Politics

By Richard Cowan and Bo Erickson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate on Thursday was expected to advance a bill to require the federal government to detain migrants living in the U.S. illegally who are suspected of criminal activity, even if they are not charged with crimes, as a growing number of Democrats voiced support for the Republican-backed measure.

The legislation, named the “Laken Riley Act” after a Georgia college student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan man previously arrested for shoplifting, passed the House of Representatives on Tuesday by a vote of 264-159, with 48 Democrats supporting the measure.

The Senate vote comes just 11 days before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration and “migrant crime.”

A range of studies by academics and think tanks have shown that immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than native-born Americans.

With a majority that currently stands at 52-47, Senate Republicans need eight Democrats to support the measure to meet the chamber’s threshold of 60 of 100 senators agreeing on most legislation.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday said he expects the bill will “have enough votes from both parties to proceed” — including his own — and several Democrats have also voiced support, including Senators John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego, who have both signed on as cosponsors, and Senator Mark Kelly.

“If we get on the bill, Democrats want to have a robust debate where we can offer amendments and approve the bill,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.

“It’s about border security and keeping Americans safe,” Democratic Senator Gary Peters told reporters on Tuesday shortly after the House vote, when asked if he would vote for the bill.

Peters is among the one-third of senators up for election in 2026. He hails from Michigan, a state that Trump narrowly won over Vice President Kamala Harris. His newly elected Michigan colleague, Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin, announced on social media that she also would vote for the bill.

Georgia Democratic Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who faces a tough reelection bid in 2026, both voiced support for the measure.

The House passed a similar bill last year, which the then-Democratic-majority Senate ignored. Another 11 House Democrats supported the bill on its second go-round.

“It’s a common-sense piece of legislation. This was the most litigated issue of the last four years and the American people spoke,” Republican Senator Katie Britt, a sponsor of the bill, told reporters.

Many Democrats see it as a back-door way for racial profiling by law enforcement and trampling on constitutional protections.

“This bill ends due process for immigrants, including DACA recipients,” said Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar, referring to Washington’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that shields young undocumented immigrants brought across U.S. borders by parents or other adults.

Trump has used harsh terms when describing immigrants in the United States illegally or awaiting asylum hearings, calling them “animals” when talking about alleged criminal acts.

Thursday’s likely vote to move toward debating this controversial bill does not necessarily mean it will have enough votes for passage. Leading Democrats are expected to insist on amendments to achieve broader immigration reforms.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Bo Erickson; Additional reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone, Chizu Nomiyama and Alistair Bell)

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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte was sworn as the 83rd governor of New Hampshire on Thursday, promising to bring people together and prodding young people to “step up and contribute.”

“I am going to be a governor for you, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, independent, you name it. Our state is so much bigger than a party or an ideology,” she said in remarks prepared for delivery. “Good government knows no party, so let’s show folks that even when partisanship is at a fever pitch, we can set a different example.”

Ayotte succeeds fellow Republican Chris Sununu, whose decision against seeking a fifth two-year term set up on one of the most competitive gubernatorial races in the country. Promising to continue Sununu’s anti-tax, pro-business economic policies, Ayotte defeated five opponents in September’s GOP primary and Democratic former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig in the November election.

In her inaugural speech, Ayotte said she would keep the state on a prosperous path but warned that belt-tightening would be necessary as lawmakers write the next two-year budget.

“We are going to have to look to find better ways to do things with fewer dollars,” she said. “Just like that family making hard decisions, there’s things we can’t skimp on — protecting our most vulnerable and serving those most in need.”

Ayotte is the third woman to be elected governor of New Hampshire, following Democrats Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, both of whom are now U.S. senators. They were the first and second women in the nation to serve in the Senate after being governor. Ayotte is the first woman to do so in reverse, according to Eric Ostermeier, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota and author of the Smart Politics news site.

While more than 150 sitting or former governors have become senators, Ayotte is among just 23 sitting or former senators elected governor since 1900, Ostermeier said. In an interview in October, Ayotte said that experience will serve her well.

“Not only do I understand how Washington works, but also how to fight for New Hampshire. I still have relationships there, across the aisle, with important people making decisions in Washington,” she said. “So I do feel like it does broaden my skill set as governor doing this in reverse.”

