Politics

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Attorneys for Donald Trump said in a court filing on Friday that all documents seized in an FBI search of the former president’s Florida home should be reviewed by a special master, including those with classified markings, a position opposed by the Justice Department.

In the filing, Trump’s attorneys and the Justice Department each proposed two different names to serve as an independent arbiter known as a special master.

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Caitlin Webber)

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Under pressure from his Republican rival, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman said this week he would participate in one debate before the November election.

In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker are still working through the details of what a debate might look like, though they appear to be inching closer to a deal. And in Arizona, Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Katie Hobbs has declined a televised debate with Republican Kari Lake.

With the fall campaign rapidly approaching, the time-honored tradition of televised debates as a forum for voters to evaluate candidates may be the latest casualty of constant media coverage and powerful digital platforms, as well as the nation’s polarized political climate. For some Republicans, eschewing debates is a chance to sidestep a media structure some in the party deride as biased and align with Donald Trump, who has blasted presidential debates. Some Democrats, including Hobbs, have pointed to raucous GOP debates from the primary season as a reason to avoid tangling with their opponents.

Despite such skepticism, veteran political consultant Terry Sullivan defended debates as “the one forum where candidates are forced into answering questions that they don’t want to answer.”

“They’re not going to do it in their TV commercials,” added Sullivan, who managed GOP Sen. Jim DeMint’s 2004 bid in South Carolina and handled media for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential effort. “And in stump appearances, press conferences, they can evade, they can dodge.”

And sometimes, Sullivan added, it’s the media coverage of what happens onstage, rather than the back-and-forth itself, that can make a bigger impression.

In what “should have been the most boring debate in the history of mankind,” Sullivan said that a 2004 panelist questioning DeMint and Democrat Inez Tenenbaum asked DeMint if he agreed with a state GOP platform tenet in opposition of openly gay teachers in South Carolina’s public schools.

“That kind of turned the race on its head for the next three months,” Sullivan said, noting headlines he characterized as “DeMint wants to fire gay teachers.”

DeMint went on to win the open seat by nearly 10 percentage points, a margin typical in recent South Carolina statewide elections. But in more competitive states, Sullivan said, a debate can serve as “a good way to find out where candidates are on the issues.”

In addition to winning candidates thousands of impressions in earned media and repackaged video clips, debate footage can also propel candidates’ messages far more broadly — and cheaply — than could television ad buys, said Michael Wukela, a South Carolina Democratic media consultant and veteran of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids.

“You’re getting that in one shot,” Wukela said, of a debate appearance being worth airtime that would otherwise cost millions. “That’s like a Super Bowl ad.”

Refusal to participate can draw ire from rivals. The Republicans whom Walker refused to debate ahead of Georgia’s primary critiqued him as ill-prepared to take on Warnock, a skilled orator.

“If you can’t get on the stage and debate fellow Republicans, how the heck are you going to debate with Raphael Warnock in the general election?” Latham Saddler, a Navy veteran and former Trump administration official who was among five Republicans challenging Walker, asked. “Usually if you’re hiding, you’re hiding for a reason.”

Walker repeatedly proclaimed his eagerness to face off with Warnock in the fall but, instead of agreeing to Warnock’s challenge to three debates, accepted an invitation to a different one altogether. This week, Warnock said he would participate in that debate, if Walker agreed to another forum Warnock wants. That back-and-forth remains unresolved.

Other Senate contests are playing out similarly.

In North Carolina, where U.S. Rep. Ted Budd skipped four Republican primary debates in his U.S. Senate bid, said Friday he wouldn’t accept an invitation from the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters to debate Democrat Cheri Beasley, as the two head for a presumably close general election. Budd said he had accepted a cable debate invite, but there’s no agreement with Beasley on that appearance.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, mused to reporters this week about what would happen if voters elected a senator who never has ”answered a legitimate question from a voter, from a newscaster in a non-taped setting, in a debate stage?” citing Fetterman’s campaign-trail absence as he recovers from a stroke.

