she told radio host Rickey Smiley that she was workshopping how to respond if Trump lies.

“There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” she said.

___

AP Polling Editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington and Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Las Vegas, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Josh Boak in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state. 

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years.

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere. 

About half the states ban transition-related surgery for minors, and even in states where such care is still legal, it is rare. In addition, guidelines from several major medical associations say a parent or guardian must provide consent before a minor undergoes gender-affirming care, including transition-related surgery, according to the American Association of Medical Providers. Most major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria. For those who opt for such care and have the support of their guardians and physicians, that typically involves puberty blockers for preteens and hormone replacement therapy for older teens.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not substantiate his claims and pointed NBC News to reports about parents’ being left in the dark about their children’s gender transitions at school. 

“President Trump will ensure all Americans are treated equally under the law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation,” said the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

Kate King, president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that even when it comes to administering over-the-counter medication such as Advil or Tylenol, school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent.

“There is no way that anyone is doing surgery in a classroom in schools,” she said when she was asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s claims stand out even amid years of allegations by conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits that teachers, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ adults are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender. 

The practice of labeling LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and trans women, as “groomers” and “pedophiles” of children had been relegated to the margins for decades, but the tropes resurfaced during the heated debate over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022. The law limits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in school and has been replicated in states across the country.

At the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers — including DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis. DeSantis, for example, alleged that Democrats want to “impose gender ideology” on kindergartners.

Nearly 70% of public K-12 teachers who have been teaching for more than one year said topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity “rarely or never” come up in their classrooms, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. Half of all teachers polled, including 62% of elementary school teachers, said elementary school students should not learn about gender identity in school.

Trump vowed last year that if he is re-elected he would abolish gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” This year, Trump also said he would roll back Title IX protections for transgender students “on day one” of his potential second presidential administration.

His campaign website says he would, if he is re-elected, cut federal funding for schools that push “gender ideology on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”

More broadly, Trump has promised to eliminate the Education Department, claiming that doing so would give states more authority over education.

During his first administration, Trump barred trans people from enlisting in the military — which he has vowed to do again if he is re-elected — and rolled back several antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. 

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This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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After a disastrous performance in the first general election debate of this cycle in June, President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid, upending the campaign in its closing months and kicking off the rapid-fire process that allowed Harris to rise as Democrats’ nominee in his place.

As was the case for the June debate, there will be no audience present.

Pennsylvania is perhaps the nation’s premier swing state, and both candidates have spent significant time campaigning across Pennsylvania. Trump was holding a rally in Butler, in western Pennsylvania, in mid-July when he was nearly assassinated by a gunman perched on a nearby rooftop. Harris chose Philadelphia as the spot where she unveiled Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in August.

In 2020, it was Pennsylvania’s electoral votes that put Biden over the top and propelled him into the White House, four years after Trump won the state. Biden’s victory came after more than three days of uncertainty as election officials sorted through a surge of mail-in votes that delayed the processing of some ballots, and the Trump campaign mounted several legal challenges.

An estimated 51.3 million people watched Biden and Trump in June. But that was before many people were truly tuned into the election, and the potential rematch of the 2020 campaign was drawing little enthusiasm.

Tuesday’s debate will almost certainly reach more people, whether or not it approaches the record debate audience of 84 million for the first face-off between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016.

Here’s a look at what to expect:

When is the 2024 presidential debate?

The presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump takes place at 8 p.m. CT/9 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Sept. 10, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

The planned debate comes nearly three weeks after the conclusion of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, in which Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination after a turbulent month kickstarted by Biden’s withdrawal.

How to watch the presidential debate

NBC News will broadcast the full debate live and offering extensive primetime coverage beginning at 8 p.m. ET. You can watch it here on the News4 streaming channel.

NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt and TODAY co-anchor Savannah Guthrie will anchor a pre-debate primetime special starting at 8 p.m. ET on NBC, followed by a live presentation of the ABC News-hosted debate at 9 p.m. ET. Holt and Guthrie will continue special coverage following the debate. 

Viewers can watch the debate live on NBC4 or on the News4 streaming channel, which is available 24/7 and free of charge across nearly every online video platform, including The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus and the NBC News app on smartphones and smart TVs.

Will mics be on or off? Full list of debate rules

The parameters now in place for the Sept. 10 debate are essentially the same as they were for the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden.

According to ABC News, the candidates will stand behind lecterns, will not make opening statements and will not be allowed to bring notes during the 90-minute debate. David Muir and Linsey Davis will moderate the event.

“Moderators will seek to enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilized discussion,” the network noted.

A Harris campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning around the debate, said a candidate who repeatedly interrupts will receive a warning from a moderator, and both candidates’ microphones may be unmuted if there is significant crosstalk so the audience can understand what’s happening.

After a virtual coin flip held Tuesday and won by Trump, the GOP nominee opted to offer the final closing statement, while Harris chose the podium on the right side of viewers’ screens. There will be no audience, written notes or any topics or questions shared with campaigns or candidates in advance, the network said.

Here’s the full list of rules:

– The debate will be 90 minutes with two commercial breaks.

– The two seated moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, will be the only people asking questions.

– A coin flip was held virtually on Tuesday, Sept. 3, to determine podium placement and order of closing statements; former President Donald Trump won the coin toss and chose to select the order of statements. The former president will offer the last closing statement, and Vice President Harris selected the right podium position on screen (stage left).

– Candidates will be introduced by the moderators.

– The candidates enter upon introduction from opposite sides of the stage; the incumbent party will be introduced first.

– No opening statements; closing statements will be two minutes per candidate.

– Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate.

– Props or prewritten notes are not allowed onstage.

– No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.

– Candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water.

– Candidates will have two-minute answers to questions, two-minute rebuttals, and one extra minute for follow-ups, clarifications, or responses.

– Candidates’ microphones will be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak and muted when the time belongs to another candidate.

– Candidates will not be permitted to ask questions of each other.

– Campaign staff may not interact with candidates during commercial breaks.

– Moderators will seek to enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilized discussion.

– There will be no audience in the room.

Are other debates planned?

Though the September debate is currently the only debate currently planned between Harris and Trump, Harris’ campaign said that a potential October debate was contingent on Trump attending the Sept. 10 debate.

In addition to the planned Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10, vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance also agreed to a debate, scheduled to be hosted by CBS News on Oct. 1.

When is Election Day?

Voters will officially head to the polls just over a month later Tuesday, Nov. 5, for Election Day, though early voting starts significantly earlier in many states.

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They have just three weeks to do so. Funding for the government runs out at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, and former President Donald Trump is urging Republicans to force a shutdown unless certain demands are met, NBC News reports. A shutdown would close federal agencies and national parks, while limiting public services and furloughing millions of workers just weeks before the election.

The presidential race looms over the final stretch for Congress; it is expected to leave again at the end of the month and return after Election Day. When the House left town for its summer break on July 25, President Joe Biden had just dropped out of the presidential race, Democrats were preparing to pick Vice President Kamala Harris as their new standard bearer, and Republicans were rushing to draw up a new playbook against Harris.

House Republicans have now settled on some lines of attack, which they’ll highlight in politically charged GOP hearings and investigations into both Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on issues from border security to the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Here’s what to expect during Congress’ final three-week sprint before it returns to the campaign trail in October.

Another shutdown threat

The single biggest task for Congress is to fund the government by the Sept. 30 deadline. It’s a foregone conclusion that lawmakers will need a stopgap bill to keep the government open past the election — they are nowhere close to agreement on a full-year funding measure. But the details and length of the bill are a source of consternation.

Under pressure from Trump and right-wing members, the Republican-led House released a stopgap bill that would keep money flowing through March 28 and tie it to the SAVE Act, a GOP-led bill to overhaul voting laws nationwide by requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Democrats oppose the latter measure, noting that it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote, with hefty penalties that make the practice very rare. They also say it could deter Americans from voting, as many lack easy access to passports or birth certificates.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said House Republicans are “taking a critically important step to keep the federal government funded and to secure our federal election process.” But if the bill passes the House, it’s going nowhere in the Democratic-led Senate, and Johnson will have to decide whether to back off or hold firm, as the GOP risks being blamed for a shutdown as the party that instigated the standoff.

“If Speaker Johnson drives House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the odds of a shutdown go way up, and Americans will know that the responsibility of a shutdown will be on the House Republicans’ hands,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a joint statement Friday after the release of the bill.

Also expiring on Sept. 30 is the farm bill for agriculture programs, which has already been punted once and is expected to be extended on a stopgap basis with a continuing resolution.

House GOP probes

After spending much of the 118th Congress focused on investigating Biden, House Republicans are now shifting their focus to Democrats’ new presidential ticket.

The House Education Committee subpoenaed Walz last week for information about how his administration responded to a large pandemic fraud scheme in Minnesota. While the committee has been investigating this issue since 2022 and had previously requested information from the state Education Department, this subpoena was the first outreach to Walz himself.

The House Oversight Committee, meanwhile, launched an investigation last month into contact Walz has had with Chinese Communist Party entities and officials, dating to the early 1990s, when Walz was a teacher leading student groups on educational trips to China.

Republicans are also focusing on the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which the Trump campaign has criticized Harris over. McCaul has threatened to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt unless he agrees to testify about Afghanistan on Sept. 19.

House Republicans also have a full lineup of hearings this week focused on the “Biden-Harris administration.” There’s a Judiciary Committee hearing on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victim Perspectives.” An Energy and Commerce subcommittee is holding one called “From Gas to Groceries: Americans Pay the Price of the Biden-Harris Energy Agenda.” And the Veterans Affairs Committee has a hearing titled “Accountable or Absent?: Examining VA Leadership Under the Biden-Harris Administration.”

While the House committees conducting the impeachment investigation of Biden released a report in August saying that the president committed impeachable offenses, it’s unlikely the full House will attempt to vote to impeach the president given the GOP’s razor-thin majority and skepticism from some rank-and-file members. Johnson only thanked the committees and encouraged Americans to read the report in a statement at the time.

Democrats strike back

House Democrats have launched their own investigations into the GOP presidential nominee, Trump, though they lack subpoena power in the minority.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, and Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the panel’s subcommittee for national security, the border and foreign affairs, sent a letter to Trump last week asking him to show proof he had never received any money from Egypt.

The top Democrats said they were probing a possible “$10 million cash bribe from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi” to Trump’s 2016 campaign, after The Washington Post reported on Aug. 2 about a secret Justice Department probe into the alleged bribe; NBC News has not independently verified that report.

“Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president — and a current candidate for president— took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator,” the Democrats wrote.

The Trump campaign responded by calling the story “fake news.”

In the Senate, Schumer has put members on notice that they will vote to confirm nominees and Biden-picked federal judges for the remainder of this year — including in the lame duck session after the election.

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The most populous presidential swing state has sided with the winner of the past two elections, each time by just tens of thousands of votes. Polling this year suggests Pennsylvania will be close once more in November.

A loss in the state will make it difficult to make up the electoral votes elsewhere to win the presidency. Trump and Harris have been frequent visitors in recent days, and the former president was speaking in Butler County on July 14 when he was the target of an assassination attempt.

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The stakes may be especially high for Harris: No Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania since 1948.

Pennsylvanians broke a string of six Democratic victories in the state when they helped propel Trump to victory in 2016, then backed native son Joe Biden in the 2020 race against Trump.

“They say that ‘If you win Pennsylvania, you’re going to win the whole thing,’” Trump told a crowd in Wilkes-Barre’s Mohegan Arena in August.

Republicans are looking to blunt Trump’s unpopularity in Pennsylvania’s growing and increasingly liberal suburbs by criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. They hope to counter the Democrats’ massive advantage in early voting by encouraging their base to vote by mail.

Harris is looking to reassemble the coalition behind Biden’s winning campaign, including college students, Black voters and women animated by protecting abortion rights.

Democrats also say it will be critical for Harris to win big in Philadelphia — the state’s largest city, where Black residents are the largest group by race — and its suburbs, while paring Trump’s large margins among white voters across wide swaths of rural and small-town Pennsylvania.

The debate is set for the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The city is a Democratic stronghold where Trump in 2020 notoriously said “ bad things happen,” one of his baseless broadsides suggesting that Democrats could only win Pennsylvania by cheating.

Biden flipped Pennsylvania in 2020 not just by winning big in Philadelphia, but by running up bigger margins in the heavily populated suburbs around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He also got a boost in northeastern Pennsylvania in the counties around Scranton, where he grew up.

Ed Rendell, a former two-term Democratic governor who was hugely popular in Philadelphia and its suburbs, says Harris can do better than Biden in the suburbs.

“There’s plenty of votes to get, a Democrat can get a greater margin in those counties,” Rendell said.

Lawrence Tabas, chair of Pennsylvania’s Republican Party, said Trump can make gains there, too. The GOP’s polling and outreach shows that the effect of inflation on the economy is a priority for those suburbanites, he said, and that the issue works in the party’s favor.

“A lot of people are really now starting to say, ‘Look, personalities aside, they are what they are, but we really need the American economy to become strong again,’” Tabas said.

Rendell dismisses that claim. He said Trump is veering off script and saying bizarre things that will ensure he gets a smaller share of independents and Republicans in the suburbs than he did in 2020.

“He’s gotten so weird that he’ll lose a lot of votes,” Rendell said.

Harris has championed various steps to fight inflation, including capping the cost of prescription drugs, helping families afford child care, lowering the cost of groceries and offering incentives to encourage home ownership.

Pennsylvania’s relatively stagnant economy usually lags the national economy, but its unemployment rate in July was nearly a full percentage point lower. The state’s private sector wage growth, however, has slightly lagged behind the nation’s since Biden took office in 2021, according to federal data.

Meanwhile, Democrats are hoping the enthusiasm since Biden withdrew from the race and Harris stepped in will carry through Election Day in November.

For one, they hope she will do better with women and Black voters, as the first female presidential nominee of Black heritage. Rendell said he is more optimistic about Harris’ chances to win Pennsylvania than he was with Biden in the race.

“I think we’re the favorite now,” Rendell said.

The debate takes place before voting starts — in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.

A national Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey conducted in July showed that about 8 in 10 Democrats said they would be satisfied with Harris as the party’s nominee compared with 4 in 10 Democrats in March saying they would be satisfied with Biden as the candidate.

There is some optimism among Pennsylvania Democrats even in Republican-leaning counties, including a number of whiter, less affluent counties near Pittsburgh and Scranton that once voted for Democrats consistently.

In Washington County, just outside Pittsburgh in the heart of the state’s natural gas-producing region, Larry Maggi, a Democratic county commissioner, thinks she will outrun Biden there.

Maggi is seeing more lawn signs for Harris than he ever saw for Biden, as well as more volunteers, many of whom are young women concerned about protecting abortion rights.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’m seeing people I’ve never seen,” Maggi said.

Democrats also hope there is a growing number of voters like Ray Robbins, a retired FBI agent and registered independent, who regrets voting for Trump in 2016. Robbins did so, he said, because he thought a businessperson could break congressional deadlock.

“He’s a liar,” Robbins said. “I think he’s totally devoid of any morals whatsoever. And you can quote me: I think he’s a despicable human being even though I voted for him.”

But Republicans have reason to be optimistic, too.

In the nation’s No. 2 gas-producing state, even Democrats acknowledge that Harris’ prior support for a fracking ban in her run for the 2020 nomination could prove costly. In this campaign, the vice president said the nation can achieve its clean energy goals without a ban, though Trump insists she will reverse course again.

Meanwhile, the Democratic advantage in the state’s voter registration rolls has steadily shrunk since 2008, from 1.2 million to about 350,000 now.

Republicans credit their outreach to younger voters, as well as Black, Asian and Hispanic voters.

“A lot of them tell us it’s the economy,” Tabas said. “And in Philly, it’s also the crime and safety in the neighborhoods and communities.”

Those gains have yet to translate into GOP wins as Democrats have beaten Republicans by more than 2-to-1 in statewide contests the past decade.

Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, chalks up the narrowing registration gap, in part, to “Reagan Democrats” who have long voted for Republicans, but did not change their registration right away.

One of those voters is Larry Mitko, a longtime Democrat-turned-Republican who lives in a Pittsburgh suburb.

Mitko, 74, voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and was leaning toward voting for Trump in 2024 because of inflation and Biden’s handling of the economy before Biden exited the race.

That is when Mitko became sure he would vote for Trump.

“I don’t like the fact of how they lied to us telling us, ‘He’s OK, he’s OK,’ and he can’t walk up the steps, he can’t finish a sentence without forgetting what he’s talking about,” Mitko said of Biden.

Harris’ late entry into the race could mean that many voters are still learning about her, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania professor of communication who researches presidential debates.

More voters than usual may not be locked into a decision even as voting looms, Jamieson said, so this debate could make a difference.

The threat was issued in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing Democrats of “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.”

“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote.

He continued, “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

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The threat was one of the most wide-ranging that he’s made while running for president after his 2020 defeat — going beyond threatening old foes and issuing warnings to those involved with the current election.

While he spent much of the 2016 campaign threatening to jail his opponent Hillary Clinton, he tends not to go after people on the periphery, like donors and election workers.

Election workers across the country have been subject to threats, most famously Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, two election workers whose entire lives were uprooted when Trump and his allies targeted them after the 2020 election with false accusations of fraud.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump began making baseless warnings of election interference that grew louder after he lost and culminated in a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s election. He’s begun making similar statements ahead of the 2024 election.

He also emphasized the GOP’s focus on election integrity this cycle during a speech Saturday in Wisconsin, suggesting that if Republicans stop Democrats from cheating, he does not need to continue campaigning. 

“We gotta stop the cheating. If we stop that cheating, if we don’t let them cheat, I don’t even have to campaign anymore,” Trump said. “We’re going to win by so much. In the meantime, too big to rig, too big to rig.”

Trump and his allies filed dozens of unsuccessful cases after the 2020 election in an attempt to overturn the results. Some Democrats say that Republicans’ new legal fights in battleground states ahead of the November election raise concerns that Republicans are attempting to sow seeds doubts about the result if Donald Trump loses.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign could not immediately be reached on Saturday night to provide additional context regarding Trump’s plan.

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On Saturday, they took their campaign against the conservative Project 2025 blueprint, written by allies of Republican Donald Trump, to the sky above college football stadiums in key swing states.

Democratic National Committee -sponsored banners pulled by small airplanes flew Saturday over Michigan Stadium, where the defending national champion Wolverines lost to Texas, and at home games for Penn State and Wisconsin. A banner set to fly over Georgia’s home game was grounded due to weather.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies have spent months warning about Project 2025, betting that the initiative makes Trump seem especially extreme. More than 900 pages and produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the plan lays out how Trump in his second term might do everything from firing tens of thousands of federal workers to abolishing government departments to imposing new restrictions on abortion and diversity initiatives.

Trump has rejected a direct connection to Project 2025, though he’s also endorsed some of its key ideas.

Saturday’s gambit aimed to put Democratic messaging over stadiums with a total capacity of 380,000-plus, with tens of thousands of fans more in the vicinity of each game.

“JD Vance ‘hearts’ Ohio State + Project 2025,” read the message going over Michigan Stadium, suggesting Trump’s running mate loves the project as much as he famously does Michigan’s hated archrival.

In Wisconsin, which hosted South Dakota, the message was “Jump Around! Beat Trump + Project 2025,” a nod to fans jumping with enough ferocity to shake Camp Randall Stadium when House of Pain’s “Jump Around” plays between the third and fourth quarters.

Penn State’s Bowling Green matchup got more general messages urging fans to “Beat Trump, Sack Project 2025.

Banners started flying around four hours before each kickoff, said DNC deputy communications director Abhi Rahman. The Trump campaign did not answer a message Saturday seeking comment.

Harris’ campaign and party bring up Project 2025 multiple times each day, often unprompted.

The DNC marked Labor Day by arguing that Project 2025 would undermine overtime rules and “hard-fought” worker rights. It also paid for internet ads on the initiative that flashed up for users searching “back to school.” Democrats have further pointed to Project 2025 in seemingly incongruous places, while highlighting Vance getting booed at a recent firefighters convention or slamming Trump for laying into his perceived political enemies in online posts.

“We want people to know exactly what Project 2025 is, what the ties are to Trump,” Rahman said. “Finding creative avenues to get the message out is something that we’re always trying to do.”

Democratic strategist Brad Bannon warned that Harris’ focus on Project 2025 “can’t overwhelm her positive message about the changes she wants to make.”

“She can’t afford to go overboard,” he said, “if it interferes with her establishing her own personal profile.”

A large portion of Saturday’s game crowds, meanwhile, may support Trump. Many college football fans hail from rural, more Republican areas, well beyond the confines of reliably Democratic college towns.

“One of the really interesting things when political candidates try to leverage sports is that they’re putting themselves at risk,” said Amy Bass, who is a professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University in Purchase, New York.

She pointed to Trump being surprised to get booed while attending Game 5 of the 2019 World Series — though the former president also made largely successful stops at tailgates before the Iowa-Iowa State football game in 2023 and when South Carolina hosted Clemson after last Thanksgiving.

