If elected, Trump says he will fire Jack Smith ‘within two seconds’Donald Trump has vowed that if he returns to the White House, he will swiftly fire Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel who is prosecuting him for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents.
In an interview today, conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt asked Trump if he would pardon himself or fire Smith. Trump meandered in his reply, before saying:
It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.
Trump also noted that “we got immunity at the Supreme Court,” a reference to the ruling by the court’s conservative majority this summer finding that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts. That complicated Smith’s election meddling case against the former president, and played a part in it not going to trial prior to the 5 November election.
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Democrats have been loudly condemning Donald Trump for rhetoric they call dictatorial, as well as steering voters’ attention to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s comment that he meets the definition of a fascist.
In an interview with the New Republic, Ben Wikler, who as chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party is hoping to deliver the electoral votes of one of the swingiest swing states to Kamala Harris, explains why he believes such allegations may tip the scales in the vice-president’s favor:
This is critical because this is the genuine article that stakes in this election. Now we’ve got Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Kelly, former President Trump’s chief of staff, who was a four-star general—and Harris amplifying it—making clear that the nation’s cameras are pointed directly at this reality. For the voters that are on the fence, who often feel deeply conflicted in the final weeks of this election, people who maybe have voted Republican in the past, but are not quite sure if they can vote for Trump again, this gives them a very clear reason to break against Trump. And that could be the entire ball game.
Wisconsin is a jump ball right now. There’s a poll today that finds 2 percent of Wisconsin, or 4 percent of Wisconsin voters, undecided, and 48-48 for Harris and for Trump. That means that the decisions made by those last 4 percent could tip the entire election here and probably, frankly, in all the other battleground states. There’s seven states that are jump balls in the final stretch. And what we know—I know this from directly knocking on doors and talking to voters; we know this from polls; we know this from models; we know this from focus groups; we know from every method of research that we have—is that there’s a share of the undecided electorate who have been traditionally Republican, who can’t stand the idea of Trump and are trying to decide for themselves whether they can overcome their aversion to Trump and still vote for him, or whether that is just so unacceptable that even if they disagree with Kamala Harris about a bunch of stuff, they’re going to vote for her in the final stretch. That is probably the election-defining question.
Harris campaign says latest Trump comments proof of his plans for dictatorshipA spokesman for Kamala Harris’s campaign said Donald Trump’s comment about firing Jack Smith and his brags about the supreme court giving presidents immunity is proof he would govern as a dictator.
“Donald Trump thinks he’s above the law, and these latest comments are right in line with the warnings made by Trump’s former Chief of Staff that he wants to rule as a dictator with unchecked power,” said Ammar Moussa, the campaign’s director of rapid response.
“A second Trump term, where a more unstable and unhinged Trump has essentially no guardrails and is surrounded by loyalists who will enable his worst instincts, is guaranteed to be more dangerous. America can’t risk a second Trump term.”
If elected, Trump says he will fire Jack Smith ‘within two seconds’Donald Trump has vowed that if he returns to the White House, he will swiftly fire Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel who is prosecuting him for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents.
In an interview today, conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt asked Trump if he would pardon himself or fire Smith. Trump meandered in his reply, before saying:
It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.
Trump also noted that “we got immunity at the Supreme Court,” a reference to the ruling by the court’s conservative majority this summer finding that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts. That complicated Smith’s election meddling case against the former president, and played a part in it not going to trial prior to the 5 November election.
Perhaps more interesting is this survey that the Guardian’s Robert Tait wrote up yesterday showing that Arab Americans are now narrowly leaning towards Donald Trump, after strongly backing Joe Biden in 2020. That shift is likely a consequence of Biden’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the 7 October attack, and could imperil Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the White House. Here’s more:
Arab Americans are slightly more likely to vote for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, according to a new poll, in a worrying sign for the Democratic nominee’s chances of carrying the battleground state of Michigan, which is home to a large Arab American population.
The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.
The figures are broadly in line with a previous poll carried out this month by the Arab American Institute. Together they suggest that Harris’s support in the community has been undermined by the Biden administration’s backing for Israel’s year-long war against Hamas in Gaza.