Fetterman’s campaign said he will participate in a televised debate in October but gave no other details, including why he would agree to just one debate. Oz’s campaign immediately dubbed it a “secret debate,” with no details on when or where.

In Pennsylvania’s governor’s race, the Republican nominee Doug Mastriano has rejected a media-moderated debate and instead reserved a hotel ballroom on Oct. 22 and picked a partisan moderator for himself: Mercedes Schlapp, who served as Trump’s White House strategic communications director and is married to the chair of the American Conservative Union.

The campaign of Democrat Josh Shapiro said Mastriano’s refusal to accept an independent moderator blew up about a dozen invitations from news organizations and other groups.

Some incumbents with an edge on their rivals have rebuffed requests for multiple debates, uninterested in taking a risk on stage that might change the course of their campaign.

South Carolina Democrat Joe Cunningham called for four general-election debates with Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, whose campaign dismissed the request as a “stunt” and ultimately agreed to one matchup. In Texas, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott has granted a single debate to Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke — on a Friday night in the thick of high school football season, which will be broadcast as distracted voters are instead at games kicking off around the state.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis initially committed to a statewide televised debate with his Democratic opponent before U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist — who came under fire for not agreeing to primary debates — won his party’s nomination. Now, the two are set to spar in a single debate, shown only on a West Palm Beach TV station.

Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Republican nominee Tudor Dixon finally agreed to a single October debate after a scheduling flap. Whitmer announced last month she would participate in two statewide, televised debates, a decision her campaign said was “consistent with past precedent.” Dixon, who criticized Whitmer for not debating before voter are able to send in absentee ballots, ultimately agreed to the solo meeting.

Noting that the uncertainty of debates can be “terrifying” for all involved, Wukela acknowledged incumbents’ reticence to allowing their challengers prominent opportunities to equate themselves with the office, or its existing occupant.

“Strom Thurmond refused to debate any of his opponents,” Wukela said of the longtime South Carolina Democrat-turned-Republican governor and senator. “If I’ve got a four-touchdown lead, why would I ever throw the ball?”

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Associated Press writer Sara Burnett in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics.

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By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department and Donald Trump’s attorneys said on Friday they are deeply divided over whether classified records seized by the FBI from the former president’s Florida estate should be reviewed by a special master, and they each put forth a separate list of candidates for the job.

In a joint filing on Friday evening, the U.S. Justice Department told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that Trump’s legal team is insisting that the special master should be allowed to review “all seized materials, including documents with classification markings.”

Trump’s lawyers also want the special master, an independent third-party, to review the records for possible executive privilege claims – a mandate the department opposes.

Both sides also each proposed two different sets of possible candidates for the job, though they said they intend to inform the court about their views on each others’ candidate list by Monday.

A special master is an independent third-party sometimes appointed by a federal court to weed through sensitive records that could be privileged and segregate them so they are not viewed by prosecutors and do not taint a criminal investigation.

The Justice Department said it is proposing two candidates for special master: Retired judge Barbara Jones, who previously served as a special master in cases involving Trump’s former lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Michael Cohen, or retired judge Thomas Griffith, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush who served on the D.C. appeals court from 2005-2020.

Trump’s team proposed Raymond Dearie, a judge on senior status in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and former U.S. Attorney who served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and Paul Huck, Florida’s former Deputy Attorney General and a former partner with Jones Day, a law firm that previously represented Trump’s campaign.

Both sides also said they disagree on whether the special master should be required to consult with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which is tasked with preserving executive branch documents.

In addition, neither side could agree on who should pay for the special master, with Trump’s team proposing to split the costs and the Justice Department saying Trump should pay since he requested it in the first place.

JUDGE HAD ORDERED ARBITER

Trump is under investigation for retaining government records, some of which were marked as highly classified, at his Palm Beach, Florida, home after leaving office in January 2021. The government is also investigating possible obstruction of the probe.

