Hakeem Jeffries Sends Strange Message After Private Biden Meeting

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met with President Biden Thursday evening when, according to a letter issued by Jeffries on Friday, they talked about a lot and decided on nothing.

“In my conversation with President Biden, I directly expressed the full breadth of insight, heartfelt perspectives, and conclusions about the path forward that the Caucus has shared in our recent time together,” Jeffries wrote to his Democratic colleagues, describing conversations in the Democratic House Caucus as “candid, clear-eyed and comprehensive.”

“As House Democrats have done throughout this Congress, we will continue to work in the best interests of everyday Americans. Thank you for your continued leadership in service of the communities we are privileged to represent.”

The letter avoids direct mentions of what Biden and Jeffries spoke about, or what the outcome of the meeting was.

Jeffries has been holding meetings with top Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus in the weeks since Biden’s disastrous debate performance. While he’s avoided making any definitive statements, closed-door Democratic meetings have been described as “an insult to funerals,” with Jeffries absorbing various concerns about Biden’s fitness to serve, pitches for Kamala Harris to replace Biden, and declarations of support for Biden. To date, 18 House Democrats and one Democratic senator have publicly called on Biden to step aside, including four independents who caucus with Democrats. Privately, influential Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have reportedly expressed concerns about Biden’s candidacy, with Pelosi providing an explosive nonanswer on Wednesday morning about a need for Biden “to decide if he is going to run.”

Following a middling NATO press conference on Thursday evening with some oof-worthy gaffes, one Democratic operative described the state of the party to Politico as “in purgatory.” Jeffries’s letter announcing that he passed along opinions from Democrats to Biden appears to be a continuation of the party’s nonmovement, as Biden has firmly indicated he has no intention of stepping aside despite continued calls for him to do so.

Representative James Clyburn pledged his support to whatever Joe Biden decides, including whether he changes his mind.

NBC’s Savannah Guthrie asked Clyburn Friday morning about whether he’s leaving “the door open just a little bit” for continued questions about Biden staying on as the Democratic nominee for president.

“I took him at his word, and that’s why I am all in,” Clyburn said, referring to Biden’s stated desire to stay on as president. “I’m ridin’ with Biden, no matter what direction he goes, no matter what method he takes; I’m with Joe Biden.”

But the South Carolina Democrat offered a caveat.

“And if he were to change his mind, I’ll just answer the question, I would be all in for the vice president,” Clyburn said, referring to Kamala Harris.

With that answer, Clyburn somehow both affirmed his support for Biden but also for Harris to succeed him. He further elaborated on what he meant when NBC’s Craig Melvin asked him, “Should the conversation about the president getting out of this race, should that conversation continue?”

“No it shouldn’t,” Clyburn said. “The conversation should focus on the record of this administration, on the alternative to his election, and let Joe Biden continue to make his own decisions about his future. He’s earned that right, and I am going to give him that much respect. If he decides to change his mind later on, then we would respond to that.”

“If Project 2025 were to become the law in any form, that is where our focus ought to be,” Clyburn added.

Clyburn’s latest remarks build on what he said nearly two weeks ago after Biden’s poor debate performance, when he gave a stronger endorsement of Harris. Now Clyburn still supports Harris, but only if Biden were to decide himself to step down. On Thursday, Biden held a rare press conference that didn’t allay many people’s concerns about his fitness for office. He stumbled starting off, and concluded chaotically after he attempted to answer a question about Harris replacing him. This press conference may have won over Clyburn, but he’s clearly still giving Biden room to drop out.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing renewed blowback for allegedly sexually assaulting a former family babysitter after he reportedly decided to shoot her a late-night apology text.

The former babysitter, Eliza Cooney, accused Kennedy in a bombshell Vanity Fair piece of rubbing her leg, reading her diary, asking her to rub lotion on his back, and trapping her in the pantry and groping her, all on separate occasions in 1998, when she was 23 and Kennedy was 45.

Kennedy apparently thought the best way to smooth things over was via text. “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings,” Kennedy wrote in a text message to Cooney, sent just after midnight on July 4 and obtained by The Washington Post.

“I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

The presidential candidate then proceeded to invite Cooney to continue the conversation either by telephone or “preferably, face to face.

“I recognize that this might not be possible. I have no agenda for sending this text other than making the most sincere and ernest [sic] amends,” Kennedy added.

The message was not well received—as unsolicited, late-night texts from men usually are.

“It was disingenuous and arrogant,” Cooney told the Post in reference to the message. “I’m not sure how somebody has a true apology for something that they don’t admit to recalling. I did not get a sense of remorse.”

And she was further surprised by the invitation to continue the conversation with her alleged abuser in person.

“Meet ‘face to face’? What woman wants to do that?” Cooney added.

