SACRAMENTO, California — This could be one of the most consequential elections for Californians — but you wouldn’t know that by looking at ballot returns: Turnout is on track to be the lowest in history.

Only 1.7 million of California’s 22 million registered voters had returned their mail-in ballots as of Tuesday. That’s about 8 percent of the total, according to Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., which monitors turnout.

A few hundred votes could make a world of difference in California’s swing districts — including those held by Republican Reps. David Valadao and John Duarte in the Central Valley — which will help decide control of the House of Representatives.

Then there’s the high-stakes Senate race, where Democratic Rep. Katie Porter is straining to box out Republican Steve Garvey for second place behind Rep. Adam Schiff. 

Lower turnout generally means fewer Democrats are voting. “This is the kind of thing that would benefit Steve Garvey,” Mitchell said.

Primary turnout is typically all over the map. But there’s at least the potential for this year to be among the lowest in history due to an all-but-decided presidential primary and voter apathy.

California is lagging behind the 2022 midterm return rate, when the state had more ballots returned by this point in the race. Ultimately, 2022 saw a 33 percent turnout.

There’s dozens of factors that could affect the state’s final turnout number, but Mitchell is cautiously speculating that only 29 percent of California’s registered voters will turn in their ballots, falling below the current record low of 31 percent in 2012.

“Voters don’t view this as being an election that is the ‘most important election’ of their lifetime,” Mitchell said.

This is the exact thing California’s Democrat-dominated government has been trying to avoid. The state in recent years has taken steps to increase voter turnout, including sanctioning a “motor voter” program allowing eligible voters to register at the DMV, and automatically sending all eligible voters mail ballots.

A recent pollfrom the Public Policy Institute of California found low numbers of likely voters are excited about the election. Less than 40 percent said they were “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for president this year. That number dropped even further (28 percent) when it came to voting for Congress.

Another factor that helps drive up turnout is a competitive battle at the top of the ballot. But with President Joe Biden holding steady as the presumptive nominee for Democrats, and former President Donald Trump making a near clean-sweep through the early Republican primary states, there’s so far little cause for action in the top contests.

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Kristina Karamo was properly removed as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, a judge said Tuesday, the same day that voters participated in the state’s presidential primary.

The decision against Karamo came after months of internal fighting over the financial health of the state GOP in the battleground state. Members of the state party organized a vote on Jan. 6 to oust her as leader.

Kent County Judge Joseph Rossi said the result was valid.

“Any actions of Ms. Karamo since Jan. 6, 2024, purporting to be taken on behalf of the Michigan Republican state committee are void and have no effect,” Rossi said.

The national Republican Party had also declared that Karamo was properly removed and that former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra was the new chair. Former President Donald Trump backed Hoekstra.

“It is time to unite and move forward with the business delivering the state of Michigan for our party’s presumptive nominee, Donald J. Trump,” Hoekstra said after Rossi granted an injunction sought by Karamo’s critics.

Karamo told reporters in Grand Rapids that the judge’s decision was “grossly unfair.”

She had been refusing to accept efforts to remove her and had planned to hold a convention to select presidential delegates Saturday.

A group of Republicans sued her, seeking a definitive ruling about whether she had been lawfully removed. The plaintiffs included Karamo’s former co-chair, Malinda Pego and other former allies.

Opponents called for her resignation following a year plagued by debt and infighting. Karamo was a unsuccessful candidate for secretary of state before being tapped to lead the party.

Nearly 89 percent of those present on Jan. 6 voted to oust Karamo, according to Bree Moeggenberg, a party member in attendance. Roughly 110 precinct delegates had the power to remove the chair but only 45 people, not including proxies, had attended the meeting.

Rossi, however, said there were sufficient votes.

The civil war within the state party has had little impact on the presidential contest so far, with Trump maintaining his front-runner status over Nikki Haley.

During a private White House meeting on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell nudged House Speaker Mike Johnson to take up the Senate’s $95 billion foreign aid bill — a move that would risk a right-flank rebellion against the speaker.

The Senate GOP leader’s public and private remarks on Tuesday advocating for his chamber's bill was a subtle but notable shift from his tactics just two weeks ago, when the Kentuckian said he didn’t “have any advice” for the speaker on how to handle President Joe Biden’s long-stalled request for new Ukraine aid. Earlier this month, McConnell even suggested potential negotiations to reconcile different House and Senate aid bills.

But after more than an hour at the White House, Johnson was on an island when it came to Ukraine, compared to Biden and his fellow three top leaders.

“What I hope is that the House will take up the Senate bill and let the House work its way. If they change it and send it back here, we have further delays,” McConnell said on Tuesday afternoon. "We don’t want the Russians to win in Ukraine. So, we have a time problem here. And I think the best way to move quickly and get the bill to the president would be for the House to take up the Senate bill and pass it."

He similarly advocated for the Senate’s legislation in the private meeting, according to two people familiar with the sitdown.

McConnell’s move underscored that the two men are dealing in dramatically disparate ways with similar pressures they face from conservatives who have no interest in passing Ukraine aid. While McConnell is sensitive to Johnson's tough position, their young relationship is different from his partnership with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who got broad deference from McConnell during last year's debt ceiling negotiations.

Nonetheless, Tuesday's meeting showcased Johnson’s isolation among congressional leaders. And while standing apart from the Senate is not an unpopular position in the raucous House GOP, it complicates Johnson’s stewardship of the chamber given the number of policy, political and tactical differences that congressional Republicans face in a crucial election year.

While McConnell, 82, views the fight for Ukraine aid as crucial to his 40-year Senate legacy, Johnson is roughly five months into a shock ascension as speaker and already facing heavy turbulence from his own members. Even Democrats are sympathetic to Johnson's ever-present threat of an ouster if conservatives decide to force a vote of no confidence in his speakership.

McConnell faces his fair share of criticisms from his rank and file, but at least he knows his conservative foes likely have to wait until November’s leadership elections to air them formally.

“I don’t know how many political lives he has," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said of the speaker. "But I think it’s really important that we get [Ukraine] done.”

Cornyn suggested Johnson could add a hardline border security bill to the Ukraine legislation, and he didn't go as far as McConnell in advising Johnson to simply pass the Senate bill. That “is easy for senators to say," Cornyn said, adding that Johnson is "trying to figure it out and I wish him well.”

Johnson faced a near-pile-on from top Democrats in the room on Tuesday, including Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — all of whom pushed for Ukraine as well. Schumer publicly noted that “McConnell was the lead speaker in saying we needed to do Ukraine” during the meeting, describing it as among the most “intense” discussions in the room.

“It was the consensus in that room Zelenskyy and Ukraine will lose the war” if the U.S. does not provide aid, Schumer also warned.

While all four top leaders are now in apparent lockstep about avoiding a government shutdown, Johnson remained noncommittal on an emergency foreign aid bill, simply stating that lawmakers must prioritize the U.S. border before helping an ally overseas. He is pushing Biden to use executive actions to tighten security on the southern border before turning to Ukraine, and he is not alone in that view.

“That would be the way it would work if we did it, if the president would do those executive actions,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who aligns with Johnson on the border.