The latest poll also shows Trump leading Harris by 39% to 33% on the question of which candidate would be most likely resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the candidates were tied at 38% apiece on who would be “better for the Middle East in general”.
Support for Trump is particularly striking given that the same poll shows twice as many respondents – 46% to 23% – think anti-Arab racism and hate crimes are likely to increase under a Trump presidency compared with under Harris.
Yesterday, Bloomberg News and Morning Consult released polling that found, like so many before it have, an essentially tied race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
The survey heard from voters in all seven swing states, and found Trump leading by 1.5 percentage points in Georgia, 1.2 percentage points in North Carolina and 0.3 percentage points in Wisconsin.
Harris was up by 0.4 percentage points in Arizona, 3.1 percentage points in Michigan, 0.5 percentage points in Nevada and 1.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania.
Many of these findings are within the poll’s one percentage point margin of error.
Should the swing states end up voting the way they are leaning in this poll – and there’s no telling that they will – Harris would win.
For more of what polls are telling us, or not telling us, check out our tracker:
NBC News has a little more detail on Beyoncé’s event with Kamala Harris in Houston tomorrow, specifically that she will be performing:
.@NBCNews confirms: Beyoncé is expected to appear with Vice President Harris in Houston Friday evening, three sources familiar with the planning tell @KellyO, @Yamiche & myself. One of the people said Beyoncé plans to PERFORM as well. @tylerpager scooped the 🐝 news first.
— Monica Alba (@albamonica) October 24, 2024 Beyoncé to campaign with Harris in Houston on Friday – reportBeyoncé will appear with Kamala Harris in Houston on Friday, the Washington Post reports, when the vice-president visits the pop star’s hometown to rally with Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred and attack abortion bans passed by Republicans.
Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” is regularly played at Harris’s campaign events, though the singer has not appeared with the vice-president since she launched her campaign.
Harris has been picking up the endorsements of a number of prominent musicians in recent weeks, including Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, who will do concerts with the campaign starting today in Atlanta.
In addition to attempting to impeach Joe Biden, House Republicans have fixated on his legally troubled son Hunter Biden, looking for evidence of corruption by the president.
They have not turned up much, despite issuing a flurry of subpoenas to Biden administration officials that have led to lengthy and complex litigation. Yesterday, one of the last outstanding matters came before a federal judge who became so frustrated with the squabble she invoked her dog. The hearing led to an agreement that will likely delay the release of any new information the Republicans are seeking until next year – at which point, there will be a new Congress, and Biden will no longer be in the White House.
Politico was at the hearing, and explains more:
A highly unusual ultimatum from a frustrated judge caused House Republican investigators to postpone their demand for testimony from two Justice Department tax attorneys in a probe of Hunter Biden’s finances.
“I’m willing to bet everything I own, plus my dog Scout, that these two line attorneys are going to have zero information to confirm your suspicion,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes told a lawyer representing the House GOP on Wednesday.
Reyes threatened to order Attorney General Merrick Garland and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to show up next week in her Washington courtroom for legal arguments on the dispute.
“Don’t test me on this … I’m not bluffing,” said Reyes, an appointee of President Joe Biden who is often seen around the federal courthouse with her golden retriever.
The fight emerged from House Republicans’ long-running search for evidence that the White House exerted political pressure on officials who investigated the younger Biden’s failure to pay income taxes. As part of that inquiry, the House Judiciary Committee tried to obtain testimony from two Justice Department tax lawyers who worked on the case.
When the Justice Department resisted the House GOP’s subpoenas to the two lawyers, the fight ended up before Reyes, who has been refereeing the dispute for months with increasing exasperation.
During a two-hour hearing on Wednesday, she pressed lawyers for both sides to punt the dispute until next year. If they refused, she said, she would summon their bosses into court.
After a brief recess, the House’s top lawyer, Matthew Berry, and veteran Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Shapiro told the judge they had agreed to shelve the matter until early next year. By that point, a new Congress and a new president will have been sworn in — developments likely to diminish both sides’ appetite for a fight linked to an all-but-defunct effort to impeach Joe Biden.
