Trump says Biden ‘will be the nominee’ amid Dem panic over debate performance
Former President Trump said he believes that President Biden “will be the nominee” for the Democratic Party, despite the president’s debate performance Thursday night that prompted calls from those on the left for him to withdraw from the 2024 race. Trump and Biden faced off in the first presidential debate in Atlanta on Thursday night. “It was a great honor to be on stage representing the people of our country,” Trump told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview Friday morning. CNN FLASH POLL SHOWS TRUMP AS CLEAR WINNER OF FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: ‘STUNNING NUMBER’ The Trump campaign declared victory shortly after the showdown ended, saying the former president and presumptive Republican nominee “delivered the greatest debate performance and victory in history to the largest voter audience in history, making clear exactly how he will improve the lives of every American.” “Joe Biden on the other hand showed exactly why he deserves to be fired,” Trump campaign co-chairs Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement Thursday night. “Despite taking a week-long vacation at Camp David to prepare for the debate, Biden was unable to defend his disastrous record on the economy and the border.” They added: “President Trump is spot-on when he says that if Joe Biden is too incompetent to stand trial, then Biden is too incompetent to be President.” That sentiment about Biden’s performance was echoed not only by his opponents, but also by traditional allies, with many Democratic strategists — including a number of former Biden administration officials like White House press secretary Jen Psaki and White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield expressing concern for the future of the president’s reelection campaign. With a raspy voice and delivering rambling answers, Biden struggled during portions of Thursday night’s debate. He also lost his train of thought several times, raising concerns among his closest allies in politics and in the media. Sources told Fox News that some Democrats were even suggesting the possibility of replacing Biden as the nominee at the Democratic nominating convention in August. TRUMP SAYS BIDEN ‘COULD BE A CONVICTED FELON AS SOON AS HE GETS OUT OF OFFICE’ But during the exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Trump was asked if he believes Biden will be the Democratic nominee. “Yes, I think he will be the nominee,” Trump said. When pressed further on concerns from Democrats over Biden’s performance and chatter that the president could be replaced, Trump told Fox News Digital he does not think Biden will be removed. “No, I don’t think so,” Trump said, touting his own debate performance. “They wouldn’t have done any better. No one else would have been better.” TRUMP VOWS HE ‘WILL NOT BLOCK’ ABORTION PILLS OR MEDICATION IF ELECTED, SAYS HE BELIEVES IN ‘EXCEPTIONS’ Trump said he “beat” Biden, and suggested he would have beaten anyone else on stage with him. A flash poll conducted by CNN following Thursday night’s presidential debate showed Trump soundly defeating Biden. The CNN poll posted on air showed that 67% of debate watchers felt that Trump won the debate, compared to 33% who believed Biden won the debate. Biden, though, told reporters after the CNN presidential debate that he felt he performed well against Trump. “I think we did well,” Biden told reporters at an Atlanta area Waffle House. Biden was asked if he was suffering from a cold, which the campaign revealed following the debate performance where many expressed concerns about the sound of the president’s voice. “I am sick,” Biden said. Officials revealed during the debate Thursday night that the president had a cold.
Supreme Court rules in favor of Jan. 6 Capitol riot participant who challenged obstruction conviction
The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a participant in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot who was challenging his conviction for a federal “obstruction” crime. The ruling reverses a lower court decision and returns the case to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, who will have the opportunity to reassess the case with Friday’s ruling in mind. The case stems from a lawsuit filed by Joseph Fischer – one of more than 300 people charged by the Justice Department with “obstruction of an official proceeding” in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. His lawyers argued that the federal statute should not apply, and that it had only ever been applied to evidence-tampering cases. The Justice Department argued that Fischer’s actions were a “deliberate attempt” to stop a joint session of Congress directly from certifying the 2020 election, thus qualifying their use of the statute that criminalizes behavior that “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do” and carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. LEGAL EXPERTS SAY BIDEN ADMIN’S LEGAL THEORY IN JAN 6 PROSECUTION ‘ON THE ROPES’ AFTER SUPREME COURT ARGUMENT Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar took a slew of tough questions from the justices during oral arguments in April. At one point, Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned whether, under the government’s argument, heckling at the State of the Union address or the recent incident of Rep. Jaamal Bowman, D-N.Y., pulling a fire alarm and diverting a House vote would constitute “obstruction.” “There are multiple elements of the [statute] that I think might not be satisfied by those hypotheticals,” Prelogar replied, adding that obstruction requires “meaningful interference” and “corrupt intent.” Chief Justice John Roberts pressed Prelogar about an opinion issued in 2019 by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) – an office that serves as a legal adviser to the department and other executive agencies – which said the obstruction statute should be viewed narrowly and contradicts the DOJ’s position in the case. Prelogar said that opinion was never “formally” adopted, but she could not say what the DOJ’s process is for formerly accepting an OLC paper.