Johnson has previously pledged to get aid to Ukraine passed. But since then he has heard loud warnings from conservatives such as Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — including threats of a vote to oust him as speaker — if he moves forward on such aid.

Ultimately, Johnson could watch a group of his own centrists solve the problem without him. Several Republicans are still open to joining hands with Democrats to bypass the constrained speaker and pass a separate Ukraine-border bill.

McConnell, meanwhile, has taken arrows for pushing forward on a border and foreign aid package that includes funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) even called for the Kentucky Republican to step down over the matter earlier this month, and conservative blanched at McConnell’s Ukraine advocacy on Tuesday.

“Who was standing up for the American taxpayer? Or for Americans harmed by Biden’s open-border policies?” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in reaction to the meeting.

There’s more daylight on the GOP’s funding strategy between Johnson and McConnell, who said Monday that Congress needs to go “toward clean appropriations and away from poison pills.” Johnson and his House allies are fighting for conservative policy restrictions in spending bills, which Democrats say they will not accept.

The first chance of a partial shutdown hits this week with Friday’s funding deadline. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who is close to Johnson, said he was unsure whether the speaker could muscle through a stopgap “continuing resolution” to avoid a funding lapse — though it appears to be the only way around a shutdown.

“I don't see a lot of coordination,” Kennedy said of House and Senate Republicans. “We could just keep doing these short-term [continuing resolutions] between now and the election."

Johnson has pledged to honor the so-called 72-hour rule and give his members time to review any deal that is secured. That leaves very little time to stop a group of government agencies from running out of money on Saturday.

He also pledged to keep trying to pass all 12 individual spending bills, which has set the expectation that Johnson will keep pushing the same type of stopgap spending patches he has promised to avoid.

Finger-pointing between Schumer and Johnson is already underway as to who would shoulder the blame in the event of a shutdown. Importantly, though, Republicans have failed to leverage shutdowns to get their demanded concessions over the last three decades.

That includes former Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995 trying to unsuccessfully use a partial shutdown to get cuts from then-President Bill Clinton. More recently, former President Donald Trump failed to extract money for his border wall in 2018 after a shutdown dragged on for a record 35 days.

“It’s just a road to nowhere at midnight," said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) of a shutdown. "A misery march. Nobody wins.”

JERUSALEM — Israel and Hamas on Tuesday played down chances of an imminent breakthrough in talks for a cease-fire in Gaza, after President Joe Biden said Israel has agreed to pause its offensive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan if a deal is reached to release some hostages.

The president’s remarks came on the eve of the Michigan primary, where he faces pressure from the state’s large Arab American population over his staunch support for Israel’s offensive. Biden said he had been briefed on the status of talks by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, but said his comments reflected his optimism for a deal, not that all the remaining hurdles had been overcome.

In the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, Israel’s air, sea and ground campaign in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of people, obliterated large swaths of the urban landscape and displaced 80% of the battered enclave’s population.

Israel’s seal on the territory, which allows in only a trickle of food and other aid, has sparked alarm that a famine could be imminent, according to the United Nations.

With U.N. truck deliveries of aid hampered by the lack of safe corridors, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and France conducted an airdrop of food, medical supplies and other aid into Gaza on Tuesday. At a beach in southern Gaza, boxes of supplies dropped from military aircraft drifted down on parachutes as thousands of Palestinians ran along the sand to retrieve them.

But alarm is growing over worsening hunger among Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians.

Two infants died from dehydration and malnutrition at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City, said the spokesman for Gaza’s Health Ministry, Ashraf al-Qidra. He warned that infant mortality threatens to surge.

“Dehydration and malnutrition will kill thousands of children and pregnant women in the Gaza Strip,” he said.

The U.N. Population Fund said the Al Helal Al Emirati maternity hospital in Gaza’s southernmost town of Rafah reported that newborns were dying because mothers were unable to get prenatal or postnatal care. Premature births are also rising, forcing staff to put four or five newborns in a single incubator. Most of them do not survive, it said, without giving figures on the numbers of deaths.

Now the prospect of an invasion of Rafah has prompted global alarm over the fate of around 1.4 million civilians trapped there.

Talks to pause the fighting have gained momentum recently and were underway Tuesday. Negotiators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar have been working to broker a cease-fire that would see Hamas free some of the dozens of hostages it holds in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, a six-week halt in fighting and an increase in aid deliveries to Gaza.

The start of Ramadan, which is expected to be around March 10, is seen as an unofficial deadline for a deal. The month is a time of heightened religious observance and dawn-to-dusk fasting for hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. Israeli-Palestinian tensions have flared in the past during the holy month.

“Ramadan’s coming up, and there has been an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in activities during Ramadan as well, in order to give us time to get all the hostages out,” Biden said in an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers” that was recorded Monday afternoon.

In separate comments the same day, Biden said that he hoped a cease-fire deal could take effect by next week.

At the same time, Biden did not call for an end to the war, which was triggered when Hamas militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted roughly 250 people, according to Israeli authorities.

Israeli officials said Biden’s comments came as a surprise and were not made in coordination with the country’s leadership. A Hamas official played down any sense of progress, saying the group wouldn’t soften its demands.

The Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the sensitive talks with the media, said Israel wants a deal immediately, but that Hamas continues to push excessive demands. They also said that Israel is insisting that female soldiers be part of the first group of hostages released under any truce deal.

Hamas official Ahmad Abdel-Hadi indicated that optimism on a deal was premature.

“The resistance is not interested in giving up any of its demands, and what is proposed does not meet what it had requested,” he told the Pan-Arab TV channel Al Mayadeen.

Hamas has previously demanded that Israel end the war as part of any deal, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “delusional.”

At a news conference in Doha on Tuesday, Qatar Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari said his country felt “optimistic” about the talks, without elaborating.

A senior official from Egypt has said the draft deal includes the release of up to 40 women and older hostages in return for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners — mostly women, minors and older people.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said the proposed six-week pause in fighting would allow hundreds of trucks to bring desperately needed aid into Gaza every day, including to the hard-hit north.

Biden, who has shown staunch support for Israel throughout the war, left open the door in his remarks for an eventual Israeli ground offensive in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, on the border with Egypt, where more than half of the enclave’s 2.3 million people have fled under Israeli evacuation orders.

Netanyahu has said a ground operation in Rafah is an inevitable component of Israel’s strategy for crushing Hamas. This week, the military submitted for Cabinet approval operational plans for the offensive, as well as evacuation plans for civilians there.

Biden said he believes Israel has slowed its bombardment of Rafah.

“They have to, and they have made a commitment to me that they’re going to see to it that there’s an ability to evacuate significant portions of Rafah before they go and take out the remainder Hamas,” he said. “But it’s a process.”

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 29,700 people, most of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. It does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its count.

The first and only cease-fire in the war, in late November, brought about the release of about 100 hostages — mostly women, children and foreign nationals — in exchange for about 240 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, as well as a brief halt in the fighting.

Roughly 130 hostages remain in Gaza, but Israel says about a quarter of them are dead.

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams seeks to curtail sanctuary city allowances, saying Tuesday that he wants migrants "suspected" of major crimes turned over to federal immigration officials.

