The right-wing European leader hit guaranteed applause lines — including telling the Texas crowd that “Hungary is the Lone Star State of Europe” — and criticizing liberals, the news media and the Democratic Party.
Trump, who is weighing when to announce his expected third run for the Republican presidential nomination, will give the final speech of the multiday CPAC Texas, an offshoot of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The confab began Thursday and is organized by the American Conservative Union.
Among the others slated to appear in Dallas are Republican elected officials and GOP candidates in the upcoming midterm elections.
CPAC and its organizers remain friendly to Trump, and the conservative activist attendees have been overwhelmingly supportive of his political future. He has easily won the informal straw polls held at events like this since leaving office, including at the 2022 CPAC in February and the 2021 CPAC Texas last summer.
Yet Trump’s speech comes as his position within the broader GOP is strong but slightly diminished. Months of uneven results for his preferred candidates in Republican primaries have shown small cracks in his otherwise overwhelming loyalty among GOP voters. And the summer’s televised hearings by the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol have highlighted the public case against Trump’s actions ahead and during the riot.
Since then, Trump has seen others emerge as potential rivals for the Republican nomination in 2024 — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Neither DeSantis nor Pence will be speaking this week, but other potential GOP candidates for president are scheduled to appear, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for a third term in November, and Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida.
Also appearing will be several Republican candidates on the ballot in the November midterms, including Senate nominee JD Vance of Ohio, gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake of Arizona and Tudor Dixon of Michigan, and House candidate Sarah Palin of Alaska — all of whom were endorsed by Trump.
Orban’s appeal to conservatives
Among the more controversial figures invited to speak at CPAC Texas is Orban, who has been embraced by elements of the American conservative movement in recent years.
The nationalist European leader has pushed forth restrictive immigration policies and clamped down on democratic institutions in Hungary while consolidating his own power.
In his Thursday afternoon address in Dallas, Orban argued that his nationalist agenda in Hungary aligns with the goals of the American conservative movement — sounding a lot like Trump.
“Progressive liberals didn’t want me to be here because they knew what I would tell you, because I am here to tell you that we should unite our forces,” Orban said.
Orban has also faced condemnation for remarks seen as racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic. Last month in Romania, Orban delivered a speech that a longtime aide denounced her as a “pure Nazi text” in her subsequent resignation letter.
While he largely stayed away from that sort of inflammatory rhetoric in Dallas, he did mock the criticism of him being racist and anti-Semitic. “A Christian politician cannot be racist,” Orban said.
Orban defended his 16-year tenure as prime minister, touting his hardline immigration policies and his calling his fight against democratic institutes part of a “culture war,” going after same-sex marriage and transgender rights.
Prompting the loudest standing ovation of his speech, Orban said: “To sum up: the mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone. Full stop, end of discussion.”
Orban’s nationalist rhetoric has won him some admirers among conservatives in the United States, including Trump, who met with Orban recently at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. Trump endorsed Orban’s bid for another term earlier this year and has repeatedly praised the Hungarian leader — including during a 2019 visit to the White House.
Another fan of Orban’s is Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who traveled to the Central European country last year and anchored his show from Budapest. And earlier this year, Orban praised Carlson during a speech at CPAC Hungary, an event in Budapest co-sponsored by the ACU.
This headline and story have been updated with additional details.
Shoppers were sent running for safety at the Mall of America Thursday, after police said shots were fired at the Minnesota shopping center.
Police responded to an “active incident” on the northwest side of the mall Thursday evening, the Bloomington Police Department tweetedsaying at that time that “numerous officers are on scene.”
Within an hour, the police department said officers had secured the scene. A suspect has not been apprehended, and no injuries have been reported, police said.
The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., is under lockdown, Aug. 4, 2022.
Pool via ABC News
Bloomington Police Department Chief Booker Hodges said during a press conference that shots were fired near the Nike store, and that officers on the scene within 30 seconds.
“After looking at video, we see two groups getting into some type of altercation at the cash register of the Nike store,” Hodges said. “One of the groups left but instead of walking away, they decided to display a complete lack of respect for human life — they to fire multiple rounds into a store with people.”