You don’t hear so much about Congress these day, and there’s a good reason for that.
Both houses are in recess, and many lawmakers are back in their districts campaigning for re-election. But the Republican-led House judiciary committee will today convene in Milwaukee for a hearing titled “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Wisconsin Perspectives”.
It’s not an accident that they are focusing on one of the issues Donald Trump is campaigning on in one of the swing states he needs to win. Led by his ally Jim Jordan, the committee has been at the forefront of ultimately fruitless effort to impeach Joe Biden, and quickly shifted to attacking Kamala Harris when she became the Democratic candidate in July. Expect this hearing to be a continuation of that offensive.
Yesterday, another former Trump administration official told Politico that she agrees with John Kelly’s assessment that the former president is a fascist, and said he has “authoritarian tendencies”.
“Does he have authoritarian tendencies? Yes,” said Elizabeth Neumann, a former deputy chief of staff in the homeland security department.
“Is he kind of leaning towards that ultra-nationalism component? Absolutely. That is kind of his brand, right? He’s made nationalism the new definition of the Republican Party.”
Neumann has already endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris.
After ex-chief of staff call him ‘fascist’, Trump lobs insults at HarrisDonald Trump’s campaign spent yesterday hitting back at John Kelly, his former White House chief of staff who went public with his thoughts that his one-time boss was a fascist.
While the president angrily condemned Kelly as “a bad general” in a Truth Social post, he didn’t bring the subject up much at a Georgia rally in the evening, instead publicly insulting Kamala Harris.
“This woman is crazy,” he told an arena full of supporters in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth. “You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.”
And more:
She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual.
It was all part of a campaign speech that was, in typical Trump 2024 form, lengthy and meandering, touching on everything from Richard Nixon to McDonald’s. The Guardian’s Sam Levin watched the whole thing, so you don’t have to:
Harris picks up endorsement from Republican mayor in key Wisconsin county – reportA Republican city mayor in a Wisconsin county that has often swung elections in the battleground state has endorsed Kamala Harris, FOX6 News Milwaukee reports.
Shawn Reilly is the mayor of Waukesha, the largest city in the county of the same name, which is also the most-populous Republican-voting county in the state that is viewed as crucial to Harris’s hopes of winning the White House. He told the broadcaster that he’s voting for the vice-president because he does not want Donald Trump to return to the White House:
“It’s difficult. The easy thing to do is just not say anything and cast my vote the way I want, but I think we’re at a crossroads now,” Reilly said. “I feel in my heart that this is something that I need to come out and say: I am going to be voting for Vice President Harris to become our next president.”
Reilly voted third party in 2016 and for President Joe Biden in 2020 but kept that to himself. For other officers, he said he votes Republican “more often than not.”
Now this red city mayor is publicly endorsing blue for president.
“It is a vote against Trump,” he said. “I am terrified of Donald Trump becoming our next president for all the reasons I have indicated: he’s already been impeached twice. He’s been convicted of felonies and this is not what the United States needs.”
The chair of the state Democratic party, Ben Wikler, cheered Reilly’s break from the GOP:
Republican former Michigan congressman endorses Harris – reportFred Upton, a Republican former congressman who represented a western Michigan district for 36 years, has endorsed Kamala Harris, the Detroit News reports.
Upton, who was one of 10 Republicans to vote for Donald Trump’s impeachment after January 6, said he had voted Democratic in a presidential election for the first time in his life because he is turned off by the former president’s extremism and believes Harris will be more successful at governing with bipartisan support.
“Watching Trump day after day, he’s ignored the advice of many senior, respected Republicans to stay on the issues,” Upton said in an interview with the Detroit News.
“Instead, he’s still talking about the election being stolen, trashing women left and right. He’s just totally unhinged. We don’t need this chaos. We need to move forward, and that’s why I’m where I am.”
The endorsement comes as Harris steps up her outreach to Republicans who she believes can be swayed against voting for Trump. Earlier this week, she campaigned alongside Liz Cheney, another Republican former congresswoman who lost her seat after breaking with the former president:
When he speaks in Tempe, Arizona later today, one wonders if Donald Trump will address the allegation made by former model Stacey Williams in an interview with the Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Lucy Osborne that he groped her in 1993. She’s the latest woman to come forward and say the then-real estate mogul put his hands on her without permission. Here’s more:
A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men.