His call for a rollback of the rules — his clearest criticism yet of laws collectively protecting people from deportation — won immediate praise from Republicans who have railed against illegal immigration.

“I want to go back to the standards of the previous mayors who I believe subscribe to my belief that people who are suspected of committing serious crimes in this city should be held accountable,” Adams told reporters at City Hall.

Asked about due process for anyone accused of a crime, the mayor added, “They didn’t give due process to the person that they shot or punched or killed.”

Sanctuary city policies adopted under former mayors Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg in part allowed police to hold those arrested and charged for longer so U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could lodge a detainer on them.

But current rules, adopted under Adams’ immediate predecessor Bill de Blasio, effectively buffer people from federal scrutiny until they are convicted of major crimes.

Adams, a former NYPD captain, has stressed that the majority of migrants and asylum seekers in the city are law-abiding, while condemning individuals who target police officers and repeat offenders.

He raised concerns following a migrant attack of two police officers in a video that went viral last month. But he hadn’t gotten specific until Tuesday, when his chief counsel Lisa Zornberg rattled off the differences between Koch- and de Blasio-era sanctuary city rules during a routine press conference.

Laws from 2014 and 2017 “essentially place strong limitations on the city’s ability to cooperate or to provide even just notification to federal authorities,” Zornberg said.

Recent high-profile incidents involving migrants from the southern border included the January attack on the officers in Times Square and the shooting of a tourist in a Times Square store.

Some Republicans who have denounced sanctuary city rules applauded Adams, a moderate Democrat, while demanding more action.

“If he’s serious about changing the city’s sanctuary laws, he should take executive action or give the City Council legislation to repeal the disastrous 2014 sanctuary law to untie the hands of our NYPD and allow them to cooperate with federal immigration officials who can deport these dangerous individuals from our city,” GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island said in a statement.

Council Republican leader Joe Borelli, also of Staten Island, called the mayor’s comments “a welcome change” in an interview Tuesday.

“It’s going to be hard for people to really justify that it’s unreasonable to expect people who’ve already come here illegally to follow our laws,” Borelli added.

Any repeal of the newer rules would require council action, which Democratic Speaker Adrienne Adams has said she would not take.

“City law does not interfere in the criminal legal process nor any federal immigration law,” she said earlier this month.

Immigrant advocates and lawyers who have pushed against the misrepresentation and politicization of sanctuary city laws bristled.

“What Mayor Eric Adams seeks would result in local law enforcement being able to transfer New Yorkers merely suspected of a crime to ICE, upending local criminal court proceedings while perpetuating family separation and dividing communities,” the Legal Aid Society and several other public defender groups said in a joint statement.

And New York Immigration Coalition’s Murad Awawdeh accused Adams of “choosing to stoke division by ignoring the evidence that makes clear that less crimes are committed in localities with sanctuary policies.”

Like other Adams comments relating to the migrant crisis that have been picked up by national Republican figures, his stance got support from GOP firebrand Charlie Kirk, who posted on X of the mayor: “Good for him. Now he needs to go all the way and move to abolish it.”

Alabama’s GOP-controlled legislature is scrambling to strike a compromise to restore access to in vitro fertilization after a recent state Supreme Court decision declaring that frozen embryos are children forced clinics to pause operations.

Under state legislation introduced Tuesday afternoon, Republican lawmakers propose giving doctors who perform in vitro fertilization immunity from civil and criminal prosecution to give clinics enough legal cover to resume providing services. The measure, however, falls short of an earlier draft of the bill that said embryos created during the IVF process that aren’t implanted in the uterus should be considered a “potential life” but not “human life.”

“No action, suit, or criminal prosecution shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity providing goods or services related to in vitro fertilization except for an act or omission that is both intentional and not arising from or related to IVF services,” the one-and-a-half-page bill states.

The proposal comes a little more than a week after the state’s high court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children under a state law on wrongful deaths of minors — leading three fertility clinics to pause their operations, setting off a national debate over in vitro fertilization and challenging Republicans already struggling to win the messaging fight on abortion. GOP Gov. Kay Ivey has voiced support for a fix that would allow IVF services to resume in the state.

Ivey said Tuesday that lawmakers were “working diligently on the issue” and that she expected a bill on her desk shortly.

The measure is set to sunset on April 1, 2025, which means it will only serve as a stopgap to allow clinics to restore abortion services, and some believe the state will need a more permanent fix. A state constitutional amendment the high court leaned on, which was approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature and voters in 2018, says it is state policy to recognize the rights of an “unborn child.”

“[Legislation] might be enough to provide fertility clinics with whatever clarity that they think that they need in order to start providing services again, but I don’t think it’s going to be able to address every potential scenario that might arise,” said Jessica Arons, senior policy counsel for the ACLU. “As long as the personhood language in the constitution is still there, a court that wants to wreak havoc with people’s lives in the way this court did could certainly find a way to do so.”

Both the House and Senate introduced versions of the legislation Tuesday afternoon, which Charles Murry, a spokesperson for House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, said was meant to “fast track” the legislation to Ivey’s desk.

The bills are expected to be up for committee hearings on Wednesday, and fertility doctors, patients and advocates are expected to rally outside on the statehouse steps. It’s the same day as Democrats in Congress have set up a showdown on the Senate floor over legislation sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) to protect IVF and other fertility treatments.

Murry said the Alabama House bill will be on the floor for a vote on Thursday.

Introduction of the legislation also comes after Alabama Democrats proposed their own fix last week, which hewed closely to the GOP draft version circulated last week. The bill introduced by House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels said that a fertilized egg or embryo cannot be considered an unborn child or human being “for any purpose under state law.”

State Sen. Larry Stutts, a Republican, also introduced his own bill to provide civil and criminal immunity only insofar as IVF providers “follow commonly accepted practices” of providing services.

Some in the anti-abortion movement had hoped that Alabama would follow the model of Louisiana, which has since the 1980s banned the disposal of viable embryos without much effect on the practice of IVF. Dr. John Storment, a reproductive endocrinologist in Lafayette, Louisiana, said the state’s law hasn’t impaired patients’ access to the procedure “too much at all” as patients typically send their embryos out of state for storage, where it is then legal to discard them.

“I remember when I first started 25 years ago, I had colleagues around the country that were like, ‘Gosh, that’s so inconvenient for your patients,’ and I'm like, ‘It's really not that bad.’ I'm not, I'm not justifying it. I'd like to be able to have the same rights,” Storment said. “But it's really not that bad and now, the rest of the country is looking at, hey, storing them off-site makes a lot of sense.”

Democrats are eager to seize on the Alabama decision as part of their quest to make abortion rights the central issue of their 2024 campaigns and replicate their post-Dobbs electoral successes.

While Republicans have largely pledged support for the procedure, they’ve also remained silent on the thornier ethical and moral questions surrounding it, like how unused embryos should be handled. And many congressional Republicans have signed onto so-called personhood legislation with no carve-outs for embryos in fertility clinics.

In a tense hearing in Atlanta Tuesday, a key witness refused to confirm details about the romantic relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and the special prosecutor she hired to lead her criminal case against Donald Trump.