The responsible individuals have not yet been located, the chief said.
“This is an isolated incident,” the department said on Twitter. “The suspect fled the MOA on foot and officers are in the process of interviewing witnesses.”
The Mall of America alerted via Twitter that it was on lockdown “following a confirmed isolated incident” at one of its tenant spaces.
Footage taken by shoppers showed people sheltering in place, including a large crowd in the basement of the mall.
The lockdown has since been raised. Shoppers on the mall’s second level have been asked to wait for an escort, while all others were advised to leave.
The mall will be closed for the rest of the evening.
The shopping mall is located in Bloomington, a suburb of the Twin Cities.
A 25-year-old woman and her two sons were found shot and killed in their Northfield home, according to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office. Officials said Kassandra Sweeney, and her two sons Benjamin Sweeney, 4, and Mason Sweeney, 1, each died of a single gunshot wound. Autopsies by the chief medical examiner revealed each of their manner of deaths was homicide. The bodies of Sweeney and her sons de ella were discovered Wednesday at their home at 56 Wethersfield Drive. The investigation continued through Thursday. Sources told News 9 that Northfield and state police were called to the address just before 11:30 am Wednesday after someone reported that several people might have been injured. When officers arrived, they found the bodies of Sweeney and her two sons. The state police Major Crimes Unit returned to their home just before 9 am Thursday. A silver Ford F-150 was taken away on a flatbed truck Thursday morning, but there was no word as to why it was removed. K-9 units were also seen going in and out of the home, and officers began searching a wooded area near the home later in the day. “Investigators believe they’ve identified all individuals involved at this point and they don’t believe there’s any danger to the public,” said Geoffrey Ward, Senior Assistant Attorney General. Ward would not comment specifically on any suspects in the case. The attorney general’s office said no arrest warrants were issued, adding the investigation remains active. This is a developing story. It will be updated as more information comes in.
NORTHFIELD, NH—
A 25-year-old woman and her two sons were found shot and killed in their Northfield home, according to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office.
Officials said Kassandra Sweeney, and her two sons Benjamin Sweeney, 4, and Mason Sweeney, 1, each died of a single gunshot wound. Autopsies by the chief medical examiner revealed each of their manner of deaths was homicide.
The bodies of Sweeney and her sons were discovered Wednesday at their home at 56 Wethersfield Drive.
The investigation continued through Thursday.
Sources told News 9 that Northfield and state police were called to the address just before 11:30 am Wednesday after someone reported that several people might have been injured. When officers arrived, they found the bodies of Sweeney and her two sons of her.
The state police Major Crimes Unit returned to their home just before 9 am Thursday.
A silver Ford F-150 was taken away on a flatbed truck Thursday morning, but there was no word as to why it was removed.
K-9 units were also seen going in and out of the home, and officers began searching a wooded area near the home later in the day.
“Investigators believe they’ve identified all individuals involved at this point and they don’t believe there’s any danger to the public,” said Geoffrey Ward, Senior Assistant Attorney General.
Ward would not comment specifically on any suspects in the case. The attorney general’s office said no arrest warrants were issued, adding the investigation remains active.
The investigation is ongoing and more information will be released as it becomes available, officials said.
This is a developing story. It will be updated as more information comes in.
Peggy Noonan is an opinion columnist at the Wall Street Journal where her column, “Declarations,” has run since 2000.
She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2017. A political analyst for NBC News, she is the author of nine books on American politics, history and culture, from her most recent, “The Time of Our Lives,” to her first, “What I Saw at the Revolution.” She is one of ten historians and writers who contributed essays on the American presidency for the book, “Character Above All.” Noonan was a special assistant and speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. In 2010 she was given the Award for Media Excellence by the living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor; the following year she was chosen as Columnist of the Year by The Week. She has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, and has taught in the history department at Yale University.