The documents probe is one of several federal and state investigations Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business. He has suggested he might run for the White House again in 2024, but has not made any commitment.

The joint filing came after Cannon, a Trump appointee in Fort Pierce, Florida, ordered the appointment of a special master arbiter on Monday, granting a request by Trump.

After the Justice Department warned on Thursday that doing so could slow the government’s effort to determine whether classified documents were still missing, Cannon said in a court filing she was willing to consider limiting the special master’s role so that person would not review classified documents.

Cannon on Monday barred federal prosecutors from continuing to use any of the seized records for their ongoing criminal probe until a special master could review them, though she carved out a narrow exemption allowing U.S. intelligence officials to continue their intelligence risk assessment.

The Justice Department on Thursday asked her to reconsider, saying it opposes giving a special master access to classified records, and needs to continue reviewing them both for the criminal probe and the national security assessment.

They also said the criminal probe and intelligence assessment are inextricably linked, and that the government was forced to pause its intelligence review amid the legal uncertainty ruling her order has created.

Prosecutors gave Cannon until Sept. 15 to decide. If she rules against them, they threatened to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

Trump, for his part, has said on social media that he declassified all the records – a claim his lawyers have avoided repeating in legal filings to the court.

The government “wrongly assumes that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified in perpetuity,” they said on Friday.

Now that Trump’s team has voiced its opposition to the department’s request, it remains to be seen whether Cannon will agree to exclude the classified materials from the special master’s mandate.

Of the more than 11,000 seized records, there are only about 100 documents with classification markings.

Trump’s team has until Monday to formally spell out its position on the Justice Department’s request.

Cannon has also faced criticism for previously ruling that the special master will be tasked with reviewing records not just covered by attorney-client privilege, but also by executive privilege as well.

The Justice Department has questioned the logic of her decision, noting the government records are not Trump’s personal property and he is no longer president.

The U.S. Supreme Court last year side-stepped the question of how far a former president’s privilege claims can go in rejecting Trump’s bid to keep White House records from a congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot by his supporters.

However, the U.S. National Archives, after conferring with the Justice Department, told Trump’s lawyers earlier this year that he cannot assert privilege against the executive branch to shield the records from the FBI.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Eric Beech and Caitlin Webber; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday underscored the need for a broad coalition of partners to help Ukraine recover and rebuild after Russia’s invasion, with a focus on near-term, high-impact projects, the Treasury Department said.

During a virtual meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Yellen also discussed the need for Ukraine’s partners to deliver expeditiously on economic assistance for the country, which has been besieged for over six months by Russian forces.

Yellen also expressed support for Ukraine’s effort to develop a macroeconomic reform program supported by International Monetary Fund financing, the Treasury said.

Ukraine, which faces $635 million in principal payments on prior IMF loans beginning next week, hopes to get details soon on the format of fresh support from the global lender, a senior central bank official said Thursday.

The United States is providing grants to Ukraine that will add up to $8.5 billion by end-September, the Treasury said. The Biden administration is also requesting an additional $4.5 billion from Congress to help the country cover its critical needs in the coming months.

Yellen’s meeting with Shmyhal came hours after the first comprehensive assessment of Ukraine’s damages and needs showed it could cost nearly $350 billion to rebuild the country, or about 1.6 times its gross domestic product in 2021.

In her discussion with Shmyhal, Yellen also outlined the next steps for implementation of a Group of Seven price cap on Russian oil meant to put downward pressure on global energy prices and reduce revenues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is using to fund the war, the Treasury said in a statement.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Leslie Adler and Jonathan Oatis)

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By Andrew Chung and Nate Raymond

(Reuters) -U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Friday permitted Yeshiva University to refuse to recognize an LGBT student club that the Jewish school in New York City has said violates its religious values, temporarily blocking a judge’s ruling ordering it to allow the group.

Sotomayor put on hold for now the judge’s ruling that a city anti-discrimination law required Yeshiva University to recognize Y.U. Pride Alliance as a student club while the school pursues an appeal in a lower court. The liberal justice handles certain cases for the court from a group of states including New York.