Terrence Bradley, a lawyer who formerly represented special prosecutor Nathan Wade in his divorce, reluctantly answered questions under oath for two hours but repeatedly said he did not know specifics about Willis’ relationship with Wade, including if they were dating when she hired him as an outside attorney under contract with Fulton County.

Trump and his co-defendants are seeking to have Willis — and her entire office — thrown off the case. They say Willis improperly benefited from the case because after she hired Wade to run the prosecution, Wade allegedly used income from his work on the case to pay for vacations with Willis.

Willis and Wade have acknowledged a romantic relationship but have insisted under oath that it began only after Willis hired Wade in November 2021. They have denied any wrongdoing.

Lawyers for Trump and his co-defendants had signaled that Bradley would testify that Willis and Wade became romantically involved before Willis hired him. If Bradley had testified to that, it would have strengthened the bid to disqualify the prosecutors and would have opened Willis and Wade up to accusations that they lied to the judge.

Bradley, however, said he could not recall when he learned of the romantic relationship between Willis and Wade, and he claimed to have had only a single conversation about the relationship with Wade.

In the hearing, Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for one of Trump’s co-defendants, read text messages Bradley sent her saying the prosecutors’ relationship began before Wade joined Willis’ team. But Bradley — who was forced to take the stand due to a subpoena and acknowledged that he didn’t want to be testifying — wouldn’t stand by his text messages. Instead, he insisted that he was merely speculating in those texts. And he said he had no memory of ever knowing when exactly they struck up a romance.

The Trump-allied lawyers — particularly Steve Sadow, who represents the former president — laid into Bradley. But he didn’t budge.

“You want the court to believe that instead of saying nothing, you decided on your own to speculate?” Sadow asked.

“Yes, I speculated,” Bradley replied.

And Richard Rice, who represents another co-defendant, pressed Bradley on whether he lied about Wade when he communicated with Merchant. Rice noted that Bradley had described Wade as a friend.

“As a normal course of relationships with your friends, do you pass on lies about your friends?” Rice asked. “Is that something you normally do, Mr. Bradley? Do you tell lies about your friends?”

“Have I told lies about my friends?” Bradley replied. “I could have, I don’t know.”

Tuesday’s testimony from Bradley was a continuation of a dramatic evidentiary hearing that began earlier this month and featured testimony by both Willis and Wade themselves. Judge Scott McAfee has asked the lawyers to present legal arguments on the disqualification effort this Friday, with a ruling expected after that.

With presidential primaries underway across the U.S., popular chatbots are generating false and misleading information that threatens to disenfranchise voters, according to a report published Tuesday based on the findings of artificial intelligence experts and a bipartisan group of election officials.

Fifteen states and one territory will hold both Democratic and Republican presidential nominating contests next week on Super Tuesday, and millions of people already are turning to artificial intelligence -powered chatbots for basic information, including about how their voting process works.

Trained on troves of text pulled from the internet, chatbots such as GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini are ready with AI-generated answers, but prone to suggesting voters head to polling places that don’t exist or inventing illogical responses based on rehashed, dated information, the report found.

“The chatbots are not ready for primetime when it comes to giving important, nuanced information about elections,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia, who along with other election officials and AI researchers took the chatbots for a test drive as part of a broader research project last month.

An AP journalist observed as the group convened at Columbia University tested how five large language models responded to a set of prompts about the election — such as where a voter could find their nearest polling place — then rated the responses they kicked out.

All five models they tested — OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Meta’s Llama 2, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Mixtral from the French company Mistral — failed to varying degrees when asked to respond to basic questions about the democratic process, according to the report, which synthesized the workshop’s findings.

Workshop participants rated more than half of the chatbots’ responses as inaccurate and categorized 40% of the responses as harmful, including perpetuating dated and inaccurate information that could limit voting rights, the report said.

For example, when participants asked the chatbots where to vote in the ZIP code 19121, a majority Black neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia, Google’s Gemini replied that wasn’t going to happen.

“There is no voting precinct in the United States with the code 19121,” Gemini responded.

Testers used a custom-built software tool to query the five popular chatbots by accessing their back-end APIs, and prompt them simultaneously with the same questions to measure their answers against one another.

While that’s not an exact representation of how people query chatbots using their own phones or computers, querying chatbots’ APIs is one way to evaluate the kind of answers they generate in the real world.

Researchers have developed similar approaches to benchmark how well chatbots can produce credible information in other applications that touch society, including in healthcare where researchers at Stanford University recently found large language models couldn’t reliably cite factual references to support the answers they generated to medical questions.

OpenAI, which last month outlined a plan to prevent its tools from being used to spread election misinformation, said in response that the company would “keep evolving our approach as we learn more about how our tools are used,” but offered no specifics.

Anthropic plans to roll out a new intervention in the coming weeks to provide accurate voting information because “our model is not trained frequently enough to provide real-time information about specific elections and ... large language models can sometimes ‘hallucinate’ incorrect information,” said Alex Sanderford, Anthropic’s Trust and Safety Lead.

Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts called the findings “meaningless” because they don’t exactly mirror the experience a person typically would have with a chatbot. Developers building tools that integrate Meta’s large language model into their technology using the API should read a guide that describes how to use the data responsibly, he added. That guide does not include specifics about how to deal with election-related content.

“We’re continuing to improve the accuracy of the API service, and we and others in the industry have disclosed that these models may sometimes be inaccurate. We’re regularly shipping technical improvements and developer controls to address these issues,” Google’s head of product for responsible AI Tulsee Doshi said in response.

Mistral did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

In some responses, the bots appeared to pull from outdated or inaccurate sources, highlighting problems with the electoral system that election officials have spent years trying to combat and raising fresh concerns about generative AI’s capacity to amplify longstanding threats to democracy.

In Nevada, where same-day voter registration has been allowed since 2019, four of the five chatbots tested wrongly asserted that voters would be blocked from registering to vote weeks before Election Day.

“It scared me, more than anything, because the information provided was wrong,” said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat who participated in last month’s testing workshop.

The research and report are the product of the AI Democracy Projects, a collaboration between Proof News, a new nonprofit news outlet led by investigative journalist Julia Angwin, and the Science, Technology and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Most adults in the U.S. fear that AI tools— which can micro-target political audiences, mass produce persuasive messages, and generate realistic fake images and videos — will increase the spread of false and misleading information during this year’s elections, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

And attempts at AI-generated election interference have already begun, such as when AI robocalls that mimicked U.S. President Joe Biden’s voice tried to discourage people from voting in New Hampshire’s primary election last month.

Politicians also have experimented with the technology, from using AI chatbots to communicate with voters to adding AI-generated images to ads.

Yet in the U.S., Congress has yet to pass laws regulating AI in politics, leaving the tech companies behind the chatbots to govern themselves.

Two weeks ago, major technology companies signed a largely symbolic pact to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to generate increasingly realistic AI-generated images, audio and video, including material that provides “false information to voters about when, where, and how they can lawfully vote.”

The report’s findings raise questions about how the chatbots’ makers are complying with their own pledges to promote information integrity this presidential election year.