A narrow loss to Hassan in 2016 ended Ayotte’s tenure in Washington after one term. Before that, Ayotte spent five years as the state’s attorney general, and she often highlighted her past as a prosecutor during her campaign.

She repeated that Thursday, saying her top priority remains keeping the state safe. She also cited the state’s housing crisis as a top issue she plans to tackle, and she praised Republicans for expanding the state’s school voucher program. Without offering details, she also announced plans to ban cellphones in schools.

“Screens are negatively impacting our learning environments, drawing students’ attention away from their classes, and becoming a barrier for teachers to do their jobs,” she said. “No more.”

Ayotte said she looks forward to talking to students visiting the Statehouse and urging them to embrace public service.

“If we don’t teach our kids about it, they aren’t going to learn it,” she said. “It is so important to root our lives in something bigger than ourselves, and it is critical to the health of our state and our communities that our next generation step up and contribute.”

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It wasn’t just fact-checking that Meta scrapped from its platforms as it prepares for the second Trump administration. The social media giant has also loosened its rules around hate speech and abuse — again following the lead of Elon Musk’s X — specifically when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity as well as immigration status.

The changes are worrying advocates for vulnerable groups, who say Meta’s decision to scale back content moderation could lead to real-word harms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company will “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse,” citing “recent elections” as a catalyst.

For instance, Meta has added the following to its rules — called community standards — that users are asked to abide by:

“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’” In other words, it is now permitted to call gay people mentally ill on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. Other slurs and what Meta calls “harmful stereotypes historically linked to intimidation” — such as Blackface and Holocaust denial — are still prohibited.

The Menlo Park, California-based company also removed a sentence from its “policy rationale” explaining why it bans certain hateful conduct. The now-deleted sentence said that hate speech “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence.”

“The policy change is a tactic to earn favor with the incoming administration while also reducing business costs related to content moderation,” said Ben Leiner, a lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who studies political and technology trends. “This decision will lead to real-world harm, not only in the United States where there has been an uptick in hate speech and disinformation on social media platforms, but also abroad where disinformation on Facebook has accelerated ethnic conflict in places like Myanmar.”

Meta, in fact, acknowledged in 2018 that it didn’t do enough to prevent its platform from being used to “incite offline violence” in Myanmar, fueling communal hatred and violence against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta known for his expertise on curbing online harassment, said while most of the attention has gone to the company’s fact-checking announcement Tuesday, he is more worried about the changes to Meta’s harmful content policies.

That’s because instead of proactively enforcing rules against things like self-harm, bullying and harassment, Meta will now rely on user reports before it takes any action. The company said it plans to focus its automated systems on “tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams.”

Béjar said that’s even though “Meta knows that by the time a report is submitted and reviewed the content will have done most of its harm.”

“I shudder to think what these changes will mean for our youth, Meta is abdicating their responsibility to safety, and we won’t know the impact of these changes because Meta refuses to be transparent about the harms teenagers experience, and they go to extraordinary lengths to dilute or stop legislation that could help,” he said.

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MIAMI (AP) — Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will be sworn in for a third term Friday while hundreds of government opponents arrested since his disputed reelection last summer languish in the country’s packed prisons.

Sharing cells with them are as many as 10 Americans.

One is David Estrella, who was last heard from in September, when the 62-year-old native New Yorker was about to take a taxi from Colombia to Venezuela with a bag of perfume, clothes and shoes to gift to friends he made on a previous trip.

“It’s like mourning someone in life,” said Margarita Estrella, his ex-wife and mother of three of his children, the youngest of whom just turned 18. “We don’t know anything about where he is, or how he’s doing. Without being able to talk to him, to hear his voice, so he knows all we’re trying to do for him, makes it a lot worse.”

The circumstances around the arrest of David Estrella and the other Americans are not well known. Most have not had access to a lawyer and only limited contact with family members, who worry they could be subject to torture, as past American detainees have alleged.

None has been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department, a designation that would give their cases more attention. Because the U.S. has no diplomatic presence in Venezuela, their families can face a long process pushing for their release.

The Americans’ detentions add another complication to the many Venezuela challenges that await President-elect Donald Trump when he returns to the White House on Jan. 20.

For senior foreign policy roles in his administration, Trump has picked several architects of the “maximum pressure” campaign he pursued during his first term when he tried to oust Maduro. They include Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Mauricio Claver-Carone, a former White House National Security Council aide, as special envoy to Latin America.