A stay Sotomayor issued of the judge’s injunction will remain in place pending a further order from herself or the entire Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.

Yeshiva’s student club application process was set to end on Monday, and the school said that absent the court’s intervention it would be forced to recognize Y.U. Pride Alliance in violation of its religious values.

“We are grateful that Justice Sotomayor stepped in to protect Yeshiva’s religious liberty in this case,” Eric Baxter, a lawyer for Yeshiva at the conservative legal group Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said in a statement.

Katherine Rosenfeld, a lawyer for the club, said it will await a final order from the court and remains committed to creating a safe space for LGBT students on the university’s campus “to build community and support one another without being discriminated against.”

Y.U. Pride Alliance formed unofficially as a group in 2018 but Yeshiva determined that granting it official status would be “inconsistent with the school’s Torah values and the religious environment it seeks to maintain.”

The dispute hinges in part on whether Yeshiva is a “religious corporation” and therefore exempt from the New York City Human Rights Law, which bans discrimination by a place or provider of public accommodation.

New York state judge Lynn Kotler in June determined that the school’s primary purpose is education, not religious worship, and it is subject to anti-discrimination law. Kotler also rejected the university’s argument that forcing it to recognize the club would violate its religious freedom protected under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

After higher state courts in August refused to stay the judge’s ruling, Yeshiva turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, emphasizing its religious character, including that undergraduate students are required to engage in intense religious studies.

“As a deeply religious Jewish university, Yeshiva cannot comply with that order because doing so would violate its sincere religious beliefs about how to form its undergraduate students in Torah values,” the school told the Supreme Court.

The Modern Orthodox Jewish university, based in Manhattan, has roughly 6,000 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs. Among the school’s values, according to its website https://www.yu.edu/about/values, are believing in “the infinite worth of each and every human being” and “the responsibility to reach out to others in compassion.”

Powered by its increasingly assertive conservative justices, the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has expanded religious rights while narrowing the separation between church and state.

During its term that ended in June, the court backed a public high school football coach in Washington state who refused to stop leading Christian prayers with players on the field after games and ruled in favor of Christian families in Maine who sought access to taxpayer money to pay for their children to attend religious schools.

In its upcoming term, which begins on Oct. 3, the court will decide a major new legal fight pitting religious liberty against LGBT rights involving an evangelical Christian web designer’s free speech claim that she cannot be forced under a Colorado anti-discrimination law to produce websites for same-sex marriages.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond and Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)

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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Four Republicans who have promoted false claims about the 2020 presidential election and are running for top state election offices said Saturday they were fighting against a corrupt system — even pointing a finger at mysterious forces within their own party.

The candidates — Arizona’s Mark Finchem, Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, Nevada’s Jim Marchant and New Mexico’s Audrey Trujillo — said they want to overhaul how elections are run in their states. They appeared at a conference inside a South Florida hotel ballroom that featured numerous speakers falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

“Our biggest enemy is our own party,” said Marchant, a businessman and former state lawmaker who was among Trump’s most ardent supporters challenging President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Nevada. “Even though we are Republicans, we are kind of the outsiders. We have a battle, but we’re not giving up.”

All are members of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, which calls for large-scale changes to elections. While not officially tied to Trump’s America First movement, it’s part of the broader effort promoting conservative candidates who align with the former president’s views.

Eliminating voting machines, mailed ballots and early voting are among their goals. The coalition also supports hand-counting of all ballots and a single day of voting for all Americans with few exceptions. They did not say whether Election Day should be a national holiday.

Many of their ideas are based on unfounded claims that voting machines are being manipulated. Nearly two years after the 2020 election, no evidence has emerged to suggest widespread fraud or manipulation while reviews in state after state have upheld the results showing Biden won.

The four are among the nearly 1 in 3 Republican candidates running for statewide offices that play a role in overseeing, certifying or defending elections who have supported overturning the results of the 2020 presidential contest, according to an Associated Press review.

