California Teamsters endorse Harris after national union declines to back any candidate – live | US elections 2024

Trump responds to interest rate cuts

The Associated Press reports that, according to the FBI and other federal agencies, Iranian hackers sought to interest President Joe Biden’s campaign in information stolen from rival Donald Trump’s campaign, sending unsolicited emails to people connected to the Democratic president in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election.

There is no evidence that any of the recipients responded, officials said, preventing the hacked information from surfacing in the final months of the closely contested election.

The hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a US government statement.

The announcement is the latest effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen, ongoing work to interfere in the 2024 election, including a hack-and-leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies linked last month to Tehran. The Justice Department has been preparing charges in that breach, The Associated Press has reported.

In August, Microsoft researchers said that Iran government-tied hackers tried breaking into the account of a “high-ranking official” on the US presidential campaign in June, weeks after breaching the account of a county-level US official:

Trump will be at a rally in New York in 45 minutes’ time. We will bring you any news from that as it happens.

Interim summary

Pod Save America host competes on new season of Survivor

It’s been another very long week (yes, it’s Wednesday) and for the crossover of political podcast lovers and Survivor fans, here’s a tiny bit of fun news: Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett will be appearing on the forthcoming season of Survivor.

The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly both have previews of Lovett’s participation in the beloved reality TV show. Survivor showrunner Jeff Probst had praise for Lovett, calling him “one of the greatest storytellers that we will ever have on Survivor”.

Lovett’s ability to narrate his own experience “is just this beautiful gift to us, because no matter what the situation or how you pose a question, he will give you a compelling answer”, Probst added.

How long Lovett actually survives Survivor, of course, is a different question.

WSJ: Vance’s team knew on day one ‘cats and dogs’ story attacking Haitians was false

The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth investigation into Donald Trump and JD Vance’s baseless slurs about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

A Springfield city manager told the WSJ that a Vance staffer had called his office to fact-check a claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets the same morning that Vance had tweeted about it. He said he told the staffer, very clearly, that the rumors were not true. But Vance just doubled and tripled down on the story and Trump repeated the lurid claim that night at a presidential debate, sparking ongoing harassment and racist rhetoric, fear among Haitians in Ohio for their personal safety, and eventually bomb threats targeting schools, hospitals and government buildings.

The WSJ also dug into the sources of the grotesque rumor targeting immigrants and found that locals who had shared these kinds of claims had already apologized for doing so.

Vance himself has not apologized, either for spreading the baseless story in the first place or for the story’s frightening and destabilizing consequences for people in Springfield.

“If I have to create stories so the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, than that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told CNN anchor Dana Bash earlier this week.

Axios summarized Vance’s response as embracing a “zero-shame strategy”.

Fact checking Trump and Vance’s claims about that $35 insulin co-payment cap

The New York Times reported that at a campaign rally today, JD Vance once again repeated the “misleading claim” that Donald Trump was responsible for capping insulin Medicare co-payments at $35. In fact, the Times reported, Vance is attempting to campaign on an achievement of the Biden administration, which capped Medicare insulin payments at $35 as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Under the Trump administration, some Medicare plans voluntarily participated in a program that capped insulin co-payments at $35, but it was the Biden administration which instituted the cost cap more broadly.

Confused? KFF Health News, an independent non-profit that covers US health policy, has a very helpful explainer, including their estimate that only 800,000 Americans had access to the $35 cost cap under the Trump policy, but more than 3.3 million had access under the broader Biden policy.

The bigger context is also crucial: KFF Health News notes that senate Republicans have proposed a full repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, which would roll back the $35 insulin co-pay cap for those millions of Americans.

Meanwhile, Biden and the Democratic party have proposed extending the $35 co-pay cap to all people who need insulin, including those with commercial insurance. This would result in cost savings for the vast majority of Americans who need insulin, according to KFF’s analysis. Democrats tried to include that broader co-pay cap in the Inflation Reduction Act, the news organization reported, “but that provision was stripped from the final legislation after the vast majority of Republicans voted to remove it”.

California Teamsters endorse Harris

While the Teamsters’ general executive board announced earlier today that the union, which represents over 1.3 million workers, would make no endorsement in the presidential race, they also released polling data that they said showed that a majority of their union members favored Donald Trump.

But other organizations of Teamsters have said they will endorse Kamala Harris, including the California Teamsters.

More on the political divisions within the Teamsters from Guardian labor reporter Michael Sainato:

Biden will address Fed’s interest rate cut on Thursday

This is Lois Beckett, picking up our live US politics coverage from Los Angeles.

Joe Biden tweeted that he will address Americans on Thursday on the state of the economy, in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it was cutting interest rates for the first time in four years.

Kamala Harris also put out a statement in response to the announcement, calling it “welcome news” for Americans, but saying more work was needed to bring prices down, which she called an important focus of her presidential campaign:

While this announcement is welcome news for Americans who have borne the brunt of high prices, my focus is on the work ahead to keep bringing prices down. I know prices are still too high for many middle class and working families, and my top priority as president will be to lower the costs of everyday needs like health care, housing, and groceries. That is why I am proposing plans to cut taxes for more than 100 million working and middle-class Americans, pass the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries, and make housing more affordable by building 3 million new homes and giving more Americans down payment assistance.

Harris announces Georgia visit amid furor over abortion-related death