But the failure of those policies is readily apparent, and it’s not clear whether Trump will pursue the same course this time.

For one, Maduro enjoys the backing of the armed forces, the traditional arbiter of disputes in Venezuela. The military has stuck by Maduro even as the U.S. and other foreign governments recognized his opponent, Edmundo Gonzalez, as the winner of last year’s vote. Also, crippling oil sanctions that Trump previously promoted have inadvertently strengthened American adversaries such as China, Russia and Iran in the strategic energy sector.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations depends on Maduro’s willingness to take back migrants from the United States. So far, Maduro has been reluctant to do so without concessions from Washington.

“To come in and take the same failed approach seems misguided,” said Brian Fonseca, a former Pentagon expert on Latin America who heads a national security think tank at Florida International University.

He said Trump would be wiser to engage with Maduro in a more pragmatic way, similar to how the U.S. has long dealt with Saudi Arabia, where human rights abuses are also a major concern.

“The U.S. must adopt a realistic approach that requires short-term compromises to gain long-term leverage where it can advance human rights and democratic governance,” Fonseca said.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment on its plans for Venezuela.

Maduro congratulated Trump after his victory in November and called for a fresh start in relations with the U.S. Venezuela’s state-owned oil company contributed $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee in 2016 and hired several lobbyists in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to draw close to the White House.

But Trump hasn’t shown any signs of softening his hawkish stance.

“They’ll take them back,” he said last month when asked whether Venezuelans could be deported to a country without diplomatic relations with the U.S. “If they don’t, they’ll be met very harshly economically.”

Analysts don’t see American prisoners as an insurmountable obstacle to rebuilding ties, but they have no illusion about Maduro’s intentions in targeting Americans.

In December 2023, the Biden administration swapped a close Maduro ally who was awaiting trial on corruption charges in Miami for 10 Americans jailed in Venezuela. At the time, the White House said it secured commitments that Maduro’s government would not arrest additional Americans.

The arrests since then, however, indicate Maduro has broken that pledge.

The detentions fit into a worrisome pattern of Maduro targeting foreigners with passports from countries at odds with Maduro, activists say.

Foro Penal, a Caracas-based legal assistance group, has counted 47 foreign or dual nationals from 13 countries among the nearly 1,800 people imprisoned for political reasons in Venezuela. That compares with barely 300 before the July election.

One is a national guardsman from Argentina who was arrested coming to visit his Venezuelan wife’s family. Authorities accused him of terrorism, linking him to five opposition activists who have been sheltering in the Argentine ambassador’s residence for 10 months. Other prisoners hail from Ecuador, Spain and the Czech Republic.

Maduro is playing up the arrest of foreigners — something he has been reluctant to do in the past. On Tuesday, he said two more Americans had been captured as part of a group of “mercenaries” that also included men from Colombia and Ukraine.

“I am sure in the next few hours they will confess,” Maduro said, adding that the men, whom he didn’t name, “came to carry out terrorist activities against the fatherland.”

Before that announcement, Venezuelan officials have given the names of seven American detainees, and human rights groups identified an additional one. The State Department has declined to provide a number, citing privacy and security concerns.

“The Maduro regime does not notify the U.S. government of the detention of U.S. citizens, and the U.S. government is not granted access to those citizens,” a State Department spokesperson said.

One American detainee, Wilbert Castaneda, is a Navy SEAL. His mother told The Associated Press that he was on vacation when he traveled to Venezuela to visit a girlfriend.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello announced Estrella’s detention in September, alleging Estrella was part of a plot led by Castaneda to assassinate Maduro. The two Americans have never met, according to their families.

Estrella had been working as an auditor at a pharmaceutical company in the New York area when he relocated to Ecuador — where he met his wife decades earlier — during the coronavirus pandemic. The same adventure-seeking lifestyle drew him to Venezuela, where he first traveled in 2023, says his former spouse.

“You could talk to him, and within a few minutes, he was calling you his brother,” Margarita Estrella said. “He was always talking about how he was looking forward to retiring and enjoying the rest of his life.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden, in a new interview days before he leaves office, cast doubt on his fitness to serve another four years even as he maintained that he could have won election to a second term.