Election experts say candidates who dispute the results of a valid election in which there has been no evidence of wrongdoing pose a danger of interfering in future elections. They warn it could trigger chaos if they refuse to accept or challenge results they don’t like.

With less than nine weeks before the November election, the candidates took time off the campaign trail in their own states to appear at the event, organized by the secretary of state coalition and the Florida affiliate of The America Project. The America Project was founded by Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general and Trump’s former national security adviser, and Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com.

It was the latest in a nationwide effort to question the results of the 2020 election and promote conspiracy theories about voting machines and the workings of election offices. The forums, held for well over a year, have helped to undermine confidence in elections among broad swaths of the Republican Party.

A few hundred people attended Saturday’s conference, which featured numerous panels claiming that elections are being manipulated in a variety of ways. One panel was comprised of former candidates — Democrats and Republicans from around the country — who sought to cast doubt on their election losses in bids to challenge elected officials in their states.

Karamo, a community college professor, gained prominence after the 2020 election for claiming she saw irregularities in the processing of handling mailed ballots while serving as an election observer in Detroit. She called the election system corrupt.

“This is not a partisan issue. It’s a liberty issue,” Karamo said. “That’s why you see people in our own party, claiming to be Republicans, trying to silence us and stop us. Even though we are the Republican nominees of this office, we have people in our own party trying to make us lose. Because they are in on it.”

A wide-ranging review of the 2020 election in Michigan by Republicans who control the state Legislature found no systemic fraud and no issues that would have changed the results. Similar reviews in other battleground states have come to the same conclusion. Dozens of court cases brought by Trump and his allies were turned away, and even the former president’s own Justice Department found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Nevertheless, the Republican secretary of state candidates speaking Saturday spoke of a system they see as hopelessly corrupted.

Finchem said he did his job as a state lawmaker in calling a public hearing to discuss election concerns and noted how Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican in his final term, dismissed the effort: “How do you like me now, Doug?” Finchem said.

He added: “We are in battle against a cartel.”

Finchem was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, before Trump backers attacked Congress and has pushed for Biden’s win in Arizona to be withdrawn, something the law provides no way to do.

False claims about the 2020 election have led to death threats against election officials and workers, prompting some to leave the profession and raising concerns about a loss of experienced professionals overseeing elections in November.

The repeated false claims of a stolen election also have eroded confidence in U.S. elections. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in 2021 found that about two-thirds of Republicans say they do not think Biden was legitimately elected.

Trujillo, a small business owner from the central New Mexico town of Corrales, said she wants the state’s officials to follow the law when it comes to elections and to increase transparency. For example, she raised concerns about the security of drop boxes used to return mailed ballots, even though there is no evidence of widespread problems with drop boxes.

She also criticized election officials for being dismissive or even condescending to voters who have doubts.

“We have questions as voters and we should get to ask them,” Trujillo said in an interview after speaking as part of the panel. “We shouldn’t feel like, ‘OK, we can’t ask that because it’s taboo and we’ll look like we’re trying to question the elections.’ Because the integrity needs to be there. It needs to be very transparent.”

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By Steve Holland and Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden is making an election-year visit to an overwhelmingly Republican part of Ohio Friday for the groundbreaking of a semiconductor plant that he will promote as evidence his economic policies are working.

Biden travels to Licking County near Columbus, Ohio, to speak at the site of Intel Corp’s new $20 billion semiconductor manufacturing facility.

The trip is part of a White House pre-midterms push to tout new funding for manufacturing and infrastructure Biden’s Democratic Party pushed through Congress, while decrying opposition Republicans backed by former President Donald Trump as dangerous extremists.

Previous trips to Maryland, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have landed the president in areas where Democrats already have strong support, but Licking County voted Republican 63% to 35% in the 2020 presidential election.

OHIO IN PLAY?

Democrats have lost Ohio in the past two presidential contests, but Republican Senator Rob Portman’s retirement may give Democrats a chance to pick up a Senate seat.

