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Author: Robert Wood

NEW YORK (AP) — A veteran tabloid publisher was expected to return to the witness stand Tuesday in Donald Trump’s historic hush money trial.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys in opening statements Monday painted competing portraits of the former president — one depicting him as someone who sought to corrupt the 2016 presidential election for his own benefit and another describing him as an innocent, everyday man who was being subjected to a case the government “should never have brought.”

David Pecker, the National Enquirer’s former publisher and a longtime friend of Trump’s, was the only witness Monday. He is expected to tell jurors Tuesday about his efforts to help Trump stifle unflattering stories during the 2016 campaign.

Prosecutors say Pecker worked with Trump and Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, on a “catch-and-kill” strategy to buy up and then spike negative stories. At the heart of the case are allegations that Trump orchestrated a scheme to bury unflattering stories about his personal life that might torpedo his campaign.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of those payments in internal business documents.

He has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Though he faces up to four years in prison if convicted, it’s unclear if the judge would decide to put him behind bars.

Before testimony resumes Tuesday, the judge will hold a hearing on prosecutors’ request to sanction and fine Trump over social media posts they say violate a gag order prohibiting him from attacking key witnesses.

The case is the first criminal trial of a former American president and the first of four prosecutions of Trump to reach a jury.

Currently:

— Key takeaways from the opening statements in Donald Trump’s hush money trial

— Key players: Who’s who at Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial

— The hush money case is just one of Trump’s legal cases. See the others here

— Trump’s $175 million bond in New York civil fraud judgment case is settled with cash promise

— Without cameras to go live, the Trump trial is proving the potency of live blogs as news tools

Here’s the latest:

‘ELECTION FRAUD’ VS. A ‘BOOKKEEPING CASE’

Donald Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying internal Trump Organization business records. But prosecutors made clear they do not want jurors to view this as a routine paper case.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said Monday the heart of the case is a scheme to “corrupt” the 2016 election by silencing people who were about to come forward with embarrassing stories Trump feared would hurt his campaign.

“No politician wants bad press,” Colangelo said. “But the evidence at trial will show that this was not spin or communication strategy. This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior.”

2 JOURNALISTS EXPELLED FROM TRUMP TRIAL FOR BREAKING RULES ON RECORDING

Two journalists covering Donald Trump’s hush money trial were removed and expelled on Monday for breaking rules prohibiting recording and photography in the overflow room, where reporters who can’t get into the main courtroom watch the proceedings on large screens, according to court officials.

One of the banned journalists had previously been warned for violating the rules during jury selection.

Uniformed court officers have been making daily announcements reminding reporters of the rules. Signs posted in the overflow room and around the courthouse make clear that photography and recording are not allowed.

COURT TO END EARLY DUE TO PASSOVER

Donald Trump’s hush money trial will adjourn early on Tuesday in observance of Passover. Judge Juan M. Merchan plans to end court proceedings at 2 p.m. for the holiday.

PROSECUTORS MADE HISTORY WITH OPENING STATEMENTS

Prosecutors on Monday made history as they presented their opening statements to a jury in the first criminal trial against a former U.S. president, accusing Donald Trump of a hush money scheme aimed at preventing damaging stories about his personal life from becoming public.

The dueling statements painted very different portraits of the man who, before serving in the White House, was best known for being a major real estate developer and his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.”

One depicted him as someone who sought to illegally corrupt the 2016 presidential election for his own benefit and the other described him as an innocent, everyday man who was being subjected to a case the government “should never have brought.”

The Associated Press



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OTTAWA — The Canadian Medical Association is asking the federal government to reconsider its proposed changes to capital gains taxation, arguing it will affect doctors’ retirement savings.

Kathleen Ross, the association’s president, says many doctors incorporate their medical practices and invest for retirement inside their corporations.

The proposed changes would increase taxes on those investments, something the association says will add “financial strain” for doctors who do not have a pension to rely on.

Ross argues the change could also affect recruitment and retention of physicians in Canada.

Doctors are the latest group to come out against the tax change, which is expected to largely affect wealthier Canadians and businesses.

The federal budget presented last week proposes taxing two-thirds rather than one-half of capital gains, or profit made on the sale of assets.

The increase in the so-called inclusion rate would apply to capital gains above $250,000 for individuals, and all capital gains realized by corporations.