The outgoing Democratic president also told USA Today in the interview published Wednesday that he tried during his Oval Office meeting with President-elect Donald Trump to discourage the Republican from going after his political opponents, as he has said he would. And Biden said he had not decided whether to issue sweeping pardons to preemptively protect those individuals from any possible retribution by Trump or the incoming administration.

“I don’t know,” Biden responded when USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page asked if he would’ve had the vigor to serve another four years in office. Biden and Page sat down at the White House on Sunday for the president’s rare interview with a print publication.

Biden, 82, talks about how he didn’t intend to run for president in 2020, but says that when Trump sought reelection last year, “I really thought I had the best chance of beating him. But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old.”

“But I don’t know. Who the hell knows?” he added. “So far, so good. But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”

Did he believe he could have been reelected? “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” Biden said. He said his assessment was “based on the polling” he reviewed, but he did not elaborate.

Concerns about Biden’s age and fitness had followed him since he announced his bid for reelection, but he dropped out of the presidential race under pressure last July after faltering in a debate against Trump. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. She lost to the Republican.

In the interview, Biden said he was considering preemptive pardons but had not decided whether to issue any. When he and Trump met in the Oval Office after the election, Biden said, “I tried to make it clear that there was no need, and it was counterintuitive for his interest to go back and try to settle scores.”

Trump didn’t answer one way or the other, Biden said, adding, “He just basically listened.”

Biden said his “greatest fear” is that Trump will eliminate parts of major climate legislation Biden signed in 2022. He also took Trump to task for implying that the driver of the deadly New Year’s Day vehicle attack in New Orleans was an immigrant who had entered the U.S. from Mexico.

The FBI has identified the driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas and an Army veteran. Fourteen people were killed and nearly three dozen were injured in the attack. Jabbar was killed by police.

Biden said he bets many people read what Trump said about the attacker and believe it.

“How do you deal with that?” he said, referring to his successor as someone “not known for telling the truth.”

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PARIS (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday dismissed President-elect Donald Trump’s interest in taking over Greenland, saying it was “obviously not a good” idea and that it would not happen.

Trump on Tuesday reiterated his interest in taking control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, and has refused to rule out force to take control of the vast Arctic island. He has said the U.S. needs Greenland for national security reasons.

“I think one of the basic propositions we’ve brought to our work over the last four years is that we’re stronger, we’re more effective, we get better results when we’re working closely with our allies, not saying or doing things that may alienate them,” Blinken told reporters at a press conference in Paris with French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot.

“The idea expressed about Greenland is obviously not a good one, but maybe more important, it’s obviously one that’s not going to happen, so we probably shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about it.”

Denmark’s foreign minister said on Wednesday that Greenland might become independent if its residents wanted this, but is unlikely to become a U.S. state.

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has signalled he will pursue a foreign policy unbound by diplomatic niceties, also declining to rule out military or economic action as part of his avowed desire to have the U.S. take back control of the Panama Canal and floating the idea of turning Canada into a U.S. state.

In 2019, Trump postponed a scheduled visit to Denmark after Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen rebuffed his idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland, which was a Danish colony until 1953 and is now a semi-sovereign territory under the Danish realm.

Greenland, part of NATO through the membership of Denmark, has strategic significance for the U.S. military and for its ballistic missile early-warning system, since the shortest route from Europe to North America runs via the Arctic island.

Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede has stated that the island is not for sale and in his New Year speech stepped up a call for independence.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said leaders in Canada, Greenland and Panama had made clear what they thought of Trump’s ideas and the Biden administration was concentrated on other matters. “I think it’s pretty apparent what their views of some of these policy pronouncements are, but it would not be appropriate for us to weigh in and cast judgment,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “We remain focused on issues that we believe are core to our national security.”

(Reporting by Makini Brice, Simon Lewis, Humeyra Pamuk and Daphne Psaledakis; additional reporting by Andrea Shalal and Katharine Jackson; editing by Kevin Liffey and Mark Heinrich)

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By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) – Two groups representing the credit reporting and credit union industries have filed a lawsuit challenging a new rule adopted by U.S. President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration banning the inclusion of medical debt in American consumers’ credit reports.

The Consumer Data Industry Association and Cornerstone Credit Union League filed the lawsuit in federal court in Sherman, Texas, on Tuesday, shortly after the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized the regulation.

