David McAfee
July 25, 2024 8:49AM ET
David McAfee
Senior Editor
David joined Raw Story in 2023 after nearly a decade of writing about the legal industry for Bloomberg Law. He is also a co-founder and a commissioning editor at Hypatia Press, a publisher that specializes in philosophical works that challenge religion or spirituality.
WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 22: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris attends an NCAA championship teams celebration on the South Lawn of the White House on July 22, 2024 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Joe Biden abandoned his campaign for a second term after weeks of pressure from fellow Democrats to withdraw and just months ahead of the November election, throwing his support behind Harris. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Vice President Kamala Harris just entered the presidential race, but her campaign has already released its initial campaign video, which happens to include music by Beyonce.
Harris was thrust into the race after President Joe Biden chose to stand down from his ambitious campaign and instead focus on finishing out his term as president. Still, she's made the most of her sprint bid to the White House, smashing targets for fundraising and voter registration.
Now, she has reportedly released her first campaign video.
ALSO READ: How much access did $50,000 buy someone at the Republican National Convention?
Scott MacFarlane, CBS News Congressional Correspondent, reported:
"New: VP Harris initial campaign video is released With references to 'the freedom to make decisions about your own body' .. with a Beyonce soundtrack.. and with images of Trump while referencing 'people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate.'"
Watch the ad below or click the link.
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Matthew Chapman
July 25, 2024
Republicans have come up with a new baseless theory for uncovering "voter fraud," wrote Abby Vesoulis for Mother Jones — and while the new lawsuits they are filing probably won't go anywhere, they could still succeed in their overall purpose.
This comes after years of former President Donald Trumppushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election being rigged, and his allies supporting it with bizarre stunts like the long-debunked "2,000 Mules" documentary.
The new tactic has the Republican National Committee suing counties in Nevada — Trump-supporting counties run by Republican election officials: "In Lyon County — which is located in western Nevada and has not favored a Democrat for president since FDR — the RNC initially asserted that 105 percent of voting-eligible residents were registered, an 'impossibly high' percentage, suggesting 'an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.' The RNC made similar claims for nearby Douglas (104 percent) and Storey (113 percent) counties."
Read also: Republican Party reveals it's had the worst fundraising year in a decade
But these figures were created using nonsensical math, Vesoulis said.
"To estimate registration rates in each county, the RNC compared voter data from the secretary of state to a US census dataset that averaged populations over five years. The census data does not account for the tens of thousands of people who migrated to Nevada during the pandemic. More crucially, it often misses people who are lawfully registered to vote but temporarily residing elsewhere — such as college students and military service members."
A Nevada legal official responded to the complaint by saying, “This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
The Nevada challenges were dismissed last month. But the real idea isn't to change election procedures for 2024, but to give MAGA activists permission to push for yet another coup against the election results should Trump be defeated, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Indeed, wrote Vesoulis, they are gearing up to spend an unprecedented amount of money, not on campaign ads or canvassing, but on election litigation and poll watchers: "The party’s recent maneuvering suggests a far more sophisticated — and more dangerous — strategy. Co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the RNC is mobilizing what it has called the 'most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history,' which will involve '100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys.'"
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Trump will 'blow' J.D. Vance 'to smithereens' rather than be upstaged: ex-aide
Matthew Chapman
July 25, 2024
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has a big problem, former Trump administration communications chief Anthony Scaramucci told CNN's Boris Sanchez Thursday. He is constantly at risk of overshadowing former President Donald Trump himself.
And that is a dangerous thing for anyone in Trump's orbit to do, he warned.
This comes amid reporting that Trump is already regretting his choice of Vance, which he made at a moment when he felt that he had already locked up the race and didn't think he needed a running mate who balanced the ticket pragmatically.
"Given that vantage point that you've had into Donald Trump, how do you think he's absorbing these comments by J.D. Vance about 'childless cat people' and the sort of blowback that he's gotten on social media and elsewhere from women notably, a subset of voters that Republicans haven't had the most success with?"
"What made Vice President Mike Pence successful as a vice presidential candidate is he understood President Trump's personality," said Scaramucci, who became a sharp Trump critic after a catastrophic and brief 10-day stint in the administration.
Read also: 'JD Vance is not a leader': Trump V.P. hopeful under fire for 'reckless' shooting comments
"He took a back seat and his attitude was do no harm, say nothing that could be overly advantageous or disadvantageous. J.D. Vance is a different beast. He's 39 years old. He's very ambitious. He has a very high opinion of himself. He sees this as a moment for him to shine, as opposed to a moment to take a backseat to Donald Trump."
And that's a problem he added, because, "remember, when Donald Trump has somebody in his field of vision that's getting attention, he usually blows them to smithereens. He did it on 'The Apprentice' with that blonde woman in the first two seasons. There was a joke inside the administration: if you're getting too much attention and Trump leans over to you and says, 'Oh, who are you, President Bannon now?' or 'You're getting more popular than me,' it was time to book a trip to Antarctica and to go into hiding."
Vance doesn't understand this, said Scaramucci. "He thinks he's actually a vice presidential candidate, but he's a deep subordinate to Donald Trump. And you just watch how this plays out."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
Anthony Scaramucci says Trump will destroy J.D. Vance rather than be upstagedwww.youtube.com
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Sarah K. Burris
July 25, 2024
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg issued a response Thursday to Donald Trump's attempt to dismiss the ruling in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts carried out when president. Justices left it to lower courts to decide what is and is not an "official act."
Trump's lawyers took the ruling and used it to demand that the guilty verdict by the jury in the so-called "hush money case" be vacated. The lawyers asked Judge Juan Merchan if they could file a motion to set aside the verdict and have a hearing.
Read Also: A criminologist explains why Trump’s Manhattan trial is the biggest threat to his freedom
Bragg's filing claims the New York case had nothing to do with official acts as the crimes took place before he was elected.
The brief says that Trump's arguments are "largely unpreserved." To make such an argument, Trump must have raised them during or before Trial and he didn't, it says.
Responding to the document, former ethics czar and impeachment lawyer Norm Eisen called it "devastating" for Trump's case.
"The Supreme Court official acts immunity decision in Trump v. US is bad enough," he said on X. "But as the DA points out, Trump's efforts to stretch it to cover this UNOFFICIAL acts case is even worse.
Trump also "raises objections as to six categories of evidence that he says should be excluded under the Supreme Court decision. But he failed to object during trial to four of the six. You can't say he didn't know about the issue bc he DID object to the other two!" Eisen wrote.
But the “most legally challenging issue,” he said, is about the status of the testimony from Trump’s former communications aide Hope Hicks. She was a Trump Organization employee who followed him to the campaign and then the White House.
She testified about things Trump told her while she worked at the White House in 2018. Eisen said that just because Hicks worked for the White House doesn’t mean their conversation involved presidential business.
MSNBC's Adam Klasfeld quoted prosecutors saying that even if all of the official acts in the Manhattan charges were removed, it would be “only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof” the jury saw.
The day after the Supreme Court's ruling, former Department of Justice official Chuck Rosenberg commented that he didn't think a Trump appeal was going to work.
"I mean, if you look at the Supreme Court's decision from yesterday, ... the conduct that underlined in the New York case seems to me to be purely private," he pointed out. "So perhaps Judge Merchan grants them a hearing, but I have a hard time imagining that they would prevail on it."
Jurors convicted Trump in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records around hush money he paid to actress and director Stormy Daniels to cover up a tryst they'd had years prior. Trump denies the affair but paid Daniels the cash ahead of the 2016 election.
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