“We have seen this portrayed by the government as tax fairness for every generation. But realistically, there are certain members of the population that are going to be more impacted,” Ross said in an interview.

The Liberal government has argued that the tax change is about levelling the playing field between those who earn income through capital gains versus employment. 

They’re also selling the change as a way to make the wealthy pay more to support things like housing and health care for all Canadians.

But Ross pointed out that doctors would not be eligible for the $250,000 exemption to the higher inclusion rate, since the investments they make are largely inside corporations.

Physicians can still invest in a Registered Retirement Savings Plan — which is tax-advantaged — so long as they pay themselves a salary out of their corporation.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said the federal government is changing the capital gains inclusion rate “because it’s unfair that a nurse pays a higher marginal tax rate than a multi-millionaire.” 

“These changes are in addition to the $200 billion we are investing in health care and the enhanced forgiveness of student loans for doctors and nurses wanting to work in rural and remote areas,” Katherine Cuplinskas said. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2024.

Nojoud Al Mallees, The Canadian Press

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Fresh research suggests western Canada’s once-dwindling caribou numbers are finally growing.

But the same paper concludes the biggest reason for the rebound is the slaughter of hundreds of wolves, a policy that will likely have to go on for decades.  

“If we don’t shoot wolves, given the state of the habitat that industry and government have allowed, we will lose caribou,” said Clayton Lamb, one of 34 co-authors of a newly published study in the journal Ecological Applications.

“It’s not the wolves’ fault.”

Caribou conservation is considered one of the toughest wildlife management problems on the continent. 

The animals, printed on the back of the Canadian quarter since 1937, require undisturbed stretches of hard-to-reach old-growth boreal forest. Those same forests tend to be logged or drilled, creating roads and cutlines that invite in deer and moose — along with the wolves that eat anything with hooves. 

Between 1991 and 2023, caribou populations dropped by half. More than a third of the herds disappeared. 

Governments, scientists and First Nations have been trying for years to find ways to bring them back. Lamb and his colleagues looked at 40 herds in British Columbia and Alberta to see if anything has worked. 

The paper suggests caribou numbers have risen by 52 per cent since about 2020 compared with what they would have occurred if nothing had been done. There are now 4,500 in the two provinces, about 1,500 more than there would have been.

“There could be some actual good news,” Lamb said. “It was surprising, in a good way.” 

The ranges of some herds are nearly 90 per cent disturbed by industry, and habitat restoration is the preferred solution. But it takes decades for a clear-cut or a cutline to return to anything like old-growth status, so various stopgaps have been used. 

Because different measures were used on different herds, the researchers could link population trends to interventions. 

Wolf sterilization didn’t work because it couldn’t be done on enough of the predators. 

Same with reducing the moose and deer populations that draw wolves into caribou habitat. Nearly all those populations would have to be killed, an unpopular move in rural and First Nations communities where hunting is both a pastime and necessity. 

“Moose reduction is incredibly controversial,” said Lamb.  

Moving animals from large herds to small helped only for a season or two.

What worked was killing wolves.  

“Wolf reductions alone increased the growth rate of southern mountain caribou subpopulations by (about) 11 per cent,” the report states.

That growth rate increased when wolf culls were combined with other measures such as feeding and penning and protecting pregnant cows. 

“Wolf reduction was the only recovery action that consistently increased population growth when applied in isolation,” says the report. “Combinations of wolf reductions with maternal penning or supplemental feeding provided rapid growth.”

The finding puts wildlife managers in a tough spot, Lamb said. 

“Shooting wolves to save another species is an incredibly difficult decision.”

In 2020 and 2021, Alberta culled 824 wolves.

Some caribou ranges have been protected. In B.C., an agreement between the province and a First Nation has conserved 8,000 square kilometres — an area bigger than Banff National Park.

Alberta has protected some habitat, but undisturbed ranges continue to shrink under forestry and energy industry pressure. 

A recent study found human disturbance increased in 23 out of 28 Alberta caribou subranges between 2018 and 2021. Development permits were approved for 700 square kilometres of caribou range.

Until those trends reverse, heavy-handed tactics such as wolf culls will be the price of caribou herds, said Lamb.   

“Every year we delay in getting trees growing, that’s one more year of having to implement these interventions. I think we’re talking about many years of supporting caribou.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2024.

