Republican attorney general for Bush says he will vote for Harris; candidates to make pitches in swing states – live | US elections 2024

Harris sets ‘aggressive’ campaign schedule after debate

Lauren Gambino

The Harris campaign is embarking on an “aggressive” new phase, building off of the vice-president’s commanding performance in Tuesday night’s debate against Donald Trump.

According to a memo released this morning, the campaign is launching a “New Way Forward” tour that begins on Thursday with two stops in North Carolina, a Republican-leaning state where Harris has shown strength. On Friday, Harris will return to Pennsylvania for events in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre.

The stepped-up battleground state travel will be paired with a series of new TV and digital advertisements featuring moments from the debate, the first of which, Leadership, aired on Wednesday night.

It features moments from the debate, including the vice-president saying Americans are seeing “two very different visions for the country: one that is focused on the future, one that is focused on the past”. The ad then cuts to Trump saying: “We’re a failing nation. A nation that is dying. We’re a nation that’s in serious decline.”

The campaign, newly energized after Harris’s performance, said it spent hours on Wednesday reviewing footage of the debate, culling what it believes are revealing exchanges that show Trump on the defensive and Harris’s offering a vision for the future.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Leonard Leo, the conservative activist who was involved in the effort to build the current rightwing supermajority on the supreme court, says he will spend $1b to fight liberal cultural influence in the United States.

“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the FT in a rare interview.

“Expect us to increase support for organisations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers.”

In a separate letter obtained by Axios, Leo writes that his 85 Fund will review its support of rightwing groups, saying it wants to prioritize efforts to “weaponize the conservative vision”.

“The 85 Fund intends to gap-fill by placing much, much greater emphasis on projects and leaders that operationalize or weaponize ideas and policies, much in the same way the Left has,” Leo wrote.

Senate Democrats have attempted to get Leo to testify about his activities, but he has so far frustrated them:

Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general under Republican president George W Bush, says he will vote for Kamala Harris.

Gonzales made the announcement with a column in Politico, where he wrote:

As the United States approaches a critical election, I can’t sit quietly as Donald Trump – perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation – eyes a return to the White House. For that reason, though I’m a Republican, I’ve decided to support Kamala Harris for president.

His reasons center less on support for Harris’s policies than disgust with Donald Trump’s actions, including his involvement in January 6:

Trump failed to do his duty and exercise his presidential power to protect members of Congress, law enforcement and the Capitol from the attacks that day. He failed to deploy executive branch personnel to save lives and property and preserve democracy. He just watched on television and chose not to do anything because that would have been contrary to his interests. Trump still describes that day as beautiful. And as for those subsequently convicted of committing crimes, he describes them as hostages.

His felony convictions:

Any discussion about fidelity to the rule of law has to include Trump’s 34 state felony convictions, his state civil financial judgment of libel based on sexual abuse, as well as the pending federal elections interference case, not to mention the recently dismissed federal documents case that Special Counsel Jack Smith is continuing to pursue. Standing alone, these charges, convictions and judgments show that Trump is someone who fails to act, time and time again, in accordance with the rule of law.

And the fact that so many of the former president’s senior officials have turned against him:

To be fair, I have spoken with Trump only once. I do not really know him. It is telling, however, that several senior officials who worked for him in the White House now refuse to support him, including his vice president, chief of staff, defense secretary and national security adviser. Their unwillingness to endorse their former boss is an indictment of his character at a level equal to his many, many criminal indictments.

Gonzales, interestingly, also says he thinks the supreme court should adopt “a tougher ethics code of disclosure”.

Here’s the latest on the ongoing controversy over the justices’ ethics:

X’s AI chatbot spread voter misinformation – and election officials fought back

Rachel Leingang

Soon after Joe Biden announced he was ending his bid for re-election, misinformation started spreading online about whether a new candidate could take the president’s place.

Screenshots that claimed a new candidate could not be added to ballots in nine states moved quickly around Twitter, now X, racking up millions of views. The Minnesota secretary of state’s office began getting requests for fact-checks of these posts, which were flat-out wrong – ballot deadlines had not passed, giving Kamala Harris plenty of time to have her name added to ballots.

The source of the misinformation: Twitter’s chatbot, Grok. When users asked the artificial intelligence tool whether a new candidate still had time to be added to ballots, Grok gave the incorrect answer.

Finding the source – and working to correct it – served as a test case of how election officials and artificial intelligence companies will interact during the 2024 presidential election in the US amid fears that AI could mislead or distract voters. And it showed the role Grok, specifically, could play in the election, as a chatbot with fewer guardrails to prevent the generating of more inflammatory content.

Read the full story here.

Donald Trump a de facto Russian asset, FBI official he fired suggests

Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said.

Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe, who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.”

He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”

McCabe was speaking to the One Decision podcast, co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, the British intelligence service.

Read the full story here.

Trump campaign publicly claims debate win but aides privately express doubts

Hugo Lowell

Donald Trump’s campaign publicly claimed victory in the debate against Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, but at least some of his aides privately conceded it was unlikely that he persuaded any undecided voters to break for him, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Will tonight benefit us? No, it will not,” one Trump aide said.

The sentiment summed up the predicament for the Trump campaign that with 55 days until the election, Trump is still casting around for a moment that could allow his attack lines against Harris to break through and overwrite her gains in key battleground state polls.

And it was an acknowledgment that despite their hopes of getting Happy Trump on stage, they got Angry Trump, who seemingly could not shake his fury at being taunted over his supporters leaving his rallies early and being repeatedly fact-checked by the moderators.

Read the full story here.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are focusing on swing states today.

Harris is scheduled to hold rallies in North Carolina – in Charlotte and Greensboro, the Associated Press reported.
Trump is heading west to Tucson, Arizona.

Yesterday, the candidates marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

At a fire station in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, close to where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, Trump posed for photos with children who wore campaign shirts. Joe Biden and Harris visited the same fire station earlier in the day.

Harris-Trump debate watched by 67m people, beating pivotal Biden showdown

Helen Sullivan

Hello and welcome back to our rolling US political coverage.

An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a 31% increase from the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that eventually led to the president dropping out of the 2024 race.

The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.

Tuesday’s count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s first face-off in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.

There was a marked increase in younger and middle-aged viewers, with 53% more adults aged 18-49 tuning in to see Harris debate Trump than watched Biden do the same, according to Nielsen data.

Read the full story here.