Sports crowds have “a propensity to get loud, also have the added layer of alcohol and tailgating and all kinds of things pregame, and they haven’t curated that crowd,” Bass said.

Rahman, though, shrugged off such concerns.

“They can get rowdy all they want at a banner,” he said. “But the message is definitely there. It’s there for a reason.”

The required annual filing, for which Alito has often sought an extension, doesn’t include details of the event tickets gifted by socialite Gloria von Thurn und Taxis of Germany. Alito didn’t report any outside income from teaching or book contracts.

The financial disclosures filed by Supreme Court justices come against the backdrop of a heightened focus on ethics at the high court amid criticism over undisclosed trips and gifts from wealthy benefactors to some justices. The other eight justices filed their forms in June; Alito received an extension.

Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, belatedly acknowledged more travel paid by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow from 2019 this year, including a hotel room in Bali, Indonesia and food and lodging at a private club in Sonoma County, California.

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Alito, meanwhile, took a private plane trip to a luxury Alaska fishing lodge from two wealthy Republican donors in in 2008, the nonprofit investigative news site ProPublica reported last year. Alito, for his part, said he was not obligated to disclose the travel under a previous exemption for personal hospitality.

Alito also reported a handful of stock sales, including between $1,000 and $15,000 of Anheuser Busch stock sold in August of 2023, as the stock began to stabilize following a boycott from conservatives over a promotion Budweiser had with a transgender influencer. Alito has not commented on the stock sale, which was first disclosed in May. He also noted a 2015 loan from the financial services firm Edward D. Jones that was originally worth between $250,000 and $500,000 has now been mostly paid down, but was inadvertently omitted from some of his past reports.

Alito has separately been under scrutiny over flags that flew outside homes he owned. He has said they were raised by his wife.

The justices recently adopted an ethics code, though it lacks a means of enforcement. The code treats travel, food and lodging as expenses rather than gifts, for which monetary values must be reported. Justices aren’t required to attach a value to expenses.

Some Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have pressed for the adoption of a binding code of conduct and provide for investigations of alleged violations. Justice Elena Kagan has also backed adopting an enforcement mechanism. But the prospect for any such legislation is considered remote in a closely divided Congress.

The annual disclosures paint a partial picture of the justices’ finances, as they are not required to reveal the value of their homes or, for those who are married, their spouses’ salary.

Concert tickets were also disclosed by another justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, this year — hers were a gift from the singer Beyoncé, valued at more than $3,700. Several justices also reported six-figure payments to justices as part of book deals.

In their day jobs, the justices are being paid $298,500 this year, except for Chief Justice John Roberts, who earns $312,200.

In 2013, Jackson Jr. pleaded guilty to conspiring with his then-wife, Sandi Jackson, to illegally use $750,000 in campaign funds for personal purposes. He was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and served about half of that term behind bars before being released to a halfway house in March 2015 to finish the sentence.

“We worked with him on a regular basis. His concern and care for his constituents’ needs were always present,” the mayors of South Chicago suburbs wrote. “Like you, we also make decisions that affect people in their everyday life. Oftentimes we must reflect upon ‘never judging a man based on his worst day.’ We believe that Congressman Jackson has better days ahead.”

The push for a pardon comes the day after Biden’s son, Hunter, pleaded guilty to federal tax charges. Earlier this year, the younger Biden was convicted on three counts related to his illegal purchase of a handgun. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday that the president remains committed to his promise not to pardon his son.

The White House declined to comment on the mayors’ request that Biden pardon Jackson Jr.

This is not the first time elected officials have appealed to Biden on Jackson Jr.’s behalf. Several members of Congress — including Jackson Jr.’s successor, Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill. — have encouraged the president in recent years to use his pardon power to help the former lawmaker. So has Jackson Jr.’s father.

The 82-year-old Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is battling Parkinson’s Disease, appeared on stage in a wheelchair at the Democratic convention Aug. 19. Surrounded by fellow civil rights leaders, he received a long standing ovation.

Biden issued blanket pardons for certain marijuana offenses in 2022 and 2023, moves that together affected thousands of people who were convicted on drug-related charges. Outside of that, he has been sparing in his use of the constitutional power to grant pardons.

The Justice Department lists 25 people who were pardoned by Biden since he took office in January 2021. Donald Trump pardoned more than 140 people, including former members of Congress, political allies and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law. Presidents often issue bursts of pardons in their final days in office, and most of Trump’s were granted between his November 2020 defeat and his departure from the White House a little more than two months later.

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The GOP presidential nominee’s full response fell short of offering a coherent vision or policy for how he’d address child care needs, as he pivoted to promoting his proposed tariffs on imported goods to the U.S. and touting the revenue they would bring in.

Asked if he would “commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable” and “what specific piece of legislation” he would support during a Q&A session at the Economic Club of New York Thursday, Trump said:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.

“Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in.

“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”

Trump’s response went viral online after the clip and transcript were shared, sparking criticism from the campaign of Democratic presidential rival Kamala Harris and leaving policy experts across the ideological spectrum baffled.

“Somewhere in that incoherent word salad was a claim that the proposed tariffs could both balance the budget and pay for free child care across the country, which is of course mathematically absurd,” said Brian Riedl, an economic policy expert with the conservative Manhattan Institute and a former policy adviser to prominent Republicans. “Trump sounded like the student who hadn’t studied for the test and was making up numbers.”

The Harris campaign responded by attacking Trump’s tariffs while highlighting her proposals to expand the child tax credit.

“Billionaire-bought Donald Trump’s ‘plan’ for making child care more affordable is to impose a $3,900 tax hike on middle class families,” Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said, citing estimates from two think tanks on the impact of Trump’s tariff plan. “The American people deserve a President who will actually cut costs for them, like Vice President Harris’ plan to bring back a $3,600 Child Tax Credit for working families and an expanded $6,000 tax cut for families with newborn children.”

The Harris proposal is less aggressive than what the Biden White House has endorsed for families with children, which includes capping child care expenses for the middle class at 7% of income, as well as universal preschool. The Harris campaign didn’t respond when asked if she’d push for those provisions if elected president.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates mocked Trump’s answer during a Friday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“If you have any idea what the hell that answer means, you’re a better detective than I am,” Bates said, before citing analyses by nonpartisan experts that Trump’s tariffs would limit economic growth.

Reshma Saujani, who asked Trump the child care question at the Economic Club of New York, told NBC News after the event that the former president’s answer “kind of blew my mind.”

“He basically said that child care was not that expensive or that tariffs would solve it,” said Saujani, who is a member of the board and said the club had invited her to ask Trump a question. “That demonstrates to me how out of touch he really is. If you’re talking to parents and moms and families on the campaign trail, they’re talking about child care and the cost of it.”

In her question to Trump, Saujani, a founder of the groups Moms First and Girls Who Code, cited statistics showing that child care costs a total of $122 billion a year and described it as “one of the most urgent economic issues facing our country.”

She asked him to mention a specific piece of legislation he would advance to address the problem.

Trump did not answer her directly. Instead, he talked about the amount of money that would come into the U.S. through tariffs on foreign countries. He seemed to be suggesting that those sums could more than pay for child care needs, although he did not outline a plan for how the government should cover them.

For her part, Saujani believes Trump was making a different point that she called “shocking”: that the cost of child care is not that a big problem for the U.S. when compared to the sums involved in tariff collection.

Asked to clarify his response, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt replied: “President Trump’s first-term economic policies uplifted families by putting more money in our pockets, while making expanded access to childcare and paid family leave top priorities in his Administration. Now in Kamala Harris’ America, hardworking families are struggling to buy basic groceries, diapers, and baby formula for their children. President Trump will make America strong, safe, and prosperous again for struggling American families when he returns to the White House.”

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During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mallory McMorrow, a 37-year-old state senator from Michigan, brought out a giant copy of the roughly 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” and slammed it on the lectern, making an expression to signal how heavy it was as she opened to start reading.

“They went ahead and wrote down all the extreme things that Donald Trump wants to do in the next four years,” McMorrow said from the stage. “We read it.”

The lengthy plan drafted by conservatives serves as a blueprint to remake the federal government in a second Trump administration. The former president, meanwhile, has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming he doesn’t know anything about has “no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

However, many of Trump’s key allies and former administration officials are writers and architects of Project 2025.

“Don’t believe it when (Trump’s) playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Aug. 9 at a campaign event in Glendale, Arizona.

Here’s what to know about Project 2025:

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What is Project 2025?

Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed, 920-page handbook for governing under the next Republican administration.

The document outlines a dramatic expansion of presidential power. The overarching theme of Project 2025 is to strip down the “administrative state.” This, according to the blueprint, is the mass of unelected government officials who pursue policy agendas at odds with the president’s plans.

Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired and replaced by Trump loyalists.

It calls for the U.S. Education Department to be shuttered, and the Homeland Security Department dismantled, with its various parts absorbed by other federal offices.

There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation

The plan says the Department of Health and Human Services should “pursue a robust agenda” to protect “the fundamental right to life,” and the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medications used in abortions should be reversed. It also calls for reviving a 19th century law, the Comstock Act, to ban any abortion medications, equipment, or materials from being sent through the U.S. Postal Service.

Diversity, inclusion and equity programs would be gutted. Promotions in the U.S. military to general or admiral would go under a microscope to ensure candidates haven’t prioritized issues like climate change or critical race theory.

On immigration, proposals include targeted raids on immigrant communities for mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship and reversing the Flores settlement to make way for family separation. It also proposes restricting legal immigration by doing away with many of the programs that offer immigrants a pathway to citizenship, including work and student visas, DACA, family-based immigration, TPS and visas for victims of crime and human trafficking.

While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has broad authority to act alone.

To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.

John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did with Congress.”

In fact, Congress would see its role diminished — for example, with a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales.

Who is behind Project 2025?

Some of the people involved in Project 2025 are former senior administration officials with deep GOP ties. The project’s former director, Paul Dans, served as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under Trump. Dans stepped down from the role in July after the project “completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a statement.

Trump’s former White House budget chief, Russell Vought, was a key architect of the plan and was also appointed to the Republican National Committee’s platform writing committee. Vought is likely to be appointed to a high-ranking post in a second Trump administration. And he’s been drafting a so-far secret “180-Day Transition Playbook” to speed the plan’s implementation to avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump’s first term.

John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, was a senior adviser. McEntee told the conservative news site The Daily Wire earlier this year that Project 2025’s team would integrate a lot of its work with the campaign after the summer when Trump would announce his transition team.

More than a hundred conservative organizations have contributed to the project, recruiting an “army” of Americans to go to Washington and “flood the zone with conservatives” if Republicans took back the White House.

What does Trump say about Project 2025?

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and has denied knowing who is behind the plan.

Yet he spoke highly about the group’s plans at a dinner sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, saying: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

Trump’s recent attempts to reject the blueprint are complicated by the connections he has with many of its contributors.

The decision to make Ohio Sen. JD Vance his running mate was taken by some as one more connection to Project 2025. Heritage’s President Kevin Roberts has said he’s good friends with Vance and that the Heritage Foundation had been privately rooting for him to be the VP pick.

Vance penned the foreword to Roberts’ own new book, which was set to be out in September but has now been postponed as Project 2025 hits turmoil. Roberts is holding off the release of his potentially fiery new book until after the November presidential election.

Stephen Miller, a former Trump White House adviser who now runs America First Legal, has also been closely involved. Miller has also sought to distance himself, insisting in a statement to NBC News that he’s “never been involved with Project 2025.”

Democrats for months have been using Project 2025 to hammer Trump and other Republicans, arguing to voters that it represents the former president’s true — and extreme — agenda.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is also weighing a defense request to overturn the verdict on immunity grounds, delayed Trump’s sentencing until Nov. 26, several weeks after the final votes are cast in the presidential election.

It had been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.

Merchan wrote that he was postponing the sentencing “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”

“The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution,” he added.

Trump’s lawyers pushed for the delay on multiple fronts, petitioning the judge and asking a federal court to intervene. They argued that punishing the former president and current Republican nominee in the thick of his campaign to retake the White House would amount to election interference.

Trump’s lawyers argued that delaying his sentencing until after the election would also allow him time to weigh next steps after Merchan rules on the defense’s request to reverse his conviction and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.

In his order Friday, Merchan delayed a decision on that until Nov. 12.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Trump’s request to have the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize the case from Merchan’s state court. Had they been successful, Trump’s lawyers said they would have then sought to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed on immunity grounds.

Trump is appealing the federal court ruling.

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The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case, deferred to Merchan and did not take a position on the defense’s delay request.

“A jury of 12 New Yorkers swiftly and unanimously convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts. The Manhattan D.A.’s Office stands ready for sentencing on the new date set by the court,” a spokesperson for Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg told NBC News.

Messages seeking comment were left for Trump’s lawyers.

Election Day is Nov. 5, but many states allow voters to cast ballots early, with some set to start the process just a few days before or after the date Sept. 18.

Trump was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels claims she and Trump had a sexual encounter a decade earlier after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.

Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first presidential campaign. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels and was later reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.

Trump maintains that the stories were false, that reimbursements were for legal work and logged correctly, and that the case — brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat — was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at damaging his current campaign.

Democrats backing their party’s nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have made his conviction a focus of their messaging.

In speeches at the party’s conviction in Chicago last month, President Joe Biden called Trump a “convicted felon” running against a former prosecutor. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, labeled Trump a “career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments and one porn star to prove it.”

Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, inspired chants of “lock him up” from the convention crowd when she quipped that Trump “fell asleep at his own trial, and when he woke up, he made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge, which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.

Trump has pledged to appeal, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.

In seeking the delay, Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that the short time between the scheduled immunity ruling on Sept. 16 and sentencing, which was to have taken place two days later, was unfair to Trump.

To prepare for a Sept. 18 sentencing, the lawyers said, prosecutors would be submitting their punishment recommendation while Merchan is still weighing whether to dismiss the case. If Merchan rules against Trump, he would need “adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options,” they said.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.

WASHINGTON — Eighty-eight current and former top executives from across corporate America have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in a new letter shared exclusively with CNBC.

Among the signers are several high-profile CEOs of public companies, including Aaron Levie of Box, Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp and Michael Lynton, chairman of Snap, Inc. 

Other signers appear to be issuing their first public endorsements of Harris since she became the de facto Democratic nominee in July.

They include James Murdoch, the former CEO of 21st Century Fox and an heir to the Murdoch family media empire, and crypto executive Chris Larsen, co-founder of the Ripple blockchain platform.

Other notable signers are philanthropist Lynn Forrester de Rothschild, private equity billionaire José Feliciano, Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, and D.C. sports magnate Ted Leonsis, owner of the NBA’s Washington Wizards, WNBA’s Mystics and the NHL’s Washington Capitals.

The three-page list also includes a slate of longtime Democratic political donors, like Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, Insight partners Deven Parekh and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios.

Another subset of names are people who have supported Harris in particular since her political campaigns in California, like the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and NBA Hall-of-Famer and billionaire businessman Magic Johnson.

More than a dozen of the signers made their fortunes on Wall Street: Tony James, the former president and COO of Blackstone and founder of Jefferson River Capital; Bruce Heyman, former managing director of private wealth at Goldman Sachs; Peter Orszag, CEO of Lazard and Steve Westly managing director of the Westly Group and a former Tesla board member. 

Still more are prominent in Silicon Valley, including the venture capitalist Ron Conway, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, and former LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.

After all these, however, the lion’s share of the 88 signers who endorsed Harris are former CEOs of major public companies.

They include former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Barry Diller of Paramount, Ken Frazier of Merck, Logan Green of Lyft, Blake Irving of GoDaddy, Alan Mulally of Ford, Laxman Narasimhan of Starbucks, and Dan Schulman of PayPal.

A strategic purpose

Considering how long the list of names runs, the endorsement letter itself is relatively short.

“The best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy” is by electing Harris president, the writers say.

They also argue that Harris would “continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment” if she were president.

The reason for the long list and the short letter is because the letter itself was not written to convince the general public to vote for Harris.

Instead, it’s purpose is to serve as a well-timed political show of force for Harris, who is locked in a very tight race, with the first presidential debate just four days away.

Both Harris and Trump have spent the past week rolling out their dueling economic visions, ahead of the Sept. 10 debate, hosted by ABC.

Harris outlined proposals to support small businesses that feature a plan to increase a tax deduction for start-up expenses by ten times, up to $50,000. 

She also proposed lifting the top capital gains tax rate to 28% for people making more than $1 million a year—up from the current 20% rate, but far lower than the 39.6% level that President Joe Biden has proposed.

Harris said she dialed back Biden’s top rate, in part, because her goal is to encourage more private-sector investment.

Trump laid out his own competing economic agenda on Thursday in New York, where he called for the creation of a government efficiency commission designed to root out fraud.

He also pledged to cut the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% for companies that make their products in the United States.

Trump has also earned support from a number of prominent Wall Street and private-sector backers, including Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

The letter’s initial organization can be traced back to four top Harris supporters: Roger Altman, senior chairman of Evercore, Blair Effron, co-founder of Centerview Partners, the former American Express CEO Ken Chenault and Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox.

The genesis of the project was described to CNBC by a person familiar with the process, who was granted anonymity to describe how it came about.

Altman, Effron, Chenault and Burns organized the effort, and then brought the letter to the Harris presidential campaign as a way to showcase the vice president’s support within the business community.

The full text of the letter and list of signatures is below.

We endorse Kamala Harris’s election as President of the United States.

Her election is the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy. With Kamala Harris in the White House, the business community can be confident that it will have a President who wants American industries to thrive. As a partner to President Biden, Vice President Harris has a strong record of advancing actions to spur business investment in the United States and ensure American businesses can compete and win in the global market. She will continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment, and she will strive to give every American the opportunity to pursue the American dream.

• Roger Altman, Founder & Senior Chairman of Evercore
• Shellye Archambeau, former CEO of MetricStream
• Carl Bass, former CEO of Autodesk
• Tom Bernstein, President and Co-Founder of Chelsea Piers
• Afasaneh Beschloss, Founder & CEO of Rock Creek
• Jeff Bewkes, former CEO of Time Warner
• W. Michael Blumenthal, 64th U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and former CEO of both Bendix and Unisys
• Rosalind “Roz” Brewer, former CEO of Sam’s Club; former CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance; former COO of Starbucks
• Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox; Chairwoman of Teneo; Founding Partner of Integrum Holdings
• Maverick Carter, CEO of The SpringHill Company
• Ken Chenault, Chairman & Managing Director of General Catalyst; former Chairman & CEO of American Express
• Peter Chernin, Co-Founder & Partner of TCG 
• Tony Coles, Chairperson & former CEO of Cerevel
• Tim Collins, Founder, CEO, and Senior Managing Director of Ripplewood
• Ron Conway, Founder & Managing Partner of SV Angel
• Robert Crandall, former President and Chairman of American Airlines
• Mark Cuban, Various entrepreneurial endeavors and a “shark” on Shark Tank
• Richelieu Dennis, Founder and Executive Chair of Sundial Group of Companies
• Barry Diller, Chairman & Senior Executive of IAC and Senior Executive of Expedia; Former Chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures and Fox, Inc.
• John Doerr, Chairman of Kleiner Perkins
• Arnold Donald, former CEO of Carnival Corporation
• Blair Effron, Partner & Co-Founder of Centerview Partners
• José E. Feliciano, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Clearlake Capital Group
• David P. Fialkow, Co-Founder & Managing Director of General Catalyst
• Anne Finucane, former Vice Chair of Bank of America
• Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chief Executive of E.L. Rothschild
• Ken Frazier, former Executive Chairman, President & CEO of Merck
• Mark Gallogly, Co-Founder and Managing Principal of Three Cairns Group; Co-Founder of Centerbridge Partners
• Chad Gifford, Former Chairman of Bank of America
• David Grain, Founder and CEO of Grain Management
• Logan Green, Chairman and former CEO of Lyft
• Daniel J. Halpern, Co-founder and CEO of Jackmont Hospitality
• Bruce Heyman, Former U.S. Ambassador to Canada and former Managing Director of Private Wealth at Goldman Sachs
• Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO and President of Ariel Investments; Chairman of Starbucks
• Roger Hochschild, former CEO and President of Discover Financial Services
• Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock Partners and Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn 
• Glenn Hutchins, Chairman of North Island or Co-Founder of Silver Lake
• Blake Irving, former CEO of GoDaddy
• Tony James, former President, CEO & Executive Vice Chairman of Blackstone; Founder of Jefferson River Capital
• David Jacobson, Senior Advisor and former Vice Chair of BMO Financial Group; Former U.S. Ambassador to Canada
• Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Chairman and CEO, Magic Johnson Enterprises
• Brad Karp, Chairman of Paul, Weiss
• Jeffrey Katzenberg, Founder & Managing Partner of WndrCo
• Ellen Kullman, President and CEO of Carbon3; former Chair and CEO of DuPont
• Todd Lachman, Founder of Sovos Brands
• Chris Larsen, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Ripple
• Jeff Lawson, former CEO of Twilio
• Ted Leonsis, CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment
• Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box
• Ed Lewis, former Chairman and CEO of Essence Communications, co-founder Essence Magazine
• William M. Lewis, Jr.
• Michael Lynton, Chairman of Snap, Inc., former CEO of Sony Entertainment
• Tracy V. Maitland, President and Chief Investment Officer of Advent Capital Management
• Helena Maus, CEO of Archetype and Marker Collective
• Marissa Mayer, co-founder and CEO of Sunshine Products, former CEO of Yahoo!
• T.J. McGill, Co-Founder of Evergreen Pacific Partners and Suzanne Sinegal McGill, Co-Founder of Rwanda Girls Initiative
• Danny Meyer, Founder & Executive Chairman of Union Square Hospitality Group
• Dustin Moskovitz, Co-founder and CEO of Asana
• Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford
• Anne Mulcahy, former Chairman and CEO of Xerox
• James Murdoch, Founder & CEO of Lupa Systems; former CEO of 21st Century Fox
• Laxman Narasimhan, former CEO of Starbucks
• Indra Nooyi, former Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo
• Peter Orszag, former Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget and CEO of Lazard
• Deven J. Parekh, Managing Director of Insight Partners
• Sean Parker, Founder of Napster; Founder and Chairman of Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy
• Charles Phillips, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Recognize; former President of Oracle and former CEO of Infor; 
• Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder and President of Emerson Collective
• Penny Pritzker, 38th U.S. Secretary of Commerce; founder and Chairman of PSP Partners 
• Vasant Prabhu, former CFO and Vice-Chair of Visa
• Spencer Rascoff, Founder and CEO of 75 & Sunny Ventures; Co-Founder and former CEO of Zillow
• Punit Renjen
• Rachel Romer, Founder of Guild Education
• Robert Rubin, former U.S. Treasury Secretary; Senior Counselor at Centerview Partners
• Kevin P. Ryan, Co-founder, MongoDB, Business Insider, GILT Groupe, Zola, Pearl Health, Affect Therapeutics, and Transcend Therapeutics
• Faiza J. Saeed
• Dan Schulman, former President & CEO of PayPal
• Jim Sinegal, Co-Founder and Former CEO of Costco
• Dan Springer, former CEO of Docusign
• Tom Steyer, Founder and former Co-Senior-Managing-Partner of Farallon Capital
• Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp
• Scott Stuart, Founding & Managing Partner of Sageview Capital
• Larry Summers, 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury and President Emeritus of Harvard University
• Hamdi Ulukaya, Founder & CEO of Chobani
• Daniel Weiss, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Angeleno Group
• Steve Westly, Founder and Managing Partner of The Westly Group
• Ron Williams, former CEO of Aetna
• Robert Wolf, former CEO of UBS Americas

“I really care about Puerto Rico and I don’t know if it’s the weight of … I want to cry and everything,” the singer said in Spanish as he attempted to swallow back tears in a clear effort to contain himself from crying. “It’s good to go out on the streets to protest, to let ourselves be heard as people, but I think that the biggest act of protest is to vote against the people who have led us to this mess on Nov. 5.”