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

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SHERBROOKE, Que. — On Monday morning in Sherbrooke, Que., dozens of tractors slowly rolled along a stretch of road between the regional offices of Quebec’s farmers association and the Agriculture Department a few hundred meters away. 

Upset about high interest rates, growing paperwork and heavy regulatory burdens, protesting farmers have become a familiar sight across Quebec since December.

“It’s pretty hard to get farmers out of their farms, because they’ve got so many hours to put in, but to see them going out, it means that there is really something going bad in farming right now,” said Benjamin Boivin, a corn and wheat farmer in Quebec’s Estrie region, east of Montreal, who was out protesting on Monday.

Government aid programs no longer match the needs of the province’s farmers — only one per cent of Quebec’s provincial budget goes to agriculture, and most of that money funds a tax credit to help farmers pay municipal taxes, he said.

Martin Caron, president of the official body that speaks for Quebec farmers — Union des producteurs agricoles, or UPA — said the net income of farms dropped by an average of 50 per cent last year, largely due to rising interest rates and the high cost of fuel and equipment.

Burdened with diminishing profits, farmers are also being forced to comply with an increasing amount of paperwork. Forms required to expand farmland can be 100 pages long, he said, and it can take months to get new buildings approved. That’s in addition to the training farmers are required to take to learn about specific crops.

“When you’ve got bureaucrats coming to your place to tell you how to do your job, which you studied, it doesn’t work anymore for the producers,” Caron said in an interview.

Since 2015, farmers have paid the government more than $400 million in environmental fees, which are charged on a range of plastic products, such as containers of seeds, fertilizer and pesticides. Caron said he wants that money returned to farmers to help them adapt to climate change.

Those fees, which don’t exist elsewhere in Canada or internationally, have put Quebec farmers at a commercial disadvantage, he said. 

Farmers, Caron said, want the government to cap interest rates for them at three per cent. And while the province has created an emergency financing program, he said it consists of more loans at unfordable rates for already indebted farmers.

Pascal Thériault, director of McGill University’s farm management and technology program, said when interest rates were low, farmers were incentivized to invest in their farms. The rising interest rates have contributed to declining profits, he added.

Farmers at the protest on Monday said government programs remain focused on encouraging expansion and new investment, rather than supporting existing operations. 

Because of the seasonal nature of farming, farmers often have to borrow money, Thériault explained.

“In the spring, you don’t have revenues yet, so you need to borrow, borrow to get your seed, to get your fertilizer, to get everything,” he said in an interview. “You need lots of dollars of assets to generate a lot of revenue and you need to borrow money to be able to afford those assets. So whenever you have an increase in the interest rate, of course, you’re hit pretty hard.”

The high amount of paperwork is partially a symptom of Quebec’s farm support programs: the government helps farmers financially and wants accountability in return, he said. For example, an agrologist — a soil specialist — is required to sign off on some paperwork, and farmers can get a subsidy to hire one, which requires its own administrative load.

“So they need to fill out paperwork so they can get someone to help them fill out paperwork,” he said. 

The Quebec government says it’s listening. “We’re talking about a perfect storm here, we understand why our producers are concerned,” Sophie J. Barma, a spokeswoman for André Lamontagne, Quebec’s agriculture minister, said in an emailed statement.

Farmers who are facing difficulties can apply to an emergency financing program created last year, she said, adding that the government is working with the UPA and other groups to reduce the regulatory and administrative burden. 

But Caron said he needs to see results. “People are waiting for action, because it’s been too long that they’ve been telling us ‘we understand, we’ll set up committees,'” he said,

“People are determined to be respected.” 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2024.

Jacob Serebrin, The Canadian Press

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SASKATOON — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be in Saskatoon today.

An itinerary released by his office says he will make an announcement this morning to highlight measures focused on youth, education, and health that were contained in last week’s budget.

Trudeau will be joined at the event by Dan Vandal, minister for northern affairs and well as Prairie economic development, as well as Women and Gender Equality and Youth Minister Marci Ien.

The budget included a renewed investment of $60-million over five years in Futurpreneur Canada, which provides young adults with access to loans, mentorship and resources to create businesses.

Trudeau has faced conflict with Saskatchewan’s government, and its leader Scott Moe, over the federal Liberal government’s carbon tax.

Moe is among a majority of provincial leaders, including lone Liberal Premier Andrew Furey of Newfoundland and Labrador, who are asking Trudeau to convene a meeting to discuss alternatives to the consumer carbon price. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 24, 2024.

