Category: US

The lead is a product of a lopsided campaign so far: Ryan spent more than $8 million on advertisements, including $6.5 million on television since May. But until this week, Vance’s campaign had been AWOL from the airwaves for that entire time. Ryan has also remained far ahead of Vance in the cash dash, in part thanks to an aggressive small-dollar donation campaign.

The outcome of the Ohio race has major stakes for the 2022 midterms. The Senate is finely balanced at 50-50, and Democrats have enjoyed a summer of solid polling in top swing-state races despite the challenging political environment. Adding another seriously competitive, GOP-held seat to the list of battleground races in the fall could tip control of the chamber next year.

Ironically, the spate of negative stories surrounding Vance’s campaign in recent weeks — that he is struggling with fundraising and his own party is questioning whether Ryan is out-hustling him on the airwaves — may have had a net positive effect on Vance’s campaign. Fundraising has picked up since, and national Republicans have stepped in to start buying ads in the race.

On Thursday, Vance joined Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, NJ, where he raised roughly $300,000 holding a golf fundraiser, according to a person with knowledge of the event.

Donors who had remained on the sidelines since the primary have suddenly started writing checks, the Vance ally said. And following a bitter primary fight, Vance’s past opponents are now stepping up to lend their support. Jane Timken just held a fundraiser for Vance, and the campaign is now scheduling additional events with Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons.

This week, One Nation, the nonprofit part of the outside-spending machine affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), announced a $3.8 million ad buy in the Ohio Senate race. That follows a nearly $1 million television buy that launched this week as a campaign collaboration between Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

In an interview with POLITICO, Ryan said national Republicans are “panicking” about Vance’s prospects and pushed back on the idea that his internal poll represents his campaign’s apogee.

“We have a lot of room to grow,” Ryan said. “In a lot of ways, this race has signed up.” He added: “It’s just going to be about how many more Republicans and independent voters we can pull in the next three months.”

On that front, Ryan is still making headway. Retiring Sen. Rob Portman‘s former chief of staff John Bridgeland, a former director of George W. Bush’s Domestic Policy Council, is expected to author an endorsement on Ryan’s behalf in a coming Sunday edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer, as well as tap into his state-based Republican rolodex, POLITICO has learned.

“Tim is spending time in every county in Ohio, including heavily Republican counties in Southwest Ohio,” Bridgeland told POLITICO. “He’s really listening to people, he wants to know what their concerns are. And JD Vance is tearing people apart. And the last thing this country needs right now are more people igniting the worst dimensions of human nature.”

Ryan’s internal polling also shows him making inroads with independents: It showed him up 20 points with those voters. According to the poll, Vance also has 85 percent name identification and a 50 percent unfavorable rating after a bruising and expensive Republican primary. Ryan, who enjoyed a smoother ride to his party’s nomination, finds himself with 80 percent name ID and a 36 percent unfavorable rating).

But Republicans on the ground in Ohio and national operatives in DC say they’re confident the liberal congressman will fall off dramatically as Vance hits the air with positive spots and, especially as Ryan begins to face attack ads in the Republican-leaning state

A person familiar with One Nation’s decision to buy ad time in Ohio said “the cash disparity between the two candidates is a concern,” but they’re expecting a Vance win “if he makes up that gap even somewhat.”

Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC that supported Vance in the primary with $15 million from Thiel, will also spend on Vance’s behalf again during the general election, according to a person familiar with the group’s plan. Thiel hasn’t yet said whether he’ll cut another check, but the super PAC has added new donors and intends to spend seven figures on Vance this fall.

“In terms of what’s coming ahead, I believe he’s probably at his high-water mark now,” said Tony Schroeder, chairman of the Putnam County Republican Party, referring to Ryan. “Frankly we’re in a period where people aren’t paying a whole heck of a lot of attention. When the engagement comes around, there’s not going to be anything that’s going to help Tim Ryan.”

Vance has left the campaign trail in Ohio multiple times this summer, including trips to Conservative Political Action Conference events. But besides addressing crowds of activists, the trips have also served as fundraising opportunities. On Friday, before speaking in Dallas at CPAC Texas, Vance headlined the organization’s donor breakfast. He also held one-on-one meetings in the donor-heavy city, as he did when he traveled to Tel Aviv last month for CPAC Israel.

“A lot of this is midsummer bedwetting, to be frank,” said a person close to the campaign, noting how unpopular President Joe Biden remains in Ohio and how closely Republican ads will seek to tie Ryan to the president.

During his speech Friday, Vance urged those in the audience to sign up to make calls and knock doors for his campaign, criticizing Ryan as a “weak, fake congressman.” His comments from him signaled there is still a fight ahead to win voters dissented with Democrats, “whether they are conservatives, whether they vote Republican every time — the people who just want a good life in the country that their grandparents and great-grandparents built .”

A campaign spokesperson said Vance was unavailable for an interview Friday while at CPAC Texas.