Before entering the Reagan White House, Noonan was a producer and writer at CBS News in New York, and an adjunct professor of Journalism at New York University. She was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up there, in Massapequa Park, Long Island, and in Rutherford, New Jersey. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford. She lives in New York City. In November, 2016 she was named one of the city’s Literary Lions by the New York Public Library.
Senate Democratic leaders say they have reached an agreement on the party’s major climate and economic bill with Kyrsten Sinema – the centrist Democrat whose opposition remained a major hurdle to passing the most ambitious US climate legislation yet.
The support of Sinema, a former member of the Green Party who has evolved into one of Congress’ most conservative Democrats, was crucial to the passage of the bill, which tackles energy, environment, health and tax measures. Its success is seen as the Democratic party’s most substantive chance to deliver domestic policy progress before the midterm elections.
Backing from all 50 Democratic senators will be needed to pass any legislation in the evenly-divided Senate given the party’s narrow majority and Republican resistance to acting on the climate crisis.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, said lawmakers had achieved a compromise “that I believe will receive the support” of all Democrats in the chamber. His party needs unanimity to move the measure through the 50-50 Senate, along with vice-president Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
Sinema, the Arizona senator seen as the pivotal vote, said in a statement that she had agreed to eleventh-hour changes in the measure’s tax and energy provisions and was ready to “move forward” on the bill.
She said Democrats had agreed to remove a provision raising taxes on “carried interest,” or profits that go to executives of private equity firms. That’s been a proposal she has long opposed, though it is a favorite of other Democrats, including the conservative West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin, an architect of the overall bill.
The carried interest provision was estimated to produce $13bn for the government over the coming decade, a small portion of the measure’s $739bn in total revenue.
Securing Sinema’s support was the next challenge for Democrats after Manchin, the centrist Democrat famed for thwarting his own party’s climate goals, surprised Washington last week by backing the plan.
Manchin, who has made millions of dollars from his ownership of a coal-trading firm, made an abrupt U-turn last week and announced support for $369bn in spending to support renewable energy and reduce emissions.
Schumer has said he hopes the Senate can begin voting on the bill – known as the Inflation Reduction Act – on Saturday. Passage by the House, which Democrats control narrowly, could come next week.
Final congressional approval of the election-year measure would be a marquee achievement for Joe Biden and his party, noting an accomplishment they could tout to voters as November approaches.
Former news anchor and Trump-backed candidate Kari Lake has won the Republican nomination for Arizona governor, elevating a candidate who has embraced the former president’s false election claims in a key swing state.
Lake did so after declaring victory prematurely on Wednesday when she had only a slim lead over land developer Karrin Taylor Robson (R), who nabbed the backing of former vice president Mike Pence and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R). And Lake had already warned that her own primary de ella might be tainted by fraud she refused to provide proof for.
“We out-voted the fraud, we didn’t listen to what the fake news had to say,” Lake told reporters, according to the Arizona Mirror. “The MAGA movement rose up and voted like their lives depended on it.”
Kari Lake was predicting fraud before primary day
Lake’s victory was one of several for prominent election deniers in Arizona. If these Republicans win in November, they will be empowered to dramatically upend the election process in a key state in 2024 and beyond. Arizona became ground zero for unfounded 2020 election conspiracies after Biden narrowly beat Donald Trump there — the first time a Democrat has taken the state since 1996.
Lake will face Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) in the general election. Hobbs defended the election process in Arizona as the person in charge of certifying Biden’s victory in 2020.
“This bitter primary race that fractured the Republican Party on a local and national level has finally come to an end and the result is a nominee who has taken an extreme position on abortion, elections, guns and more,” said Raquel Terán, the chairwoman of the Arizona Democratic Party.
Other election deniers who prevailed in Tuesday’s Arizona GOP primary were venture capitalist Blake Masters, now set to face Sen. Mark Kelly (D) in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, and secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem.
Masters ran an ad saying “I think Trump won” and Finchem, a state lawmaker, was outside the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, before rioters stormed the building in a deadly attack. He has self-identified with the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group and self-styled militia, and said he would decertify Arizona’s 2020 election results if he had the power to do so.