The Canadian Press

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken is starting three days of talks with senior Chinese officials in Shanghai and Beijing this week with U.S.-China ties at a critical point over numerous global disputes.

The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip — shortly after a conversation between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a similar visit to China by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a call between the U.S. and Chinese defense chiefs — might be seen by some as encouraging, but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider.

From Russia and Ukraine to Israel, Iran and the broader Middle East as well as Indo-Pacific and trade issues, the U.S. and China are on a series of collision courses that have sparked fears about military and strategic security as well as international economic stability.

Blinken “will raise clearly and candidly our concerns” during the talks starting Wednesday, a senior State Department official said.

Here’s a look at some of the key issues Blinken is expected to bring up on the trip:

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

The Biden administration has grown increasingly concerned in recent months about Chinese support for Russia’s defense industrial base, which U.S. officials say is allowing Moscow to overcome Western sanctions imposed after its invasion of Ukraine and resupply its military. U.S. officials say this will be a primary topic of conversation during Blinken’s visit.

While the U.S. says it has no evidence China actually is arming Russia, officials say other activities are potentially equally problematic.

“If China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War,” Blinken said last week.

A senior State Department official said Friday that “through Chinese support, Russia has largely reconstituted its defense industrial base, which has an impact not just on the battlefield in Ukraine but poses a larger threat, we believe, to broader European security.”

MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS

U.S. officials, from Biden on down, have repeatedly appealed to China to use any leverage it may have with Iran to prevent Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza from spiraling into a wider regional conflict.

While China appears to have been generally receptive to such calls — particularly because it depends heavily on oil imports from Iran and other Mideast nations — tensions have steadily increased since the beginning of the Gaza war in October and more recent direct strikes and counterstrikes between Israel and Iran.

Blinken has pushed for China to take a more active stance in pressing Iran not to escalate tensions in the Middle East. He has spoken to his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, several times over the past six months and urged China to tell Iran to restrain the proxy groups it has supported in the region, including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.

Blinken told Wang in a phone call this month that “escalation is not in anyone’s interest and that countries should urge Iran not to escalate,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said of their last conversation.

The senior State Department official said Blinken would reiterate the U.S. interest in China using “whatever channels or influence it has to try to convey the need for restraint to all parties, including Iran.”

TAIWAN AND THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

In the Indo-Pacific region, China and the United States are the major players, but Beijing has become increasingly aggressive in recent years toward Taiwan and its smaller Southeast Asian neighbors with which it has significant territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea.

The U.S. has strongly condemned Chinese military exercises threatening Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province and has vowed to reunify with the mainland by force if necessary. Successive U.S. administrations have steadily boosted military support and sales for Taipei, much to Chinese anger.

The senior State Department official said Blinken would “underscore, both in private and public, America’s abiding interest in maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. We think that is vitally important for the region and the world.”

In the South China Sea, the U.S. and others have become increasingly concerned by provocative Chinese actions in and around disputed areas.

In particular, the U.S. has voiced objections to what it says are Chinese attempts to thwart legitimate maritime activities by others in the sea, notably the Philippines and Vietnam. That was a major topic of concern this month when Biden held a three-way summit with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND SYNTHETIC OPIOIDS

The U.S. and China are at deep odds over human rights in China’s western Xinjiang region, Tibet and Hong Kong as well as the fate of several American citizens that the State Department says have been “wrongfully detained” by Chinese authorities.

China has repeatedly rejected the American criticism as improper interference in its internal affairs. Yet, Blinken will again raise these issues, according to the senior State Department official, who added that China’s self-described efforts to rein in the export of materials that traffickers use to make fentanyl have yet to yield significant results.

The two sides agreed last year to set up a working group to look into ways to combat the surge of production of fentanyl precursors in China and their export abroad. U.S. officials say they believe they had made some limited progress on cracking down on the illicit industry but many producers had found ways to get around new restrictions.

Matthew Lee, The Associated Press





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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has scheduled a special session to hear arguments over whether former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted over his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.

The case, to be argued Thursday, stems from Trump’s attempts to have charges against him dismissed. Lower courts have found he cannot claim for actions that, prosecutors say, illegally sought to interfere with the election results.

Trump has been charged in federal court in Washington with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, one of four criminal cases he is facing. A trial has begun in New York over hush money payments to a porn star to cover up an alleged sexual encounter.

