Kamala Harris visits Georgia in wake of Hurricane Helene
Here is the Associated Press’s report on Kamala Harris visiting Augusta, Georgia:
Harris handed out meals, embraced a shaken family and surveyed Hurricane Helene’s “extraordinary” path of destruction through Georgia on Wednesday as she left the campaign trail to pledge federal help and personally take in scenes of toppled trees, damaged homes and lives upended.
She visited Augusta, where power lines stretched along the sidewalk and utility poles lay cracked and broken. The vice president spoke from a lectern erected in front of a house with a fallen tree teetering on its roof, acknowledging those who had died in the disaster while also trying to project a tone of unity and hope for communities now facing long and expensive rebuilds.
Harris said she wanted to, “personally take a look at the devastation, which is extraordinary.” She expressed admiration for how “people are coming together. People are helping perfect strangers.”
The Democratic presidential nominee said that shows “the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us,” an echo of a line she frequently uses on the campaign trail.
Before delivering her remarks, Harris could be seen embracing and huddling with a family of five grappling with the storm’s aftermath.
“We are here for the long haul,” she said.
Harris also toured a Red Cross relief center and received a briefing from local officials, praising those working to “meet the needs of people who must be seen and must be heard.”
“I am now listening,” she said.
Key events
If you’re just tuning in: Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed bid to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in a newly unsealed court filing that argues that the former US president is not entitled to immunity from prosecution.
The filing was unsealed on Wednesday. It was submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team following a supreme court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents and narrowed the scope of the prosecution.
Trump’s legal team have employed a delaying strategy in all the numerous legal cases that Trump faces that has mostly been successful.
The 165-page filing is probably the last opportunity for prosecutors to detail their case against Trump before the 5 November election given there will not be a trial before Trump faces the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris.
Prosecutors laid out details including an allegation that a White House staffer heard Trump tell family members that it did not matter if he won or lost the election, “you still have to fight like hell”.
The new filing cites previously unknown accounts offered by Trump’s closest aides to paint a portrait of an “increasingly desperate” president who, while losing his grip on the White House, “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process”.
“So what?” the filing quotes Trump as telling an aide after being alerted that his vice-president, Mike Pence, was in potential danger after a crowd of violent supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6.
“The details don’t matter,” Trump said, when told by an adviser that a lawyer who was mounting his legal challenges would not be able to prove the false allegations in court, the filing states.
Per the press pool report: Governor Roy Cooper, who was seated directly to Biden’s right, introduced Biden, saying that an entire region of the state was still in a “dangerous situation.”
Cooper said he was “grateful” for the “quick” action and the “massive surge of help.”
“Mr. President, we know we’ve made a lot of asks of you – and we are grateful,” he said.
“This is going to be a long and difficult recovery.”
Here is what Biden said in North Carolina, according to the press pool report:
“In a moment like this we put politics aside,” he said. “Our job is to help as many people as we can, as quickly as we can.”
Biden said he’d flown over a lot of disaster areas before, but was struck by the scenes he saw earlier today in the Asheville area. He said he could not “imagine what it must have been like” as “all that rain came down,” remarking about how much of Asheville is underwater.
Biden said the hurricane would cost billions of dollars. “Congress has an obligation” to make sure states have the necessary resources, he said.
“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis any more, at least I hope they don’t. They must be brain dead if they do,” he said. “Storm like Helene are getting stronger and stronger.”
US president Joe Biden is in North Carolina, where he has “made additional disaster assistance available to the State of North Carolina by authorizing an increase in the level of federal funding for emergency work undertaken in the State of North Carolina as a result of Tropical Storm Helene”, according to the White House.
“Under the President’s order today, the Federal funds for debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance has been increased to 100 percent of the total eligible costs for 180 days from the start of the incident period.”
Kamala Harris visits Georgia in wake of Hurricane Helene
Here is the Associated Press’s report on Kamala Harris visiting Augusta, Georgia:
Harris handed out meals, embraced a shaken family and surveyed Hurricane Helene’s “extraordinary” path of destruction through Georgia on Wednesday as she left the campaign trail to pledge federal help and personally take in scenes of toppled trees, damaged homes and lives upended.
She visited Augusta, where power lines stretched along the sidewalk and utility poles lay cracked and broken. The vice president spoke from a lectern erected in front of a house with a fallen tree teetering on its roof, acknowledging those who had died in the disaster while also trying to project a tone of unity and hope for communities now facing long and expensive rebuilds.
