President Donald Trump issued an ominous warning about the Justice Department and the FBI on Friday, promising further firings to get rid of a "lingering stench" following reports that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed secretly recording the president.
Trump, speaking at a rally in Missouri, did not explicitly mention the Rosenstein furor, which was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by The Associated Press.
But Trump lashed out against what he sees as anti-Trump bias in the Justice Department, touting the firings he has orchestrated, unnerving many in federal law enforcement and sparking fears about the future of the special counsel's Russia probe, which Rosenstein oversees.
President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign rally, Friday, Sept. 21, 2018, in Springfield, Mo. (AP PhotoEvan Vucci)
"You've seen what happened in the FBI and the Department of Justice. The bad ones, they're all gone. They're all gone," Trump said. "But there is a lingering stench and we're going to get rid of that, too."
One person present during Rosenstein's remarks said he was being sarcastic. The Times also said he raised the idea of using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump as unfit for office. Rosenstein said the story is "inaccurate and factually incorrect."
It was the latest storm to buffet the White House, which this week was battered by a number of potentially damaging stories. Beyond the speculation about Rosenstein, it was revealed that Trump's former fixer, Michael Cohen, is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. The president also backed off his plan to declassify documents related to the ongoing probe, and the fate of his Supreme Court nominee remained uncertain.
Republican Senate candidate Josh Hawley dances before President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Friday, Sept. 21, 2018, in Springfield, Mo. (AP PhotoEvan Vucci)
Negotiations continued Friday about a possible appearance by Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's nominee, of sexual assault at a high school party more than three decades ago. Trump made the future of Kavanaugh and the federal judiciary a centerpiece of his rally in Springfield, which was designed to support the state's Republican Senate candidate, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, in his race against Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill.
"I don't know who she is with but she is not with the state of Missouri," Trump said. "(Kavanaugh) is a fantastic man, a fantastic man. She won't vote for him."
But Trump, who used Twitter earlier Friday to cast doubt on Ford's claim, preached optimism on Kavanaugh, saying "he was born for the U.S. Supreme Court" and reassuring the crowd that "it's going to happen. It's going to happen."
He added: "We have to fight for him, not worry about the other side. And by the way, women are for that more than anybody would understand."
When Hawley praised Trump's judicial picks, the crowd began chanting Kavanaugh's name. And the president, drawing energy from a packed, raucous crowd, dished out plenty of red meat, pledging to build his signature border wall, telegraphing that he is willing to escalate trade conflicts with both China and Western allies and suggesting he was "willing to wait" to make a peace deal with North Korea. He also took a swipe at Sen. John McCain, who died away last month, for sinking the GOP health care bill, though he did not mention the late war hero by name.
Trump also repeatedly laced into the Democratic Party.
"They aren't just extreme," he said. "They are frankly dangerous and they are crazy."
The reports about Rosenstein created even greater uncertainty for the deputy attorney general tenure at a time when Trump has lambasted Justice Department leadership and publicly humiliated both Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
More broadly, it's the latest revelation that could affect Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible coordination between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. Sessions recused himself from that issue soon after he took office, to Trump's dismay, and Rosenstein then appointed Mueller. With all that hanging in the air, Trump has resisted calls from conservative commentators to fire both Sessions and Rosenstein and appoint someone who would ride herd more closely on Mueller or dismiss him.
A number of key FBI officials, including director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe, have been fired since Trump took office.
Republicans view the McCaskill-Hawley contest as one of their best chances of flipping a seat in the Senate, where the GOP has a slim 51-49 majority, and polls show it's a toss-up. Democrats are hoping the enthusiasm that's put the GOP-led House in play will spill over to the Senate, though the map there is much tougher. McCaskill is among 10 Democratic incumbents seeking re-election in states Trump won — some by wider margins than Missouri.
Hawley, the state's 38-year-old first-term attorney general, was on Friday repeatedly called a "star" by Trump, who carried Missouri by 19 percentage points in 2016.
Trump's rally for Hawley came a day after he held one for the Republican incumbent senator widely considered to be the most vulnerable, Dean Heller of Nevada. With the chances of Republicans keeping control of the House of Representatives looking increasingly dismal, the White House has fixated on keeping the Senate as a bulwark against any Democratic effort to impeach and then remove Trump from office.
Earlier Friday, Trump visited a Las Vegas-area veterans facility to sign a spending bill that includes nearly $100 billion for veterans care and military construction, though he has continued to warn in recent days that he may be willing to shut down the federal government over spending for border security, including his long-promised wall.
Associated Press writer Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
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WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) — This North Carolina voter is nervous.
Will Rikard, a 49-year-old father of two, was among several hundred Democrats who stood and cheered for Joe Biden as the first-term president delivered a fiery speech recently about the billions of dollars he has delivered to protect the state's drinking water.