Kennedy initially brushed off the accusations in an interview on Breaking Points, chalking up the sexual harassment claims to his “very, very rambunctious youth.”

“In terms of the other allegations, listen, I have said this from the beginning: I am not a church boy. I am not running like that,” Kennedy said. “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote I could run for king of the world.”

He also derided the rest of the Vanity Fair exposé, which included a photo of Kennedy posing next to what veterinarians identified as a barbecued dog, calling the article “a lot of garbage.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson relied on some flimsy facts to back the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, to make it harder for noncitizens to vote in the U.S. elections, something that is of course, already illegal.

The bill, which would require a Real ID or U.S. passport for voting rather than the standard driver’s license, passed the Republican-led House Wednesday, but it was built on a false premise and backed by baseless claims.

To attract support for the bill, Johnson circulated a white paper that included some claims about voting by undocumented immigrants—that aren’t backed up by any evidence, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

In one section, Johnson’s handout referred to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who had ordered 137 noncitizens to be removed from the state’s voter rolls. But LaRose has yet to provide any actual evidence of illegally cast ballots.

LaRose even acknowledged in a May press release that some of those people could’ve been included as “the result of an honest mistake.”

“These may be well-meaning people trying to pursue the American dream, and communication barriers sometimes result in a registration form being submitted in error,” LaRose said. “We need to help them get that cleared up before an accidental registration becomes an illegal vote that could result in a felony conviction or even deportation.”

Under federal law, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles is required to offer voter registration forms to state residents seeking any service. As a result, some forms are filled out by noncitizens, who even mark themselves as ineligible to vote, but the forms are still processed anyway. Another possible explanation is that those voters have been naturalized but have yet to visit the BMV to officially change their status.

If the evidence isn’t really adding up, there’s a good reason for that: Noncitizens don’t really vote in state or federal elections. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Noncitizen voting is a right-wing conspiracy, though, and in reality, the only ones concocting a scheme to fake votes in the last election were in Donald Trump’s camp.

The SAVE Act is ultimately doomed to fail, but that may be by design. It will never pass the Democratic-led Senate, and President Joe Biden has already promised to veto it. But its failure sets the stage for Republicans to run rampant with claims of widespread voter fraud in the upcoming election, even though the numbers don’t support it.

In his latest desperate move to avoid being held to account, Donald Trump is arguing that evidence used to convict him for setting up hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election should be dismissed and his 34-count felony conviction should be vacated based on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that significantly expanded presidential immunity.

“Because of the implications for the institution of the Presidency, the use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution that tainted the District Attorney’s grand jury proceedings as well as the trial,” defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a motion filed on Thursday. “The jury’s verdicts must be vacated.”

The motion was filed on Thursday, the same day Trump was initially scheduled to be sentenced for his felony convictions. Trump’s lawyers pointed to two pieces of evidence—Hope Hicks’s testimony of conversations she had with Trump while he was in office and posts he made on Twitter while he was president—arguing both constituted official actions. The Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t entirely define what constitutes an official action, but in his lawsuit that came before the Supreme Court, Trump had argued for absolute immunity on the basis that anything a president does is inherently an official act. It’s unclear if the Supreme Court’s ruling is retroactively applicable or if it applies to evidence brought in state-level cases, as it focused on the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in relation to Trump’s fake electors scheme. While some evidence in Trump’s hush-money trial occurred during his presidency, the trial focused on actions Trump took when he was still a candidate, not president.

Whether removing Hicks’s testimony and Trump’s Twitter posts will be discounted as evidence, and whether that change is enough to throw the case is up to the judge. Last week, Judge Juan Merchan agreed to delay Trump’s sentencing to September 18 to review the Supreme Court’s ruling and its impact on the case.

Donald Trump was quick to pounce on one of President Joe Biden’s verbal flubs late Thursday, leveraging a glaring mistake to his advantage.

Moments after finishing his scripted speech, Biden mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump,” shocking the crowd of reporters as well as some of his Cabinet members in attendance.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [inaudible] think she was not qualified to be president, so let’s start there,” Biden said.

Moments later, Trump was resharing a clip of the slipup to his Truth Social page, mocking the president’s inability to keep his characters and facts straight.

“Crooked Joe begins his ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference with, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president, though I think she was not qualified to be president,’” Trump wrote, intentionally misquoting what Biden said. “Great job, Joe!”

Trump also took advantage of several other verbal lapses Biden had while responding to members of the White House press corps Thursday evening, including a moment when he stumbled over referring to his chief of staff of the military, and when he slurred the words “intelligence community” and “declassified.”