Bad Bunny made the statements as part of a wide-ranging interview with Puerto Rican YouTuber El Tony posted on Labor Day.

Since then, clips of the interview have become the source of countless memes on social media, from people posting what outfits they’ll wear on Election Day to fan-generated jingles echoing some people’s discontent with the political party that’s currently in power.

It also seems to be having an early effect in empowering disenfranchised voters frustrated with local party politics and motivating newly eligible young voters to register to vote before the Sept. 21 deadline.

“Voting is very important, especially if you are young. Deciding the future of the place where we live, where we grew up, don’t let others decide it,” Bad Bunny, 30, said in Monday’s interview.

A day after the interview was posted online, college students at the University of Puerto Rico were hosting a voter registration event on the Río Piedras campus when the entire school lost power, serving as a bleak reminder of Puerto Rico’s new normal: one in which widespread power outages have only become longer and more recurrent in recent years as permanent reconstruction of its hurricane-ravaged electrical grid has been pending since 2017.

Hundreds of students who had attended the event were unable to register to vote Tuesday following the outage, but organizers urged people to return Wednesday. About 300 students became newly registered voters and dozens more updated their existing voter registration with their latest address.

Several voting rights and civic engagement organizations shared videos and photos on social media showing long lines of people at different college campuses at various voter registration events Thursday.

Bad Bunny’s remarks came days after Somos Más, a Puerto Rico-based civic engagement nonprofit, released data revealing that 75% of all newly eligible voters under age 21 had not yet registered to vote.

According to the organization, the numbers are consistent with an overall decline in new voter registrations and voter turnout since 2012 that experts have attributed to both a growing lack of trust in Puerto Rican government institutions and population loss.

More than 700,000 working-age Puerto Ricans have been forced to migrate to the U.S. mainland over the past 15 years due to economic turmoil stemming from Puerto Rico’s financial crisis, which became the largest public debt restructuring in U.S. history, and devastating natural disasters that include 2017’s Hurricane Maria and a series of earthquakes in 2020.

Against this background, Puerto Ricans have become more critical of the partisan lines that have deeply divided the local electorate for more than five decades, resulting in significantly lower voter turnout over the past two election cycles.

In 2016, Puerto Rico had record low voter turnout of 55%, an unusual milestone for an island known for high voter turnouts of 73% to 89%. Voter turnout remained at 55% in the 2020 election.

Traditionally, most people have supported either the pro-statehood New Progressive Party or the Popular Democratic Party, which supports the current territorial status. A smaller percentage of “independentistas” support the Puerto Rican Independence Party, which advocates for independence from the U.S.

But a surge of independent candidates and newly formed political parties, such as the Citizens’ Victory Movement, which is running on an anti-colonialism ideology, and Project Dignity, which favors a Christian democracy, have emerged in recent years as a result of growing distrust in local government institutions that have long been run by the establishment parties.

This year, members of the Puerto Rican Independence Party and the Citizens’ Victory Movement joined together under a new coalition named Alianza de País in an attempt to go against establishment parties.

Desperate for a change, younger voters who have only known a Puerto Rico riddled in crises tend to be more open and supportive of new, emerging candidates, compared with the older electorate.

“No changes will happen overnight, but at some point we have to start rebuilding Puerto Rico,” Bad Bunny said as he urged people to register to vote.

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In a report to the White House, the watchdog agency said Del Toro’s comments about the presidential election came in a BBC interview and when he was responding to questions after a speech in London. While he later reported the remarks, his unwillingness to take responsibility for them is troubling, the special counsel said.

The agency said Del Toro’s comments, which were made before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits U.S. officials from engaging in political activity while they are on duty and from “using their official authority or influence to interfere with or affect the result of an election.”

“The United States and the world need the mature leadership of President Biden,” Del Toro said in response to a question after giving a speech at the Royal United Services Institute in late January. He added, “We cannot afford to have a president who aligns himself with autocratic dictators and rulers whose interpretation of democratic principles is suspicious (at) best.”

Later, during an interview on “BBC News Sunday,” Del Toro was asked about his comments on Trump’s democratic principles. Del Toro responded that in the past, Republican and Democratic presidents abided by core American values and protected democracy.

“When you have someone who doesn’t align to those core principles, it makes you wonder, you know, should you be supporting that individual?” he said.

Del Toro was asked, “You said he had a suspicious attitude to democracy?” And the Navy secretary responded, “Absolutely so.”

Several days later, Del Toro self-reported the blunder to the special counsel, saying his intention was to focus on the importance of strong international alliances. But, he added, “In retrospect, I believe my response should have been delivered more broadly without reference to specific candidates.”

In a separate written response to the watchdog’s findings, the secretary’s lawyer, Michael Bromwich, said Del Toro’s remarks were “spontaneous and unpremeditated” and did not constitute a violation of the Hatch Act. Bromwich said Del Toro was responding to questions and did not directly speak Trump’s name.

Special counsel Hampton Dellinger said in his report that Del Toro “crossed a legal line.” And he said the secretary’s “unwillingness to acknowledge a mistake is striking” and troubling.

Asked about the violation, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said at a briefing that the department is reviewing the report. She added that “it’s important that we maintain the trust and confidence of the American people, which requires us to avoid any action that could imply the support of any political party, candidate or campaign.”

Navy Capt. Clay Doss said in a statement that the service got a copy of the report Thursday and “this matter will be addressed through the appropriate process.”

Dellinger said he appreciates that Del Toro reported the comments, “but this fact alone should not absolve him.” Del Toro has also issued his own directive for his Navy force, Dellinger said, noting that “it is more important than ever for us to remember that the DON (Department of the Navy) is an apolitical body. …. Public trust and confidence depend on this.”

The findings come after two Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the Pentagon’s top two leaders in August, pressing them to ensure the military is not swept up in politics during the presidential election.

Career government officials found to have violated the Hatch Act can be fired, suspended or demoted and fined up to $1,000, though few penalties are ever levied against federal employees.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for a comment.

“When you saw 5,000 people a day crossing into a town like Eagle Pass, Texas, you could see that that was on your TV. You knew what was going on in America,” Abbott told a crowd of about 50 people gathered at a wedding venue in a Phoenix suburb. “What Harris wanted to do was to silence the critics, and they could silence the critics by making this problem go invisible.” 

“They’re doing that daily, flying people across the border or through this [asylum application program], getting them to come to a port of entry, at which time they will put them on a bus and then transport them to some other place,” he said.

An internal document obtained by NBC News in 2022 revealed a plan from the Department of Homeland Security to transport migrants awaiting immigration proceedings from U.S. cities along the southern border farther into the interior of the country. Typically, migrants who are granted asylum in the United States are transported to different parts of the country by paying for it themselves or through the charity of nongovernmental organizations after being released by Customs and Border Protection.

NBC News has contacted Abbott’s team for clarification on the programs he was referencing. In response to Abbott’s claims, the Harris-Walz campaign shared a statement from a border town mayor from Bisbee, Arizona, criticizing Trump for opposing a bipartisan border bill that Senate Republicans shot down in February. 

“The border bill would have made our country safer, made the border more secure,” said Mayor Ken Budge in a statement. “Now that it’s election time, JD Vance and Trump are here to campaign on the border — even though they’re responsible for blocking the most important bill we’ve seen to improve border security,” Budge added.

The attack from Abbott comes as the Trump campaign has sought to tie Harris to chaos surrounding migrants and the U.S. border. Since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump has repeatedly called Harris the “border czar” in attacks, seizing on the assignment Biden gave her in 2021 to work with Central American countries to tackle the “root causes” of migration.

Minutes after attacking Harris for busing migrants to other parts of the country, Abbott bragged about doing the same.

Recalling the steps he took when Texas began busing migrants in 2022 under Operation Lone Star, Abbott boasted that the program “began busing them to Washington, D.C., and then dropping them off at the address of the residence of the vice president of the United States of America, Kamala Harris.” Applause and cheers reverberated throughout the campaign event. 

“If you were a sanctuary city, you were on the list to be bused to because you volunteered,” said Abbott of his formulation of the busing program. “You said, ‘We welcome you here until you get there,’” he said. “It shows the hypocrisy of the Democrats.” 

During the Republican National Convention in July, Abbott vowed that “buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.” Buses sending migrants to blue cities have not been sent out on a consistent basis for months; in all of July no buses left Texas, according to data obtained by NBC News. 

In June, a Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that Border Patrol agents stopped roughly 84,000 migrants crossing the U.S. southern border, the lowest monthly number since Biden took office in 2021. The Biden administration attributed the low numbers to new asylum restrictions implemented earlier that month.

Didi Martinez and Laura Strickler contributed.

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Indictments announced Thursday by the Department of Justice allege that Dimitri Simes and his wife received over $1 million dollars and a personal car and driver in exchange for work they did for Russia’s Channel One since June 2022. The network was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Simes, 76, and his wife, Anastasia Simes, have a home in Virginia and are believed to be in Russia.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a statement announcing the indictments. “Such violations harm our national security interests — a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a U.S. citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

The indictments come at a time of renewed concern about Russian efforts to meddle with the upcoming U.S. election using online disinformation and propaganda. On Wednesday federal authorities charged two employees of the Russian media organization RT with covertly funding a Tennessee company that produced pro-Russian content.

Simes, who led a Washington think tank called the Center for the National Interest, figured prominently in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential ties to the Trump campaign.

The report chronicles interactions that the Soviet-born Simes, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s, had with assorted figures in Trump’s orbit, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Before one such meeting, according to the Mueller report, Simes sent Kushner a letter detailing potential talking points for Trump about Russia and also passed along derogatory information about Bill Clinton that was then forwarded to other representatives of the campaign.

Simes’s think tank helped arrange a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at which Simes introduced Trump. Among those present was Sergei Kislyak, the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S.

Simes was never charged with any crime in relation to the investigation.

After the report was released, Simes defended himself in an interview in The Washington Post: “I did not see anything in the Mueller report that in any way that would indicate any questionable activity on my part or on the center’s part.”

A second indictment alleges that Anastasia Simes, 55, received funds from sanctioned Russian businessman Alexander Udodov. Udodov was sanctioned last year for his support for the Russian government. He is the former brother-in-law of Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and has been linked to business dealings with both of them. Udodov also has been investigated for money laundering.

If convicted of the charges, the couple face a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

Messages left with an attorney for Simes and the Trump campaign were not immediately returned on Thursday.

Hunter Biden’s stunning decision to plead guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges without the benefits of a deal with prosecutors came hours after jury selection was supposed to begin in the case accusing him of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes.

The president’s son was already facing potential prison time after his June conviction on felony gun charges in a trial that aired unflattering and salacious details about his struggles with a crack cocaine addiction. The tax trial was expected to showcase more potentially lurid evidence as well as details about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which Republicans have seized on to try to paint the Biden family as corrupt.

Although President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election muted the potential political implications of the tax case, the trial was expected to carry a heavy emotional toll for the president in the final months of his five-decade political career.

“After watching prosecutors exploit his family’s pain during the Delaware trial and realizing that they were planning to do it again here in California, Hunter decided to enter his plea to protect those he loves from unnecessary hurt and cruel humiliation,” defense attorney Abbe Lowell told reporters outside the Los Angeles courthouse.

“Hunter put his family first today, and it was a brave and loving thing for him to do,” Lowell said.

Hunter Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years behind bars, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence. Sentencing is set for Dec. 16.

More than 100 potential jurors had been brought to the courthouse in Los Angeles on Thursday to begin the process of picking the panel to hear the case alleging a four-year scheme to avoid paying taxes while spending wildly on things like strippers, luxury hotels and exotic cars.

Prosecutors were caught off guard when Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the judge Thursday morning that Hunter wanted to enter what’s known as an Alford plea, under which a defendant maintains their innocence but acknowledges prosecutors have enough evidence to secure a conviction.

Prosecutors said they objected to such a plea, telling the judge that Hunter Biden “is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him.”

“Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty,” prosecutor Leo Wise said.

Hunter Biden Jun 25

Hunter Biden's law license suspended in Washington, D.C. after criminal conviction

Hunter Biden Jun 11

Hunter Biden found guilty on all charges in federal gun trial

Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his 2016 through 2019 taxes and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he didn’t act “willfully,” or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.

Hunter Biden had agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses last year in a deal with the Justice Department that would allow him to avoid prosecution in the gun case if he stayed out of trouble. But the agreement imploded after a judge questioned unusual aspects of it, and he was subsequently indicted in the two cases.

His decision to change his plea Thursday came after the judge issued some unfavorable pre-trial rulings for the defense, including rejecting a proposed defense expert lined up to testify about addiction.

Scarsi, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump, also placed some restrictions on what jurors would be allowed to hear about the traumatic events that Hunter Biden’s family, friends and attorneys say led to his drug addiction.

The judge barred attorneys from connecting his substance abuse struggles to the 2015 death of his brother Beau Biden from cancer or the car accident that killed his mother and sister when he was a toddler.

The indictment alleged that Hunter Biden lived lavishly while flouting the tax law, spending his cash on things like strippers and luxury hotels — “in short, everything but his taxes.”

Hunter Biden’s attorneys had asked Scarsi to also limit prosecutors from highlighting details of his expenses that they say amount to a “character assassination,” including payments made to strippers or pornographic websites. The judge has said in court papers that he will maintain “strict control” over the presentation of potentially salacious evidence.

Prosecutors had said they want to introduce evidence about Hunter Biden’s overseas dealings, which have been at the center of Republican investigations into the Biden family often seeking — without evidence— to tie the president to an alleged influence peddling scheme.

The special counsel’s team had planned to have a business associate of Hunter Biden’s testify about their work for a Romanian businessman, who prosecutors say sought to “influence U.S. government policy” while Joe Biden was vice president.

Sentencing in Hunter Biden’s Delaware conviction is set for Nov. 13. He could face up to 25 years in prison in that case, though he is likely to get far less time or avoid prison entirely.

Liberated from the constraints of a re-election campaign, he’s in the beginning stage of a strategy that will take him over the next five months to places at home and abroad that he likely would have ignored as a 2024 candidate, but with the goal of keeping the White House, his legacy and some of his most significant accomplishments secure.

On Thursday, Biden travels to a small town in a county in southwest Wisconsin that had voted reliably Democratic for two decades until former President Donald Trump carried it twice. Biden will make more trips like these, to Republican leaning areas — and even eventually red states — to make the case that his agenda has also benefited those who voted against him, according to multiple Biden advisers.

Aides are also reallocating time Biden had reserved for domestic politics to focus instead on foreign policy, with plans for an international farewell tour of sorts that could include a long-promised trip to Africa in October.

“The schedule will be robust and he plans to leave it all on the field,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt said.

Biden enters the twilight of his presidency with little recent precedent to guide him. Re-elected presidents begin their second terms knowing they have years to begin shaping their legacies. Recent one-term presidents, on the other hand, were fighting until their final weeks to hold onto the office.

Yet one senior Biden adviser noted that the president has been mindful of the weight of history since the moment he first entered the Oval Office, weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and amid public health and economic crises.

“It’s been ever present, because the stakes have been so high,” the adviser said.

Still, the president’s aides said a new approach was required after Biden made the consequential decision in late July to end his bid for a second term and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket. One of the first directives Biden gave after bowing out was to his chief of staff, Jeff Zients, saying he wanted his final 180 days in the Oval Office to be as consequential as any similar period before in his term.

In general terms, that meant implementing the pillars of his legislative record — infrastructure investments, boosting manufacturing, climate change initiatives and expanded veterans care — while looking at where the president could lay the groundwork for unrealized or even new policy ideas that would give a potential Harris administration a running start.

Zients then set about working with other top advisers to put a specific action plan in place, the early contours of which was presented to Biden when he began a two week, bicoastal vacation following his farewell speech at the Democratic National Committee on Aug. 19, Biden aides said.

Advisers said it focuses on four goals: finding new ways to increase investment in U.S. infrastructure; reducing costs for Americans; safeguarding freedoms the president believes are under siege; and strengthening U.S. alliances to confront global challenges.

Each goal aims to burnish Biden’s legacy, but the president’s aides said they also will help make a case against Trump that they hope will help Harris’ campaign.

“Good governance is a way to show contrast,” one official said.

Biden’s team is regularly in touch with the Harris campaign operation — one, advisers note, they largely built — to ensure the president’s actions are helpful, Biden aides said. The goal, they said, is for Biden to act “surgically” and to campaign where it is “strategically impactful” for him to go, as one of them put it.

The plan is for Biden to focus on constituencies where he has had appeal, such as senior voters and blue-collar communities, aides said.

The Biden official also argued that the president’s record continues to be popular among Democrats. “It’s not like 2008,” the official noted, when then-President George W. Bush was poised to leave office with approval ratings as low as the 20% range and an economy in free-fall.

Much of Biden’s domestic travel will be under the guise of official administration business, like stops he plans Thursday and Friday in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Biden is also expected to travel extensively overseas, including in October after the annual gathering of world leaders in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, according to two senior administration officials and two former senior U.S. officials familiar with the plans.

The possible countries he could visit in October, as the presidential campaign is at a fever pitch, include Germany as well as at least one stop in sub-Saharan Africa, the officials said.

None of the ideas under discussion have been finalized on the president’s schedule, one of the senior administration officials said, adding: “The team is pulling together options.”

Biden does plan to travel to Brazil for the Group of 20 summit and Peru for a gathering of Asia-Pacific leaders, officials said. Biden is looking to hold high-profile meetings with key world leaders, including at the UN General Assembly later this month and a potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November on the sidelines of the G20, the officials said.

Since dropping out of the 2024 race, Biden has had a lot more time to devote to foreign policy matters than his senior aides had planned for when they thought he would be campaigning nonstop for his re-election, the officials said.

“His foreign policy agenda is very full” in these final months, according to White House National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett.

Now, he can chat longer on the phone with world leaders, extending calls that previously would have been curtailed with a more jam-packed schedule. In recent conversations, the president has mentioned to his counterparts that he looks forward to seeing them again before leaving office and has even joked about how much more free time he has on his hands, a Biden aide said.

While Biden’s goals for his final months in elected office are set, specific plans beyond September remain subject to change, aides said, noting the presidency naturally comes with unseen events.