But afterward, the Wilmington resident acknowledged he is worried about Biden's political standing in the looming rematch with former Republican President Donald Trump.
“There's not enough energy,” Rikard said of Biden's coalition. “I think people are gonna need to wake up and get going.”
Exactly six months before Election Day, Biden and Trump are locked in the first contest in 112 years with a current and former president competing for the White House. It's a race that is at once deeply entrenched and highly in flux as many voters are only just beginning to embrace the reality of the 2024 campaign.
Wars, trials, the independent candidacy of Robert Kennedy Jr. and deep divisions across America have injected extraordinary uncertainty into a race for the White House in which either man would be the oldest president ever sworn in on Inauguration Day. At the same time, policy fights over abortion, immigration and the economy are raging on Capitol Hill and in statehouses.
Hovering over it all is the disbelief of many voters, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Biden and Trump — their respective parties’ presumptive nominees — will ultimately appear on the general election ballot this fall.
“I think we have an electorate that’s going through the stages of grief about this election,” said Sarah Longwell, who conducts regular focus groups with voters across the political spectrum as co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. “They’ve done denial — ‘Not these two, can’t possibly be these two.’ And I think they’re in depression now. I’m waiting for people to hit acceptance.”
Trump is in the midst of the first of potentially four criminal trials and facing felony charges. The Constitution does not prevent him from assuming the presidency if convicted — or even if he is in prison.
Biden, who will turn 82 years old just weeks after Election Day, Nov. 5, is already the oldest president in U.S. history; Trump is 77.
Privately, Democratic operatives close to the campaign worry constantly about Biden's health and voters' dim perceptions of it. In recent weeks, aides have begun walking at Biden’s side as he strolls to and from Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on the White House South Lawn in an apparent effort to help mask the president's stiff gait.
Still, neither party is making serious contingency plans. Whether voters want to believe it or not, the general election matchup is all but set.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said many voters arel recovering from what he called “a knock-down, drag-out fight” that was the 2020 presidential election.
“Many of them have not wrapped their heads around the fact that it is, in fact, going to be a rematch,” Cooper said in an interview. “When they do, I don’t think there’s any question that Joe Biden is going to win the day."
Even before voters begin paying close attention, the political map in the fight for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency is already taking shape.
Biden's campaign is increasingly optimistic about North Carolina, a state he lost by just 1 percentage point in 2020. Overall, the Democratic president's reelection campaign has several hundred staff in more than 133 offices in the seven most critical states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.
Trump's team has barely begun to roll out swing-state infrastructure, although he campaigned in Wisconsin and Michigan over the past week, sending a clear signal that he wants to block Biden's path to reelection via the Democrats' Midwestern “blue wall."
Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said Trump is making plans to invest new resources in at least two other Democratic-leaning states.
At a private donor retreat in Florida on Saturday, LaCivita discussed the campaign's plans to expand its electoral map into Virginia and Minnesota, based on the Trump team's growing optimism that both states are within reach.
“We have a real opportunity to expand the map here,” LaCivita told tThe Associated Press. “The Biden campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars on TV ads and in their ‘vaunted ground game’. And they have nothing to show for it.”
Biden's campaign welcomed Trump's team to spend money in Democratic states. “The Biden campaign is going to relentlessly focus on the pathway to 270 electoral votes, and that’s what our efforts represent," campaign communications director Michael Tyler said.
Biden has been spending far more aggressively on election infrastructure and advertising heading into the six-month stretch toward Election Day.
In the eight weeks since he essentially clinched the Republican nomination, Trump's campaign has spent virtually nothing on television advertising, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. Outside groups aligned with Trump have spent just over $9 million.
Over the same period, AdImpact found, Biden and his allies have spent more than $29 million spread across Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump's team has been unusually conservative, in part, to avoid the perceived mistakes of 2020, when his campaign essentially ran out of money and was forced to cut back on advertising in the election's critical final days, but also because it has struggled to reignite its appeal with small donors and because of the diversion of some dollars to the former president's legal defense.
Trump's team insists they will soon ramp up their advertising and on-the-ground infrastructure, although LaCivita refused to offer any specifics.
It is clear that Biden and Trump have serious work to do to improve their standing with voters.
While optimistic in public, Biden allies privately acknowledge that his approval ratings may be lower than Democrat Jimmy Carter’s numbers at this point in his presidency. Trump’s ratings are not much better.
Public polling consistently shows that voters don’t like their 2024 options.
Only about 2 in 10 Americans say they would be excited by Biden (21%) or Trump (25%) being elected president, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March. Only about one-quarter of voters in the survey say they would be satisfied about each.
A recent CNN poll conducted in April found that 53% of registered voters say they are dissatisfied with the presidential candidates they have to choose from in this year’s election.