The easy punches from Biden’s opponent follow a NATO summit in which diplomats and world leaders watched and worried over Biden’s mental fitness, and his subsequent ability to win over the American public and maintain the threatened international alliance. Meanwhile, back at home, Democratic lawmakers are weighing whether to formally rescind their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Even within Biden’s campaign, staffers are reportedly looking for other options: On Thursday, a leaked report revealed that the campaign was quietly polling voters on Harris’s odds, should she take the top of the ticket in a direct match-off against Trump. The leaked poll didn’t include its results, but other polls assessing Harris’s viability have indicated that she would have a slight advantage over Biden.

Former Donald Trump supporters will be featured on multiple billboards near the Milwaukee arena where the Republican National Convention will take place next week, with a simple message for the former president: I won’t vote for you.

The billboards are the handiwork of Republican Voters Against Trump, which has placed similar billboards around the city, sporting simple slogans like, “I won’t vote for a convicted felon.” The project, which has produced 15 billboards and one 60-second ad spot that will run in four swing states, is being funded by the Republican Accountability PAC, and targets moderate Republicans and right-leaning voters in key battlegrounds.

Scott Moore, a 63-year-old Army veteran from Nashville, Tennessee, is one of the former Trump backers whose face will be blown up and featured on the massive signs.

“I always thought a businessman could shake up the good ol’ boy system. I wasn’t thrilled about him, but I thought he was a successful businessman,” Moore told the Tennessee Lookout. He’d voted for Trump in 2016.

But later, he explained, “I saw that what he was doing was about him and not about our country.”

An estimated 2,429 delegates will attend the RNC, which begins Monday in Milwaukee, where they are expected to formally confirm Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Of those delegates, several are the very same fake electors alleged to have aided Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results in 2020.

To secure the party’s nomination, Trump must clinch 1,215 delegates. This seems likely, as he received 2,243 in the primaries, and former presidential candidate Nikki Haley released her 97 delegates this week, directing them to back Trump’s nomination.

President Joe Biden on Thursday ended a defiant press conference with a strange qualifier on his personal commitment to staying in the presidential race.

When asked directly whether he would consider withdrawing if polling numbers indicated Vice President Kamala Harris would fare better in a matchup against Donald Trump, the 81-year-old president said no, with one caveat.

“You earlier explained confidence in your vice president. If your team came back and showed you data that she would fare better against former President Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race?” a Scripps reporter asked.

“No, unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win,’” Biden said, adding “… me.”

“And no one’s saying that. No polls are saying that,” he added in a whisper, launching the room filled with the White House press corps into chaos. It was the last question of one of the most critical evenings of Biden’s presidency, as Democratic lawmakers weigh whether to formally strip their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Despite Biden’s insistence, national polls have shown Harris faring as well or better than him in a direct matchup against Trump in November.

Following a two-hour delay to the beginning of his first major press conference in recent memory, President Joe Biden flubbed almost as soon as he finished reading off the teleprompter.

Responding to a question Thursday about NATO’s reaction to Biden’s increasingly unsteady future in U.S. politics, the 81-year-old president stumbled over the names of who his vice president, and his major opponent, really were.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, mistakenly referring to Donald Trump instead of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Why did he call President Trump the Vice President?” asked the official X account of the House GOP moments after the verbal slip.

On Thursday, MSNBC dug up a clip from 2022 of Trump expressing some pretty convincing familiarity with the people behind Project 2025—and potentially hinting at knowing that the document was in the works.

“Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heridges to [sic] lay the groundwork,” Trump stumbled. “And Heridges does such an incredible job at that,” Trump added, stumbling again.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming,” Trump said, seeming to imply Project 2025.

The comments were made during an April 2022 keynote speech by Trump at a Heritage Foundation event where he was introduced by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In that speech, he praised Heritage Board Chairman Barb Van Andel-Gaby as well as Heritage fellows Tom Homan and Mark Morgan—all of whom he now claims he doesn’t know at all.

“Already we have shown the power of our winning formula, working closely with many of the great people at Heritage over the four incredible years that we’ve worked with you a lot, and we were just discussing it with Kevin,” Trump said during the 2022 speech in his typical rambling style. “They’re going to work on some other things that are going to be very exciting, I think, Kevin, I think maybe the most exciting of all.”

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump claimed late Wednesday night. Trump issued his first denial of Project 2025 last Friday, declaring to closed ears, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

CNN found nearly 140 former Trump aides and advisers who have contributed to Project 2025, including six former members of his Cabinet, four of his ambassadors, and Republican National Committee members appointed to their positions in coordination with the Trump campaign. The document functions as a sort of light-speed roadmap for an impending Republican presidency, laying pathways to actualize Trump’s mass deportation plan, consolidate federal agency power, and dismantle LGBTQ+ and abortion rights. Trump has tried in vain to distance himself from Project 2025 and its patently extreme agenda, presumably hoping to woo voters with softer stances before flipping once elected. Either Trump is struggling with a pretty sizable memory lapse, or he’s lying.