His role in the campaign won’t be as robust as outgoing President Barack Obama’s was eight years ago for then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, which included regular campaign events in battleground states including a large, closing joint rally in Philadelphia.

But Biden aides pointed to the president’s event Monday in Pittsburgh as indicative of what they believe he can do for Harris, starting with vouching for her character and commitment to supporting the kind of working and middle-class voters he has long considered his political base.

“We can help strengthen the argument, fortify the argument for her in the way that we did as vice president to President Obama, and the same way Vice President Harris helped us to win in 2020,” the senior Biden adviser said.

On Tuesday at a White House event, Biden said he would in the weeks ahead “talk with Americans all across the country about the progress we’re seeing in their communities.” He also indicated he wants to make the most of his final months there.

“I’m not going to be in the White House much longer, but you got to come and see me,” Biden told the four local officials who participated virtually in Tuesday’s event.

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The Sept. 10 event in Philadelphia will use the same rules and format as the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden.

Both campaigns had previously agreed to hold the debate on that date, but the agreement appeared to be in jeopardy after Trump suggested he might back out and Harris’ team sought to change the rule on muted microphones.

Candidate microphones will be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak.

Trump campaign official Jason Miller said in a statement that the former president’s campaign was “thrilled that Kamala Harris and her team of Biden campaign leftovers” have “accepted the already agreed upon rules.”

“Americans want to hear both candidates present their competing visions to the voters, unburdened by what has been,” Miller said. “We’ll see you all in Philadelphia next Tuesday.”

In a letter to ABC, the Harris campaign agreed to the muted microphone rule but said she “will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President.”

“Notwithstanding our concerns, we understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format. We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accepted the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones,” the letter said, bringing an end to the stalemate.

The 90-minute debate will be held without an audience in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center at 9 p.m. ET, and will be moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News. Neither candidate will be allowed notes or props, and both will stand for the entire debate. Both will have two minutes to answer questions and two-minute rebuttals, with an additional minute to each candidate for follow-up, clarification or response.

The rules mirror the June 27 CNN debate between Trump and Biden. The president’s performance in the debate was widely panned and eventually led to him exiting the race and endorsing Harris in July.

0 seconds of 2 minutes, 48 secondsVolume 89%

The standoff over muted or live microphones had threatened to derail the debate, and the Harris campaign took jabs at Trump during the impasse.

“Both candidates have publicly made clear their willingness to debate with unmuted mics for the duration of the debate to fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates — but it appears Donald Trump is letting his handlers overrule him. Sad!” a Harris campaign spokesperson previously said in a statement to NBC News.

Trump had told reporters that he was considering backing out of the debate because he didn’t like how Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was treated in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.”

“When I looked at the hostility of that, I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network.’ I want to do it,” Trump said.

He also acknowledged at the time that he didn’t have an issue with both microphones being live, but said that “we agreed to the same rules” as the June 27 debate with Biden. “I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted,” Trump said.

Trump publicly relented on ABC hosting the debate in a post on Truth Social on Aug. 27 when he said he had “reached an agreement” with the network.

A virtual coin flip on Tuesday determined podium placement and the order of closing statements for Sept. 10, ABC News said. Trump won the coin toss and decided to speak last during closing statements. Harris selected the right podium position on the screen.

NBC news’ Rebecca Shabad, Zoë Richards and Megan Lebowitz contributed.

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Before getting into the details of her plans, she started by making comments about the deadly shooting at a Georgia high school Wednesday.

“We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.

Harris then launched into details of her small business tax plan, part of what she called an “opportunity economy” where everyone gets a chance at success.

To do that, she said, she wants to expand tax incentives for small business startup expenses from $5,000 to $50,000, with the goal of eventually spurring 25 million new small business applications over four years.

She also said she plans to change the way the government taxes capital gains, expand access to venture capital, support innovation hubs and business incubators and increase federal contracts with small businesses.

“I believe America’s small businesses are an essential foundation to our entire economy,” the vice president said.

Harris also took time to drive home her differences from opponent Donald Trump, describing her campaign as the underdog in a tight race with the future at stake.

“We are witnessing a full-on attack on hard-fought hard-won fundamental freedoms and rights,” she said, citing the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and its implications for abortion rights as well as concerns about voting rights, gun control and other topics.

Harris made her stop at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, outside Portsmouth, to meet with co-founders Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier. Their brewery got support to open its current location through a small business credit and installed solar panels using federal programs championed by the Biden administration, according to the Harris campaign.

Before leaving New Hampshire, Harris also visited a pretzel shop in Portsmouth along with all four members of New Hampshire’s all-Democratic congressional delegation.

New Hampshire has been reliably blue in recent presidential elections, but the trip could also have some benefit across state lines, since Maine splits its electoral votes, allowing candidates to win some without carrying the full state. Still, it marks a rare deviation from Harris spending most of her time visiting a tight group of Midwest and Sun Belt battlegrounds likely to decide November’s election.

Since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris, the vice president has focused on the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have been the centerpiece of successful Democratic campaigns.

She’s also frequently visited Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, all of which Biden narrowly won in 2020, and North Carolina, which she’s still hoping to flip from Republican former President Donald Trump.

Wednesday’s stop came after Harris marked Labor Day with Monday rallies in Detroit and Pittsburgh and before she heads back to Pittsburgh on Friday — marking her 10th visit to Pennsylvania in 2024. By contrast, Wednesday was her first visit to New Hampshire in years.

Trump has called for lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% — a break with Biden, who in his budget proposal in March suggested setting the corporate tax rate at 28%. Harris has released relatively few major policy proposals in the roughly six weeks since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket, but has not suggested she’s planning to deviate greatly from his administration on tax policy.

The small business plan Harris presented Wednesday had lots of facets that many in the business community would like. But that contrasts another proposal Harris unveiled last month, where she promised to help fight inflation by working to combat “price gouging” from food producers that she suggests have driven grocery store prices up unnecessarily.

She didn’t only focus on the economy during Wednesday’s event — she also elicited cheers from the crowd by speaking on abortion rights.

“We trust women, and when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom as president of the United States I will proudly sign it into law,” she told spectators.

And in her comments on Trump, she tried to stoke fears about what Trump could do in a return to office, given a recent Supreme Court decision that found presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts.

“What this means is that, almost explicitly, he has been told no consequences and imagine, just imagine, Donald Trump with no guardrails,” she said.

Harris has built her campaign around calls to grow and strengthen the nation’s middle class — and suggested that rich Americans and large corporations should “pay their fair share” in higher taxes.

Biden, who similarly built his campaign around promoting the middle class, won New Hampshire by 7 percentage points in 2020, but Trump came much closer to winning it against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Still, the Harris campaign notes that it has 17 field offices operating in coordination with the state Democratic party across New Hampshire, compared to one for Trump’s campaign.

Some of the state’s Democrats were angry that Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to make South Carolina the first state to vote in the party’s presidential primary this year — displacing Iowa’s caucus and a first-in-the-nation primary New Hampshire held for more than a century.

Despite that, New Hampshire pressed ahead with an unsanctioned primary. Though Biden didn’t campaign in it, or appear on the ballot, he still easily won via a write-in drive.

Trump is nonetheless hoping to use what happened to his advantage, posting on his social media account that Harris “sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up.”

“Additionally, the cost of living in New Hampshire is through the roof, their energy bills are some of highest in the country, and their housing market is the most unaffordable in history,” the former president wrote. “I protected New Hampshire’s First-In-The-Nation Primary and ALWAYS will.”

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U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York found that there was no good cause to grant Trump’s lawyers permission to even file a motion.

The judge’s order said that in arguing “good cause” to move the case, Trump primarily argued that the state judge presiding over the criminal case, Juan Merchan, is biased against him and that the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity ruling from July presents a valid federal defense for the hush money case.

Hellerstein rejected both arguments, finding first that a state court judge’s alleged bias does not present a federal question that would justify jurisdiction in a federal court.

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Hellerstein also held that his July 2023 conclusion he had made that removal of the case was not warranted — which followed briefing and an evidentiary hearing — remained the same because “the hush money payments were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority.”

Hellerstein rejected a similar attempt last year, but Trump’s attorneys argued the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity in a separate Trump criminal case presents a valid federal defense to his conviction.

The judge’s decision comes after prosecutors in New York urged Merchan not to allow Trump’s eleventh-hour effort to move the case to federal court to prevent him from ruling on pending motions in the historic state criminal case. 

Trump has asked Merchan to set aside the jury’s verdict because it allegedly relied on evidence of Trump’s “official,” and therefore immune, conduct, but also has requested that Merchan delay his sentencing until after the November election. Both motions are still pending.

“Federal law is clear that proceedings in this Court need not be stayed pending the district court’s resolution of defendant’s removal notice,” the DA’s letter said. It also added that “the concerns defendant expresses about timing are a function of his own strategic and dilatory litigation tactics: This second notice of removal comes nearly ten months after defendant voluntarily abandoned his appeal from his first, unsuccessful effort to remove this case; three months after he was found guilty by a jury on thirty-four felony counts; and nearly two months after defendant asked this Court to consider his CPL § 330.30 motion for a new trial.”

The DA’s office opposes Trump’s efforts to overturn the verdict and contends the impact of the “official acts” that were referred to in the case were negligible.

Merchan is expected to rule on that matter Sept. 16 — two days before Trump’s sentencing.

Prosecutors have also said they would defer to the judge on pushing back the Sept. 18 date in order to give Trump “adequate time” to try an appeal, but also urged him to pronounce sentence “without unreasonable delay.”

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He also waived the right to be present at his arraignment, where he will be charged with the same four counts from last year’s original indictment.

“I, President Donald J. Trump…do hereby waive my right to be present at Arraignment and I authorize my attorneys to enter a plea of not guilty on my behalf to each and every count of the superseding indictment,” he said in the filing.

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Special counsel Jack Smith’s office said in a court filing last week that it would not oppose Trump waiving his appearance on the charges, which are the same as the ones he pleaded not guilty to last August: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.

Smith sought the revised indictment from a new grand jury after the Supreme Court issued a ruling on presidential immunity that barred federal prosecutors from using certain “official acts” Trump took in his role as president in their case against him.

The new indictment omits evidence from the previous one that could be construed as having to do with official acts, including Trump’s alleged conversations with Justice Department officials and White House advisers about his false claims of election fraud and ways to overturn the 2020 results.

Much of the superseding indictment is the same as the original, with prosecutors maintaining Trump didn’t actually believe the lies he was spreading in the wake of his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden and that he knew that they were not true.

“These claims were unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing, and the Defendant and his co-conspirators repeated them even after they were publicly disproven,” the fresh indictment says. “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.”

Smith’s office said in its filing last week that the revised indictment “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions.”

Trump blasted that indictment on social media shortly after it was filed, calling it a “direct on democracy.”

“The case has to do with ‘Conspiracy to Obstruct the 2020 Presidential Election,’ when they are the ones that did the obstructing of the Election, not me,” he wrote.

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Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday will unveil a new proposal to provide small businesses with a $50,000 tax deduction for startup expenses, ten times the current $5,000 allowable deduction, according to a Harris campaign official who was granted anonymity to share details of a proposal that is not yet public.

Harris will roll out the new plan at a presidential campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday, part of her broader kick-off of the post-Labor Day two-month sprint to Election Day.

Under the proposal, new small businesses could spread the deduction out over several years, or delay claiming the $50,000 tax deduction until the company turned a profit.

The Internal Revenue Service has previously run into issues ensuring that its small business tax breaks end up in the right pockets, especially during the pandemic, when the agency flagged a spike in fraudulent claims.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for clarification about which startups and small businesses would be eligible for the tax deduction.

On Wednesday, Harris will also set a goal of collecting 25 million new small business applications in her first term if she is elected president. This would be six million more than the Biden administration has recorded so far.

The announcements give Harris ammunition for her upcoming Sept. 10 debate against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, hosted by ABC News. Trump has worked to position himself as the more pro-business candidate, while attacking Harris’ economic record.

The Harris campaign has been building the vice president’s economic platform at warp speed, since she emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21.

As voters consistently rank high costs of living as their top election issue, Harris’ policy proposals so far have focused on the affordability of housing, groceries, prescription drugs, child care and healthcare.

Part of that pitch has included a federal ban on so-called “price gouging” in the food industry, implying that high food prices are a result of grocery companies artificially inflating prices.

That proposal has drawn backlash from the business community and some economists.

Meanwhile, Trump has long sold himself as a friendly face to big business. During his third presidential run, Trump is proposing to make his first-term tax cuts permanent, including a lower corporate tax rate.

“If you think things are expensive now, they will get 100 times WORSE if Kamala gets four years as President,” Trump wrote last week on his X account. “If you want more CASH and less TAX, VOTE TRUMP!!!”

By focusing on small businesses, Harris’ tax deduction proposal could help her thread the needle between rebutting Trump’s attacks, and keeping up her political crusade against corporate greed.

Beyond the campaign trail, questions linger about where the vice president would come down on business regulation if she were to win the White House.

Some of Harris’ supporters on Wall Street say they expect her to take a friendlier approach than Biden has to big business on issues like antitrust enforcement.

Her comments came during a rally before cheering union members marking Labor Day in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, where Harris said U.S. Steel was “an historic American company and it is vital for our country to maintain strong American steel companies.”

“U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated, and I will always have the backs of America’s steelworkers,” she said.

That echoes Biden, who repeated Monday what he’s said since March — that he opposes U.S. Steel’s would-be sale to Nippon, believing it would hurt the country’s steelworkers. It also overlaps with Republican former President Donald Trump. It’s little surprise that Harris would agree with Biden on the issue, but it nonetheless constitutes a major policy position for the vice president, who has offered relatively few of them since Biden abandoned his reelection bid and endorsed his vice president in July.

Biden took the stage first and was met with chants of “Thank You, Joe” as he and Harris appeared in an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall.

The president called Harris the only “rational” choice for president in November. He said choosing her to be vice president was the “single best” decision of his presidency and told the union members that electing her will be “the best decision you will ever make.”

Biden also started to say, “Kamala Harris and I are going to build on this” as if he were still running and she was his running mate — but he corrected himself. It underscored just how much the race has changed and how Harris has been careful to balance presenting herself as “a new way forward” while remaining intensely loyal to Biden and the policies he has pushed.

Her delivery is very different — and in some cases she’s pushed to move faster than Biden’s administration — but the overall goal of expanding government programs to buoy the middle class is the same.

“We know this is going to be a tight race till the very end,” Harris told the Pittsburgh crowd.

The joint rally with Biden was Harris’ second of the day and followed Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade, one of the country’s largest. It was their first joint appearance at a campaign event since the election shakeup six weeks ago.

Harris opened her Labor Day campaigning solo with an event in Detroit, where hundreds of audience members wore bright yellow union shirts and hoisted “Union strong” signs. The vice president said “every person in our nation has benefited” from unions’ work.

“Everywhere I go, I tell people, ‘Look, you may not be a union member, you’d better thank a union member,” Harris said, noting that collective bargaining by organized labor helped secure the five-day work week, sick pay and other key benefits and solidify safer working conditions.

“When unions are strong, America is strong,” she said.

The 81-year-old Biden has spent most of his lengthy political career forging close ties with organized labor. The White House said he asked to introduce Harris in Pittsburgh — instead of the usual other way around — because he wanted to highlight her record of supporting union workers.

In addition to opposing the Nippon Steel sale, Biden has endorsed expanding tariffs on imported Chinese steel — another area of policy agreement with Trump, who has cheered steeper foreign tariffs on many imports. Still, in a statement Monday, U.S. Steel said it remains “committed to the transaction with Nippon Steel, which is the best deal for our employees, shareholders, communities, and customers.”

“The partnership with Nippon Steel, a long-standing investor in the United States from our close ally Japan, will strengthen the American steel industry, American jobs, and American supply chains, and enhance the U.S. steel industry’s competitiveness and resilience against China,” the company said, noting that it employs nearly 4,000 people in Pennsylvania alone.

Nippon Steel reacted to Harris’ comments by saying it was confident that its “acquisition of U. S. Steel will revitalize the American steel rust belt, benefit American workers, local communities, and national security in a way no other alternative can.” The Harris campaign released a statement countering that sentiment from David McCall, president of the United Steelworkers union, who said Harris’ opposition to the sale “once again made it clear that she will always stand up for steelworkers.”

The 59-year-old Harris has sought to appeal to voters by positioning herself as a break from former president Trump’s acerbic rhetoric while also looking to move beyond the Biden era. Harris events feel very different from Biden’s, which usually featured small crowds. But the vice president’s agenda includes the same issues he’s championed: capping the cost of prescription drugs, defending the Affordable Care Act, growing the economy, helping families afford child care — and now her position on the sale of U.S. Steel.

The vice president has promised to work to lower grocery store costs to help fight inflation. She’s moved faster than Biden in some cases, calling for using tax cuts and incentives to encourage home ownership and ending federal taxes on tips for service industry employees. But she’s also offered relatively few specifics on major policies, instead continuing to side with Biden on top issues.

Harris appeared onstage with Biden after the president addressed the opening night of last month’s Democratic National Convention, but they had not shared a microphone at a political event since Biden himself was running against Trump. At that time, the campaign was using Harris mostly as its chief spokeswoman for abortion rights, an issue they believe can help them win in November as restrictions grow and health care worsens for women following the fall of Roe v. Wade.

For more than 3 1/2 years, Harris has been one of Biden’s chief validators. Now the tables are turned, as Harris looks to lean on Biden — a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania — to help win the potentially decisive state.

Although the vice president has appeared more forceful in speaking about the plight of civilians in Gaza, as Israel’s war against Hamas there nears the 11-month mark, she also has endorsed Biden’s efforts to arm Israel and bring about a hostage deal and ceasefire. Before she left Washington for Detroit, Biden and Harris met in the White House Situation Room earlier Monday with the U.S. hostage deal negotiating team.

“History will show what we here know: Joe Biden has been one of the most transformative presidents,” Harris said in Pittsburgh. “And as we know Joe still has a lot of work to do.”

When that event was over, Biden and Harris rode back to the airport together in the presidential limo. Air Force One and Air Force Two subsequently took off within moments of each other to return to suburban Washington — though the president and vice president never travel on the same plane for continuity of government reasons, just in case of an air emergency.

__

Weissert reported from Washington.

López, a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant in Mexico City, had reason to rejoice: after several frustrating attempts, he was able to secure an appointment to seek asylum in the U.S.

He is one of thousands of migrants whose U.S.-bound journey has landed them in the Mexican capital, the southernmost point until recently from which migrants can register to request an appointment to seek asylum through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s mobile app known as CBP One.

Since June, when the Biden administration announced significant restrictions on migrants seeking asylum, the app became one of the only ways to request asylum at the Southwest border.

This U.S. asylum policy and its geographic limits are a driving force behind the emergence of migrant encampments throughout the Mexican capital where thousands of migrants wait weeks — even months — in limbo, living in crowded, makeshift camps with poor sanitation and grim living conditions.

From point of transit to temporary destination

Historically, Mexico City has not been a stop for northbound migrants. They try to cross the country quickly to reach the northern border. But the delays in securing an appointment, coupled with the danger that plagues cartel-controlled northern Mexico border cities and the increased crackdown by Mexican authorities on migrants have combined to turn Mexico City from a point of transit to a temporary destination for thousands.

Some migrant camps have been dismantled by immigration authorities or abandoned over time. Others, like the one where López has lived for the past few months, remain.

Like López, many migrants have opted to wait for their appointment in the somewhat safer capital, but Mexico City presents its own challenges.

Shelter capacity is limited, and unlike large U.S. cities like Chicago and New York, which rushed last winter to find housing for arriving migrants, in Mexico City, they are mainly left to their own devices.

Andrew Bahena, coordinator of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, or CHIRLA, said that up until late 2023 many migrants were contained in southern Mexican cities like Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala. Many tried to disguise their location to defeat CBP One’s geographic limits, but when U.S. authorities took notice, more migrants began aiming for Mexico City to make their appointments from there, he said.

As a result, there has been an increase in the migrant population living in the Mexico City camps.

“We talk about this as border externalization and it’s something the United States and Mexico have been jointly implementing for years,” said Bahena. “The CBP One app is probably one of the best examples of that today.”

“These folks are asylum seekers, they’re not homeless people living in Mexico,” he added.

A maze of tents and tarps

When López first arrived in Mexico City at the end of April, he thought about renting a room only to realize it was not an option.

He earned 450 pesos ($23) a day working three times a week at a market. Rent was 3,000 pesos a week ($157) per person to share a room with strangers, an arrangement that has become commonplace in Mexican cities with migrant populations.

“The camp is like a refuge,” said López. Migrants can share space with people they know, avoid the curfews and strict rules of shelters and potentially stay longer if necessary.

The camps are a maze of tents and tarps. Some call their space “ranchito,” or small ranch, assembled from wood, cardboard, plastic sheets, blankets and whatever they can find to protect them from the chilly mountain air and intense summer rains that pound the city.

At another camp in La Merced neighborhood, hundreds of blue, yellow and red tents fill a plaza in front of a church. It’s one of the capital’s largest camps and just a 20-minute walk from the city center.