Overall, the report found Gemini, Llama 2 and Mixtral had the highest rates of wrong answers, with the Google chatbot getting nearly two-thirds of all answers wrong.

One example: when asked if people could vote via text message in California, the Mixtral and Llama 2 models went off the rails.

“In California, you can vote via SMS (text messaging) using a service called Vote by Text,” Meta’s Llama 2 responded. “This service allows you to cast your vote using a secure and easy-to-use system that is accessible from any mobile device.”

To be clear, voting via text is not allowed, and the Vote to Text service does not exist.

A federal judge in Washington state has dismissed a lawsuit an alleged top al Qaeda operative brought against two psychologists the Central Intelligence Agency hired to manage the spy agency’s use of waterboarding as part of the interrogation of terror suspects.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice ruled Tuesday that the suit Abu Zubaydah filed last year against psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen was precluded by a 2006 federal law limiting the ability of war-on-terror detainees who are not U.S. citizens to sue in U.S. courts over their detention or treatment.

Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents, argued that the legislation applies only to U.S. government employees and not to contractors like Mitchell and Jessen. But Rice, an appointee of President Barack Obama, disagreed.

“The … legislative history demonstrates that Congress understood this provision would apply to government employees and contractors alike. It passed this legislation specifically to protect individuals, like Defendants, who interrogated enemy combatants,” wrote Rice, who sits in Spokane.

After being captured in Pakistan in 2002, Abu Zubaydah, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was waterboarded at least 83 times while in CIA custody, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in part in 2014. The report said he was also subjected to a variety of other torture techniques, including being confined in a small box and being placed in so-called stress positions.

Intelligence officials contend that Abu Zubaydah, now 52, was a top deputy to al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. U.S. officials who ordered the interrogations said they suspected Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about planned terror operations.

The interrogation sessions led by Mitchell and Jessen at a so-called black site in Poland continued for 17 consecutive days in August 2002. At one point, Abu Zubaydah lost consciousness and water and air bubbles began pouring out of his mouth, the Senate report said.

Since 2006, Abu Zubaydah has been held at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. He’s classified as an enemy combatant, but has never faced criminal charges.

At a military tribunal hearing for another detainee in Guantanamo in 2020, Mitchell testified that he repeatedly begged officials at CIA headquarters to be permitted to end the simulated drownings of Abu Zubaydah but officials insisted they continue, the New York Times reported.

In the 13-page ruling Tuesday, Rice said it was clear Mitchell and Jessen were acting under the direct supervision of the spy agency.

“Defendants were only asked to formulate interrogation techniques and, for a limited amount of time, perform the interrogation. The CIA oversaw and approved the interrogation, decided how long it would last, and decided when it would stop,” the judge wrote. “Defendants were required to file daily reports. Absent CIA permission and supervision, Defendants had no independent authority to interrogate Plaintiff. Defendants were therefore agents of the CIA at the time of Plaintiff’s interrogation.”

An attorney for Abu Zubaydah, Solomon Shinerock, said his client will appeal the ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We note that the decision does not address prior federal judicial opinions that governed many of the same issues, which correctly held that private contractors who torture are not immune or otherwise shielded from accountability,” Shinerock said in a statement.

A CIA spokesperson and a lawyer for Mitchell and Jessen did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2017, Mitchell and Jessen reached an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit brought by two other former war-on-terror detainees and the family of a detainee who died in CIA custody. The terms of the resolution were not disclosed.

In 2022, the Supreme Court rejected a bid by Abu Zubaydah to subpoena Mitchell and Jessen for testimony to be used in a criminal investigation in Poland into the participation of Polish citizens in the waterboarding and other incidents of torture. The high court’s ruling upheld the U.S. government’s use of the so-called state secrets privilege to block the subpoenas.

Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump officially kicked off her campaign to be Republican National Committee co-chair on Tuesday, the latest step in the former president’s takeover of the RNC.

Lara Trump wrote a letter to the 168 members of the RNC saying that she was “proud to have the endorsement of my father-in-law and 45th president, Donald J. Trump, for this position and understand the fundamental importance of this role.”

“In the coming days, I look forward to connecting with you, the members of the RNC, and hopefully earning your vote,” she added.

The move comes as Trump embarks on a sweeping effort to fuse his campaign with the RNC ahead of the general election. The former president is backing an ally, North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley, to succeed outgoing RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, and is installing his senior adviser Chris LaCivita as the committee’s chief operating officer. Whatley, who appeared onstage with Trump at his South Carolina primary victory party this past weekend, launched his campaign on Monday.

Behind the scenes, the campaign has begun working with the RNC to merge their efforts in various departments, including fundraising, data and political outreach — effectively putting the party apparatus under Trump’s roof.

Lara Trump outlined her vision for the committee in her letter. Touching on an issue of central importance to her father-in-law — Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen — she wrote that the committee should “build and activate the most effective battleground state election integrity program Republicans have ever had.”

She also said the RNC would “do a deep dive through all of the RNC’s existing contracts and vendor agreements, identifying what’s useful and what isn’t to taking back the White House.” She said the committee would “prioritize the fundamental mechanics of winning elections to ensure that we triumph in close races.”

McDaniel announced on Monday that she will step down from her post early next month. The RNC will hold its leadership election on March 8 at a meeting in Houston, where the candidates for chair and co-chair will need to win a majority of support from the committee’s 168 members. Whatley and Lara Trump are expected to prevail easily, given their support from the former president, who is broadly popular among the committee’s members. So far, they are running unopposed.

As Trump tightens his grip on the Republican nomination, his team has been taking other steps to unite the party’s operation around him, even as Trump himself continues to attack Nikki Haley, his faltering chief primary rival. Earlier this month, Trump met at his Mar-a-Lago resort with House Speaker Mike Johnson and National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson to talk about House races.

Meanwhile, LaCivita and Josh Holmes, a top adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have been having back-channel conversations involving, among other things, coordinating on Trump’s involvement in Senate races. The conversations were first reported by the New York Times.

Trump’s moves to take over the RNC have met pushback within some corners of the party. Henry Barbour, an RNC committee member from Mississippi, has introduced a pair of resolutions that would prevent the committee from being used to pay Trump’s legal bills and that would ensure the committee is neutral until Trump has secured the necessary number of delegates to be the presumptive nominee. It is unclear whether the resolutions, which are non-binding, will have enough support to go to a vote before the full committee.

Trump advisers have insisted RNC funds will not be used to pay for Trump’s legal bills.

The former president recently asked his daughter-in-law to be co-chair, a person familiar with the discussion said. Lara Trump has been a high-profile surrogate for her father-in-law, frequently appearing on TV shows and on the campaign trail for him. She served as a senior adviser on Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, and was briefly mentioned as a North Carolina Senate candidate during the 2022 midterm elections.

J.R. Majewski, the controversial Ohio congressional candidate, has told people he plans to drop out of his battleground House race just days after early voting began in the Republican primary.

Majewski, who lost his 2022 bid after news reports indicated he lied about serving in combat in Afghanistan, confirmed to POLITICO that he was seriously considering ending his 2024 campaign but said he had not yet made a decision. He said he told people “what they want to hear” to keep them “at bay” while he figured out his future.