The Supreme Court is moving faster than usual in taking up the case, though not as quickly as special counsel Jack Smith wanted, raising questions about whether there will be time to hold a trial before the November election, if the justices agree with lower courts that Trump can be prosecuted.

The justices ruled earlier this term in another case that arose from Trump’s actions following the election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The court unanimously held that states could not invoke a provision of the 14th Amendment known as the insurrection clause to prevent Trump from appearing on presidential ballots.

Here are some things to know:

WHAT’S THE ISSUE?

When the justices agreed on Feb. 28 to hear the case, they put the issue this way: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

That’s a question the Supreme Court has never had to answer. Never before has a former president faced criminal charges so the court hasn’t had occasion to take up the question of whether the president’s unique role means he should be shielded from prosecution, even after he has left office.

Both sides point to the absence of previous prosecutions to undergird their arguments. Trump’s lawyers told the court that presidents would lose their independence and be unable to function in office if they knew their actions in office could lead to criminal charges once their terms were over. Smith’s team wrote that the lack of previous criminal charges “underscores the unprecedented nature” of what Trump is accused of.

NIXON’S GHOST

Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace nearly 50 years ago rather than face impeachment by the House of Representatives and removal from office by the Senate in the Watergate scandal.

Both Trump’s lawyers and Smith’s team are invoking Nixon at the Supreme Court.

Trump’s team cites Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case in which the Supreme Court held by a 5-4 vote that former presidents cannot be sued in civil cases for their actions while in office. The case grew out of the firing of a civilian Air Force analyst who testified before Congress about cost overruns in the production of the C-5A transport plane.

“In view of the special nature of the President’s constitutional office and functions, we think it appropriate to recognize absolute Presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility,” Justice Lewis Powell wrote for the court.

But that decision recognized a difference between civil lawsuits and “the far weightier” enforcement of federal criminal laws, Smith’s team told the court. They also invoked the high court decision that forced Nixon to turn over incriminating White House tapes for use in the prosecutions of his top aides.

And prosecutors also pointed to President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, and Nixon’s acceptance of it, as resting “on the understanding that the former President faced potential criminal liability.”

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

The subtext of the immunity fight is about timing. Trump has sought to push back the trial until after the election, when, if he were to regain the presidency, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case. Prosecutors have been pressing for a quick decision from the Supreme Court so that the clock can restart on trial preparations. It could take three months once the court acts before a trial actually starts.

If the court hands down its decision in late June, which would be the typical timeframe for a case argued so late in the court’s term, there might not be enough time to start the trial before the election.

WHO ARE THE LAWYERS?

Trump is represented by D. John Sauer, a former Rhodes Scholar and Supreme Court clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia. While serving as Missouri’s solicitor general, Sauer won the only Supreme Court case he has argued until now, a 5-4 decision in an execution case. Sauer also filed legal briefs asking the Supreme Court to repudiate Biden’s victory in 2020.

In addition to working for Scalia early in his legal career, Sauer also served as a law clerk to Michael Luttig when he was a Republican-appointed judge on the Richmond, Virginia-based federal appeals court. Luttig joined with other former government officials on a brief urging the Supreme Court to allow the prosecution to proceed. Luttig also advised Vice President Mike Pence not to succumb to pressure from Trump to reject some electoral votes, part of Trump’s last-ditch plan to remain in office.

The justices are quite familiar with Sauer’s opponent, Michael Dreeben. As a longtime Justice Department official, Dreeben argued more than 100 cases at the court, many of them related to criminal law. Dreeben was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and joined Smith’s team last year after a stint in private practice.

In Dreeben’s very first Supreme Court case 35 years ago, he faced off against Chief Justice John Roberts, then a lawyer in private practice.

FULL BENCH

Of the nine justices hearing the case, three were nominated by Trump — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. But it’s the presence of a justice confirmed decades before Trump’s presidency, Justice Clarence Thomas, that’s generated the most controversy.

Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, urged the reversal of the 2020 election results and then attended the rally that preceded the Capitol riot. That has prompted calls for the justice to step aside from several court cases involving Trump and Jan. 6.

But Thomas has ignored the calls, taking part in the unanimous court decision that found states cannot kick Trump off the ballot as well as last week’s arguments over whether prosecutors can use a particular obstruction charge against Capitol riot defendants. Trump faces the same charge in special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution in Washington.

