Gun safety advocates criticize Vance for ‘hypocrisy’ as he mocks Walz for debate gaffe – live | US elections 2024

Exclusive: Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir

Martin Pengelly

Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.

“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.

“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.

“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

At his rally in Pennsylvania, Tim Walz warned that JD Vance seems much more willing than Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence to interfere with electoral integrity.

“There is a reason Mike Pence wasn’t on that stage with me,” Walz said of his debate last night. “He chose the constitution over Donald Trump … Senator Vance made it clear he will always make a different choice.”

Pence certified the 2020 election results, as required by the constitution, despite Trump’s suggestions that he could have resisted.

Vance has said he wouldn’t have done as Pence did.

“If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said in an interview with ABC News earlier this year. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”

Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed attempt to keep power after losing the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in newly unsealed evidence arguing that the former president shouldn’t be immune from prosecution.

Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the filing, which was submitted by submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team following a supreme court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents.

The prosecutors argue that Trump in this case should not be immune because he was acting in the capacity of a candidate, not president, when he attempted to challenge the election results. The prosecutors allege:

Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted — a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.

Tim Walz’s assessment of the debate last night: “That’s gaslighting.”

“Senator Vance is a slick talker,” said Walz, who said he and his opponent had a “civil but spirited debate”. But be also criticized Vance’s many obfuscations last night.

“The moment that really stuck out is I just asked the simplest of all questions that that every single American should be able to answer. I asked him if Donald Trump lost the 2020 election,” Walz said. “He refused to answer.”

Federal prosecutors said they may bring additional charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors said they are pursing “several related investigations” surrounding Adams’s corruption probe after he was charged last week with taking bribes and foreign campaign contributions.

According to the Associated Press, assistant US attorney Hagan Scotten said that it is “quite likely” that prosecutors will seek a superseding indictment and that it is “possible” that more charges will be brought against Adams.

“There are several related investigations here,” Scotten told US district judge Dale Ho during a status hearing.

The youth-led March for Our Lives gun control movement which emerged following the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in 2018 has condemned JD Vance for his “hypocrisy” on gun violence prevention.

In a statement released on Wednesday following last night’s vice presidential debate where Vance urged schools build “stronger doors” to prevent shooters, the movement said:

Despite clear evidence that loose gun laws lead to more deaths, Vance doesn’t want to talk about guns – he wants to talk about ‘mental health’ and armed guards at schools. Let’s talk about it. Vance opposed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that invested billions in school-based mental wellness, instead arguing that we should arm teachers. And from Parkland to Uvalde, time and time again, armed school officers do not prevent school shootings.

Unlike Vance, who believes school shootings are a ‘fact of life’, Walz recognizes we can and must end gun violence. As the Minnesota governor, Walz signed commonsense laws that prevent gun violence long before someone picks up a gun.

Vance mocks Walz’s ‘friends with school shooters’ debate remark

Joan E Greve

Abandoning the civil tone of the VP debate last night, JD Vance came out swinging against Tim Walz as he campaigned in the battleground state of Michigan this afternoon.

Speaking to voters in Auburn Hills, Vance said he thought the debate went “pretty well,” as snap polls indicated voters considered it to be a tie between the two vice-presidential candidates.

Vance then mocked Walz over the Democrat’s biggest gaffe of the night, in which he said he was friends with school shooters. (Walz seemingly meant to say he was friends with victims of school shootings.)

“That was probably only the third or fourth dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance said. “I gotta be honest, I feel a little bad for Governor Walz. And the reason I feel bad for him is because he has to defend the indefensible, and that is the record of Kamala Harris.”

The Republican nominee for vice-president, JD Vance, is in Auburn Hills, Michigan, and has just taken the stage for a rally in this crucial battleground state, the day after his debate last night against his Democratic rival, Tim Walz.

After his relatively amiable presentation last night in what has been dubbed a “midwest nice” debate between the US senator from Ohio and the governor from Michigan, Vance returned to the sharper tone that’s more his norm on the campaign trail.

First, he nodded to the debate last night and said: “I thought it went pretty well,” as the crowd at a manufacturing facility he’s visiting began chanting “JD, JD, JD.”

Vance said he talked to the man at the top of the GOP ticket, Donald Trump, after the debate and Trump seized on Walz’s presumed slip of the tongue that he is friends with school shooters – when it’s widely understood he meant the victims of school shooters, having been talking at the debate about meeting with parents who’d lost their children to the school shooting at Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012.

“That’s probably the third or fourth dumbest comment he made that night,” Vance said, adding that he feels “a bit bad” for Walz because he has to defend Kamala Harris. That’s something of a contrast to his relatively convivial style with Walz last night, when he was critical of Harris but less so about and to Walz.

Hello again, US politics live blog readers, Joe Biden is en route to the Carolinas to survey and be briefed on the appalling damage and death toll from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Kamala Harris is en route to Georgia for the same reason.

Fresh from last night’s debate, JD Vance is about to speak at a rally in Michigan and Tim Walz is joining John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and will appear at a rally in about an hour.

So much news to come and we’ll keep you posted as it happens. Here’s where things stand:

• Joe Biden plans to visit communities in Florida and Georgia tomorrow that have been hit by Hurricane Helene, the White House has announced. That follows his visit to the Carolinas today.

• Implementing Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign could cost the federal government as much as $88b per year on average, according to a new analysis released on Wednesday. If elected, Trump has vowed to carry out the “largest deportation operation” in US history, but he has offered few concrete details about how he would achieve a campaign of such scale – and at what cost.

• Biden has approved a major disaster declaration for the state of Virginia amid the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene. The White House said the president ordered federal aid to supplement commonwealth and local recovery efforts in the areas affected by Helene.

• The vice-presidential hopefuls debated for 90 minutes on Tuesday night, but the Harris campaign wants Americans to remember one moment, a split-second reply that Tim Walz called a “damning non-answer”. Just hours after the primetime event concluded, with viewers split over a winner and analysts praising JD Vance for the more polished performance, the Harris campaign has launched an ad highlighting the moment the Republican refused to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. (He did.)

• Monday’s 60 Minutes show on CBS will feature an interview solely with Harris, after the network said Trump accepted an invitation and then backed out. “A 60 Minutes candidate hour will feature only Kamala Harris after former President Donald Trump, who’d previously agreed to be on the show, decided not to participate in the Monday, October 7 special,” CBS reported.

• There was no clear winner of last night’s vice-presidential debate among registered voters quizzed in another snap poll last night, this one conducted for CNN by polling firm SSRS. After Walz and Vance had a constructive debate, CNN reported that their viewers who were polled thought better of both candidates after the debate than they had before.

• White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan called Iran’s missile attack on Israel yesterday a “significant escalation” in the Middle East conflict, although he said it was ultimately “defeated and ineffective”, in part because of assistance from the US military in shooting down some of the inbound missiles. Biden said his administration is “fully supportive” of Israel and that he’s in “active discussion” with aides about what the appropriate response should be.