Another major wild card is Kennedy, a member of the storied political dynasty and an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who is running as an independent. Both major campaigns are taking him seriously as a potential spoiler, with Trump's allies notably ramping up their criticism of Kennedy in recent days.
For now, Biden's team is most focused on reminding voters of Trump's divisive leadership. Three years after Trump left office, there is a sense that some voters may have forgotten what it was like with the former reality television star in the Oval Office — or his efforts to overturn the 2020 election that have landed him in legal peril.
“The plan is reminding voters of what life was like with Trump and also demonstrating to voters that the ways in which the world feels uncertain to them now are not, in fact, caused by the president, but can actually be navigated by this president," Biden pollster Mary Murphy told the AP. "Voters will trust his leadership and stewardship, knowing that things can be a lot worse if it’s Donald Trump.”
Biden's team is also betting that fierce backlash to new restrictions on abortion, which Trump and Republicans have largely championed, will drive voters to Democrats like they did in the 2022 midterm election and 2023 state races.
But Biden's success also is dependent on the Democrat's ability to reassemble his winning coalition from 2020 at a time when enthusiasm is lagging among critical voting blocs including Blacks, young voters and Arab Americans unhappy over the president's handling of the war in Gaza.
Trump has been forced to adapt his campaign to his first criminal trial in New York. Prosecutors allege he committed financial fraud to hide hush money payments to a porn actor, Stormy Daniels, who says she had a sexual encounter with Trump. He denies her claim and has pleaded not guilty.
For now, Trump is forced to attend the trial most weekdays. A verdict is likely still weeks away. And after that, he faces the prospect of more trials related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents. The Supreme Court is weighing whether Trump should be granted immunity, or partial immunity, for the actions he took while in office.
Trump over the past week wedged in campaign stops around his court schedule, rallying voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, where the abortion debate is raging.
Trump seemed to be searching for a way to lessen the political sting from the upheaval over the Supreme Court’s overturning of national abortion rights. The former president suggested the issue will ultimately bring the country together as states carve out differing laws.
“A lot of bad things will happen beyond the abortion issue if you don’t win elections, with your taxes and everything else," he told Michigan voters.
Trump's camp privately maintains that his unprecedented trial in New York will dominate the news — and voters' attention — for the foreseeable future. His campaign has largely stopped trying to roll out unrelated news during the trial.
Even if Trump were to be convicted by the New York jury, his advisers insist the fundamentals of the election will not change. Trump has worked aggressively to undermine public confidence in the charges against him. Meanwhile, more traditional issues work in his favor, including stubbornly high inflation and the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, in the view of the Trump team.
LaCivita said that such issues constantly reinforce Biden's weakness as “the news of the day keeps getting worse.”
Both sides seem to agree that the dynamics of the race may yet shift dramatically based on any number of factors, from how the economy fares or the course of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to crime or migration trends or other foreseen events. Potential candidate debates this fall could be another wild card.
Such uncertainty, said Biden's battleground states director Dan Kanninen, can play to their favor.
“That dynamic is an opportunity as much as a challenge for us," he said, "because we will have the resources, the infrastructure and the operation built to be engaging voters throughout all those difficult waters.”
Miller reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Linley Sanders in Washington and Michelle L. Price in Freeland, Michigan, contributed to this report.
FILE - Former President Donald Trump appears at Manhattan criminal court before his trial in New York, May 3, 2024. Just six months before Election Day, President Joe Biden and Trump are locked into the first presidential rematch in 68 years that is at once deeply entrenched and highly in flux. Trump is in the midst of the first of potentially four criminal trials and could well be a convicted felon by November. Still, nothing prevents him from assuming the presidency if convicted, or even if he is in prison. (Curtis Means/Pool Photo via AP, File)
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally, May 1, 2024, in Waukesha, Wis. Just six months before Election Day, President Joe Biden and Trump are locked into the first presidential rematch in 68 years that is at once deeply entrenched and highly in flux as many voters are only just beginning to embrace the reality of the 2024 presidential election. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, File)
FILE - President Joe Biden gestures after speaking May 2, 2024, in Wilmington, N.C. Just six months before Election Day, Biden and former President Donald Trump are locked into the first presidential rematch in 68 years that is at once deeply entrenched and highly in flux as many voters are only just beginning to embrace the reality of the 2024 presidential election. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
In this combination photo, President Joe Biden speaks May 2, 2024, in Wilmington, N.C., left, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, May 1, 2024, in Waukesha, Wis. Just six months before Election Day, Biden and Trump are locked into the first presidential rematch in 68 years that is at once deeply entrenched and highly in flux as many voters are only just beginning to embrace the reality of the 2024 presidential election. (AP Photo)