Harris said she wanted to, “personally take a look at the devastation, which is extraordinary.” She expressed admiration for how “people are coming together. People are helping perfect strangers.”
The Democratic presidential nominee said that shows “the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us,” an echo of a line she frequently uses on the campaign trail.
Before delivering her remarks, Harris could be seen embracing and huddling with a family of five grappling with the storm’s aftermath.
“We are here for the long haul,” she said.
Harris also toured a Red Cross relief center and received a briefing from local officials, praising those working to “meet the needs of people who must be seen and must be heard.”
“I am now listening,” she said.
Walz is speaking in Reading, the Pennsylvanian city with the highest number of Latino voters.
The Latino vote could be key to this election.
As my colleague Joseph Contreras explains, their importance in presidential races has been steadily growing over the past 50 years, and Latinos are projected to represent nearly 15% of eligible voters nationwide by November.
Historically, Latinos have ranked among the Democratic party’s most reliable sources of votes, in about the same league as Black and Jewish voters. But the party’s once commanding advantage has been shrinking. Hillary Clinton trounced Donald Trump among Latinos nationwide in 2016 by a factor of 81% to 16%, yet four years later the former president upped his share to one out of every four votes cast by Latinos.
Tim Walz is expected to hold a campaign event in Pennsylvania any minute as he campaigns in the swing state with the highest number of electoral college votes (19) – we’ll bring that to you live.
This is Helen Sullivan taking over the Guardian’s live US politics coverage.
Joan E Greve
JD Vance took a self-proclaimed victory lap after his vice-presidential debate against the Democrat Tim Walz, appearing on Wednesday at a campaign rally in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.
Vance told supporters in Auburn Hills that he thought the debate went “pretty well” on Tuesday, as snap polls showed viewers considered it to be a tie between the two vice-presidential candidates.
Departing from the generally civil tone of the debate, Vance mocked Walz over his biggest gaffe of the night, in which the Democratic governor said he was friends with school shooters. (Walz seemingly meant to say he was friends with victims of school shootings.)
“That was probably only the third or fourth dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance said. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel a little bad for Governor Walz. And the reason I feel bad for him is because he has to defend the indefensible, and that is the record of Kamala Harris.”
In his prepared remarks, Vance did not touch on his weakest moment in the debate, when he refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential race. But when Vance took questions from the media after his speech, a reporter did ask him about the exchange, and he again sidestepped the question.
“The media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office and get back to commonsense economic policies,” Vance said.
Today so far
Here’s where things stand:
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Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed attempt to keep power after losing the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in newly unsealed evidence arguing that the former president shouldn’t be immune from prosecution. Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the filing, which was submitted by submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team following a supreme court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents.
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Joe Biden plans to visit communities in Florida and Georgia tomorrow that have been hit by Hurricane Helene, the White House has announced. That follows his visit to the Carolinas today. The president approved a major disaster declaration for the state of Virginia amid the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene.
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Implementing Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign could cost the federal government as much as $88b per year on average, according to a new analysis released on Wednesday. If elected, Trump has vowed to carry out the “largest deportation operation” in US history, but he has offered few concrete details about how he would achieve a campaign of such scale – and at what cost.
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Biden has approved a major disaster declaration for the state of Virginia amid the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene. The White House said the president ordered federal aid to supplement commonwealth and local recovery efforts in the areas affected by Helene.
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The vice-presidential hopefuls debated for 90 minutes on Tuesday night, but the Harris campaign wants Americans to remember one moment, a split-second reply that Tim Walz called a “damning non-answer”. Just hours after the primetime event concluded, with viewers split over a winner and analysts praising JD Vance for the more polished performance, the Harris campaign has launched an ad highlighting the moment the Republican refused to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. (He did.)
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Vance returned to the sharper tone that’s more his norm on the campaign trail during a rally in Michigan. Walz, meanwhile, at a Pennsylvania rally said that Vance’s obfuscations about Trump’s policies and legacy amounted to “gaslighting”.
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The youth-led March for Our Lives gun control movement which emerged following the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in 2018 has condemned JD Vance for his “hypocrisy” on gun violence prevention, after he suggested schools build “stronger doors” to prevent shooters,.