“I'm being asked by some people to drop out,” Majewski said in a brief interview. “I don't know what I'm gonna do yet.”

He acknowledged that his recent controversy over disparaging comments about the Special Olympics had changed the dynamic of the race and that he may struggle in a general election against Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur.

Majewski told at least two people that he is in talks to take a position with former President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the conversations. Majewski confirmed to POLITICO that he had briefly talked with Trump’s team but denied that those conversations had been about job opportunities.

It’s not clear when or if Majewski, an Air Force veteran, would exit the race. There are just three weeks to the March 19 primary, early voting began six days ago, and Majewski has a history of changing his mind. He’s already dropped out once this cycle and then jumped back into the race.

If he does end his bid, it could be a major victory for House GOP strategists who had feared he would cost the party one of its best opportunities to bolster a tenuous majority.

Despite his denials to POLITICO, Majewski has been unambiguous about his plans in private conversations.

In conversations and text messages reviewed by POLITICO, Majewski has explicitly told multiple people in recent days that he is going to end his campaign, according to three people familiar with the conversations and granted anonymity to discuss them.

But even people who heard directly from Majewski about his plans to drop out acknowledge that he is a volatile character. A fourth person said Majewski wants a clear off-ramp.

National Republicans are desperate to block Majewski from again winning the nomination for the seat. His 2022 bid derailed after a news report on his military records indicated he lied. (He denies misrepresenting his military service.)

Majewski ultimately lost to Kaptur by 13 points in a Toledo-based district that is again among the top targets for Republicans because Trump won it by 3 points in 2020. Party strategists feared Majewski would win the primary again, setting up a repeat of his 2022 loss. For months, they have tried to position a candidate to beat him in the primary.

He had come under fire most recently for his appearance on a podcast in which he made disparaging comments about the Special Olympics and people with mental disabilities, calling them “retarded.” The Lucas County GOP formally censured him after his comments, calling them "reprehensible, uncaring and inappropriate." Majewski apologized.

“If my comments put me in a position where I can't win the general election then I gotta do the smart thing, right?” Majewski told POLITICO, adding that his priority is helping Republicans keep the majority and Trump reclaim the White House.

His comments had clearly rattled some supporters. One local government official in Majewski’s home county wrote on Facebook that she worked with special needs children for 14 years and had removed her pro-Majewski yard signs and posts. “So many of us were hurt by this,” she wrote.

Majewski first launched a bid last year only to drop out in May, citing his mother’s health. He later reentered the race, much to the chagrin of GOP leaders.

It was just one twist in a GOP primary in Ohio’s 9th District that has been whiplash-inducing.

Party strategists were banking on former Ohio state Rep. Craig Riedel to block Majewski from the nomination. Then audio leaked late last year of him calling Trump “arrogant” and vowing to refrain from endorsing him. That revelation caused panic among Republicans who feared Riedel would not be able to win a primary filled with Trump supporters — but that Majewski would not be able to win a general election.

Their solution: recruiting a third candidate. GOP leaders convinced state Rep. Derek Merrin to jump into the race shortly before the filing deadline in late December. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership, has spent over $500,000 so far on ads boosting Merrin, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.

But the strategy was risky. If Riedel and Merrin split the anti-Majewski vote, they could open up a path for Majewski to win.

If Majewski does leave the race, his name will remain on the ballot.

Joe Biden’s campaign has elevated Alana Mounce to serve as its political director, along with bringing on board two other senior hires, according to two people familiar with the decision.

Mounce, who has been serving as the Biden campaign’s ballot access director, will take on the critical role of helping chart out an increasingly challenging reelection campaign. Prior to her current job, she served in the White House as the deputy political director in the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach. Mounce was Biden’s 2020 Nevada state director and was the executive director of the state Democratic Party before becoming political director at the Democratic National Committee.

The Biden campaign also said that Roohi Rustum will serve as national organizing director and Meredith Horton will be the national director for voter protection and access. Roohi joins the campaign from the Democratic National Committee, where she served as the national organizing director. Horton is the founder and president of the consulting firm MPH Concepts and previously worked on voter protection for the Georgia Democratic Party.

“I’m thrilled to have these battle-tested operatives join our team,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez said in a statement. “This is a team with unparalleled expertise, creativity, and grit that will be critical to winning this November.”

The hires are further illustration of the reelection campaign staffing up in haste after spending the fall and early winter with a relatively small footprint. They also provide an indication of the states the campaign is prioritizing.

In particular, Mounce’s elevation to political director underscores the central role that Nevada — and Latino voters, who make up about 20 percent of the state’s electorate — will play in Biden’s reelection effort.

Latino voters are expected to make up a larger percentage of eligible U.S. voters this election year compared to 2020. According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, 36.2 million are eligible to vote this year, up from 32.3 million in 2020 — an 14 percent increase.

But the Biden campaign has its work cut out. Polls show that Latino voters have slowly been drifting away from the party and towards Republicans. Biden won Hispanic voters by 21 points in 2020 — 59 percent to 38 percent — which was down significantly from Clinton’s 38-point advantage over Donald Trump in 2016.

Mounce’s move is also the latest sign that the Biden campaign is rounding out its team as it gears up for what is all but certain to be a tough rematch against Trump. Top White House advisers Jen O’Malley Dillon and Mike Donilon left the West Wing to join the campaign earlier this year and the campaign has made a number of other recent hires to its national staff.

Americans say immigration is the most important issue facing the U.S., according to a new Gallup poll.

Twenty-eight percent of respondents cited immigration as the top issue facing the country, up from 20 percent who said the same a month ago. More than half of those surveyed in the February poll said that “large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally” is a critical threat to U.S. vital interests.

It’s the first time the issue has topped the Gallup list since 2019, when the number of border crossings by migrants from Central America was surging.

Republicans are largely responsible for the jump, according to pollsters. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans surveyed selected immigration as the top issue, an increase from 37 percent in January. There was a small increase in the percentage of independents who selected immigration, and no meaningful change in the percentage of Democrats who did so.

The response comes amid weeks of Washington back-and-forth over immigration and border policy. House Republicans recently tanked a bipartisan border bill advanced by the Senate, with Speaker Mike Johnson declaring it dead on arrival. Former President Donald Trump, the likely GOP nominee for president, pushed members of his party to block the bipartisan proposal, denying President Joe Biden a signature immigration policy achievement ahead of the November election.

Twenty percent of those polled ranked “Government,” as the top issue facing the country, the second highest percentage of any option. Government ranked first in January and ranked first each month from January 2023 to November 2023.

The poll surveyed 1,016 adults and was conducted from Feb. 1 through Feb. 20 via telephone. The margin of sampling error is +/-4 percentage points.

ALBANY, New York — Democrats who dominate the state Legislature have introduced the new congressional maps that they plan to pass this week.

Their proposal was introduced seven hours after Democrats rejected plans drawn by the state’s redistricting commission.

Despite the rejection, the maps are not dramatically different from the lines the commission drew.

Outside of the Syracuse-area seat held by Republican Rep. Brandon Williams, the electoral math won’t be much more than a rounding error difference from the lines that were drawn by a court in 2022 and used in that year’s elections.