“This is a place where up to 2,000 migrants have been living in the last year,” said Bahena. ”About 40% are children.”

Migrants in La Merced have organized themselves, building an impromptu pump that moves water from the public system and distributes it on a fixed schedule, with every tent receiving four buckets of water every day.

“At the beginning there were a lot of problems, lots of trash and people in Mexico didn’t like that,” said Héctor Javier Magallanes, a Venezuelan migrant, who has been waiting nine months for a CBP One appointment. “We made sure to fix those problems little by little.”

As more migrants kept arriving at the camp, he set up a task force of 15 people to oversee security and infrastructure.

Despite efforts to keep the camp clean and organized, residents haven’t been able to avoid outbreaks of illnesses, exacerbated by drastic weather changes.

Keilin Mendoza, a 27-year-old Honduran migrant, said her kids constantly get colds, especially her 1-year-old daughter.

“She’s the one that worries me the most, because she takes the longest to recover,” she said. Mendoza has tried accessing the free medical attention from humanitarian organizations at the camp, but resources are limited.

Israel Resendiz, coordinator of Doctors Without Borders’ mobile team, said the uncertainty of life in the camps weighs heavily on migrants’ mental health. “It’s not the same when a person waiting for their appointment (…) can get a hotel, rent a room or have money for food. The majority of people don’t have these resources.”

The secretary of inclusion and social welfare and the secretary of the interior in Mexico City didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press about the camps. Press representatives of Clara Brugada, the incoming mayor of Mexico City, said the issue must first be discussed at the federal level.

Meanwhile, tensions between camp residents and neighbors have increased, sometimes leading to mass evictions of the camps.

In late April, neighbors from the trendy and central Juárez neighborhood blocked some of the city’s busiest streets, chanting, “The street is not a shelter!”

Eduardo Ramírez, one of the protest organizers, said it’s the government’s job to “help these poor people that come from their countries in search of something better and have the bad luck of traveling through Mexico.”

“They sleep on the streets because the government has abandoned them,” he said.

In a camp hosting about 200 families in the northern neighborhood of Vallejo, tensions — and fear — run rampant.

“One day they threw chlorinated water on a kid and hot water on another,” recalled 50-year-old Salvadoran Sonia Rodríguez, a resident of the camp.

Despite making her “ranchito” as dignified as possible — she has a grill for cooking, bunk beds and a television — her gaze turns somber when she remembers she’s been living for 10 months in an improvised camp that is not her home, without her things, far from her normal life.

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

Voters in the swing states (Arizona and Nevada), blue-leaning states (Colorado, Maryland and New York) and red-leaning states (Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota) will have the ability to directly decide the future of abortion access this fall. Among the organizers who submitted signatures to qualify an abortion rights amendment for this year’s ballot, only those in Arkansas fell short.

These 10 initiatives will be the latest to pursue enshrining abortion access in a state’s constitution since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Here is what the proposed amendments would do if passed — and how they would impact current abortion care laws in those states.

Arizona

The proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot in this crucial southwestern battleground would create a “fundamental right” to an abortion up until fetal viability, or about the 24th week of pregnancy. After that point, the measure would bar the state from restricting abortion in situations when the health or the life of the pregnant person is at risk, according to the treating health care professional.

Under current Arizona law, abortion is legal up until the 15th week of pregnancy, with an exception after that to save the woman’s life and no exceptions after that for rape or incest. If voters approve the proposed ballot measure in November, it would effectively undo the 15-week ban. It needs a simple majority of support to pass.

Colorado

The proposed amendment in Colorado would declare formally that “the right to abortion is hereby recognized” and that “government shall not deny, impede or discriminate against the exercise of that right.”

It also explicitly states that the government may not prohibit health insurance coverage for abortion, including insurance plans for public employees and publicly funded insurance plans. That provision would effectively undo a 1984 law that barred people from using their health insurance to pay for abortion care.

The ballot measure in Colorado — where there are no laws restricting abortion and no gestational limits at all for women seeking an abortion — is intended to formally enshrine those rights, a move organizers say is crucial to prevent lawmakers from having any future opportunity to undo them.

To pass in November, the measure requires the support of 55% of voters under state law, not just a simple majority.

Florida

The state’s ballot initiative would bar restrictions on abortion before fetal viability and would include exceptions past that point for “the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

Passage of the amendment would effectively undo the state’s six-week ban on abortion, which includes exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the woman.

Under Florida law, the measure must receive the support of 60% of voters in November, rather than a simple majority, to pass.

Maryland

Lawmakers, who control the amendment process in Maryland rather than citizens, voted to place a measure on the ballot that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

It would add language to guaranteeing the right to “to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end one’s own pregnancy.”

Abortion is already legal in the state through fetal viability, with exceptions afterward when the woman’s life or health is at risk, or when a fetal anomaly is detected. A simple majority is needed for passage.

Missouri 

Missouri’s amendment would enshrine language in the state constitution to protect abortion rights up until fetal viability, with exceptions after that point for the life and health of the mother.

The amendment specifically states that the government “shall not deny or infringe upon a person’s fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” which the amendment defines as all decisions related to reproductive health care, explicitly including “birth control,” “abortion care” and “miscarriage care” — up until fetal viability. The proposal also deems any “denial, interference, delay or restriction” of such care as “invalid.”

After that point, the government may regulate abortion except in cases where a treating health care professional has judged the “life or physical or mental health” of the mother to be at risk.

At the same time, the amendment would allow lawmakers and state officials to restrict or limit abortion rights in situations in which doing so “is for the limited purpose and has the limited effect of improving or maintaining the health of a person seeking care, is consistent with widely accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that person’s autonomous decision-making.”

Missouri currently has one of the strictest abortion bans in the U.S. in place, with exceptions to protect the life of the mother and for medical emergencies. If the amendment were to pass, it would effectively undo that law. A simple majority is needed for passage.

Montana

The ballot measure in Montana would amend the state constitution to provide a right to “make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion.” It would also “prohibit the government from denying or burdening the right to abortion before fetal viability,” and  “prohibit the government from denying or burdening access to an abortion when a treating healthcare professional determines it is medically indicated to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

Abortion is currently legal in Montana until fetal viability, so enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution would serve to make it more difficult for lawmakers to undo current protections in the future. A simple majority is needed for passage.

Nebraska

In Nebraska, two dueling constitutional amendments will appear on the November ballot.

One of the ballot measures, known as “Protect the Right to Abortion,” would amend the state’s constitution to state that “all persons shall have a fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient.”

The other, called “Protect Women and Children,” bars abortions in the second and third trimesters, except in the case of a medical emergency or when the pregnancy is a result of sexual assault or incest.

Nebraska law currently bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and saving the mother’s life. The pro-abortion rights measure would effectively undo that law, while the other would basically codify the law in the state constitution.

For a ballot measure to pass in Nebraska, it needs to receive a majority of the vote and at least 35% of the total votes cast in the election in favor of it. If both amendments pass, the one with the most votes prevails.

Nevada

In Nevada, abortion is already legal until the 24th week of pregnancy. But fearing that such rights could be undone in the future, reproductive rights advocates succeeded in placing a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would enshrine similar language, protecting abortion rights up until fetal viability.

Under state law, even if the measure passes in November, voters would need to approve it again in 2026 before the Nevada constitution is formally amended.

New York

As in Maryland, lawmakers, not citizens, control the amendment process in New York. State legislators voted to put a measure on the ballot that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

The Equal Protection of Law Amendment doesn’t actually explicitly mention abortion, but would enshrine rights in the state constitution designed to protect against anything the government does to affect a person’s “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.”

In New York, abortion is legal up to around the 24th week of pregnancy. Passage of the proposal — which requires a simple majority — would effectively cement those projections constitutionally. 

South Dakota

The proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot in South Dakota would make abortion legal in all situations in the first trimester of pregnancy. It would allow “regulation” by the state of abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy, but such regulation “must be reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.” 

The amendment would allow “regulation or prohibition” by the state in the third trimester, except in cases when a physician has determined that the care would be necessary to “preserve the life or health” of the woman.

If it passes, the amendment would effectively undo the state’s near-total ban on abortion, which snapped back into effect after Roe v. Wade was struck down in 2022. The law, which abortion advocates say is among the harshest in the U.S., prohibits all abortions except when necessary to save the woman’s life.

The ballot measure will need to win a simple majority to pass.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

• Trump says he wants to make IVF treatments paid for by government or insurance companies if elected
• Democrats grow concerned Republicans are planting seeds with legal suits to overturn a Trump defeat
• Harris says Trump ‘disrespected sacred ground’ during an incident at Arlington National Cemetery

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The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and had dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.

It was not immediately clear what motivated the man or whether he was a Trump supporter or critic.

The man made it over a barrier ringing the media area and began climbing the back side of a riser where television reporters and cameras were stationed, according to a video of the incident posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. People near him tried to pull him off the riser and were quickly joined by police officers and sheriff’s deputies.

The crowd cheered as a pack of police led the man away, prompting Trump to say, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?”

Johnstown’s police chief, Richard M. Pritchard, confirmed to The Associated Press on Saturday that the man was arrested, released and will be formally charged next week. Pritchard said the man, whose identity will be disclosed when charges are filed, will face misdemeanors in municipal court for alleged disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and disrupting a public assembly.

Pritchard, who was not directly involved in the arrest, declined to speculate on the man’s motives.

Fierce criticism of the media is a standard part of Trump’s rally speeches, and his supporters often react by turning toward the press section and booing; some use their middle finger to demonstrate their distaste for journalists.

Moments before the man ventured into the media’s designated section, Trump had reprised his familiar assertion that the media is a collective “enemy of the people.” Video of the incident does not make clear what the man was yelling as he climbed barriers or as he was being subdued and arrested.

Trump’s campaign tried to distance the former president from the man and his actions, suggesting he was a Trump opponent.

“Witnesses, including some in the press corps, described a crazed individual shouting expletives at President Trump,” said campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez. “His aggression was focused on the president and towards the stage as he entered the press area.”

Alvarez did not identify the witnesses she cited or expound on what the man may have shouted. Alvarez added that the campaign appreciates the response of local law enforcement officials and the U.S. Secret Service for acting quickly.

Shortly after the incident, police handcuffed another man in the crowd and led him out of the arena. It was not immediately clear whether that detention was related to the initial altercation.

The incident happened amid heightened scrutiny of security at Trump rallies after a gunman fired at him, grazing his ear, during an outdoor rally in July in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania. Security at political events has been noticeably tighter since the shooting.

A Secret Service spokesperson referred questions to local authorities.

Harris accused Trump of “disrespect[ing] sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt.”

“If there is one thing on which we as Americans can all agree, it is that our veterans, military families, and service members should be honored, never disparaged, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude,” she added.

Harris also called on Trump to “never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States of America,” as a result of his actions.

Her statement comes after the U.S. Army said that a member of Trump’s campaign staff “abruptly pushed aside” a staff member at the cemetery so that Trump and his campaign could take photos and videos with families of service members who passed away during the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

The incident occurred in Section 60, where taking videos and photos is usually prohibited.

During an interview with NBC News Thursday, Trump defended his actions, saying a family “asked me whether or not I would stand for a picture at the grave of their loved one who should not have died.”

He claimed that he did not request to take photos and videos, but “While I was there, I didn’t ask for a picture. While I was there, they said, ‘Sir, could we have a picture at the grave?’”

In a post on X responding to Harris, Trump’s running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance said, “President trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence. Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?”

And Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt blasted Harris in her own post, blaming the vice president for the servicemembers’ deaths during the withdrawal, which occurred during the Biden administration.

“Kamala’s stupidity led to one of the most embarrassing events in American history and 13 brave US soldiers being killed,” Leavitt posted, adding “For this alone, Kamala does not deserve to be elected. Kamala has already proven that she would be a dangerously incompetent Commander in Chief.” 

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His announcement came a day after telling NBC News that Florida’s six-week ban is “too short” and declining to take a clear stance on a state ballot measure that would expand access to the procedure.

On Friday, Trump said, once again, that women need “more time” than six weeks to decide whether to have an abortion, but that the “Democrats are radical” and he couldn’t back the amendment.

“So I think six weeks, you need more time than six weeks. I’ve disagreed with that right from the early primaries when I heard about it, I disagreed with it,” Trump said in comments to Fox News. “At the same time, the Democrats are radical, because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation where you can do an abortion in the ninth month. … So I’ll be voting no for that reason.”

The proposed amendment would bar restrictions on abortion before fetal viability, around the 24th week of pregnancy, while ensuring exceptions to protect the health of the mother.

The backlash from anti-abortion advocates was fierce after Trump’s interview with NBC News, with some warning that the Republican presidential nominee was risking losing support from a key bloc of the party’s base.

Alarmed by what she saw, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the influential anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called Trump on Thursday to ask for clarity on his comments, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. Trump told her that he didn’t state a position on an amendment on his home state’s ballot this fall.

Dannenfelser told him that “it’s imperative that you’re clear because there’s confusion now that you may be in support of this,” the source added. She also told him the amendment is “incongruent” with his opposition to late-term abortion.

During the interview with NBC News, Trump said, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” when asked how he would vote on the ballot measure. It’s unclear what he meant as the Florida initiative gives voters a binary choice.

Later Thursday, Trump’s campaign issued a statement saying the former president had “not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida.”

Meanwhile, anti-abortion activists, who have provided critical support to Trump during his three presidential runs, piled on. Some also criticized his suggestion that he’d mandate that the government or insurance companies pay for in vitro fertilization treatments. 

“Former President Trump now appears determined to undermine his prolife supporters,” evangelical theologian Albert Mohler wrote on X. “His criticism of Florida abortion restrictions & his call for government funding of IVF & his recent statement about ‘reproductive rights’ seem almost calculated to alienate prolife voters.”

The clash put Trump and Republicans in uncharted waters, facing the first presidential election in half a century without Roe v. Wade on the books to protect abortion rights. The GOP was largely unified behind legislation to outlaw abortion at the state and federal levels when they were able to use it to rally anti-abortion voters with no chance of it succeeding legislatively.

But some Republicans now fear voter backlash from the majority of Americans who say in polls they want abortion to be mostly or always legal, particularly as Democrats seek to further capitalize on the issue. And Trump, who has bragged about appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, is still struggling to navigate it.

Abortion foes are caught in their own bind over whether to abandon Trump or to support him in the hope that Republicans will win in November and continue to pursue nationwide abortion restrictions, despite the former president’s claims to the contrary.

“If Donald Trump loses in November, it will be his improvisational approach to abortion that alienated the pro-life community that costs him victory,” conservative radio host Erick Erickson said.

Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life — which has helped organize tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists, mostly on college campuses — wrote Thursday on X: “My phone is blowing up with @SFLAction volunteers who no longer will door knock for President Trump if this is not corrected. With polls neck and neck, this is the last thing we need right now to defeat Kamala’s pro-abortion extremism.”

She told NBC News the Trump campaign “personally” told leaders in her group that he’s undecided on the Florida measure. She said they expect him to vote “no” and warned that Trump’s waffling on the issue would likely hurt his support with many volunteers.

“When they hear the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, walking back past pro-life statements, it’s devastating to them,” she said. “And it’s shocking to them that Republicans would betray this very important part of the Republican Party.”

“He needs to be very careful with his words,” she added.

Taryn Fenske, a spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, pushed back against Trump’s initial comments.

“Donald Trump has consistently stated that late-term abortions where a baby can feel pain should never be permitted, and he’s always stood up for parents’ rights,” Fenske said in a statement on X. “Amendment 4 would allow late-term abortions, eliminate parental consent, and open the door to taxpayer-funded abortions. It’s extreme and must be defeated.”

The governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis, also weighed in, saying the initiative “would open the door to taxpayer funded abortions” and added, “We must spread the word and vote NO on 4!”

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said Trump is lying about his shifts on abortion and his pro-IVF rhetoric.

“We’re going to hold Donald Trump and JD Vance accountable for the devastating impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade and their threats to access to IVF. So every day between now and Election Day, we are going to make sure that the communities that will decide this election know the fundamentals here and the fundamental choice this election,” Harris spokesman Kevin Munoz told reporters on Friday. “Kamala Harris is going to fight for your rights. Donald Trump will take them away.”

In response to Trump’s announcement Friday about how he’ll vote on the amendment, the Harris campaign issued a statement saying that Trump “will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant” and said if he’s elected, he will “limit access to birth control, threaten access to fertility treatments and ban abortion nationwide, with or without Congress.”

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The proposal to build courses at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Southeast Florida is now put on hold after bipartisan pushback and protests across the state. But had the idea received state approval, and both Woods and Nicklaus would have been involved in course-design work.

“There were actually going to be at least two courses; one would be a Tiger course and one would be a Jack course,” Eugene Stearns, an attorney who represents Nicklaus, told NBC News.

He said Nicklaus, who has designed more than 300 courses across the world, would have done the work free of charge had the proposal become a reality. 

“For Jack, it was a charitable issue,” Stearns said. 

The proposal — which was first reported by the Tampa Bay Times — was part of changes to nine state parks that also included the addition of amenities like pickle ball courts and new lodges. Golf courses, however, were the biggest point of controversy from the proposal.

A DeSantis administration official said the plans were not finalized and they expected pushback. But things spiraled too quickly before they were ready when they were made public.

“We kind of lost the narrative on this one,” said a DeSantis administration official. “Leaks did not help.”

DeSantis never said he backed the plan, and he has stated he never “approved” it. It came out of an agency whose head the governor appoints.

The backlash ran the political spectrum, from Democrats to environmental groups to most state Republicans, including Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, along with Rep. Matt Gaetz.

“I know you love our Florida environment. We campaigned together on saving the environment in 2018. I saw your sincerity firsthand, up close,” Gaetz posted on X, directing his comments to DeSantis. “Please use your excellent leadership skills to kill this anti-Florida Man initiative. Keep our parks natural.”

There has also been pushback to past attempts to put golf corses in Florida state parks, with the general idea that people in the state are opposed to any additional development in those areas.

TGR Design, Wood’s Florida-based golf course design company, did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment, but four sources, including the DeSantis administration official, confirmed that it was involved in the early stages of the proposal.

The proposal was spearheaded by Folds of Honor, an Oklahoma-based non-profit organization that helps veterans. It uses golf, among other things, to raise scholarship money for families of members and first responders who were killed or disabled.

The group, which has floated the idea of golf courses in Florida state parks in the past, issued a statement last week confirming its involvement. It said the plan was to bring “world class” golf to Southeast Florida and donate proceeds to military and first-responder families.

The statement from the group was shared and amplified by nationally-known conservative firebrand Dan Bongino, who said the group personally assured him the proposal was not returning. 

“My good friends at ‘Folds of Honor’ have also assured me that they do not plan to move forward on this project,” Bongino, who lives in the area, wrote on social media. “They are great people, doing great things. They just didn’t understand the local passion for JD Park.”

A second lesser-known group, Delaware-based Tuskegee Dunes Foundation, earlier posted on a newly-created website that it was also behind the proposal, but it has since backed away.

“We have received clear feedback that Jonathan Dickinson State Park is not the right location,” the group posted. “We did not understand the local community landscape and appreciate the clarity. We will not pursue building in the beloved Jonathan Dickinson State Park.”

Little is known about that group, which shared an Oklahoma address with Folds of Honor, but the group in January did hire two Florida lobbyists, including Ryan Matthews, the former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, which is the agency that would have had broad authority to move forward with the plan and whose leader DeSantis appoints.

DeSantis’ communications team initially supported the idea, even as public pushback grew.

In a statement last week, DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern said that it was something former President Teddy Roosevelt, a well-known conservationist, would have supported.

“Teddy Roosevelt believed that public parks were for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, and we agree with him,” Redfern said. “No administration has done more than we have to conserve Florida’s natural resources, grow conservation lands, and keep our environment pristine. But it’s high time we made public lands more accessible to the public.”

On Wednesday, though, DeSantis distanced himself from the proposal.

“It was not approved by me. I never saw that,” he told reporters. “A lot of that stuff was just half-baked, and it was not ready for prime time.”

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Musk voted by mail in November 2016, the year Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, and in the November 2018 midterm election, the records show. Musk’s primary residence was in Los Angeles at the time. 

The state records show that Musk had a sparse history of voting in California. During the 18 years he was eligible to vote there, he cast ballots in only those two elections. He became eligible to vote when he became a U.S. citizen in 2002 and cast his first ballot 14 years later, at age 45. He was actively registered to vote by August 2006, the records show. 

Among the elections Musk skipped were presidential races in which Barack Obama, John McCain and Mitt Romney were on the ballot, all primary elections and all local elections. California has an open primary system in which all registered voters are allowed to participate. 

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This is the first time Musk’s California voting records have been made public. NBC News obtained the history through a public records request to the California secretary of state’s office. The office initially declined the request for Musk’s voter file, saying it doesn’t provide records for canceled registrations. It later reversed the decision. 

Musk canceled his registration in the state in August 2020, according to his voter file. He announced at a conference in December 2020 that he had moved to Texas. 