Ottawa County Sheriff Steve Levorchick said he met Vance for the first time last month when Vance was traveling the state and visiting individually with law enforcement leaders. Levorchick took office in 2011 as a Democrat, but changed his voter registration last year to Republican. An Obama-Trump county, Ottawa broke from its longtime bellwether status in 2020 to support Trump for a second term.

Levorchick said as of now, he plans to cast his vote this fall for Vance, suggesting there is mistrust for Ryan in some law enforcement circles.

“Is he further right than some people may want? Could be,” Levorchick said of Vance. “But when you only have two candidates to pick from, you have to weigh who’s actually better suited to represent you.”

His connection to the massacre: McCraw leads the state agency investigating the law enforcement response to the Uvalde mass shooting. His agency includes the Texas Rangers, an investigative branch of the Texas DPS.

McCraw called the police response “an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”

He identified the incident commander as the school district police chief and slammed the chief’s decision to not immediately breach the classroom door. Officers waited in or around a hallway for more than an hour after the shooting began.

“It was the wrong decision, period,” McCraw said. “There’s no excuse for that.”

Why he’s under scrutiny: Uvalde’s mayor criticized McCraw for directing blame at the Uvalde schools police chief when officers from McCraw’s own agency were also at the scene.

DPS did not directly address McLaughlin’s criticism of McCraw. In a July 5 statement, DPS said it is “committed to working with multiple law enforcement agencies to get the answers we all seek” and said “this is still very much an active and ongoing investigation.”

The 376 respondents came from an array of agencies, according to a Texas House investigative committee report. Among them, 149 were from the US Border Patrol, 91 were from the Texas Department of Public Safety and 14 were from the Department of Homeland Security.

“Every agency in that hallway is gonna have to share the blame,” McLaughlin, the elder, told CNN on July 5.

A shifting timeline of when DPS personnel arrived on the scene raises serious questions about the department’s trustworthiness, the head of the largest police union in Texas told CNN. He has called for an “outside independent source” to probe the initial response.

“I don’t know that we can trust (DPS) to do an internal investigation,” said Charley Wilkison, executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, which represents some law enforcement officers in Uvalde. “I would say that DPS was fast to wash its hands, to point fingers and to make sure that the general public, particularly the elected officials, knew that they were spotless, blameless and that this was a local problem.”

Latest: While in June the DPS director called the response an “abject failure,” a DPS trooper was on scene outside Robb Elementary just 2 minutes and 28 seconds after the gunman entered, CNN was first to report August 2. The trooper was seen on police bodycam video provided to CNN by McLaughlin.

Previously, McCraw said one trooper had entered the hallway at 11:42 am, or nine minutes after the shooter entered the school. Uvalde police bodycam video first reported on by CNN showed a DPS trooper at the west entrance of the school at 11:37:51 – about five minutes earlier than previously acknowledged.

DPS’ investigation into the shooting will include an internal review of the actions taken by every DPS officer on the scene to determine whether any should be referred to an inspector general for investigation, McCraw said August 4. The DPS director said he had not yet reviewed video from all 34 body cameras – noting that he may have to correct that number in the future – but he had seen excerpts.

McCraw would not publicly release any details of the probe, in accordance with a Uvalde County district attorney’s request, he said, noting the case could take years.

Photo: Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis/Getty Images

Some budget experts had surmised that certain conditions placed on the electric vehicle tax creditsincluding restrictions on where car battery materials must be sourced, ran afoul of the budget rules guiding the process that Democrats are using to pass their bill with a simple majority and evade a filibuster.

Under the current proposal, a car is only eligible for full credit if the batteries were made with materials from the US or countries that have trade agreements with the US — a requirement that some experts argue will make it very difficult to obtain the tax credit.

But those provisions can apparently remain in the package — a decision likely to please Sen. Joe Manchin (DW.Va.), who wanted the restrictions in order to curb the electric vehicle industry’s reliance on China.

“The Finance Committee’s clean energy tax package adheres to Senate rules, and important provisions to ensure our clean energy future is built in America have been approved by the parliamentarian,” Wyden said in a statement. “I’m especially pleased that our prevailing wage provisions were approved. These provisions guarantee wage rates for clean energy projects. Clean energy jobs will be good-paying jobs.”

Saturday’s procedural hurdle, once cleared by Democrats, will trigger up to 20 hours of debate evenly divided by both Democrats and Republicans. But both sides aren’t expected to use their full time.

Rather, senators are likely eager to get started with a marathon amendment process known as vote-a-rama, in which the GOP will mount a series of politically tricky votes for Democrats in the hopes of amending the party-line package more than a year in the making. The Senate must endure the amendment marathon before Democrats can finally approve it.

Democrats are waiting to see whether they can include provisions that allow Medicare to negotiate the price of certain high-cost drugs and whether they can penalize drug companies for raising prices on individuals with private health insurance faster than inflation.

Republicans have argued that the savings yielded by the mandate involving the private insurance market, in particular, could be considered a budget side effect of the policy rather than its main purpose, which would break Senate budget rules.

Name a traumatic news event in recent decades, and it’s almost certain Alex Jones has claimed it didn’t happen — or not the way you think it did.