Some recent forecasts show Democrats favored to maintain control of the Senate, after a series of wins in Congress. But not all candidates welcome Biden’s campaigning support.

Representative Tim Ryan is running against Republican J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist and author of the book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” who has Trump’s backing.

Asked Thursday if Biden should seek a second term, Ryan told Youngstown, Ohio, network WFMJ, “My hunch is that we need new leadership across the board – Democrats, Republicans, I think it’s time for a generational move.”

Ryan has not asked Biden to campaign with him in the state, and has broken with the president on some issues.

Trump’s political organization announced on Monday that Trump will appear at a rally for Vance in Youngstown, Ohio, on Sept. 17.

CHIPS ACT PROJECTS

Intel backed the Ohio project in anticipation of the passage of the Chips and Science Act, a funding law that Biden signed last month after some Republicans joined Democrats to support it, the White House says.

The Chips act is aimed at jumpstarting the domestic production of semiconductors in response to supply-chain disruptions that have slowed the production of automobiles.

A string of other companies have announced new semiconductor plants resulting from passage of the Chips act, which authorized about $52 billion in government subsidies for U.S. semiconductor production and research, and an investment tax credit for chip plants estimated to be worth $24 billion.

During Biden’s visit, Intel will announce it has distributed $17.7 million to Ohio colleges and universities to develop semiconductor-focused education and workforce programs, part of a $50 million education and research investment in the state.

The Intel facility will contain at least two fabricating plants that the White House said will be built by union labor, creating more than 7,000 construction jobs and 3,000 full-time jobs producing cutting-edge chips.

(Reporting By Steve Holland and Jane Lee; Editing by Heather Timmons, Aurora Ellis and Jonathan Oatis)

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By Andy Sullivan and Jarrett Renshaw

(Reuters) – In his campaign for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, Republican candidate Ted Budd has described himself as a “conservative warrior” and a “liberal agenda crusher.” But some of his fellow Republicans worry he is not fighting hard enough.

While Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley has spent the summer running TV ads and campaigning across the state, Budd has kept a lower profile, staying off the airwaves for months and devoting much of his time to private fundraising events.

Former Governor Pat McCrory, who lost to Budd in a hard-fought Republican primary, told Reuters that Budd is running a “risk averse” campaign, while conservative radio host Brett Winterble lamented the lack of “fire and fury” in the race.

The North Carolina contest is one of a handful that could determine which party controls the Senate after the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Republicans need to pick up only one seat to win back the majority, which would enable them to block most of Democratic President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda and reject his nominees for jobs in his administration and the federal judiciary.

Opinion polls show a race effectively tied between Budd, a congressman and gun-store owner backed by former President Donald Trump, and Beasley, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who would become the only Black woman in the Senate if elected.

Seven Republican strategists said in interviews that they are concerned that Budd is not doing enough to court independent voters, who now outnumber registered Republicans and Democrats in the politically competitive state.

The strategists said they fear the race will steal resources from Republican candidates in other states including Georgia and Arizona that are key to the party securing Senate control.

“There is no doubt outside groups will have to come once again and rescue Republicans in the final weeks,” said one strategist involved in the race, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Republican Leadership Fund, a national committee that backs Senate Republicans, has begun to air $27 million worth of attack ads in North Carolina aimed at boosting Budd’s chances. Other conservative groups are contacting voters directly.

INFLATION AND BIDEN

Budd’s campaign said his U.S. House of Representatives duties kept him in Washington for much of the summer, but he plans to run TV ads and campaign more intensively in the state in the coming weeks, focusing on bread-and-butter matters like inflation. Republicans have sought to pin the blame for rising prices on Biden.

“Inflation is the number one issue right now in North Carolina, and Cheri Beasley has supported all of the Joe Biden policies that yielded this inflation,” said Jonathan Felts, a senior adviser to the Budd campaign. “I feel pretty good about our chances.”