NBC News sought comment from Musk about his voting history and his past statements about mail-in ballots. In an email, he didn’t address his votes but stood by his view about voter fraud. 

“Voting by mail has been recognized as an invitation to fraud throughout the world,” he wrote. 

Musk has criticized voting by mail at least four times this year on his social media app, X, mixing his criticisms with falsehoods and partial truths about U.S. elections — part of a broader pattern of his posting misleading or false claims about election security.

In January, he wrote: “In the USA, you don’t need government issued ID to vote and you can mail in your ballot. This is insane.” 

But that’s misleading. The standard voter registration form asks applicants for ID numbers, and while the specific requirements vary by state, they generally require a driver’s license number, a state identification number or a Social Security number. And some states, such as Texas, ask for the same information again when people vote by mail. California requires some first-time voters to mail copies of their IDs with their ballots. 

In May, Musk falsely asserted that widespread voting by mail was “not allowed” before the Covid-19 pandemic: “Widespread voting by mail (not allowed before the scamdemic) makes proving fraud almost impossible.” 

Voting by mail was the choice of a majority of California voters both times Musk voted. In the November 2018 election, 65% of California ballots were cast by mail, according to state records. In the November 2016 election, the figure was 58%. 

California now has universal voting by mail, with all registered voters receiving ballots in advance that they can mail back or deliver by hand. 

The California secretary of state’s office declined to comment on Musk’s criticism, but it did provide information about how the state tries to ensure the system’s integrity. It said that when people register, it checks ID numbers against what’s on file and that when people vote by mail, it examines their signatures. State law requires voters to attest under penalty of perjury that they’re eligible to vote. The office also said it captures the IP addresses used for all online voter registrations in case someone tries to register multiple names from the same device, among other security measures. 

Numerous investigations and studies have documented that there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S., and examples of fraud involving mail-in or absentee ballots are exceedingly rare. When they do occur, prosecutors have successfully brought cases against perpetrators, including in a highly publicized fraud scheme in North Carolina, despite Musk’s claim that voting by mail makes proving fraud almost impossible. 

Musk’s own Super PAC, America PAC, has been encouraging some swing state voters to absentee vote with ballots that can be submitted by mail. NBC News obtained a mailer from America PAC that was distributed in Wisconsin that included a QR code linking to America PAC’s website, with accompanying text reading “SCAN HERE TO APPLY FOR YOUR ABSENTEE BALLOT.” In Wisconsin, voters can cast absentee ballots by mailing them in, by bringing them to a county clerk’s office or by bringing them to a polling place.

After he moved to Texas, Musk voted by absentee ballot in 2020, the Daily Beast has reported. It’s not clear whether he mailed the absentee ballot. The website also reported that Musk voted in an election in Texas in June 2022 but skipped the November 2022 election. 

Musk is registered to vote in Brownsville, Texas, where his company SpaceX has operations, though as of December he lived in Austin, according to a report from Business Insider, citing court records. 

Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is often ranked as the wealthiest person in the world. 

Musk isn’t the only one to both criticize voting by mail and use it. Trump has done the same, including voting by mail in 2020 in Florida. Musk has endorsed Trump’s bid to return to the White House over Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Voting by mail was for years associated with Democrats as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts. But this year some Republicans are embracing it as a way to boost turnout on their side. 

Musk wrote on X this year, “I voted 100% Dem until a few years ago.” The contents of ballots are secret, and the state records don’t show whom Musk voted for. 

He has said he voted for Clinton in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020. 

Musk was registered in California as having no party preference, consistent with his describing himself as an independent. 

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Harris presented herself as a pragmatist in the long-anticipated interview, given to CNN’s Dana Bash alongside her running mate, Tim Walz. The vice president sought to strike a balance between defending the Biden-Harris administration’s legacy and charting her own path if elected president, while taking questions about how some of her policy positions have changed since the last time she ran for president.

“I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems,” Harris said.

Here are five takeaways from the interview.

Defending her shifting stances

Harris has changed her position on some major issues since 2019, when she ran for president and sought to win over progressive Democratic primary voters by cosponsoring Medicare for All, supporting a Green New Deal, opposing fracking and calling for decriminalizing migration.

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“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris said in the interview Thursday, adding that she continues to believe “the climate crisis is real” and that the White House made strides to address it with the Inflation Reduction Act.

On fracking, Harris said she promised during the 2020 vice presidential debate that she wouldn’t seek to ban fracking, “nor will I going forward.” She continued, “I cast the tie-breaking vote that actually increased leases for fracking as vice president.”

(Harris said during her 2020 debate against Mike Pence that “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”)

Harris added that there can be “a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

On those who cross the border unlawfully, Harris said, “I believe there should be consequence. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally.” She also criticized Trump for pushing Republicans to kill a bipartisan border security bill.

“My value around what we need to do to secure our border — that value has not changed. I spent two terms as the attorney general of California prosecuting transnational criminal organizations,” she said.

Brushing off Trump’s rhetoric on her race

Trump has sought to attack Harris’ racial identity, falsely claiming she previously identified as Indian American and only started identifying as Black recently.

Harris didn’t engage.

“Same old, tired playbook,” she said. “Next question, please.”

Harris cast Trump as a politician of the past, calling him “someone who is really been pushing an agenda and an environment that is about diminishing the character and the strength of who we are as Americans, really dividing our nation.

“And I think people are ready to turn the page on that,” she continued.

It reflects Harris’ approach to the campaign since she took the baton from Biden last month: running her own race as opposed to focusing on what Trump has said day to day.

Her ‘Day One’ agenda

Harris said her “Day One” agenda as president will be to start “implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy,” citing her recent economic proposals aimed at lowering costs.

“Prices, in particular for groceries, are still too high. The American people know it. I know it,” she said. “Which is why my agenda includes what we need to do to bring down the price of groceries, for example, dealing with an issue like price gouging.”

Harris continued, “What we need to do to extend the child tax credit to help young families be able to take care of their children in their most formative years. What we need to do to bring down the cost of housing; my proposal includes what would be a tax credit of $25,000 for first-time home buyers.”

When asked why she hasn’t already done those things as vice president, Harris defended Biden’s record but said “there’s more to do.” Harris also said she doesn’t regret her remarks after the late June debate that the president could ably serve another four-year term. (Biden bowed to pressure mounting in his party and withdrew from the presidential race on July 21, less than a month later.)

Trump lashes out at Harris’ answers

Trump responded on his social media platform ahead of the interview after watching a clip of Harris defending her new stances.

“I just saw Comrade Kamala Harris’ answer to a very weakly-phrased question … her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed.’ On that I agree, her values haven’t changed — The Border is going to remain open, not closed, there will be Free Healthcare for Illegal Aliens, Sanctuary Cities, No Cash Bail, Gun Confiscation, Zero Fracking, a Ban on Gasoline-Powered Cars, Private Healthcare will be abolished, a 70-80% tax rate will be put in place, and she will Defund the Police,” Trump wrote. “America will become a WASTELAND!”

Walz: ‘I wear my emotions on my sleeves’

Walz defended his prior characterizations of his service in the national guard, including suggesting while discussing gun policy that he served in combat situations. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, himself a military veteran, accused him of “stolen valor.”

Walz — who has previously said through a spokesperson that he “misspoke” when talking about handling weapons “in war” — elaborated on his remarks, blaming that and other misstatements on a habit of speaking “passionately.”

“First of all, I’m incredibly proud I’ve done 24 years of wearing the uniform of this country,” Walz said in the Thursday interview. “I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about about our children being shot in schools and around around guns. So I think people know me,” he said. “They know who I am. They know where my heart is.”

“If it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog,” he said. “The one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another member’s service in any way.”

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The newspaper, which obtained the document as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, reported that Moore made the claim on the application in 2006 when he was 27.

In a statement, the governor wrote that he had been encouraged to fill out the application for the fellowship by his deputy brigade commander serving overseas in the Army. At the time, Moore said the deputy brigade commander had recommended him for the Bronze Star — and told him to include the award on his application “after confirming with two other senior-level officers that they had also signed off on the commendation.”

Toward the end of his deployment, however, Moore said he was disappointed to learn he had not received the Bronze Star. When he returned home, Moore said he was “focused on helping my fellow veterans, a mission I continue to advance as governor.”

“Still, I sincerely wish I had gone back to correct the note on my application,” Moore, a Democrat, said in a statement Thursday. “It was an honest mistake, and I regret not making that correction.”

The Bronze Star is awarded to service members for meritorious service in combat zones.

The governor noted in his statement Thursday that he was listed as a top 1% officer in Operation Enduring Freedom in his officer evaluation report.

“My deputy brigade commander felt comfortable with instructing me to include the award on my application for the Fellowship because he received confirmation with the approval authority that the Bronze Star was signed and approved by his senior leadership,” Moore wrote.

The governor also wrote that in the military, “there is an understanding that if a senior officer tells you that an action is approved, you can trust that as a fact. That is why it was part of the application, plain and simple.”

The award had been mentioned during interviews with media when Moore was running for governor in 2022, but Moore never said in those interviews that he had not received the commendation. In an interview with the New York Times, the governor said for the first time that he regretted failing to correct the interviewers who had described him as a recipient of the award.

The newspaper also spoke to the officer who Moore said had recommended he put the award on his application this week in an interview arranged by Moore’s staff. The officer, Michael Fenzel, who is now a lieutenant general serving as the United States security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, told The Times that Moore had first objected to the idea of mentioning the Bronze Star.

Fenzel said he had told Moore that he and others had approved the medal, and that it was appropriate to include it in his application, the newspaper reported, and that it would be processed by the time his fellowship began.

“The first thing you should do, if you believe a loved one is going down a rabbit hole, becoming radicalized, is to try to assess exactly how far down the rabbit hole they are,” Brian Hughes told the News4 I-Team.

Hughes is the co-founder and associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University.

Hughes warned that once people make social connections within extremist groups, “it becomes very, very hard to pull them out.”

Why an ex-member of a racist gang now works with Life After Hate

Connecting with others is part of the psychology of why people join extremist organizations in the first place.

“The day that I became involved in this stuff, it could have been a gang, it could have been some other type of extremism,” Brad Galloway told the I-Team. He was looking for “that sense of belonging, that sense of worth, that sense of identity, that we’re all actually searching for.”

Galloway was a member of a Canadian racist skinhead gang for 13 years and eventually became one of its leaders. It’s a time he says he’s not proud of but does not deny.

“The violence was particularly something that, over time, I was like, well, what is this doing? What is this creating? What is this changing? All that I see that it’s doing is hurting,” he said.

For the last decade, Galloway has helped people get out of extremist groups. He works across the U.S. with a group called Life After Hate.

After a decade spent in an extremist group and now with more time out of one, he said, “These groups are not looking for an answer that doesn’t involve violence.”

What a survey showed about beliefs on political violence

In this election year, there’s real concern about how those extremist views could inflame political violence in America.

“Views that were at one time held by a very small number of the population are finding their way into the mainstream,” Dr. Garen Wintemute told the I-Team.

Wintemute is the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.

His group’s ongoing research shows 25% of Americans surveyed in 2023 believe violence is usually or always justified to advance at least one of 17 political objectives. That’s a decrease from the year before, but he says it is potentially more dangerous.

The survey also showed an increase in the number of people who support violence who also said they would be armed with a gun, threaten someone with a gun and even said they were very likely or extremely likely to shoot someone with it for a political reason.

“I think people take it as a matter of course that violence is going to be a part of our political process,” Hughes said. “Ten years ago, that would have been shocking to say.”

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News4 I-Team Feb 6

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To Hughes, political extremism and the violence that surrounds it have become far too familiar in recent years. He said it’s not unstoppable, though.

“When people have the tools and the resources to recognize these issues before they become very severe, they do intervene. And those interventions are effective,” he said.

How to talk with a loved one about political extremism

Hughes admitted that relationships with people who have become involved with extremist groups can be frustrating.

“It is hard. It can be very frustrating. It can really make you mad to have to talk to a person who seems so far afield, but it has to be done, and the best way to do it is to do it from a place of curiosity.”

Lead with curiosity, not condemnation: Every expert the I-Team spoke with over the past year said the key to convincing a loved one to leave an extremist group is to lead with curiosity, not condemnation.

Hughes has worked with Rachel Carroll Rivas at the Southern Poverty Law Center to develop strategies to help people who have been radicalized.

“If we actually ask the question of, what was the purpose? What do you think is going on here? Why is this happening, that really gives people that agency to come to a decision on their own.”

Galloway, the former extremist turned exit specialist, said, “I want to understand why you’re there, right? So, why is it that you have such a dissent for the government, or why is it that you have such a dissent for certain cultures or communities within America?”

Galloway said he’s led 50 people away from extremism and is currently working with 20 more.

He credits his wife for being part of the push to get him to leave.

“She was never involved in any of that stuff. She would poke at it all the time and say, ‘Are you sure about that? I mean, have you researched, have you looked at that … just keeping those questions going.”

Keep the conversation going: Former Oath Keeper turned congressional Jan. 6 witness Jason VanTatenhove told the I-Team earlier this year that keeping the conversation going is another key.

“We have opportunities with the people in our lives. It’s going to take a tsunami of those little moments of reaching across in our own personal lives to begin to see some change. I think we need everyone to be doing this,” he said.

Do what you can: Wintemute echoed VanTatenhove’s point.

“We all have to be willing to say, ‘This is not acceptable. I will do my part.’ Elected official, I need you to do yours, but we can’t look elsewhere for the solution.”

Go here to see resources from the PERIL project at American University.

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This story was reported by News4 Investigative Reporter Ted Oberg and News4 Investigative Producer Rick Yarborough, shot by News4 Photojournalists Jeff Piper and Steve Jones, and edited by Jones.

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“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump said, before adding, “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

Asked to clarify whether the government would pay for IVF services or whether insurance companies would do so, Trump reiterated that one option would be to have insurance companies pay “under a mandate, yes.”

Abortion and IVF have been a political liability for the GOP this year. Democrats have blasted Republicans over IVF in recent months, saying that GOP-led restrictions on abortion could lead to restrictions on IVF as well.

In a statement, Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said that “Donald Trump’s own platform could effectively ban IVF and abortion nationwide” and added that “because Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, IVF is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country. There is only one candidate in this race who trusts women and will protect our freedom to make our own health care decisions: Vice President Kamala Harris.”

The statement refers to the GOP platform’s language on the 14th Amendment in its section on abortion policy: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”

Earlier this year, the Alabama state Supreme Court ruled that embryos created via IVF were to be considered people, a move that led to the largest fertility clinics in the state pausing their IVF care.

Trump’s stance could put him at odds with anti-abortion advocates who oppose certain parts of the IVF process that involve discarding unused embryos.

Currently, few people have insurance plans that cover fertility treatments like IVF, leaving many couples to pay out of pocket for the treatment’s high costs. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates the cost per patient for one cycle of IVF at about $20,000.

According to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, its member clinics performed 389,993 IVF cycles in 2022. At a cost of around $20,000 each, that would come to $7.8 billion for that one year.

A growing number of employers have begun to offer fertility benefits over the last decade, however. Some pay for a fixed amount of a patient’s costs, while others have a lifetime maximum of a particular number of cycles.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, spoke in a recent, separate NBC News interview about his “frustration that reproductive rights is a whole suite of pro-family things that Republicans are way better at than Democrats. And the media always focus on abortion. But, you know, we’ve actually done a lot of things to try to promote fertility treatments to people who are struggling with it.”

Trump’s stance on IVF is the latest instance of him addressing criticism of his presidential administration through 2024 campaign policy proposals. After criticism from Democrats that his 2017 tax plan favored the wealthy, he announced that if elected again, he would eliminated taxes on tips for service workers.

Now, as he and other Republicans face criticism for supporting the Supreme Court justices who struck down Roe, Trump is proposing to protect IVF and address its costs.

In the interview, Trump did not explicitly say how we would vote on an upcoming ballot measure in his home state of Florida that would guarantee a right to abortion until fetal viability, which is around 24 weeks of pregnancy. He repeated past criticism that Florida’s current six-week limit on abortion, which was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is “too short.” Trump added, “it has to be more time.”

Pressed on how he will be voting in November, he said, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.”

Trump has long gone back and forth on his position on abortion before arriving at his current position that the issue should be up to the states.

As president, before Roe v. Wade was overturned, he once urged the Senate to pass a 20-week ban on abortion. After he left office, he celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe and the national right to abortion, at one point going as far as saying, “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” in a social media post.

But as the presidential race has taken shape this year, the former president has inched further away from other Republicans on the issue, especially as abortion has emerged as a key issue for Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies.

In a speech at the Democratic convention last week, Harris called Trump and Vance “out of their minds” and accused them of planning to “ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion.”

In the interview, Trump said on abortion policy that “exceptions are very important for me,” later adding, “I believe in exceptions for life of the mother … incest, rape.”

Trump on Thursday also pushed back on criticism of his Monday visit to Arlington National Cemetery, saying that a family “asked me whether or not I would stand for a picture at the grave of their loved one who should not have died.”

The former president said that he did not initiate the photo, adding, “While I was there, I didn’t ask for a picture. While I was there, they said, ‘Sir, could we have a picture at the grave?'”

Trump’s campaign has faced criticism this week after reports emerged that a member of Trump’s staff “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery staff member who tried to prevent Trump and others from taking photo and videos in Section 60, where service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried and where filming is typically prohibited.

The former president on Thursday also blasted Harris on immigration and border security, reprising his usual language about the increased number of migrants entering the country in recent years.

“Our country is going to hell. We’ve never been in a position like this,” Trump said, adding, “There’s never been a country that’s been invaded like we have been invaded. And I think that alone loses them the election.”

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Sitting with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris was asked about changes in her policies over the years, specifically her reversals on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris replied.

The interview with CNN’s Dana Bash gave Harris a chance to try to quell criticism that she has eschewed uncontrolled environments while also giving her a fresh platform to define her campaign and test her political mettle ahead of an upcoming debate with former President Donald Trump set for Sept. 10. But it also carried risk as her team tries to build on momentum from the ticket shakeup following Joe Biden’s exit and last week’s Democratic National Convention.

“First and foremost, one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to strengthen and support the middle class,” Harris said. “When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward.”

The CNN interview was taped at 1:45 p.m. Thursday at Kim’s Cafe, a local Black-owned restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, and aired in the evening.

Harris also brushed off Trump’s questioning of her racial identity after the former president said she “happened to turn Black.” Harris, who is of Black and South Asian heritage, said it was the “same old, tired playbook.”

“Next question.”

She also said she’d name a Republican to serve in her Cabinet if she were elected, though she didn’t have a name in mind.

Joint interviews during an election year are a fixture in politics; Biden and Harris, Trump and Mike Pence, Barack Obama and Biden — all did them at a similar point in the race. The difference is those other candidates had all done solo interviews, too. Harris hasn’t yet done an in-depth interview since she became her party’s standard bearer five weeks ago, though she did sit for several while she was still Biden’s running mate.

Harris and Walz are still introducing themselves to voters, unlike Trump and Biden, of whom people had near-universal awareness and opinion.

Harris said serving with Biden was “one of the greatest honors of my career,” as she recounted the moment he called to tell her he was stepping down and would support her.

Decision 2024 Aug 23

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Kamala Harris Aug 25

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During her time as vice president, Harris has done on-camera and print interviews with The Associated Press and many other outlets, a much more frequent pace than the president — except for Biden’s late-stage media blitz following his disastrous debate performance that touched off the end of his campaign.

Harris’ lack of media access over the past month has become one of Republicans’ key attack lines. The Trump campaign has kept a tally of the days she has gone by as a candidate without giving an interview and have suggested she needs a “babysitter” and that’s why Walz will be there.

“I just saw Comrade Kamala Harris’ answer to a very weakly-phrased question, a question that was put in more as a matter of defense than curiosity, but her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed,’” Trump posted online.

Trump has largely steered toward conservative media outlets when granting interviews, though he has held more open press conferences in recent weeks as he sought to reclaim the spotlight that Harris’ elevation had claimed.

Harris and Walz went out on a two-day bus tour through southeast Georgia that culminated with an evening rally in Savannah. Harris campaign officials believe that in order to win the state over Trump in November, she must make inroads in GOP strongholds across the state.

Democrats’ enthusiasm about their vote in November has surged over the past few months, according to polling from Gallup. About 8 in 10 Democrats now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, compared with 55% in March.

This gives them an enthusiasm edge they did not have earlier this year. Republicans’ enthusiasm has increased by much less over the same period, and about two-thirds of Republicans now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting.

But at a packed arena on Thursday, Harris cast her nascent campaign as the underdog and encouraged the crowd to work hard to elect her in November.

“We’re here to speak truth and one of the things that we know is that this is going to be a tight race to the end,” she said.

Harris went through a list of Democratic concerns: that Trump will further restrict women’s rights after he appointed three judges to the U.S. Supreme Court who helped overturn Roe, that he’d repeal the Affordable Care Act, and that given new immunity powers granted presidents by the U.S. Supreme Court, “imagine Donald Trump with no guard rails.”

Her rally was briefly disrupted by demonstrators who were protesting the U.S. involvement in the Israel-Hamas war.