Mark Sherman, The Associated Press

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primaries will cement the lineup for a high-stakes U.S. Senate race between Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican challenger David McCormick, a contest that is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and could help decide control of the Senate next year.

Casey, seeking his fourth term, is perhaps Pennsylvania’s best-known politician and a stalwart of the presidential swing state’s Democratic Party — the son of a former two-term governor and Pennsylvania’s longest-ever serving Democrat in the Senate.

McCormick is a two-time Senate challenger, a former hedge fund CEO and Pennsylvania native who spent $14 million of his own money only to lose narrowly to celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2022’s seven-way GOP primary. Oz then lost to Democratic Sen. John Fetterman in a pivotal Senate contest.

This time around, McCormick has consolidated the party around his candidacy and is backed by a super PAC that’s already reported raising more than $20 million, much of it from securities-trading billionaires.

McCormick’s candidacy is shaping up as the strongest challenge to Casey in his three reelection bids. McCormick, intent on shoring up support in the GOP base, told an audience of conservatives in suburban Harrisburg earlier this month that he tells people “you’re going to agree with about 80% of what I say … but we disagree 90% of the time with the crazy progressive left that’s destroying our country.”

The Senate candidates will share a ticket with candidates for president in a state that is critical to whether Democrats can maintain control of the White House and the Senate. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are expected to win their party nominations easily now that all major rivals have dropped out.

Of note, however, could be the number of “ uncommitted ” write-in votes cast in the Democratic primary to protest Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

In the Senate contest, Democrats have attacked McCormick’s opposition to abortion rights, his frequent trips to Connecticut’s ritzy “Gold Coast ” where he keeps a family home, and the focus on investing in China during his dozen years as an executive at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, including as CEO.

Casey has been a key player for Democrats trying to reframe the election-year narrative about the economy by attacking “greedflation” — a blunt term for corporations that jack up prices and rip off shoppers to maximize profits — as fast-rising prices over the past three years have opened a big soft spot in 2024 for Democrats. Recent indications that the U.S. economy avoided a recession amid efforts to manage inflation have yet to translate into voter enthusiasm for giving Biden a second term.

McCormick, meanwhile, has accused Casey of rubber-stamping harmful immigration, economic, energy and national security policies of Biden, and made a bid for Jewish voters by traveling to the Israel-Gaza border and arguing that Biden hasn’t backed Israel strongly enough in the Israel-Hamas war.

Casey is one of Biden’s strongest allies in Congress.

The two men share a hometown of Scranton and their political stories are intertwined. Biden — who represented neighboring Delaware in the Senate and roots for Philadelphia sports teams — has effectively made Pennsylvania his political home as a presidential candidate. Long before that, Biden was nicknamed “Pennsylvania’s third senator” by Democrats because he campaigned there so often.

McCormick and Trump have endorsed each other, but are an awkward duo atop the GOP’s ticket. Trump savaged McCormick in 2022’s primary in a successful bid to lift Oz to his primary win. And McCormick, for his part, has told of a private meeting in which he refused Trump’s urging to say that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, a disproven claim the former president has never abandoned.

Democrats currently hold a Senate majority by the narrowest of margins, but face a difficult 2024 Senate map that requires them to defend incumbents in the red states of Montana and Ohio and fight for open seats with new candidates in Michigan and West Virginia.

A Casey loss could guarantee Republican control of the Senate.

Elsewhere on the ballot Tuesday, Pennsylvanians will decide nominees for an open attorney general’s office and two other statewide offices — treasurer and auditor general — plus all 17 of the state’s U.S. House seats and 228 of the state’s 253 legislative seats.

For attorney general, Republicans have a two-way race while Democrats have a five-person primary field. Democrats also will decide on challengers to incumbent Republican state Treasurer Stacy Garrity and state Auditor General Tim DeFoor.

For Congress, 44 candidates are on ballots, including all 17 incumbents, just three of whom are facing primary challengers: Democratic Reps. Summer Lee in a Pittsburgh-based district and Dwight Evans in Philadelphia and Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in suburban Philadelphia.

Lee’s primary against challenger Bhavini Patel has shaped up as an early test of whether Israel’s war with Gaza poses political threats to progressive Democrats in Congress who have criticized how it has been handled.