Stacey Williams, who worked as a professional model in the 1990s, said she first met Trump in 1992 at a Christmas party after being introduced to him by Epstein, who she believed was a good friend of the then New York real estate developer. Williams said Epstein was interested in her and the two casually dated for a period of a few months.
“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams said.
The alleged groping occurred some months later, in the late winter or early spring of 1993, when Epstein suggested during a walk they were on that he and Williams stop by to visit Trump at Trump Tower. Epstein was later convicted on sex offenses and killed himself in prison in 2019.
Moments after they arrived, she alleges, Trump greeted Williams, pulled her toward him and started groping her. She said he put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and her buttocks. She said she froze because she was “deeply confused” about what was happening. At the same time, she said she believed she saw the two men smiling at each other.
Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary for Donald Trump’s campaign, provided a statement denying the allegations, which said in part: “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”
Harris heads to Georgia, Trump to Arizona as campaign grinds to finishThe two lead actors in US politics (soon there will be only one) are scheduled to make a single appearance each today, as they look to clinch the support of swing state voters with little time left before the election.
Kamala Harris will head to Georgia for a campaign event in Clarkston, outside Atlanta, at 7pm ET. She flies from there to Houston, Texas, where tomorrow, she’s set to attack Donald Trump’s abortion policy in a state that is not a swing state, but which moved swiftly to ban the procedure after Roe v Wade was overturned. She will also campaign with Colin Allred, the Democratic Senate candidate whose victory could allow the party to maintain its control of Congress’s upper chamber, which the GOP is otherwise viewed as having a good shot at taking.
As for Trump, he’s having one of his usual rallies in a Tempe, Arizona arena at 4pm. Based on how his campaign advertised it, the former president will attack Harris and the Democrats over inflation, but Trump, of course, rarely stays on topic.
An Arizona prosecutor said the man arrested in the shooting of a Democratic national committee office in suburban Phoenix had more than 120 guns and more than 250,000 rounds of ammunition in his home, leading law enforcement to believe he may have been planning a mass casualty event.
The Associated Press (AP) reports that Maricopa county prosecutor Neha Bhatia said at Jeffrey Michael Kelly’s initial court appearance on Wednesday that federal agents told her about the large seizure made after Kelly’s arrest. Scopes, body armour and silencers were also found, she said. A machine gun was discovered in the car he was driving.
The sheer size of the cache led authorities to believe “this person was preparing to commit an act of mass casualty,” Bhatia said.
Police said Kelly, 60, allegedly fired BB pellets and then gunshots at the glass front door and a window of the Arizona Democrats’ field office in Tempe. Police found three .22-caliber bullet casings while searching Kelly’s trash, according to court documents, reports the AP.
Nobody was inside during the shootings in the early morning hours of 16 September, 23 September and 6 October.
The Tempe location was one of 18 Harris field offices in Arizona where Democrats gathered to organise Harris campaign efforts. It was shut down after the last shooting, police said.
Kelly is also accused of hanging several political signs lined with razor blades on Tuesday in Ahwatukee, an affluent suburb of Phoenix where most voters have chosen Democrats in recent elections. Authorities said he also hung plastic bags holding a white powder labeled “biohazard” from those signs.
The AP reports that authorities said the hand-painted signs were attached to palm trees and appeared to criticise Democrats and their presidential nominee, vice-president Kamala Harris.
Kelly was being held on three felony counts of acts of terrorism and four other counts related to the shootings, according to police. A $500,000 cash bond was set with a requirement for house arrest and an ankle monitor in the event he is able to raise that amount.
His attorney Jason Squires said Kelly was a retired aerospace engineer who at one time had top security clearance, had no criminal record and was not a flight risk. Kelly’s next appearance was set for the morning of 29 October in Maricopa county superior court.
Political violence has already marred the campaign season, with the Republican presidential nominee being targeted by assassination attempts at a campaign rally and at one of Trump’s Florida golf courses.