The campaign wants the events to motivate voters in GOP-leaning areas who don’t traditionally see the candidates, and hopes that the engagements drive viral moments that cut through crowded media coverage to reach voters across the country.

Harris has another campaign blitz on Labor Day with Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh with the election rapidly approaching. The first mail ballots get sent to voters in just two weeks.

“A nameless bureaucrat at Arlington whose job it is to preserve the dignity of the cemetery is doing the complete opposite in trying to make what was a very solemn and respectful event into something it was not,” said Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita, a retired Marine who was with Trump at the cemetery Monday.

Trump has long portrayed himself as a champion of service members and veterans — an image bolstered by participants in Monday’s ceremony. But he has also created a pattern of disparaging service members that has led even some former aides to question the authenticity of his support for the military.

The latest episode threatens to blunt his attacks on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over a 2021 terrorist assault at the so-called Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport, which killed 13 American service members.

It was the third anniversary of the bombings, which occurred during the harried U.S. exit from Afghanistan, that took Trump to the Arlington burial ground, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, on Monday. He laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to honor those who died in the bombings and then moved to Section 60, an area reserved for participants in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Trump was joined at both sites by family members of the men and women killed at Abbey Gate. The family members invited him to participate in the commemoration, and they wanted the moment to be documented, according to two people who were present.

“I gave my permission,” Kelly Barnett, the mother of Marine Staff Sgt. Darin “Taylor” Hoover, told NBC News. “I wanted the memories. I wanted to make sure that my family at home — I have a huge family — I wanted to make sure that they were involved with it, as well, and they could see it and feel it, have the experience that we had. And so I said, yeah, in no uncertain terms, I was OK with it.”

Trump posed for a photograph beside Hoover’s grave, smiling and giving a thumbs-up gesture in a shot that included the headstones of other service members who were not part of Monday’s ceremony.

A federal regulation admonishes that memorial services at Army cemeteries “will not include partisan political activities.”

There is no greater sacrifice than giving one’s life in defense of our country. It was my solemn privilege to stand alongside the family of Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover at Arlington National Cemetery today as we paid tribute to his legacy and the 12 others who lost their lives… pic.twitter.com/tR6dhpMYsB

— Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox (@GovCox) August 26, 2024

NPR first reported Tuesday that two Trump campaign staffers had a confrontation with a cemetery official who tried to prevent them from filming.

“We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed,” the cemetery said in a statement.

Whatever happened, Barnett and another participant — who asked to remain anonymous without authorization to speak for the families — said they noticed nothing amiss.

“We didn’t even hear about it until the next day,” the second participant said, who did not believe Trump’s participation amounted to campaign activity.

“It wasn’t politicized,” this person said.

Trump posted video that included clips from Monday’s ceremony to his TikTok account. In the video, he blamed Biden and Harris for the deaths at the Kabul airport.

Trump, like most Republican presidential candidates in recent decades, has won the majority of voters who have served in the military, according to exit polls. But his edge was smaller in his defeat in 2020 — 54% to 44% — than when he won that part of the electorate 61% to 34% in taking the presidency in 2016.

His aides have publicly dismissed the report of a physical interaction at the cemetery and accused Democrats of ignoring the anniversary, which is the most poignant reminder of a withdrawal that was politically damaging to Biden.

“They’re trying to muddle the fact that there was only one commander in chief in Arlington on Aug. 26,” LaCivita said. He noted that Biden was on vacation and that Harris did not visit Arlington on the anniversary. Both of them issued statements. 

Neither Trump nor Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, served in uniform. Their running mates, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., did.

Harris’ campaign declined to comment on the report of an altercation at Arlington, but its communications director, Michael Tyler, addressed it in a CNN interview Wednesday.

“Frankly, I think this episode is pretty sad when it’s all said and done,” Tyler said. “Listen, this is what we’ve come to expect from Donald Trump and his team. Donald Trump is a person who wants to make everything all about Donald Trump. He’s also somebody who has a history of demeaning and degrading military service members, those who have given the ultimate sacrifice.”

A Trump adviser who spoke with NBC News pointed to a statement signed by five Gold Star family members and two Purple Heart recipients who were with Trump on Monday defending him amid the firestorm. They said in the statement that they gave approval for Trump’s videographer and photographer to capture those moments so they could “cherish these memories forever.”

“Everything involved in the day was at their invitation,” this person said. “It wasn’t a campaign event. It was an event done by the families of these people, and they invited the commander-in-chief who has consistently demonstrated strong and unwavering support for them and all service members and their families.”

This person said that Trump was “grateful” for the invitation and that he would show “how committed he is when he’s back in the White House to ensure that the people who manufactured that insane and disastrous withdrawal are held accountable for it.”

The Trump campaign’s handling of the episode after details leaked to the media raised some eyebrows among Republicans, particularly a statement in which communications director Steven Cheung said “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”

A Republican operative, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the statement “so unprofessional.” A Trump ally, meanwhile, said the “behavior” outlined at the cemetery was “really out of character” for the campaign.

For years, Trump has faced accusations of showing disrespect to veterans and service members.

Early this year, he mocked the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for being unable to raise his arms because of injuries he sustained as a prisoner of war. In 2015, he also said McCain was not a “war hero” because “he was captured.”

“I like people that weren’t captured,” he said at the time.

McCain, a veteran of the Vietnam War, gained national recognition for his time as a prisoner of war in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was tortured.

This cycle, Trump also questioned why Nikki Haley’s husband was not with her on the campaign trail during the Republican primaries. Maj. Michael Haley was serving overseas at the time.

Just this month, Trump described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is a civilian honor, as “much better” than the Medal of Honor, a military honor, because recipients of the latter are often deceased or severely injured.

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said last year his former boss denigrated veterans and service members as “suckers” and “losers,” confirming remarks that were published in The Atlantic years earlier. Trump has vehemently and repeatedly denied making such comments.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat and Army veteran, pointed to Trump’s comments about the Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, adding that the episode at Arlington National Cemetery appeared to be a “continuation of something that I just find really problematic.”

“There is this attacking of those with military service and this increasing politicization and disrespect for those who have chosen to serve this country,” he said, adding that he still wanted to learn more details about what happened between Trump’s staff and the cemetery official.

At their convention last week, Democrats took Trump to task over military issues, emphasizing a theme of patriotism. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that Trump “does not understand the service and sacrifice of our military” and that he was the only president since World War II who has not “honored our veterans and their sacrifices.”

But for Republicans, the episode served to further shine a light on what they see as one of the Biden administration’s biggest failings in Afghanistan, a key piece of their message on global instability over the past four years.

“The veterans that I talk to feel disrespected and disappointed, certainly at their commander in chief, in the direction of the United States militarily,” Pennsylvania state Rep. Rob Mercuri, a veteran and congressional candidate in the 17th District, which is a swing district with a large veteran population. “The only thing I would say about President Trump is that his plan is to project strength. My view is that the Reagan Doctrine of peace through strength is really important to come back to.”

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Alex Seitz-Wald contributed.

FBI officials also said they had found no indication or evidence that any co-conspirators worked with 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to kill Trump just days before he accepted the 2024 Republican nomination at the RNC.

“I want to be clear: We have not seen any indication to suggest Crooks was directed by a foreign entity to conduct the attack,” FBI Assistant Director Bobby Wells told reporters.

Another official Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Pittsburgh field office, said that the shooter had searched for details of campaign events held by both Trump and President Joe Biden, who was still the presumptive Democratic nominee when Trump was shot. Crooks also searched for information on the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, Rojek said.

Crooks engaged in a “sustained, detailed effort to plan an attack” and “looked at any number of events and targets” before ultimately “hyper-focusing” on the Trump rally after it was announced in early July. The Trump rally appears to have been a “target of opportunity,” Rojek said.

Rojek said that investigators found a “mixture of ideologies” in the content the FBI recovered from Crooks’ accounts. “I would say that we see no definitive ideology associated with our subject, either left-leaning or right-leaning,” Rojek said. “It’s really been a mixture and something we’re still attempting to analyze and draw conclusions on.”

The shooter’s family had been “extremely cooperative” with the investigation, Rojek added.

A bullet whizzed by Trump’s skull and struck him in the ear during the July 13 attack, leaving the former president bleeding as the Secret Service formed a wall around him and ushered him to a vehicle. Attempted assassin Crooks was shot and killed seconds after shots rang out. A rally attendee, former fire chief Corey Comperatore, was killed in the attack, and others were injured.

Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service at the time of the shooting, stepped down last month under pressure from lawmakers. Multiple officials at the Secret Service were placed on leave as an internal investigation into rally planning unfolds, a source familiar with the decisions told NBC News.

Donald Trump Aug 27

Shooter in Trump assassination attempt used air-conditioning unit to get on roof

Secret Service Aug 23

Some Secret Service officials have been placed on leave in response to Trump assassination attempt

Last week, Trump spoke from behind bulletproof glass during an outdoor rally in Asheboro, North Carolina.

The FBI said their victim impact interview with Trump was “productive” and noted that they provided the former president with an “in-depth briefing” on the investigation.

“We’re grateful to the former president for his cooperation and his time,” Rojek said.

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“We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed,” the statement read.

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” said the cemetery in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. “Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants.”

Trump participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Monday, marking the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in an attack by the Islamic State outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan. More than 150 Afghans were also killed. Parents of fallen service members have expressed anger at President Joe Biden’s administration for a lack of answers surrounding the attack.

After the ceremony, Trump headed to Section 60 of the cemetery, where some service members killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried and recording is typically heavily restricted.

NPR first reported Tuesday that two Trump campaign staffers had a confrontation with a cemetery official who tried to prevent them from filming.

Trump communications director Steven Cheung denied some of the details of the report and said the campaign was willing to release footage to support its claim.

“There was no physical altercation as described and we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made,” Cheung said in a statement. “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”

Cheung followed up in a statement on X, saying Trump was allowed to have a photographer there.

Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita posted a video on x that showed Trump laying flowers at a gravesite.

In a statement, he said a “despicable individual” physically prevented Trump’s team from accompanying him to the event.

“For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” LaCivita said. “Whoever this individual is spreading these lies are dishonoring the men and women of our armed forces, and they are disrespecting everyone who paid the price for defending our country.”

LaCivita claimed that Trump was at Section 60 at the invitation of Abbey Gate Gold Star families “to honor their loved ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country.”

Trump generated controversy this month when said this month that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian award, was “better” than the top military award, the Medal of Honor, because those who receive the latter are often dead or injured.

Trump has previously faced scrutiny over a 2020 report in The Atlantic, which former White House chief of staff John Kelly later confirmed, that he made disparaging remarks about fallen soldiers, calling them “suckers” and “losers.” Trump has denied the allegation.

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The new indictment removes a section of the indictment that had accused Trump of trying to use the law enforcement powers of the Justice Department to overturn his election loss, an area of conduct for which the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion last month, said that Trump was absolutely immune from prosecution.

The stripped-down criminal case represents a first effort by prosecutors to comply with a Supreme Court opinion likely to result in a significant revision of the allegations against Trump over his efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power. It was filed three days ahead of a deadline for prosecutors and defense lawyers to tell the judge in the case how they wanted to proceed in light of that opinion, which said former presidents are presumptively immune from prosecution for official White House acts.

The two sides will be back in court for a status hearing next week, the first such appearance in months given that the case had been effectively frozen since last December as Trump’s immunity appeal worked its way through the justice system.

In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Trump called the new indictment “an act of desperation” and an “effort to resurrect a ‘dead’ Witch Hunt.’” He said the new case has “all the problems of the old Indictment, and should be dismissed IMMEDIATELY. ”

The special counsel’s office said the updated indictment, filed in federal court in Washington, was issued by a grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in the case. It said in a statement that the indictment “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions.”

The central revision in the updated criminal case concerns Trump’s dealings with the Justice Department.

The original indictment included allegations that Trump tried to enlist the department in his failed effort to undo his election loss, including by conducting sham investigations and telling states — incorrectly — that significant fraud had been detected.

It detailed how Jeffrey Clark, a top official in the Trump Justice Department, wanted to send a letter to elected officials in certain states falsely claiming that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election” and had asked top department officials to sign it, but they refused.

Clark’s support for Trump’s election fraud claims led Trump to openly contemplate naming him as acting attorney general in place of Jeffrey Rosen, who led the department in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Trump ultimately relented in that idea “when he was told it would result in mass resignations at the Justice Department,” according to the original indictment. Rosen remained on as acting attorney general through the end of Trump’s tenure

The new case no longer references Clark as a co-conspirator. Trump’s co-conspirators were not named in either indictment, but they have been identified through public records and other means.

In its opinion, the Supreme Court held that a president’s interactions with the Justice Department constitute official acts for which he is entitled to immunity, effectively stripping those allegations from the case.

“As we have explained, the President’s power to remove ‘executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed’ may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

The justices returned other core allegations in the case to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the trial judge presiding over the case, to determine what constitutes an official act protected from prosecution — and what does not.

The new indictment still includes one of the more stunning allegations brought by Smith — that Trump participated in a scheme orchestrated by allies to enlist slates of fraudulent electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden who would falsely attest that Trump had won in those states.

It also retains allegations that Trump sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes, and that Trump and his allies exploited the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to further delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the interactions between Trump and Pence amounted to official conduct for which “Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution.”

The question, Roberts wrote, is whether the government can rebut “that presumption of immunity.”

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the ruling. In an excerpt from an interview with CBS News’ “Sunday Morning” that aired Tuesday, she said: “I was concerned about a system that appeared to provide immunity for one individual under one set of circumstances. When we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same.”

A police officer who tried to subdue Michael Sparks with pepper spray described him as a catalyst for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Senate that day recessed less than one minute after Sparks jumped into the building through a broken window. Sparks then joined other rioters in chasing a police officer up flights of stairs.

Before learning his sentence, Sparks told the judge that he still believes the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud and “completely taken from the American public.”

“I am remorseful that what transpired that day didn’t help anybody,” Sparks said. “I am remorseful that our country is in the state it’s in.”

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who sentenced Sparks to four years and five months, told him that there was nothing patriotic about his prominent role in what was a “national disgrace.”

“I don’t really think you appreciate the full gravity of what happened that day and, quite frankly, the full seriousness of what you did,” the judge said.

Federal prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of four years and nine months for Sparks, a 47-year-old former factory worker from Cecilia, Kentucky.

Defense attorney Scott Wendelsdorf asked the judge to sentence Sparks to one year of home detention instead of prison.

A jury convicted Sparks of all six charges that he faced, including a felony count of interfering with police during a civil disorder. Sparks didn’t testify at his trial in Washington, D.C.

In the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, Sparks used social media to promote conspiracy theories about election fraud and advocate for a civil war.

“It’s time to drag them out of Congress. It’s tyranny,” he posted on Facebook three days before the riot.

Sparks traveled to Washington, D.C, with co-workers from an electronics and components plant in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. They attended then-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House on Jan. 6.

After the rally, Sparks and a friend, Joseph Howe, joined a crowd in marching to the Capitol. Both of them wore tactical vests. Howe was captured on video repeatedly saying, “we’re getting in that building.”

Off camera, Sparks added: “All it’s going to take is one person to go. The rest is following,” according to prosecutors. Sparks’ attorney argued that the evidence doesn’t prove that Sparks made that statement.

“Of course, both Sparks and Howe were more right than perhaps anyone else knew at the time — it was just a short time later that Sparks made history as the very first person to go inside, and the rest indeed followed,” prosecutors wrote.

Dominic Pezzola, a member of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group, used a police shield to break a window next to the Senate Wing Door. Capitol Police Sgt. Victor Nichols sprayed Sparks in the face as he hopped through the shattered glass.

Nichols testified that Sparks acted “like a green light for everybody behind him, and everyone followed right behind him because it was like it was okay to go into the building.” Nichols also said Sparks’ actions were “the catalyst for the building being completely breached.”

Capitol riot

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Undeterred by pepper spray, Sparks joined other rioters in chasing Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman as he retreated up the stairs and found backup from other officers near the Senate chamber.

“This is our America!” Sparks screamed at police. He left the building about 10 minutes later.

Sparks’ attorney downplayed his client’s distinction as the first rioter to enter the building.

“While technically true in a time-line sense, he did not lead the crowd into the building or cause the breach through which he and others entered,” Wendelsdorf wrote. “Actually, there were eight different points of access that day separately and independently exploited by the protestors.”

But the judge said when and where Sparks entered the Capitol was an important factor in his sentencing.

“I think it’s undeniable that the first person (to enter the Capitol) would have an emboldening and encouraging effect on everyone who was at least in your vicinity,” Kelly told Sparks. “To say it wasn’t a material, key point in the mob’s taking of the Capitol, I think, is just ignoring the obvious.”

Sparks was arrested in Kentucky less than a month after the riot. Sparks and Howe were charged together in a November 2022 indictment. Howe pleaded guilty to assault and obstruction charges and was sentenced last year to four years and two months in prison.

More than 1,400 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. Approximately 950 riot defendants have been convicted and sentenced. More than 600 of them have received terms of imprisonment ranging from a few days to 22 years.

The administrative stay issued by U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker comes just days after 16 states, led by Republican attorneys general, challenged the program that could benefit an estimated 500,000 immigrants in the country, plus about 50,000 of their children.

One of the states leading the challenge is Texas, which in the lawsuit claimed the state has had to pay tens of millions of dollars annually from health care to law enforcement because of immigrants living in the state without legal status.

President Joe Biden announced the program in June. The court order, which lasts for two weeks but could be extended, comes one week after the Department of Homeland Security began accepting applications.

“The claims are substantial and warrant closer consideration than the court has been able to afford to date,” Barker wrote.

Barker was appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2019 as a judge in Tyler, Texas, which lies in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a favored venue for advocates pushing conservative arguments.

The judge laid out a timetable that could produce a decision shortly before the presidential election Nov. 5 or before a newly elected president takes office in January. Barker gave both sides until Oct. 10 to file briefs in the case.

The policy offers spouses of U.S. citizens without legal status, who meet certain criteria, a path to citizenship by applying for a green card and staying in the U.S. while undergoing the process. Traditionally, the process could include a years-long wait outside of the U.S., causing what advocates equate to “family separation.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return an email seeking comment on the order.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton cheered the order.

“This is just the first step. We are going to keep fighting for Texas, our country, and the rule of law,” Paxton posted on the social media platform X.

Several families were notified of the receipt of their applications, according to attorneys advocating for eligible families who filed a motion to intervene earlier Monday.

“Texas should not be able to decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and their immigrant spouses without confronting their reality,” Karen Tumlin, the founder and director of Justice Action Center, said during the press conference before the order was issued.

The coalition of states accused the administration of bypassing Congress for “blatant political purposes.”

The program has been particularly contentious in an election year where immigration is one of the biggest issues, with many Republicans attacking the policy and contending it is essentially a form of amnesty for people who broke the law.

To be eligible for the program, immigrants must have lived continuously in the U.S. for at least 10 years, not pose a security threat or have a disqualifying criminal history, and have been married to a citizen by June 17 — the day before the program was announced.

They must pay a $580 fee to apply and fill out a lengthy application, including an explanation of why they deserve humanitarian parole and a long list of supporting documents proving how long they have been in the country.

If approved, applicants have three years to seek permanent residency. During that period, they can get work authorization.

Before this program, it was complicated for people who were in the U.S. illegally to get a green card after marrying an American citizen. They can be required to return to their home country — often for years — and they always face the risk they may not be allowed back in.

First, Vance told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that before imposing mass deportations, Trump would need to “stop the bleeding.”

“You have to stop so many people from coming here illegally in the first place, and that means undoing everything that [Vice President] Kamala Harris did practically on day one of the administration,” he added, later saying: “Before we even fix the problem, we’ve got to stop the problem from getting worse.”

Asked again by moderator Kristen Welker about whether the Trump administration’s plan would include family separation, Vance dodged again.

“I think that families are currently being separated,” he said, adding that “you’re certainly going to have to deport some people in this country.”

He argued that mass deportations under Trump would “start with the most violent criminals in our country.”

“Those people need to be deported,” Vance said. “That’s where you focus federal resources.”

Vance went on to blast Harris again, baselessly accusing her of backing policies that led to family separations and to children living with criminals.

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When President Joe Biden and Harris first took office, Biden rescinded the Trump-era zero-tolerance policy and established a family reunification task force that found that more than 5,000 families were separated under the policy.

More recently, the Biden administration worked with a bipartisan group of senators to craft a comprehensive immigration and border security plan that seemed to have buy-in from both parties on Capitol Hill.

But GOP support for the bill tanked after Trump indicated his disapproval of the plan.

Vance’s remarks Saturday came days after Trump visited the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona for a campaign event.

While there, the former president also dodged NBC News’ questions about whether his proposal for “zero tolerance” policies on the border would lead to family separations, instead saying “provisions will be made” for mixed-status families that may have some members who are American citizens and some who are undocumented.

Trump did not clarify what provisions would be made for those families.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com.  More from NBC News:

• JD Vance says Trump would veto a national abortion ban
• Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ramp up campaigning to build on convention momentum
• Union members aren’t just voting on labor this year

Harris, who accepted her party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night, frequently invokes life lessons from her mother during her political speeches. One piece of advice she mentioned on Thursday night was her mother’s insistence that her daughter “never do anything half-assed,” Harris said.

