Vance says Harris can ‘go to hell’ in critical remarks on Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal – live | US elections 2024

Vance has finished his speech and is now taking questions.

“The only thing that is broken about this country is our failed leadership,” Vance says.

From what I can tell, this event is a small one (Vance has during his speech already made claims that people were leaving Harris’s events while she spoke, following on from false claims made by Trump about AI-generated crowd sizes).

NBC’s Karl Winter is at the event, where earlier he counted 180 chairs. It is unclear how many of them are occupied now.

Vance claims that Harris is using tax dollars to subsidise products made by the “Communist Chinese”.

He is repeating false claims about Harris and electric vehicles.

Biden in May announced a quadrupling of tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100%.

China has vowed retaliation against the “bullying” tariff hikes and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said they showed that some in the US may be “losing their minds”, Reuters reports.

The Biden-Harris administration is expected to announce final implementation plans for steep tariff increases on certain Chinese imports this week.

Meanwhile Obama has just marked the tenth anniversary of his tan suit with a side-by-side picture of Harris in hers at the DNC:

More on this important subject:

Vance turns to Harris, saying, “She does this thing”.

“She stands before crowds like this and she’ll say without a hint of irony, without a hint of shame that on Day one she’ll tackle the affordability crisis,” he says.

“Day One was 1300 days ago, what the hell have you been doing all that time,” he says.

Vance is speaking now. He has welcomed his wife Usha Vance, said she always gets a little embarrassed, and added, “But why not embarrass your wife? Take the opportunity, I’ll deal with the consequences later.”

JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, are taking to the stage in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile Harris and Walz, dropped in on a high school band practice Wednesday as part of a two-day bus tour through southeast Georgia campaigning for the critical battleground state, as the students performed their school fight song for the Democratic ticket.

“We’re so proud of you and we’re counting on you,” Harris told the young crowd at Liberty County High School, some shrieking with excitement at the sight of the vice president. “Your generation … is what is going to propel our country into the next era of what we can do and what we can be.”

The trip culminates Thursday with a rally in Savannah, the Associated Press reports. Campaign officials believe that in order to win the state over Republican Donald Trump in November they must make inroads in GOP strongholds. They need more than Atlanta and the suburbs that delivered for Joe Biden in 2020.

Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said bus tours offer an “opportunity to get to places we don’t usually go (and) make sure we’re competing in all communities.”

The campaign wants the events to motivate voters in GOP-leaning areas who don’t traditionally see the candidates, and hopes that the engagements drive viral moments that cut through crowded media coverage to reach voters across the country.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is expected to speak in Wisconsin in ten minutes’ time, at 7pm ET, according to the Hill. We’ll bring you the main developments from that live.

The gunman in the assassination attempt of Donald Trump searched online for events of both the former president and Joe Biden and saw the Pennsylvania campaign rally where he opened fire last month as a “target of opportunity”, a senior FBI official said on Wednesday.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot at Trump from a nearby roof before being killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper, did extensive research for an attack before the shooting and had looked at any number of events or targets, including the current and former president, said Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office.

The new details were disclosed as FBI officials, in the latest in a series of briefings about the investigation, revealed that they had yet to uncover a motive for the 13 July attack in Butler, Pennsylvania, despite conducting nearly 1,000 interviews.

“We have a clear idea of mindset, but we are not ready to make any conclusive statements regarding motive at this time,” Rojek said.

Maya Yang

Today so far

During his remarks in Erie, JD Vance again argued that the altercation at Arlington national cemetery was “the media creating a story” and instead used a question from a reporter about the incident to condemn Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

NPR reported on Tuesday that two Trump campaign staffers had been involved in an altercation with a cemetery official for filming and taking pictures in a section that is reserved for recent US military casualties. The Trump campaign was given permission to have a photographer in attendance while Trump was visiting the cemetery, Vance said.

“You know what I think our veterans care a lot more about, that Kamala Harris’s VP nominee lied about his military experience,” he said. Republicans have repeatedly attacked Walz’s military record in recent weeks by spreading falsehoods and distortions about his service.

Vance also argued that 13 Americans died in Afghanistan because Harris “refused to do her job”.

“Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened and she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up. She can go to hell!”

Vance says Harris can ‘go to hell’ in critical remarks on Afghanistan withdrawal

Sarah Palin won a new trial in her libel lawsuit against the New York Times.

A jury in 2022 rejected the former Alaska governor’s claims of defamation. Palin had argued that the newspaper damaged her reputation by linking her campaign rhetoric to the 2011 Arizona shooting that wounded US representative Gabby Giffords and left six others dead.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court ruled that she should receive a new trial, and found that the judge in the original proceedings made several errors, including wrongly excluding evidence.

A spokesperson for the Times called Wednesday’s decision “disappointing” while Palin’s lawyer said it was “a significant step forward”.

Congressman says relatives approved Trump campaign taking photos at Arlington cemetery

Speaking of Donald Trump, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that the former president is gearing up to continue his legal challenge against special counsel Jack Smith, who yesterday unveiled a new indictment against him for trying to overturn the 2020 election:

Donald Trump is expected to​ continue to battle against criminal charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election by challenging further parts of the revised indictment that removed allegations​ the US supreme court found were subject to immunity​.

The superseding indictment ​filed on Tuesday by special counsel prosecutors mainly removed allegations about Trump’s efforts to use the​ justice department to ​obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and reframed the narrative to say Trump was being charged in his capacity as a candidate​.

The document retains the same four criminal ​conspiracy statutes against Trump that were originally filed last summer. But portions of the new indictment have been rewritten to emphasize that Trump was not acting in his official capacity during his efforts to try​ to overturn the election.

Trump’s lawyers see the changes as minimal and will seek to pare back the charges further, ​according to people familiar with the matter, because they consider large parts of what remains in the updated indictment to be presumptively immune conduct that the judge needs to resolve​.

In that sense, there are no immediate consequences of the ​special ​counsel Jack Smith getting a superseding indictment in the case. Trump still ​plans to initiate new litigation, ​which will be appealed to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit​, and any trial would not happen before the November election.

Vance says Trump campaign ‘was allowed’ to have photographer at Arlington national cemetery