Voters will decide from among three would-be Republican challengers to Democratic Rep. Susan Wild, whose Allentown-based district is politically divided, and six Democratic candidates hoping to challenge Republican Rep. Scott Perry of southern Pennsylvania.

Perry has become a national figure for heading up the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus during a speakership battle and his efforts to help Trump stay in power after losing 2020’s presidential election.

___

Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/timelywriter.

Marc Levy, The Associated Press



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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is wading deeper into the fight over abortion rights that has energized Democrats since the fall of Roe vs. Wade, traveling to Florida to assail the state’s forthcoming ban and similar restrictions that have imperiled access to care for pregnant women nationwide.

Tuesday’s campaign visit to Tampa takes Biden to the epicenter of the latest battle over abortion restrictions. The state’s six-week abortion ban is poised to go into effect May 1 at the same time that Florida voters are gearing up for a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.

Biden is seeking to capitalize on the unceasing momentum against abortion restrictions nationwide to not only buoy his reelection bid in battleground states he won in 2020, but also to go on the offensive against Donald Trump in states that the presumptive Republican nominee won four years ago. One of those states is Florida, where Biden lost by 3.3 percentage points to Trump.

At the same time, advocates on the ground say support for abortion access cuts across parties. They’re intent on making the issue as nonpartisan as possible as they work to scrounge up at least 60% support from voters for the ballot initiative.

That could mean in some cases, Florida voters would split their tickets, backing GOP candidates while supporting the abortion measure.

“I think that normal people are aware that a candidate campaign is really different than a ballot initiative,” said Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, which gathered signatures to put the abortion question before voters. “You can vote for your preferred candidate of any political party and still not agree with them on every single issue.”

Brenzel continued, “This gives voters an opportunity to have their message heard on one policy platform.”

On the same day the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the ballot measure could go before voters, it also upheld the state’s 15-week abortion ban. That subsequently cleared the way for the new ban on the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, which is often before women know they are pregnant, to go into effect next week.

Organizers of the abortion ballot measure say they collected nearly 1.5 million signatures to put the issue before voters, although the state stopped counting at just under a million. Roughly 891,500 signatures were required. Of the total number of signatures, about 35% were from either registered Republican voters or those not affiliated with a party, organizers said.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat, said if the abortion ballot initiative becomes branded as a partisan effort, “it just makes it more challenging to reach 60%.” Eskamani, who worked at Planned Parenthood before running for political office, said she is encouraging the Biden administration to focus broadly on the impact of a six-week ban and let the ballot measure speak for itself.

“At the end of the day, the ballot initiative is going to be a multimillion-dollar campaign that stands very strongly on its own,” Eskamani said.

While in Florida, Biden is sure to go on the attack against his general election challenger, who has said abortion is a matter for states to decide.

Trump’s campaign did not respond to a question on whether the former president, a Florida voter, would oppose or support the ballot measure. In an NBC interview last September, Trump called Florida’s six-week ban “terrible.” But he has repeatedly highlighted the justices he tapped for the U.S. Supreme Court who, through the 2022 ruling that ended a constitutional right to an abortion, cleared the way for such restrictions to be written.

Trump and other Republicans are aware that voter backlash against newfound abortion restrictions could be a serious liability this fall.

Abortion-rights supporters have won every time the issue has been put before voters, including in solidly conservative states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio. Last month, a Democrat in a suburban state House district in Alabama flipped the seat from Republican control by campaigning on abortion rights, weeks after in vitro fertilization services had been paused in the state.

Nikki Fried, the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, said Florida will be a competitive state on the presidential level “because of the extremism that has come out of Florida.” There are no Democrats in a statewide elected position and no Democrat has won the state on the presidential level since 2012, but state party officials have found some glimmers of political change in vastly smaller races, such as the open Jacksonville mayor’s race last May that saw a Democrat win in what was once a solidly Republican city.

Alongside the abortion initiative, Floridians will also vote on a ballot measure on whether to legalize recreational marijuana later this fall that could also juice turnout and enthusiasm in favor of Democrats.

Republicans were dismissive of the Biden campaign and the broader Democratic Party’s efforts to use abortion as a political cudgel, arguing that other issues will matter more with voters in November.

“Floridians’ top issues are immigration, the economy and inflation; in all three areas Joe Biden has failed,” said Evan Power, the chairman of the state Republican Party. “Instead of coming to talk to Floridians about manufactured issues, he should get to work solving the real issues that he has failed to lead on.”