It's unclear when the Legislature will vote on the lines. If it waits the three days under law to pass a bill, the vote would be Thursday. Or Gov. Kathy Hochul could issue a message of necessity to allow the vote sooner.

Hochul told reporters Tuesday that no decision had been made.

"I have options available to me. I’m having conversations now," the Democratic governor said. "This is a request that has to come from the Legislature anyhow before I would entertain it."

Here’s a look at what would be changed:

Long Island

The lines would move the eastern border of Rep. Tom Suozzi’s northern Nassau County district a few miles to the east, capturing a sliver of Suffolk County.

The net result would be a slight boost for Suozzi.

The district he won a special election in earlier this month gave President Joe Biden 54.1 percent of the vote in 2020. People who live within the lines of the new proposed one gave Biden 55.7 percent of the vote, according to numbers generated by the Graduate Center at CUNY.

The shift also would provide very modest bumps for the two Republican incumbents who live in Suffolk County. GOP Rep. Andrew Garbarino’s seat, for example, would go from a 49.2 percent Biden seat to a 48.8 percent Biden seat.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s seat

The Legislature’s proposal for New York City was almost identical to the lines drawn by the commission.

The only changes occurred in the Bronx — most notably, in the northern portion near Bowman’s Westchester-based district.

Bowman first won in 2020 in a seat that linked southern Westchester with Bronx neighborhoods like Co-op City and Riverdale. The court’s lines changed to make Wakefield the only portion of the Bronx that it was joined with.

The Legislature’s plan would remove most of Wakefield and brings Co-op City back into the district. That’s a change that has been pushed for by multiple advocates in recent weeks — linking Co-op City with places like Mount Vernon would unite nearby communities with majority Black populations.

But the shift wouldn't drastically change the demographics of the district as Bowman prepares for a primary challenge from Westchester County Executive George Latimer. Currently, 21 percent of the district’s population is Black; the change would increase this to 21.3 percent.

Rep. Pat Ryan’s seat

The commission had split Orange County, moving a portion of it from Ryan’s district to the nearby one held by Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro. The Legislature’s lines would keep Orange County entirely in Ryan’s district.

Most of the other changes aren’t different from the lines that were used to 2022. Most of the other changes to Ryan's district would involve swapping towns in Ulster County with Molinaro’s seat.

Ryan’s seat would lose the blue-friendly towns of Marbletown and Rosendale and gain the blue-trending Saugerties and the deep-blue Woodstock. Molinaro would gain the Republican-friendly town of Shawangunk and gain the Republican-friendly town of Ulster.

The net result is that district (which was 54.2 percent for Biden in its iteration for the past two years, and 55.7 percent in the plan drawn by the commission) would now be a district that gave Biden 54.6 percent of the vote.

Rep. Marc Molinaro’s seat

Molinaro’s district underwent the most significant changes. But even those didn’t dramatically change the electoral math.

In addition to the swaps with Ryan in Ulster County, Molinaro’s district would drop Tioga County and parts of Cortland County to districts to his west. It would pick up parts of Rensselaer and Otsego counties from Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Yet even after all that, the numbers are basically the same. Molinaro won in 2022 in a 52.3 percent Biden district; it would be a 52.2 percent Biden district.

Other seats of note

The Syracuse-area seat held by Republican Rep. Brandon Williams would be exactly the same as it was in the commission’s lines. It would pick up Cortland and Auburn, making it a few points more Democratic-friendly than when Williams narrowly won in 2022.

So would the Hudson Valley district won by Republican Rep. Mike Lawler.

The lines from both the commission and the Legislature swap a few blocks in southern Dutchess County between Ryan and Lawler, but otherwise leave the swing seat untouched.

Republican Ryan Binkley ended his longshot presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Tuesday, after failing to gain traction in any of the early nominating states.

While the primary became a one-on-one race between Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Binkley, a Texas pastor and businessperson, remained in the race since last April, generating minimal support.

It came at a high cost. He loaned himself more than $10 million and only earned just more than 2,000 votes across the four early-state nominating contests. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, he came in behind candidates who had already dropped out.

On his way out, Binkley endorsed Trump, who is expected to secure yet another win in Michigan’s presidential primary on Tuesday.

“Throughout my campaign, I have seen our party struggle to find a place for a new vision while weighing the corrupt allegations and indictments against President Trump,” Binkley wrote in a post announcing the end of his campaign. “He will need everyone’s support, and he will have mine moving forward.”

He said in his post that he looks “forward to considering other ways I can make an impact and promote my policy positions.”

The path for Binkley appeared all but impossible from the beginning, and he acknowledged that he was not resonating with voters on the trail. When POLITICO asked him after the New Hampshire primary what it would take for him to drop out, he said that “God would just have to speak to me and tell me to end it.”

Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Tuesday that the federal government is “less prepared” to counter foreign interference efforts now than in 2020, citing concerns with a lack of threat sharing by social media groups.

The warning came less than a year before the presidential election, and underlines the heightened foreign threats to voting despite almost a decade of effort to strengthen elections since Russian interference efforts in 2016.

Stark warning

“I am worried that we are less prepared for foreign interference in our elections in 2024 than we were in 2020,” Warner said during an appearance at the Trellix Public Sector Cybersecurity Summit. Warner zeroed in on threats from Russia, noting that it’s “cheaper” for Moscow to meddle in U.S. elections and cause chaos than to build military equipment.

“Anyone who doesn’t think the Russian intel services have and will continue to interfere in our elections is — I wonder where they are getting their information to start with,” Warner told reporters following the event.

Hands tied

The senator also cited concerns about social media platforms not having shared election threat information with the federal government since last summer due an ongoing case against the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The case, currently under review by the Supreme Court, centers on whether CISA violated the First Amendment in coordinating with social media platforms to flag disinformation.

Because of both that case and new threats from hackers using artificial intelligence, Warner said those working under former President Donald Trump “were better geared” to address interference.

“The NSA, CISA, ODNI, FBI literally have had no communications with any of the social media platforms on elections … since July of last year, and that ought to scare the hell out of all of us,” Warner said.

Wider concerns

The senator’s comments were made two days after White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that “of course there are concerns” that Russia will interfere in U.S. elections in November, adding that the White House plans to engage with Congress on this topic. However, other leading members of the administration, including CISA Director Jen Easterly, have been vocal in their confidence about the security of U.S. elections this year.

Russia is unlikely to be alone in this effort, particularly given the heightened geopolitical tensions involving the U.S. in the Middle East and in China. Warner said he worried that the threat is “not high enough on the American public’s radar screen,” and called on bipartisan members of Congress to step up and help address the issue.

“The kind of manipulation that was going to take place in 2016 looks like child’s play at this point,” Warner said.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is slashing the size of its force by about 24,000, or almost 5 , and restructuring to be better able to fight the next major war, as the service struggles with recruiting shortfalls that made it impossible to bring in enough soldiers to fill all the jobs.

The cuts will mainly be in already-empty posts — not actual soldiers — including in jobs related to counter-insurgency that swelled during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars but are not needed as much today. About 3,000 of the cuts would come from Army special operations forces.