The agency said the rule would remove $49 billion in medical debts from the credit reports of about 15 million Americans. It was adopted despite demands from Republicans in Congress that Biden’s financial regulators stop issuing new rules as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office on Jan. 20.

The trade groups say the rule violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which expressly permits consumer reporting agencies to report information about medical debt and authorizes creditors to consider that information.

“It is black letter law that an agency cannot prohibit through regulations what Congress has expressly permitted by statute,” the lawsuit said. “Because the final rule contravenes the statute, it should be vacated.”

The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan, a Trump appointee. The CFPB declined to comment.

According to the CFPB, medical debt provides little indication of whether a borrower is likely to repay a loan and the change should result in rising credit scores and could lead to an additional 22,000 low-cost mortgages per year being issued.

The new rule will also prohibit lenders from considering certain medical information in making lending decisions and help prevent debt collectors from seeking to coerce consumers into paying erroneous medical debts they do not actually owe, the agency said.

Banking and credit bureau industry groups argued that the ban could leave them blind to important information about the risk financial institutions face from borrowers, resulting in banks offering fewer loans.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas’ top elections official launched a campaign for governor Wednesday after building his public profile by pushing back against unfounded election conspiracy theories and breaking with fellow Republicans on voting rights issues.

Secretary of State Scott Schwab is the first candidate to confirm plans to seek the GOP nomination in 2026 to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. He announced his campaign in an online video, giving the August 2026 primary race an early start.

Schwab has repeatedly vouched for the integrity of Kansas elections on his two-term watch, despite President-elect Donald Trump’s false assertions that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Such assertions circulated widely within the GOP.

Schwab also has defended the use of ballot drop boxes and countered other Republicans’ suggestions that voting by noncitizens — which is rare — is a serious problem in U.S. elections.

Republicans are keen to recapture the governor’s office in GOP-leaning Kansas after Kelly narrowly won a second four-year term in 2022 despite Democratic President Joe Biden’s unpopularity with voters. With Kelly in office, Republicans have been unable to enact some policies seen in other red states, such as a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors and a program let parents use state education dollars to pay for private schooling. Many Republicans expect a crowded primary.

Schwab compiled an orthodox conservative record on issues such as tax cuts, abortion and even election issues in 14 years in the Kansas House before he was first elected secretary of state in 2018. In his announcement video, he advocated a cut in local property taxes and endorsed proposed rules on foreign land restriction, particularly China, something Kelly vetoed this year.

“I believe that to do something great, you have to throw off the chains that hold you back,” he said in his video statement. “For Kansas, those chains come from big government.”

Yet Schwab has become notable for his willingness to dispute fellow Republicans’ assertions on election issues. He won a second term in 2022 after beating back a primary challenge from an election conspiracy promoter, Mike Brown, who later became Kansas Republican Party chair.

Schwab has repeatedly expressed frustration over unfounded arguments that fraud is widespread, noting in December that GOP complaints dropped after Trump’s victory in 2024. He attributed conspiracy theories to “a small group of people” and told reporters, “When their person wins, then they don’t complain.”

“Are there going to be people who say the world is still flat? Are there going people say we’ve never been to the moon?” Schwab said after he and other officials certified the November results. “I do my job, and I let the work of our election workers speak for itself.”

His embrace of ballot drop boxes has also put him at odds with some Trump supporters — including state Attorney General Kris Kobach — who suggest that they make fraud easier, despite a lack of evidence of problems.

As a legislator, Schwab backed a law that took effect in 2013 to require new Kansas voters to provide proof of citizenship to register, but he reconsidered after it kept more than 31,000 eligible citizens from voting and the federal courts struck it down. He has also rejected unfounded arguments that voting by immigrants in the U.S. illegally is potentially a serious problem.

“If I’m an illegal immigrant — I’m here illegally — the last thing I’m going to do is go to government to let them know I’m here,” he said in December. “And that’s exactly what voter registration is.”

Schwab, 52, launched his bid for governor 8 1/2 years after a searing and highly public family tragedy: In 2016, one of his four sons, 10-year-old Caleb, died while riding what was billed as the world’s tallest water slide at a now-demolished water park in Kansas City, Kansas.

The park closed after its 2018 season, and Schwab’s family settled legal claims against its operators and other parties for nearly $20 million, according to court documents.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Prosecutors will ask a judge on Wednesday for six years in prison for a former FBI informant whose bogus story about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter accepting bribes became central to Republicans’ impeachment effort.