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There was no clear winner of last night’s vice-presidential debate among registered voters quizzed in another snap poll last night, this one conducted for CNN by polling firm SSRS. After Walz and Vance had a constructive debate, CNN reported that their viewers who were polled thought better of both candidates after the debate than they had before.
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Monday’s 60 Minutes show on CBS will feature an interview solely with Harris, after the network said Trump accepted an invitation and then backed out. “A 60 Minutes candidate hour will feature only Kamala Harris after former President Donald Trump, who’d previously agreed to be on the show, decided not to participate in the Monday, October 7 special,” CBS reported.
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White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan called Iran’s missile attack on Israel yesterday a “significant escalation” in the Middle East conflict, although he said it was ultimately “defeated and ineffective”, in part because of assistance from the US military in shooting down some of the inbound missiles. Biden said his administration is “fully supportive” of Israel and that he’s in “active discussion” with aides about what the appropriate response should be.
Analysis: Harris faces triple trouble, even before October’s inevitable surprises
David Smith
100” was spelled out in giant numbers on the White House north lawn on Tuesday. It was a birthday tribute to the former US president Jimmy Carter, who served only one term after being buffeted by external events such as high inflation and a hostage crisis in Iran.
The current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, must know the feeling as he fights three fires at once. Iran has launched at least 180 missiles into Israel, six US states are still reeling from Hurricane Helene, and ports from Maine to Texas shut down as about 45,000 dockworkers went on strike.
Unlike Carter, Biden already knows his fate: he is not seeking re-election next month. But what remains uncertain is whether the trio of troubles will drag down his vice-president and would-be successor, Kamala Harris. Certainly her rival, Donald Trump, smells an opportunity to tar her with the same brush of chaos.
“The world is on fire and spiralling out of control,” he said in a written statement. “We have no leadership, no one running the country. We have a non-existent president in Joe Biden, and a completely absent vice-president, Kamala Harris, who is too busy fundraising in San Francisco.”
Will it stick? No one can be sure. Democrats must again be breathing a sigh of relief that they jettisoned Biden after his miserable debate performance in June. The president steeped in foreign policy is running at one catastrophe a year: the botched Afghanistan withdrawal of 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the deadly Hamas attack on Israel in 2023.
In the unsealed court documents released today, prosecutors detail each time Trump tried to pressure his former vice president Mike Pence to accept that their was fraud in the 2020 elections.
Here are all the times — according to Jack Smith — Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence and Mike Pence said he saw no evidence of fraud. pic.twitter.com/cDKD4xGgPb
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 2, 2024
Donald Trump’s campaign has reaised more than $160m in September, according to Reuters, and have about $283m of cash on hand.
The campaign raised $130 million in August – just a third of that Harris raised ($361m) that month.
Exclusive: Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir
Martin Pengelly
Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.
“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.
“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”
Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
An estimated 43.15 million viewers watched the vice-presidential debate last night, according to Nielsen.
In comparison, about 67.1 million tuned into the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in September.
Walz compares Vance to Pence in first rally since debate
At his rally in Pennsylvania, Tim Walz warned that JD Vance seems much more willing than Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence to interfere with electoral integrity.
“There is a reason Mike Pence wasn’t on that stage with me,” Walz said of his debate last night. “He chose the constitution over Donald Trump … Senator Vance made it clear he will always make a different choice.”
Pence certified the 2020 election results, as required by the constitution, despite Trump’s suggestions that he could have resisted.
Vance has said he wouldn’t have done as Pence did.
“If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said in an interview with ABC News earlier this year. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”
The 165-page document details prosecutors’ case against Donald Trump, who is facing criminal charges accusing him of a conspiracy to obstruct the certification of the election, defraud the US and interfere with Americans’ voting rights in the 2020 election.
It will likely be their last opportunity to lay out their case before the upcoming election day on 5 November. Trump, JD Vance and their supporters have continued to spread doubts about the system.
My colleague Sam Levine laid out the stakes here:
Judge unseals new evidence in Trump election case
Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed attempt to keep power after losing the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in newly unsealed evidence arguing that the former president shouldn’t be immune from prosecution.
Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the filing, which was submitted by submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team following a supreme court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents.
The prosecutors argue that Trump in this case should not be immune because he was acting in the capacity of a candidate, not president, when he attempted to challenge the election results. The prosecutors allege:
Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted — a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.