Seung Min Kim, The Associated Press

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump faces serious charges in two separate cases over whether he attempted to subvert the Constitution by overturning the results of a fair election and illegally remain in power.

Yet it’s a New York case centered on payments to silence an adult film actress that might provide the only legal reckoning this year on whether he tried to undermine a pillar of American democracy.

Trump is charged in the so-called hush money case with trying to falsify business records, but it was hard to tell that as the trial opened Monday.

Lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo wasted little time during opening statements tying the case to Trump’s campaigning during his first run for the presidency. He said the payments made to Stormy Daniels amounted to “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”

Whether the jury accepts that connection will be pivotal for Trump’s fate. The presumptive nominee faces charges related to falsifying business records that would typically be misdemeanors unless the alleged act could be tied to another crime. Prosecutors were able to charge them as felonies because they allege that the false records were part of an effort to cover up state and federal election law violations — though that’s still not the type of direct election interference that Trump is charged with elsewhere.

Trump himself has referred to the New York trial and the three other criminal cases against him as a form of election interference, suggesting without evidence that they’re part of a Democratic plan to undermine his campaign to return to the White House.

“I’m here instead of being able to be in Pennsylvania and Georgia and lots of other places campaigning, and it’s very unfair,” he told reporters before Monday’s court session.

While the charges are felonies, the New York case is seen as the least consequential against the former president. In the two election cases, Trump is accused of more direct involvement in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

He faces a four-count federal indictment in Washington, D.C., in connection with his actions in the run-up to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. He and others were charged in Georgia with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law by scheming to illegally overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him in those cases and a fourth charging him with mishandling classified documents.

All the other cases are tied up in appeals that are expected to delay any trials until after the November election. If that happens, the New York case will stand as the only legal test during the campaign of whether Trump attempted to illegally manipulate an election — and the case isn’t even about the election results he tried to overthrow.

On Monday, Trump’s attorney quickly moved to undercut the idea that a case in which the charges center on record-keeping could seriously be considered an effort to illegally undermine an election.

“I have a spoiler alert: There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy,” said his attorney, Todd Blanche. “They put something sinister on this idea, as if it’s a crime. You’ll learn it’s not.”

Some legal experts monitoring the cases against Trump said they were skeptical of connecting the payments to a form of “election interference.” Doing so also runs the risk of diminishing the gravity of the other charges in the public mind.

Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota Law School professor and former associate White House counsel during the George W. Bush administration, said he believed the facts of the case met the evidence needed to determine whether a felony had been committed that violated campaign law, but added, “The election interference part, I have a little bit of trouble on this.”

Richard Hasen, a UCLA law school professor, said the New York case does not compare to the other election-related charges Trump faces.

“We can draw a fairly bright line between attempting to change vote totals to flip a presidential election and failing to disclose embarrassing information on a government form,” he wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times column.

In an email, Hasen said New York prosecutors were calling the case election interference “because that boosts what may be the only case heard before the election.”

Some said prosecutors’ decision to characterize the New York case as election interference seemed to be a strategy designed to raise its visibility.

“When (Manhattan District Attorney) Alvin Bragg calls it an election interference case, that’s more of a public relations strategy,” said Paul Butler, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor. “I think there was concern that people were looking at the other prosecutions and they weren’t discussing the Manhattan case.”

Declaring the case a hush money trial made it seem less important than the others and “so they’ve styled it … as a case about election interference. But again, what he’s charged with is falsifying business records.”

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels and his lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.

The key question in the prosecution’s argument is why were the business records falsified, said Chris Edelson, an American University assistant professor of government. Their allegation is that “Trump was preventing voters from making an informed decision in the election.”

It’s an argument he believes prosecutors can make. “I think that the prosecutors will have to explain this to the jury. I don’t think it’s impossible to do,” he said.

The New York trial revolves around allegations of a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, made to Daniels to prevent her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the final days of the 2016 race.

“Candidates want to suppress bad news about them. But there’s a difference between trying to limit people knowing about that information and about breaking the law to keep them from finding out,” said Andrew Warren, a former state attorney in Florida who was suspended by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and is running for his old office while his court battle continues.

Warren said he believes the case has always been about more than the payments. If it is accepted as a hush money case, “Trump wins,” he said. “If there was intent to deceive the voters, the prosecution wins.”

Gary Fields, The Associated Press

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