Alexander Smirnov will be sentenced in Los Angeles federal court after pleading guilty last month to tax evasion and lying to the FBI about the phony bribery scheme in what prosecutors say was an effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Smirnov, a dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, falsely claimed to his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid then-Vice President Biden and his son $5 million each around 2015.

Smirnov’s explosive claim in 2020 came after he expressed “bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, according to prosecutors. In reality, investigators found Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017 — after Biden’s term as vice president.

Prosecutors noted that Smirnov’s false claim “set off a firestorm in Congress” when it resurfaced years later as part of the House impeachment inquiry into President Biden, a Democrat who defeated Republican then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The Biden administration dismissed the House impeachment effort as a “stunt.”

Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.

“In committing his crimes he betrayed the United States, a country that showed him nothing but generosity, including conferring on him the greatest honor it can bestow, citizenship,” Justice Department special counsel David Weiss’ team wrote in court papers. “He repaid the trust the United States placed in him to be a law-abiding naturalized citizen and, more specifically, that one of its premier law enforcement agencies placed in him to tell the truth as a confidential human source, by attempting to interfere in a Presidential election.”

Smirnov was arrested last February in the case accusing him of lying to the FBI, and prosecutors in November brought new tax charges alleging he concealed millions of dollars of income he earned between 2020 and 2022.

Smirnov’s lawyers are seeking no more than four years behind bars, noting the “substantial assistance” he provided to the U.S. government as an FBI informant for more than a decade. Smirnov’s lawyers noted in court papers that he suffers from serious health issues related to his eyes and argue that a lengthy sentence would “unnecessarily prolong his suffering.”

“Mr. Smirnov has learned a very grave lesson and proffers to this Honorable Court that he will not find himself on this side of the law again,” attorneys Richard Schonfeld and David Chesnoff told the judge in court papers.

Smirnov was prosecuted by Weiss, who also brought gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced in December after being convicted at a trial in the gun case and pleading guilty to tax charges. But he was pardoned by his father, who said he believed “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”

In seeking a lighter sentence, Smirnov’s lawyers wrote in court papers that both Hunter Biden and President-elect Trump — who was charged in two federal cases by a different special counsel — “have walked free and clear of any meaningful punishment.”

Special counsel Jack Smith abandoned the two federal cases against Trump — accusing him of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida — after Trump’s presidential victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of Hunter Biden at https://apnews.com/hub/hunter-biden.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden is the consummate Washington insider. Jimmy Carter was anything but.

Yet the 46th and 39th U.S. presidents had a decades-long friendship starting when Biden, as a young Delaware lawmaker, became the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s outsider White House bid in 1976. Their bond will be on display one final time Thursday as Biden eulogizes Carter during his state funeral at Washington National Cathedral.

It marks quite a bookend for both men. Carter and Biden each had notable evolutions as the Democratic Party and the country changed over their long public lives. Both were presidents who endured four rocky years in the Oval Office before being forced out under terms that were not their own — and handing power to larger-than-life Republican figures in the process.

“America and the world in my view lost a remarkable leader. … He was a statesman and humanitarian. And Jill and I lost a dear friend,” Biden said hours after Carter died Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

For Biden, the spotlight provides an opportunity not simply to praise the late president’s work after leaving office but perhaps also to amplify reassessments of Carter as president. That framing could, not so subtly, be something the 82-year-old Biden hopes for himself as he prepares to hand power over to President-elect Donald Trump on Jan. 20.

Trump’s presence at Carter’s funeral intensifies the dynamics. The former and incoming president spent the 2024 campaign lampooning Biden and Carter together, playing up Republican caricatures of Carter as an incompetent steward of an inflationary economy and directing the same indictment at Biden’s administration.

“Biden is the worst president in the history of our country, worse than Jimmy Carter by a long shot,” Trump would say, even using some version of the attack when former first lady Rosalynn Carter was on her deathbed in 2023 and on Carter’s 100th birthday on Oct. 1, 2024. “Jimmy Carter is happy,” Trump would say, “because he had a brilliant presidency compared to Biden.”

But some Democrats say the timing of Carter’s funeral, so close to Trump’s second inauguration, makes for a favorable comparison with the Republican’s bellicose tone.