Nonpartisan analysts have said Budd remains favored to win the race to succeed retiring Republican Senator Richard Burr, given Biden’s low approval ratings and voter concerns about the economy.

Democratic candidates have come up short in the past three Senate races in North Carolina, despite raising more money than their Republican rivals. Even so, some Republican strategists said the current race is more competitive than they had anticipated, and called on Budd to campaign more aggressively.

A senior Republican official in North Carolina said Budd’s reluctance to talk to the news media or voters will not help him attract unaffiliated women voters concerned about his strict opposition to abortion.

“This is an issue that he needs to get in front of or else it could really hurt,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Abortion rights have become a central theme of the midterms after the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

Beasley, who has raised more than twice as much money as Budd, has emphasized her support for abortion rights and other policies popular with Democrats. But Beasley has also sought to portray herself as having an independent streak, unafraid to break with her party on issues.

Beasley won statewide judicial elections in 2008 and 2014. She lost her re-election bid for the state Supreme Court in 2020 by 401 votes out of 5.3 million cast – a better performance than Biden, who lost the state by 11,000 votes.

Her campaign has criticized Budd for voting against bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor legislation.

“Cheri has the momentum in this race with her unique candidacy, winning message and robust campaign,” campaign spokesperson Dory MacMillan said.

Budd has campaigned as a staunch conservative, posing with a handgun in his waistband at the U.S.-Mexico border and vowing to block Biden’s “woke, socialist agenda.” Budd has not yet said whether he will agree to a debate with Beasley.

He campaigned with Trump during the Republican primary race, and like many Republican lawmakers, voted against congressional certification of Trump’s 2020 election loss to Biden. It is not clear whether Trump will return to North Carolina before the general election.

McCrory, Budd’s former Republican rival, said Trump’s support could turn off unaffiliated voters.

“North Carolina is always close, but this year it will be even closer,” McCrory said.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan in Washington and Jarrett Renshaw in Philadelphia; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Will Dunham)

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ATLANTA (AP) — A group of computer and election security experts is urging Georgia election officials to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots ahead of the November midterm elections, citing what they say are “serious threats” posed by an apparent breach of voting equipment in one county.

The 13 experts on Thursday sent a letter to the members of the State Election Board and to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who’s a non-voting member of the board. It urges them to immediately stop using the state’s Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines. It also suggests they mandate a particular type of post-election audit on the outcome of all races on the ballot.

The experts who sent the letter include academics and former state election officials and are not associated with efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The midterm elections are just two months away. A switch to hand-marked paper ballots could easily be made by then because state law already provides for them to be used as an emergency backup, the letter says.

State Election Board Chair William Duffey responded in an email to The Associated Press that the “security of our election equipment is of paramount interest to the State Election Board as is the integrity of the election process in Georgia.” He noted that the alleged breach in Coffee County is being investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and secretary of state’s office investigators and said the FBI has been asked to assist.

“The investigation is active and ongoing,” Duffey wrote. “Information developed will be considered to evaluate the impact of the Coffee County conduct.”

Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly said that Georgia’s elections remain secure because of varied security mechanisms in place. Spokesperson Mike Hassinger said in an email that the office will respond “in due time with due care” and that the response will be “addressed directly to the authors, rather than leaked to the media to obtain some sort of rhetorical advantage.”

The apparent unauthorized copying of election equipment in Coffee County happened in January 2021. It is documented in emails, security camera footage and other records produced in response to subpoenas in a long-running lawsuit that argues Georgia’s voting machines are vulnerable and should be replaced by hand-marked paper ballots.

Those records show that a computer forensics team traveled to the rural county about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta on Jan. 7, 2021, to forensically copy voting equipment. Emails show that Sidney Powell and other Trump-allied attorneys were involved in arranging for the visit.

The security video also shows that Doug Logan and Jeff Lenberg, who were involved in broader efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election results, visited the office later that month.