Endorsed by prominent election conspiracy theorists MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, Lake has said she doesn’t recognize Biden as the country’s legitimate president. She has said if she had been governor in 2020, she wouldn’t have certified Biden’s victory. And if she wins in November, Lake’s most dramatic election-related proposals would eliminate machines that tabulate votes, like electronic equipment from Dominion Voting Systems used by Maricopa County,where more than half of Arizona residents live, and replace them with people to hand count millions of ballots from individual precincts where voters would be required to cast their ballots in person.
State officials, many of them Republicans, have warned that counting all ballots by hand would make it impossible to meet statutory deadlines.
Lake, if elected, also wants to terminate mail voting, exchanging it for a one-day election, and strengthen voter identification and auditing requirements, which already exist in Arizona.
The 52-year-old mother of two began her career in Iowa after studying journalism at the University of Iowa. After many years in the industry that ended with her frequently being criticized for sharing misinformation on her social media accounts, Lake left her anchor position at Phoenix’s local Fox station in March 2021. Three months later, she announced her campaign for governor.
Full Arizona results here
Lake won the endorsement of Donald Trump that September and has in many ways modeled her campaign after that of the former president. Even before the primary, Lake was telling her supporters of her not to trust the results of Tuesday’s primary — unless she wins.
See who Trump has endorsed in the Republican primaries
If Lake wins in the fall, her leadership would move the state further to the right after Biden won Arizona in the 2020 presidential election — a possible shift that has alarmed many more conventional Republicans in the Grand Canyon State. Lake has pledged to try to enact election-related policies that could fundamentally upend the way Arizonans vote — and how their votes are counted.
Hannah Knowles, Colby Itkowitz and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.
Georgia’s abortion ban counts a fetus as a person. And now, so does its tax code.
The state’s Department of Revenue announced this week that “any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat” can be claimed as dependent, providing a $3,000 tax exemption for each pregnancy within a household, months before the child is born. Georgia’s law bans most abortions after six weeks, which is usually around when doctors can begin to detect fetal cardiac activity.
The announcement marks a new frontier of anti-abortion policymaking in a post-Roe America, where conservative lawmakers have moved beyond banning abortion, and are now trying to expand the legal rights and protections afforded to a fetus under “fetal personhood” laws. Georgia, Alabama and Arizona have passed abortion bans that include language broadly defining a fetus as a person.
Separately, nearly 40 states, including Texas and California, define a fetus as a person in cases involving homicide. For example, Scott Peterson in 2004 was convicted in California of murdering his wife and unborn child. His wife, Laci Peterson, was eight months pregnant when she was killed.
Georgia’s abortion law goes further than any other fetal personhood provision. Called the Living Infants Fairness and Equality, or LIFE, Act, it prohibits abortion after six weeks and explicitly recognizes the fetus as a person.
A federal judge struck down the legislation last summer, finding that it violated a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. The appeals court delayed a final decision, pending a ruling from the US Supreme Court.
More Coverage of the Kansas Abortion Vote
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, a three-judge panel from the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit handed Georgia conservatives their long-anticipated victory, allowing the abortion restrictions to take effect.
In the appeals court’s July 20 ruling, Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr. wrote that “a person of reasonable intelligence is capable of understanding that the ‘core meaning’ [of]’ the provision is to expand the definition of person to include unborn humans who are carried in the womb of their mother at any stage of development.”
Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the law in 2019, celebrated the court’s decision.
“Georgia is a state that values and supports life at all stages — and the Georgia LIFE Act and this provision both reflect that commitment,” said a spokesman for Mr. Kemp.
State Representative Ed Setzler, a Republican sponsor of the law, said in a leaked 2019 video that the ultimate goal of the law is to have the Supreme Court acknowledge the personhood of a fetus.
“It is about establishing personhood of the unborn child, in the tax code, for child support for mothers, in our census counts, across our code, so that we can lay the foundation that no other state in the nation in the last 46 years has ever done, which is to establish the personhood of this child, and we’re going to take this to the highest court in the land,” Mr. Setzler said in the video.
Mr. Setzler did not respond to requests for comment.