“Jimmy Carter is a fundamentally decent man, and Joe Biden is a fundamentally decent man,” said Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic power broker who got her start on Carter’s 1980 reelection campaign.

Biden has focused on the same idea.

“When I endorsed him for president … it was not only his policies but his character,” Biden said after Carter’s death. Asked specifically what Trump could learn from Carter, the president replied: “Decency, decency, decency.”

Biden, who served 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president before winning the presidency on his third try in 2020, had not yet become a Washington careerist when he aligned with Carter. Elected senator at 29, Biden was in his first term when Carter, then Georgia governor, mounted a White House bid as a Beltway afterthought.

“He grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘I need you to help me with my campaign,’ and I said, ‘I’ve only been around a couple years, Mr. Governor,’” Biden recalled. “He said, ’No, it will make a difference.’”

Biden chose Carter over powerful Senate colleagues and campaigned across the country for him during primary season and the general election campaign.

Both were moderates on fiscal issues and social issues. Both were outspoken about their religious faith — Biden the Roman Catholic, Carter the evangelical Baptist.

Their relationship, however, was not seamless once Carter won.

Both had opposed federally mandated busing to make public schools more racially diverse. Still, in 1977, Carter opposed a Biden Senate bill that would have limited courts’ authority on the topic. Carter viewed it as an unconstitutional breach of the separation of powers.

The young senator quipped: “Nixon had his enemies list, and President Carter has his friends list. I guess I’m on his friends list, and I don’t know which is worse.”

Still, Biden was one of the Democrats who warned Carter that his liberal rival, then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, might challenge the president in the 1980 primary. When Kennedy, an Irish Catholic like Biden, did run, Biden stuck with Carter even as his fortunes lagged.

When Biden ran for president the first time ahead of 1988, Carter was busy building his post-White House Carter Center, a nonpartisan human rights organization, and he was still a pariah for Democrats after losing to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide. Carter took private meetings with aspiring presidents but generally did not appear publicly with them.

When Biden ran a second time, he assessed Carter in a 2007 book with a calculated realism, writing that Carter’s values were not enough: “That’s the first time I realized that on-the-job training for a president can be a dangerous thing.”

He even took issue with the former president’s religiosity: “I campaigned hard for Carter in two elections, but I thought he had a dangerous penchant for moralizing. ‘You thump that Bible one more time,’ I told him once, ‘and you’re going to lose me, too.’”

Biden’s second campaign also flopped, but nominee Barack Obama tapped him for the vice presidential slot. The Obama campaign did not invite Carter to speak at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

As Biden was running for president a third time, Carter, then almost 95, threw an unintentional curveball.

“I hope there’s an age limit,” Carter said with a laugh as he answered audience questions at the Carter Center in 2019. “If I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president.”

Biden and his primary rival Bernie Sanders were old enough to turn 80 in the White House.

Still, Carter returned Biden’s loyalty with familiar language.

“We deserve a person with integrity and judgment. Someone who is honest and fair” and a president with “experience, character and decency,” Carter said in a message taped for Biden’s 2020 nominating convention.

On one of Biden’s first trips as president, he and first lady Jill Biden made a side trip to Plains, Georgia, to visit Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter. Biden told reporters afterward that Carter had asked him to speak at his state funeral. The Bidens visited privately with the former president ahead of his wife’s funeral in 2023.

Biden ultimately did reach 80 in the White House, and widespread worry over his age drove him to end his reelection bid. As pressure mounted on Biden after a disjointed debate against Trump, the widowed Carter, more than a year into hospice care, made no public statements or private maneuvers.

“He, like a lot of us, was incredibly gratified by his friend’s courageous choice to pass the torch,” said Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson. “You know, my grandfather and the Carter Center have observed more than 100 elections in 40 countries. So, he knows how rare it is for somebody who’s a sitting president to give up power in any context.”

Whatever Biden says Thursday, former Obama campaign architect David Axelrod noted that the outgoing president will not enjoy the same opportunities as Carter to recast his legacy.

“Jimmy Carter spent four years in Washington out of 100 years of his life,” Axelrod said. “Jimmy Carter is looked at differently (now) because he spent 44 years after losing the presidency doing extraordinary things all over the world. … Biden won’t have that luxury.”

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Associated Press writer Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.

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