At the same time, however, the plan will add about 7,500 troops in other critical missions, including air-defense and counter-drone units and five new task forces around the world with enhanced cyber, intelligence and long-range strike capabilities.

According to an Army document, the service is “significantly overstructured” and there aren't enough soldiers to fill existing units. The cuts, it said, are “spaces” not “faces” and the Army will not be asking soldiers to leave the force.

Instead, the decision reflects the reality that for years the Army hasn't been able to fill thousands of empty posts. While the Army as it's currently structured can have up to 494,000 soldiers, the total number of active-duty soldiers right now is about 445,000. Under the new plan, the goal is to bring in enough troops over the next five years to reach a level of 470,000.

The planned overhaul comes after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan that forced the Army to quickly and dramatically expand in order to fill the brigades sent to the battlefront. That included a massive counter-insurgency mission to battle al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

Over time the military's focus has shifted to great power competition from adversaries such as China and Russia, and threats from Iran and North Korea. And the war in Ukraine has shown the need for greater emphasis on air-defense systems and high-tech abilities both to use and counter airborne and sea-based drones.

Army leaders said they looked carefully across the board at all the service's job specialties in search of places to trim. And they examined the ongoing effort to modernize the Army, with new high-tech weapons, to determine where additional forces should be focused.

According to the plan, the Army will cut about 10,000 spaces for engineers and similar jobs that were tied to counter-insurgency missions. An additional 2,700 cuts will come from units that don't deploy often and can be trimmed, and 6,500 will come from various training and other posts.

There also will be about 10,000 posts cut from cavalry squadrons, Stryker brigade combat teams, infantry brigade combat teams and security force assistance brigades, which are used to train foreign forces.

The changes represent a significant shift for the Army to prepare for large-scale combat operations against more sophisticated enemies. But they also underscore the steep recruiting challenges that all of the military services are facing.

In the last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the Navy, Army and Air Force all failed to meet their recruitment goals, while the Marine Corps and the tiny Space Force met their targets. The Army brought in a bit more than 50,000 recruits, falling well short of the publicly stated “stretch goal” of 65,000.

The previous fiscal year, the Army also missed its enlistment goal by 15,000. That year the goal was 60,000.

In response, the service launched a sweeping overhaul of its recruiting last fall to focus more on young people who have spent time in college or are job hunting early in their careers. And it is forming a new professional force of recruiters, rather than relying on soldiers randomly assigned to the task.

In discussing the changes at the time, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth acknowledged that the service hasn't been recruiting well “for many more years than one would think from just looking at the headlines in the last 18 months.” The service, she said, hasn't met its annual goal for new enlistment contracts since 2014.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) will take her bill to federally protect in-vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments to the Senate floor on Wednesday, asking for unanimous consent and daring Republicans to block its passage.

“If you truly care about the sanctity of families, and you're genuinely, actually, honestly interested in protecting IVF, then you need to show it by not blocking this bill on the floor,” she told reporters Tuesday.

Her move comes as Democrats, who have promised to make IVF an election-year issue, look to squeeze Republicans and highlight the ongoing fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Congressional Republicans have rushed to defend IVF in the aftermath of a controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling even as many have signed onto so-called personhood legislation with no carve-out for embryos in clinics.

In calling for unanimous consent, it would take only one Republican senator to scuttle the bill, which could also highlight divisions within the GOP over how to respond to the Alabama ruling that frozen embryos should be protected as people.

Duckworth, who had two daughters through IVF and was briefly stationed in Alabama while serving in the military, first introduced her IVF bill in 2022 and reintroduced it this January with a House companion led by Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.). The legislation would establish federal protections that override any state policy that restricts access to IVF. When Duckworth attempted to call up the bill in 2022, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) objected without explanation and scuttled the vote.

Duckworth, joined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and cosponsors of the bill, on Tuesday argued that the bill’s national protections for assisted reproductive technologies are newly essential in light of Alabama’s February ruling.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a leading cosponsor of the bill, argued in favor of the unanimous consent strategy despite the risks, given that any one member of the chamber can block it.

“We all know how much we have to do in the Senate right now to get the appropriations bills passed so that the government doesn't shut down,” she said, adding that Republicans would likely use “every procedural move” to drag out a vote for “several weeks, if not more.”

“There's no reason to use all that time,” she said, arguing that the current threat to IVF is enough of an emergency to warrant the expedited process.

Still, should Republicans object on Wednesday, Duckworth said she would “love” to schedule a roll call vote on the bill. Schumer’s office did not immediately respond to questions about whether he would be open to giving floor time to the issue.

Duckworth added that despite the stampede of GOP officials expressing support for IVF since the Alabama ruling dropped, she has not heard from any colleagues across the aisle willing to support her bill.

Though some, including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), have said they’re willing to consider the legislation, other conservatives, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), insist it’s unnecessary, dismissing the idea that other states could quickly follow in Alabama’s footsteps.

Though Rubio acknowledged that there is currently a lot of "uncertainty among practitioners about both what the bioethics are and what the legality is with regards to unused human embryos," he insisted to reporters Tuesday there is "no threat to IVF" that would require congressional action.

Democrats in the House and Senate are working to counter this idea, arguing that what happened in Alabama will not stay in Alabama.

“This is a federal issue,” Rep. Susan DelBene (D-Wash.), chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, told reporters. “We've continued to see the states pass legislation but then try to reach beyond their boundaries to either criminalize behavior or risk women's access to reproductive care. We need a clear federal solution so that women and families are protected all across the country.”

President Joe Biden will meet with members of the Teamsters on March 12 as the influential union weights its endorsement strategy for the coming elections, after interviewing former President Donald Trump last month.

“We realize that President Biden’s time is limited and we appreciate that he is making it a priority to meet with Teamsters,” Sean O’Brien, the union's general president, said in a release. “Our rank-and-file members and leadership are eager to have this conversation about the future of our country and the commitments that working people need from our next President.”

The planned meeting at the union's D.C. headquarters comes several weeks after Trump ventured there for a roundtable event with Teamsters leadership as well as rank-and-file members.

The Teamsters historically is a Democratic mainstay, though a sizable contingent of its membership leans Republicans and the union has pledged to hold an open process in evaluating presidential candidates this cycle.

The union’s leadership, namely O’Brien, has caught some flack both internally and from other parts of the organized labor movement for courting Trump, even if the Teamsters ultimately goes for Biden. Beyond the former president, the Teamsters has also held meetings with several independent candidates and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who’s running a longshot primary challenge to Biden.

Additionally, the Washington Post reported that the Teamsters recently donated $45,000 to the Republican National Committee, in a noticeable break from past practices. Nevertheless that figure is less than a third of what it’s given the Democratic National Committee in recent months.

Following their Jan. 31 meeting, Trump and O’Brien expressed political differences on immigration policy — a foundational plank of the former president’s agenda — and the Teamsters’ leader said that Biden “has done a lot of good work for union members.”

Still, Trump has continued to jockey for the union’s blessing, posting on Truth Social in mid-February that the union “should go with Trump” over Biden.

“I will stop Illegal Immigration, which will Save the Teamsters,” Trump wrote.