Georgia’s push to recognize a fetus as a person could lay the blueprint for other conservative states, which have not yet clarified the meaning and effects of such an approach, legal experts said.
“The anti-abortion movement has always been a personhood movement, there was just no consensus on what that actually meant,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written several books on abortion and the law .
Before the demise of Roe, conservatives were united around the singular goal of restricting abortion access. But Ms. Ziegler says the anti-abortion movement is struggling to find consensus on what fetal personhood means in a post-Roe legal landscape.
“Nobody has really worked out, how do you enforce personhood beyond just ‘you can’t have an abortion,’” she said. “Georgia is starting to work that out, but they’ve really only looked at a handful of situations. How do you enforce this in HOV lanes? Do you give a fetus its own attorney? There are so many questions left open.”
Last month, a pregnant Texas woman ticketed for riding in the HOV lane alone argued that her fetus counted as a person under the state’s abortion ban. Texas’ abortion ban does not include fetal personhood, but its penal code does.
Georgia’s abortion law also allows the mother to collect child support to cover the cost of “direct medical and pregnancy related expenses” before the child is born.
Democrats said the law might also expose women who experience miscarriages to unknown consequences.
“So what happens when you claim your fetus as a dependent and then miscarry later in the pregnancy, you get investigated both for tax fraud and an illegal abortion?” tweeted Lauren Groh-Wargo, the campaign manager of the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams.
Monday’s announcement says taxpayers who claim the new deduction may be asked to provide medical records or documentation of the pregnancy. The Revenue Department has not clarified if and how families who lose a pregnancy might protect themselves from allegations of fraud.
Specific instructions on how to claim a fetus on a tax return are expected later this year.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) said Thursday that she would “move forward” with Senate Democrats’ spending bill to tackle climate change, health care and tax reforms.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) said Thursday that she would “move forward” with Senate Democrats’ spending bill to tackle climate change, health care and tax reforms.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced late Thursday she will “move forward” with Democrats’ massive climate, prescription drug and spending bill, after Democrats appeared to reach an agreement about Sinema’s concerns with the legislation.
Sinema’s announcement all but locks in the bill for Democrats, who need all 50 Democratic votes on board in order for the bill to pass, with a tie-breaker vote from Vice President Kamala Harris. The legislation solidifies key portions of President Biden’s domestic agenda.
In a statement, Sinema said, “We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation. Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”
In recent days, Sinema had expressed concern over the portion of the bill about narrowing the carried interest tax loophole. Democrats say the measure would have added about $14 billion in funding.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that the agreement reached among Democratic senators maintains major components of the bill.
“I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act that I believe will receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference,” Schumer said.
“I have had many productive discussions with members of our conference over the past three days and we have addressed a number of important issues they have raised.”
Schumer added that the final bill will be introduced Saturday, when the Senate is back in session.
President Biden, in a statement late Thursday, said “we’ve taken another critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America’s families.”
“I look forward to the Senate taking up this legislation and passing it as soon as possible,” Biden said in a statement from the White House.
The legislation is getting passed through a budget reconciliation process, which circumvents the 60 votes usually needed to pass a bill. The Senate Parliamentarian is still combing through the text to make sure the legislation can be voted on through the reconciliation process.
Once the bill gets introduced on the floor — which Schumer says will happen Saturday afternoon – up to 20 hours of debate, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, will begin.
After debate over the bill ends, the process known as vote-a-rama starts, and senators can introduce as many amendments as they want, a process that typically goes late into the night.
Washington — The Justice Department on Thursday filed federal charges against four current and former Louisville police officers connected to the 2020 death of Breonne Taylorwho was shot and killed by police in a raid on her apartment while she was sleeping.
The charges against defendants Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meany, Kelly Goodlett and Brett Hankison include various civil rights violations, conspiracy, use of force offenses and obstruction. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the civil rights charges against three of the officers stem from alleged falsification of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant that authorized the early morning raid on Taylor’s apartment.
“The federal charges announced today allege that members of the place-based investigations unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant of Ms. Taylor’s home, that this act violated federal civil rights laws and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor’s death, Garland said at the Justice Department.
Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was shot on March 13, 2020, when officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) stormed into her apartment where she was asleep with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Walker thought the officers were intruders and fired his handgun at them as they were entering, striking one in the leg. The officers fired 22 shots into the apartment in response, one of which struck Taylor in her chest, killing her.
The LMPD fired Hankinson and Jaynes in the months after the Taylor’s death, and the department said Thursday that the police chief had begun “termination procedures” for Meany and Goodlett, who are still on the force.
In charging documents, prosecutors said Goodlett and Jaynes, both detectives, included false and misleading information in an application for the search warrant, specifically that a postal inspector had informed Goodlett that the target of their drug trafficking investigation was receiving packages at Taylor’s address. That was false, prosecutors allege, but Meany, a sergeant and their supervisor of him, approved the warrant application anyway.
This undated photo shows Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
Photo provided by Taylor family attorney Sam Aguiar via AP
“We allege that the defendants knew their actions in falsifying the affidavit could create a dangerous situation, and we allege these unlawful acts resulted in Ms. Taylor’s death,” Garland said, noting that none of the officers who executed the warrant “were not involved in the drafting of the warrant and were unaware of the false and misleading statements it contained.”
The attorney general said Jaynes, Goodlett and Meany also “took steps to cover up their unlawful conduct after Ms. Taylor’s death” and “conspired to mislead federal, state and local authorities who were investigating the incident.”
Jaynes and Goodlett allegedly met in Jaynes’ garage on the night of May 17, 2020, after seeing media reports that a postal inspector had contradicted the information in the search warrant application. The pair devised a scheme to tell investigators a false story about the affidavit, according to charging documents. They both told similar stories about a postal inspector casually mentioning the target was receiving packages at Taylor’s address, a claim they knew was false, prosecutors said.
Meany is also accused of lying to investigators about the officers’ unannounced entry into Taylor’s home. According to charging documents, Meany told the FBI that his officers executed the warrant at the request of the SWAT unit, when in fact he knew that the unit did not put in such a request.
In a separate indictment, Hankison was charged with two counts of deprivation of rights for firing 10 rounds through a window and glass door in Taylor’s apartment after she was killed. Hankison was acquired on state charges of wanton endangerment at trial earlier this year.
The charges come more than a year after the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the patterns and practices of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department, a probe that is separate and ongoing, a release from the department noted.
“The charges announced today are criminal against individual officers, while the ongoing pattern or practice investigation is a civil investigation that is examining allegations of systemic violations of the Constitution and federal law by LMPD and Louisville Metro,” the department said. “The civil pattern or practice investigation is being handled independently from the criminal case by a different team of career staff.”
Four people were critically injured following a lightning strike Thursday evening in Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, authorities said.
The four patients, two men and two women, were all taken to area hospitals in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, Vito Maggiolo, a spokesperson for the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department, said in a Thursday evening news briefing.
The lightning strike was reported at 6:52 pm The victims were near a statue of Andrew Jackson, Maggiolo said, adding that “it appeared they were in the vicinity of a tree.”
Uniformed Secret Service agents and US Park Police officers who were in the area and witnessed the strike provided first aid to the victims, Maggiolo said.
“Their agents, their officers, witnessed this lightning strike and immediately began to render aid,” Maggiolo said.
It’s unclear exactly what the victims were doing at the time.
“All we know for sure is that there was a lightning strike in their immediate vicinity, and all four were injured,” he said.
A CBS News camera that was recording on the White House North Lawn around the time of the lightning strike captured the powerful rumble of the thunder.
“The thunder was so loud, @gabrielle_ake and I jumped up in fright,” CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes tweeted. “‘That’s too close – we’re shutting down’ advised photographer Ron Windham.”
Our camera was rolling on the White House North Lawn tonight when lightning struck Lafayette Park nearby, injuring four. The thunder was so loud, @gabrielle_ake and I jumped up in fright. “That’s too close — we’re shutting down” advised photographer Ron Windham. pic.twitter.com/oTtU9VeQBw