The experts who sent the letter Thursday have long criticized Georgia’s voting machines, which print a paper ballot that includes a human-readable summary of the voter’s selections and a barcode that is read by a scanner to tally the votes. They argue the machines already made elections more vulnerable to tampering because voters cannot read the barcode to verify that it accurately reflects their selections.

But the copying and sharing of election data and software from Coffee County “increases both the risk of undetected cyber-attacks on Georgia, and the risk of accusations of fraud and election manipulation,” the letter says.

The expert letter also cites work by University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, who serves as an expert witness in the long-running voting machines lawsuit. He has identified what he says are security vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting machines. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in June issued an advisory based on Halderman’s findings.

In addition to urging a switch to hand-marked paper ballots, the experts say a statewide post-election, risk-limiting audit should be done on all of the races on the ballot. A risk-limiting audit essentially uses a statistical approach to ensure that the reported results match the actual votes cast. Current rules require only one statewide contest to be audited.

At least some of the experts who signed the letter sent to the Georgia State Election Board last year sent a similar letter to California’s secretary of state ahead of a recall election for the state’s governor urging a rigorous audit of that contest. The secretary of state did not act on the recommendations.

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Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy contributed reporting.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Alek Skarlatos, a Republican nominee for Congress in Oregon, was cleared this week of violating campaign finance law, months after a Democratic-aligned group filed a complaint alleging he improperly funded his campaign with money from a nonprofit he also controlled.

“Democrats have created a false controversy to smear Alek Skarlatos,” campaign manager Ross Purgason said in a statement. “The (Federal Election Commission) has dismissed these false allegations.”

Skarlatos, who is running for a second time to represent a coastal Oregon district, established the nonprofit veterans group 15:17 Trust shortly after losing his bid for the seat in 2020, pledging to advocate for veterans “left high and dry” by the country “they put their lives on the line for.” And he used $93,000 left over from his campaign to help seed the nonprofit.

But several months later, after Skarlatos decided in 2021 to run for the seat again, the nonprofit transferred $65,000 back to his campaign. The transfers of money were the subject of an Associated Press story last year, which was followed by a complaint filed with the FEC by End Citizens United, a Democrat-aligned group.

Campaign finance laws prohibit candidates from self-dealing and from accepting illicit money from the often opaque and less regulated world of political nonprofits. That includes a prohibition on candidates donating campaign cash to a nonprofit they control, as well as a broader ban on accepting contributions from such groups, legal experts say.

But in this case, the FEC found that Skarlatos’ nonprofit wasn’t very active and failed to raise much money, taking in about $1,800. The agency also determined that the transfers of cash from Skarlatos’ campaign to his nonprofit and back were done in a short enough time span that it likely amounted to a legitimate refund.

“Without information to indicate the contrary, the $65,000 payment from the 15:17 (Trust) to the Committee was likely a bona fide refund,” the agency states in a filing, which was provided by the Skarlatos campaign and has not yet been released publicly.

The AP’s story last year detailed how Skarlatos’ nonprofit was soliciting money online but otherwise was maintaining a decidedly low profile and had not yet released annual tax paperwork detailing how much it had raised and how the money was spent it.

The story also noted how laws governing transfers of money by candidates to nonprofits they operate are intended to prevent sidestepping the ban on the personal use of campaign funds. And it detailed how Skarlatos had previously collected $43,000 from his 2020 campaign in mileage reimbursements, rent and expenses vaguely listed as contractor campaign staff.

The FEC did not receive a full explanation of how the nonprofit spent the money Skarlatos lent it, including the remaining $28,000 that was not refunded to his campaign. The Skarlatos campaign said about $14,000 was spent on fundraising, but an additional $14,000 was not accounted for in the filing released by the agency.

Skarlatos was a member of the Oregon National Guard when he gained a measure of fame in 2015, helping to disrupt an attack on a train bound for Paris by a heavily armed man who was a follower of the Islamic State group. Hailed as a hero, he appeared on “Dancing with the Stars,” visited the White House and was granted dual French citizenship. It also led to a role starring as himself in the Clint Eastwood movie “15:17 to Paris.”

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