Harris is the United States’ first-ever woman, Black American and South Asian American to serve as vice president. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was 19 years old when she left India for the U.S. Gopalan earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley before embarking on a career as a breast cancer researcher. She died in 2009.

Gopalan’s advice, as shared by Harris, largely falls under the “authoritative” style of parenting, which involves frequent communication and setting “clear rules and expectations” for your children, child psychologist Francyne Zeltser wrote for CNBC Make It in 2021.

The advice is also, for the most part, expert approved. Here are four pieces of guidance Harris received from her late mother, which she’s said helped shape her own career success.

‘Never do anything half-assed’

Harris has shared this blunt advice from her mother before. On Thursday night, she said it inspired her to dedicate herself fully to pursuing a law career, becoming a prosecutor to help “protect people.”

“At a young age, I decided I wanted to do that work,” said Harris.

Children who learn to fully commit to their goals, and who don’t give up at the first sign of difficulty, are more likely to achieve those goals on their way to long-term success, research shows. And parents who praise their kids’ effort, even more than the results, teach them that they’re strong enough to handle failure and bounce back, psychotherapist Amy Morin told CNBC Make It last year.

“Make sure they know that you’re just as impressed that they’re out there and trying and hustling hard,” Morin said.

‘Never let anyone tell you who you are, you show them who you are’

Harris credits her mother’s advice, which she repeated on Thursday, for giving her the confidence to ignore doubters throughout her career. People often tried to dissuade her from seeking an opportunity because she was “too young” or “no one like you has done it before,” she told MSNBC in 2021.

“I’ve heard all of those things many times over the course of my career, but I didn’t listen,” Harris said.

Mentally strong children don’t succumb to peer pressure or let other people define them, and they’re typically better equipped to confidently handle life’s challenges, Morin told Make It.

“The big part of mental strength is knowing, ‘I’m in charge of how I think, feel and behave, regardless of what’s going on around me,'” said Morin.

‘Never complain … do something about it’

Harris cited this quote from her mother on Thursday, too. In the past, she’s said that it came from her mother’s refusal to allow her children to endlessly complain without coming up with a plan of action for themselves.

“If you ever came home complaining about something, our mother would look at you with a straight face, one hand probably on a hip, and she’d say, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?'” Harris told MSNBC in 2020.

Parenting experts generally advise against coddling your children, which could make them less likely to develop important traits like resilience and self-motivation. They also recommend against being harsh, and instead suggest finding a middle ground where you can hold them accountable for the clear expectations you’ve agreed upon.

“When you trust kids to make their own decisions, they start to feel more engaged, confident and empowered. And once that happens, there’s no limit to what they can achieve,” author and parenting expert Esther Wojcicki wrote for Make It in 2022.

‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’

The viral “coconut tree” quote might be the most widely known piece of advice Harris says she received from her mother.

“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” Harris said in a now-viral video clip, recorded during a 2023 White House event.

Harris’ mother was again demanding accountability from her children — by insisting they think about themselves, and their individual problems, as existing within a much larger context. Open-mindedness and empathy are key traits of the emotional intelligence that kids need to become mentally strong, according to experts like Morin and parenting coach Reem Raouda.

Emotional intelligence skills “are key predictors for happiness and success,” Raouda wrote for Make It in February.

Are you stressed about money? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course. We’ll teach you how to be more successful and confident with your money, and practical strategies to boost savings, get out of debt and invest for the future. Start today and use code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off through September 2, 2024.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

Asked on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” about GOP lawmakers like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham who would want to see Trump advocate for and pass an abortion ban, Vance told moderator Kristen Welker that Trump has “explicitly” said he would veto a ban.

“I mean, if you’re not supporting it, as the president of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it,” Vance argued.

The latest position from the Trump campaign comes as the former president has changed his position on abortion policy over the years.

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In April, Trump was asked on a tarmac in Atlanta about whether he would sign a national abortion ban if it passed through Congress and he simply answered “no.”

But the former president didn’t clarify at the time what he considered a “ban.”

In 2018, when he was president, Trump called on the Senate to pass a 20-week limit on abortions that had already passed the House.

Last year, he celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the constitutional right to abortion.

“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump said in a May 2023 social media post.

And as recently as March, Trump flirted with the notion of a 15-week federal abortion ban, telling a local radio host that “the number of weeks now — people are agreeing on 15, and I’m thinking in terms of that, and it’ll come out to something that’s very reasonable.”

“But people are really — even hard-liners are agreeing — seems to be 15 weeks, seems to be a number that people are agreeing at,” Trump added in that interview.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

• Members of the Kennedy family denounce RFK Jr.’s decision to endorse Trump
• Satellite images show Ukraine’s expanding attacks inside Russia
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The kinetic energy powering Kamala Harris ’ whirlwind presidential campaign carries the hopeful aspirations of history and the almost quaint idea of electing the first woman to the White House. But inside it, too, is the urgent and determined refusal of many Democratic female voters to accept the alternative — again.

“Serious.” “Unapologetic.”

Listen to the women cheering “We’re not going back!” at the Harris campaign rallies. See them singing along during the dance party roll call at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Understand the mothers and daughters and sorority sisters and, yes, the men, brothers and boys who have watched and waited and winced as the country tried eight years ago to break the glass ceiling — and failed.

“Overdue.”

This time, this year, facing Donald Trump again, a certain and influential swath of the electorate is not messing around. “It’s our time,” said Denise Delegol, 60, a retired postal worker from West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.

Harris campaign reignites Democratic party’s enthusiasm

The promise of a Harris presidency is shaking a sizable segment of the nation out of a political funk, reviving the idea of a milestone election and an alternative to repeating the Trump era. It’s putting the country on the cusp of what Michelle Obama, in her convention speech to Democrats, called a “brighter day.”

Once President Joe Biden bowed out of the race and embraced his vice president at the top of the ticket, some found hope where before they had felt mostly dread.

“Overnight it went from doom-scrolling to hope-scrolling,” said Lisa Hansen of Wisconsin, who led an early Trump resistance group in 2017 as her first foray into political activism.

Lori Goldman of Michigan, who founded Fems for Dems to elect Hillary Clinton two presidents ago, said, “I’m too old to not ever have seen a president that’s female in the United States.” She’s 65.

And Shannon Nash, a California attorney, co-founder of the Tech4Kamala group and, like Harris, a fellow member of the historic Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., said from the convention hall Thursday night, “The joy is coming back to politics.”

Women have been here before, in 2016, when they donned matching pantsuits, poured champagne and settled in on election night, some with friends and daughters by their side, expecting Clinton to win the White House only to be shaken by Trump’s victory.

As one woman said at the time, she threw up the next morning.

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When is the upcoming Harris vs. Trump presidential debate?

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Republican women eye history, too

To be sure, some voters had a different first female president in mind. Nikki Haley lifted Republican hopes during the GOP primary, but her moment faded after rival Trump branded his former ambassador to the United Nations “birdbrain.”

Lisa Watts, a retired business owner from Hickory, North Carolina, who was attending her fifth Trump rally this week, had little interest in Harris. “I don’t think that her record proves that she is ready to run this country,” Watts said.

The thousands of women who pack Trump rallies, and tens of millions more who are expected to cast ballots for him in November, are participating on the other side of the potential history-making.

The former president, convicted in a hush-money case and still facing a pending federal indictment for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, would become the first felon to win the White House.

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump rejected as “insulting” the idea that Americans should vote for a woman for president because it would make history.

“If you ever give me a job because … of the fact that I’m a woman and not based on any merit or qualification, guess what? I’m turning that job down all day long,” the former president’s daughter-in-law said on her podcast in July.

Abortion, immigration and the war in Gaza

For those voting for Harris, this election feels more joyful, but also more necessary and urgent.

“We need to do this, be serious about it this time,” said Monique LaFonta, a mother of two twin girls, after attending a Harris rally in Milwaukee.

Trump’s creation of a conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned a woman’s right to abortion access produced outrage among many women who powered that year’s midterm election — and are a potentially influential force in this one.

“We are living in just such a wildly different situation,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice women. She said Harris is “unapologetic” when it comes to reproductive rights.

Harris herself carries this potentially history-making moment not as a campaign feature but a matter-of-fact representation of who she is and has always been, much the way Barack Obama often left his race merely implied to voters. Rather than reminding voters that the nation’s 47th president could become the first in its more than two-century history to not be a man, Harris is running instead on what she would do in the job and how she would do it.

In her speech Thursday night accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Harris acknowledged that she’s “no stranger to unlikely journeys,” but she did not specifically mention the historic nature of her candidacy.

Many receive her style as a brand of American optimism rooted in the generations who came before her, a Black and South Asian woman, the daughter of immigrants — a Jamaican father and Indian mother — who dared to dream in this country. She is blaring Beyonce’s “Freedom” as her campaign theme song along the way.

And yet among demonstrators calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war outside the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, pharmacist Fedaa Ballouta said that while having the first female president would mean a lot, she expects more. “I wish that that woman was pro-life when it matters regarding Palestinians.”

Clinton’s defeat paved the way for this moment

So much has changed in the American political landscape since Trump entered that scene almost a decade ago with his braggadocio and electoral momentum.

“Such a nasty woman,” he called his 2016 Democratic rival Clinton, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state. “Horseface,” he labeled a Republican primary rival, a woman. “Fat pig,” he bullied a famous female comedian. He once bragged that as a celebrity he could “grab” women by their private parts — and get away with it.

More than 1 million people in the United States and around the world filled city streets in protest the day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Many wore pink “pussy” hats. “The Resistance,” they called it.

Trump himself has stayed the course, deriding Harris as “Laffin’ Kamala,” mocking her laugh or mispronouncing her name, which means “lotus flower” in Sanskrit.

In many ways, Clinton’s defeat eight years ago set the stage for this moment. It was a crushing setback that dashed women’s hopes for bringing the U.S. into alignment with leading democracies around the world that have had a female in charge.

Angie Gialloreto of Pittsburgh was disappointed then. But the 95-year-old, attending her 13th presidential convention, is still at it, ready and waiting for the country to try again. “It’s time,” she said.

___

Many of the women interviewed by The Associated Press this week are eager for what’s next. Listen to what they have to say.

Monique Lafonta, 41, Milwaukee, health care consultant and mother of twin daughters:

“Why can’t a woman be president? Why has it taken us so long to get to this point?” LaFonta wondered the day after a Harris rally in Milwaukee. “Are we going to make the same mistake again?” LaFonta remembers celebrating election night 2016 at a birthday party with friends when Clinton lost to Trump. “It was unintentionally the worst birthday party I ever went to — everyone was crying at the end of the night,” she said. As a mother now, she said what’s happened with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the threats posed by the Project 2025 agenda are “scary.” “I have two 6-year-old daughters who have less rights than I did,” she said.

Originally from Louisiana, she recalls her parents living through the Jim Crow era in the South. “I never even thought we would see a Black president in my lifetime,” she said. “To have another glass ceiling like that in my lifetime, it’s really so special.” At the Harris rally in Milwaukee this week, it was “so electric, so contagious,” she said. “Just joy.”

Ashbey Beasley, 48, Highland Park, Illinois, stay-home mother

“We’re overdue,” Beasley said. She remembers watching one state after another fall to Trump on election night eight years ago. “I just started crying,” she said. “We turned the TV off.” The difference between then and now? “We’ve had a Trump presidency. We’ve seen the kind of chaos.” The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was a “turning point” she said. “The MAGA culture came out of the closet,” and a lot of people “were like, I’m not OK with this.”

Having survived a 2022 mass shooting in her city with her son, she has become a gun safety advocate and worries Trump is too close to gun rights groups. “What I want people to know whatever you see out in the world — whatever horrific terrible tragedy — that can be you,” she said from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Just because you don’t need an abortion right now, doesn’t mean you won’t.”

Lori Goldman, Michigan, founded Fems for Dems in 2016 to elect Hillary Clinton

At 65, she said, “I’m too old to not ever have seen a president that’s female in the United States.” On Election Day 2016, Goldman had about 30 people to her house and they canvassed until the afternoon, all the while thinking it unnecessary. She said she’s less naïve now.

For Goldman and chair of Fems for Dems Marcie Paul, the difference between organizing in 2016 and now is knowing the impacts of a Trump administration. Both are mothers, and they cited their daughters’ futures as a reason to vote Harris, both for her policy on reproductive rights and for her potential to be the first female president. Paul said it’s the most important election of a lifetime. “But really — this time it is.”

Anne Hathawaya, Indiana, the state’s Republican National Committeewoman

She dismissed the potential history-making milestone as been there, done that. “We had Hillary Clinton as a candidate in 2016 so this is not a new phenomenon,” said Hathaway, who was in charge of the arrangements committee at the Republican convention. She said she is focused on the candidates’ visions, not their genders. “This is a race between two presidential candidates who have very different opinions and views and where they think this country should go.”

Holly Sargent, York, Maine

She had spent the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election campaigning for Hillary Clinton in her quiet Maine beach town, watching the rise of Trump “with horror.” But she said the despair she felt at that year’s election defeat was healed with Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention this week. Sargent teared up as she sat with Maine delegates thinking of all that has transpired, and could yet. “We’re going to do it this time. And when we do it, we do it for Hillary and for Shirley Chisholm and for Geraldine Ferraro and for all of the extraordinary women who have gone before.”

Jennifer Richardson, 44, Albany, New York, attorney

She said as a Black woman, and an attorney, having Harris atop the party’s ticket resonates so much. “I see myself in her,” she said from the Democratic convention. “I see all my friends in her.” Added Richardson, “For her to win, it’s like we all won.”

Denise Delegol, 60, West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, retired postal worker

Delegol was decked out in pearls, a purple Harris “When We Fight We Win” T-shirt and purple high-tops decorated with the word “WIN” on the toes, and curious to check out the protests at a park near the convention hall. “It’s a beautiful thing that she can lead a country that was predominantly led by old white men who think they know what’s best for all, all people, including women and our bodies,” she said. Harris, she said, “is going to change all that.”

She wants her fellow Americans to understand how important the election is, and that “this is just a time for all Americans to come together because we have more in common than not in common.” Her conversations with family and friends are all about what’s happening. “Now it’s our time,” she said. “And I don’t think nothing can stop us now, as far as women breaking the glass ceiling.”

Fedaa Ballouta, Chicago pharmacist, attending a demonstration against the Israel-Hamas war outside the Democratic convention

She said it means a lot to have a female nominee for president, and as a pharmacist who finds it heartbreaking to see people struggle to afford medication she is eager for what Harris could do to help lower the costs of prescription drugs. “I really want to support our candidate of the same gender category,” she said. But what she really wants to see from Harris is a cease-fire in the war. “Pro-Life doesn’t just refer to abortion and pregnancy,” she said. “What about the killing of innocent civilians? That’s also pro-life.”

She believes this election will be meaningful for the country. “I was just in New York City, and I’m looking at the Statue of Liberty, and I’m thinking, ‘Are we a nation that provides liberty or takes it away from others?’”

Liz Shuler, president, AFL-CIO union

Schuler recalls breaking out the champagne and popcorn with friends on election night 2016, before “people left, of course, heartbroken.” This time around, she said, “we are protecting our hearts.”

“I think every woman you talked to probably feels the same way. But I think we, as union women, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and just keep up the fight.”

Angie Gialloreto, 95, Pittsburgh, attending her 13th presidential nominating convention

Gialloreto said she was disappointed by Clinton’s loss eight years ago, but she’s excited with Harris in place to try again. “It’s time,” she said from the convention hall. Gialloreto has attended every Democratic convention since Jimmy Carter was nominated for president in 1976. She said it’s an exciting time, “not for me, I’ve lived my life — for the short time I have, I’m going to celebrate — but it’s the young ones.

“Reality is here.”

___

Associated Press writers Isabella Volmert in Michigan, Mike Householder and Farnoush Amiri in Chicago, Michelle Price in North Carolina, Ali Swenson and Aaron Morrison in New York, video journalists Martha Irvine, Serkan Gurbuz and Teresa Crawford in Chicago and photojournalist Jacquelyn Martin in Milwaukee and Chicago contributed to this report.

The vice president formally accepted the party’s nomination in a speech to close out the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday night.

Harris’ nomination came less than two months after President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump squared off in the first presidential debate of this election cycle. Suffice to say, a lot has happened since in what’s been a whirlwind period for American politics.

2024 DNC Aug 22

Kamala Harris summons Americans to reject divisions and defeat threat of Trump's candidacy

Donald Trump Aug 23

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So, with Election Day just months away, when will Harris and Trump have their head-to-head showdown? Here’s what to know about the Harris-Trump debate:

When is the next presidential debate in 2024?

Harris and Trump will take the debate stage on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 9 p.m. ET. The debate will be hosted by ABC News.

ABC News was previously set to hold the second debate between Biden and Trump on that same debate before the president dropped his reelection bid.

Who are the moderators for the next presidential debate?

ABC News’ Linsey Davis and David Muir will serve as moderators for the second debate. Davis hosts “ABC News Live Prime” and Muir hosts “World News Tonight.”

Where is the next presidential debate being held?

The Harris-Trump debate will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

How many presidential debates are there?

Trump had proposed two additional debates, one on Sept. 4 hosted by Fox News and one on Sept. 25 hosted by NBC News. But Harris campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said in a statement on Aug. 15 that, “The American people will have another opportunity to see the vice president and Donald Trump on the debate stage in October.”

Tyler did not provide any additional details about that October debate. He said Trump’s campaign “accepted our proposal for three debates — two presidential and a vice presidential debate.”

“The debate about debates is over,” Tyler added.

How many presidential debates were there in 2020?

There were two Biden-Trump debates leading up to the 2020 election, one in September and one in October. A third debate was canceled due to COVID-19.

When is the VP debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz?

Trump running mate JD Vance and Harris running mate Tim Walz will square off in a debate hosted by CBS News on Tuesday, Oct. 1.

The Harris campaign said that the Oct. 1 showdown would be the only VP debate. Vance had previously challenged Walz to an additional debate on Sept. 18 hosted by CNN.

When is the presidential election?

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5.

“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride,” said a statement signed by five of the former independent presidential candidate’s siblings.

“We believe in Harris and Walz,” the statement continued. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

The statement includes signatures from Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy and Rory Kennedy.

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Joe Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, reacted to the statement, sharing it on X and writing that it was “well said.”

Separately, the former candidate’s cousin Jack Schlossberg said that he has “never been less surprised in my life.”

“Been saying it for over a year — RFKjr is for sale, works for Trump. Bedfellows and loving it,” he posted to X. “Kamala Harris is for the people — the easiest decision of all time just got easier.”

Schlossberg is the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy.

Many members of the Kennedy family have been publicly critical of the independent’s presidential bid, instead vocalizing their support for first President Joe Biden and now Harris.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Friday that he would withdraw from the presidential race and back Trump. However, he said that he would only remove his name from the ballot in “about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler.” He encouraged voters in states where he remains on the ballot to still support him.

“These are the principled causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” he said during his Friday remarks. “The causes were: Free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children.”

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement that the Harris campaign is for “any American out there who is tired of Donald Trump and looking for a new way forward.”

“Even if we do not agree on every issue, Kamala Harris knows there is more that unites us than divides us: respect for our rights, public safety, protecting our freedoms, and opportunity for all,” she said in a bid to attract Kennedy supporters.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Meta said Friday that it blocked a “small cluster” of WhatsApp accounts linked to an Iranian hacking group that was targeting officials associated with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

The company said in a blog post that the bogus WhatsApp accounts appeared to originate from the Iranian threat actor dubbed APT42, which other tech companies like Google previously described as an “Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage actor.” The group has targeted various activists, non-government organizations, media outlets and others.

Meta said the scheme was intended to exploit “political and diplomatic officials, and other public figures, including some associated with administrations of President Biden and former President Trump.” The campaign also targeted people in Israel, Palestine, Iran and the U.K.

With less than 75 days until the November election, Meta is attracting increased public attention due to ways that Facebook has been exploited and manipulated in the two prior presidential campaigns. The company said it hasn’t seen any evidence that the accounts of any WhatsApp users were compromised, and it’s sharing more information with “law enforcement and our industry peers.”

Meta said its security team was able to spot APT42’s involvement after analyzing suspicious messages that an unspecified number of users reported receiving from the fraudulent WhatsApp accounts.

“These accounts posed as technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft,” Meta said in the blog post. “Some of the people targeted by APT42 reported these suspicious messages to WhatsApp using our in-app reporting tools.”

The Trump campaign said earlier this month that a foreign actor had compromised its network and illegally obtained internal communications. Microsoft also said at the time that it identified several Iranian hacking groups that were attempting to influence the U.S. presidential election, and that a group  affiliated with APT42 “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”

In 2019, Microsoft said it had identified several hackers linked to the Iranian government who were believed to have targeted an unspecified U.S. presidential campaign in addition to other government officials and media.

WATCH: Big Tech: too big to split