The Boston Marathon bombing in 2013? Staged by the FBI.

The shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011? A government mind control operation.

The September 11th terrorist attacks? An inside job.

There lies.

The conspiracy theorist and radio host was confronted with his track record of fabulism this week in an Austin, Texas, courtroom. He was on trial to determine how much he should pay for defaming the parents of a first grader killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, after years of falsely claiming that no children died and the families were “crisis actors” in a “giant hoax “Designed to take away guns.

“Would you agree with me that there is not a mass tragedy, mass bombing, mass shooting that has occurred in America in the past 15 years that you have not attached the words ‘false flag’ to?” Mark Bankston, the parents’ attorney, asked Jones.

“I have asked the question because I believe a lot of things are provocateur or allowed to happen,” Jones replied.

The jury ordered Jones to pay $49.3 million in damages to Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, for the mental anguish caused by his lies about Sandy Hook.

Jones has a history of prolific fabulism

Jones got his start in public access broadcasting in Austin, Texas, in the 1990s. From his early days on air, he has spouted conspiracy theories about the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

When his wild claims got him fired from a local radio station, he founded Infowars in 1999 and started broadcasting over the internet and in radio syndication.

After the September 11th attacks, Jones emerged to fame as a “truther,” claiming the Bush administration was behind the tragedy.

As his audience grew, Jones popularized a vocabulary for pernicious doubt: not just that officials and media are hiding the truth, but that tragic events are being engineered for nefarious purposes.

“He’s at least a catalyst of those prevailing narratives that follow almost every newsworthy tragedy, whether it’s a mass shooting or otherwise,” said Sara Aniano, a disinformation researcher at the Anti-Defamation League.

Jones’s response to Sandy Hook was perhaps the most egregious example. For years, Infowars aired falsehoods that the tragedy was invented and implied the families of the murdered children were lying.

That created a template to cast doubt on subsequent mass shootings.

“A lot of people who share these theories that those were staged by the government for gun control reasons or that the children and parents are crisis actors will reference Sandy Hook as the basis of that conclusion,” Aniano said.

The lies on Infowars had real-world consequences.

At the trial, Lewis and Heslin testified about the harassment and death threats they’ve received from people who believe Jones.

“When you say those things, there’s a fringe of society that believe you, that are actually dangerous,” Lewis said in emotional testimony addressed directly to Jones.

Infowars profits from “preaching apocalypse”

Infowars doesn’t just spread harmful lies; it profits from them.

According to a forensic economist called by the parents’ lawyers, Infowars’ parent company raked in $64 million in sales of supplements, survivalist gear and other products last year.

The plaintiffs also presented evidence from Jones’s own cell phone showing in 2018, Infowars was making as much as $800,000 a day.

The combined net worth of Jones and Infowars is between $135 million and $270 million, the economist estimated.

Jones is not the first person to grift off conspiracy theories, but Infowars harnessed the power of the internet to do so on a massive scale — a model that’s been imitated by anti-vaccine advocates, COVID-19 deniers and champions of baseless claims that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

“You preach apocalypse and then you sell stuff that can help you in an apocalypse,” said Yunkang Yang, a communications professor at Texas A&M.

Trump and Jones find common ground in conspiracism

Jones has also left a mark on conservative politics.

When Barack Obama was president, Infowars and Donald Trump both promoted the racist lie that he was not an American citizen.

Infowars was also a big spreader of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely accused Hillary Clinton and other Democrats of running a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington, DC pizzeria. Days after Jones urged his audience to investigate, a man, who told the New York Times he listened to Jones’s radio show, entered the restaurant and fired a rifle. (Jones later apologized to the restaurant owner for promoting the lie.)

In late 2015, ahead of Republican primaries, Trump called into Infowars for a mutually fawning interview with Jones.

Trump “gave those folks who are conspiracy theorists signals that he was their guy and they had a candidate who was a conspiracy theorist for the first time,” said Melissa Ryan, CEO of consulting firm CARD Strategies, which tracks disinformation and extremism.

“Trump won by being willing to appeal to this base of supporters that other people in the party would have kept at arm’s length,” she said, “lest they be called out for having extremist views.”

The early years of Trump’s presidency may have been the peak of Jones’s mainstream influence. By 2018, pressure mounted on tech companies to crack down on hate speech and harmful falsehoods. Jones and Infowars were kicked off Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Apple’s app store.

That curbed his ability to reach a wider audience, but according to evidence presented in court, he’s still making plenty of money. The forensic economist called by the plaintiffs said Jones’s deplatforming has not dented his revenues from him.

Now, Jones and Infowars are facing multiple trials that could put them on the hook for further damages to the victims of his lies.

Jones is trying to shield his assets through bankruptcy, but has vowed to keep Infowars alive.

But even if Jones were to go silent and Infowars went out of business tomorrow, the seeds of doubt he so effectively planted are flourishing.

“Conspiracy is a permanent part of our political and cultural discourse now,” Ryan said. “I think you can say that Alex Jones was an innovator in that.”