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Supreme Court sides with fishermen in landmark case deciding fate of the administrative state
The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a group of fishermen who challenged a decades-old legal doctrine that they say gave the administrative state too much power over their business. In a 6-2 ruling where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not participate, the court’s majority said the federal rule promulgated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requiring the fishermen to pay $700 a day for an “at-sea monitor” is out of the bounds Congress set for the federal agency. The justices in January heard the arguments of two cases stemming from lawsuits brought by New Jersey fishermen and herring fishermen from Rhode Island challenging NOAA’s rule they say threatened to ruin their livelihoods. The court’s decision overruled what’s known as the Chevron doctrine — a legal theory established in the 1980s that says if a federal regulation is challenged, the courts should defer to the agency’s interpretation of whether Congress granted them authority to issue the rule, as long as the agency’s interpretation is reasonable and Congress did not address the question directly. “Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority. SUPREME COURT APPEARS READY TO REEL IN ADMINISTRATIVE STATE IN LANDMARK CHALLENGE FROM EAST COAST FISHERMEN “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits, courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agency acts within it,” he wrote. “But courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous,” he said. READ THE SUPREME COURT DECISION – APP USERS, CLICK HERE: He added that Chevron “was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties.” “And the only way to ‘ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,”he said. Justice Clarence Thomas in a separate concurrence wrote that Chevron deference “permits the Executive Branch to exercise powers not given to it.” “Chevron deference was ‘not a harmless transfer of power,’” Thomas wrote said. “‘The Constitution carefully imposes structural constraints on all three branches, and the exercise of power free of those accompanying restraints subverts the design of the Constitution’s ratifiers.’ In particular, the Founders envisioned that ‘the courts [would] check the Executive by applying the correct interpretation of the law.,’” he continued. “Chevron was thus a fundamental disruption of our separation of powers. It improperly strips courts of judicial power by simultaneously increasing the power of executive agencies. By overruling Chevron, we restore this aspect of our separation of powers,” he said. Justice Neil Gorsuch also penned a separate concurrence saying, “Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss. In doing so, the Court returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding.” SUPREME COURT SIGNALS INTEREST IN HEARING A MAJOR CLIMATE CHANGE CASE THAT COULD BE A ‘NIGHTMARE’ FOR LIBERALS During oral arguments earlier this year, Gorusch explained that case he saw “routinely on the courts of appeals—and I think this is what niggles at so many of the lower court judges—are the immigrant, the veteran seeking his benefits, the Social Security disability applicant, who have no power to influence agencies, who will never capture them, and whose interests are not the sorts of things on which people vote, generally speaking,” stated Gorsuch. “[I] didn’t see a case cited, and perhaps I missed one, where Chevron wound up benefiting those kinds of peoples. And it seems to me that it’s arguable—and certainly the other side makes this argument powerfully—that Chevron has this disparate impact on different classes of persons,” he said. Gorsuch called Chevron a “recipe for instability.”
Fox News Digital focus group members shift whom they are voting for after debate
Some members of the Fox News Digital focus group had a change of heart on how they planned to vote after watching the debate. “Cognitive ability … this is the highest office, and for me, it’s very important that I trust the executive to understand and be cognitively competent,” one member of the focus group, who changed their support from President Biden to former President Donald after the debate, said of their reasoning. The comments come after the first debate between Biden and Trump, who will square off in a rematch of the 2020 election. BIDEN RIPPED FOR ‘OLD’ APPEARANCE, ‘WEAK’ VOICE DURING FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: ‘DEEPLY ALARMING’ Biden, who has faced growing questions about his fitness to continue serving in the nation’s highest office, looked to dispel any notion that he lacked the physical and mental capacity for four more years as president. However, many critics point out that his performance only did more to deepen those fears among voters. “From the very first moment, Biden looked old, hard to understand, confused, saying scary things, and just throwing mud,” Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow said shortly after the debate. Those observations were shared by the Fox News Digital focus group, with one member saying that one only had to play back video of the debate to see why the night solidified his support for Trump. TRUMP VOWS HE ‘WILL NOT BLOCK’ ABORTION PILLS OR MEDICATION IF ELECTED, SAYS HE BELIEVES IN ‘EXCEPTIONS’ “I’ve lived four years with Trump, I lived three and a half years with [Biden],” the member said. “I’ll take the other four.” Overall, 10 of the 15 members of the group said they were supporting Trump after the debate. Asked whether any moments for Biden stuck out, some respondents praised the president for his positions on taxes and childcare. Nevertheless, the group expressed concern overall when it comes to Biden’s ability to lead the country. “I don’t think anyone is going to remember anything he said tonight,” one member said. “They’re going to remember how he said it.” For its part, the Biden campaign insists the debate was a net negative for Trump and helped make the case for the president. “Based on research we conducted during tonight’s debate, it is clear that the more voters heard from Donald Trump, the more they remembered why they dislike him. Meanwhile, President Biden started slow but finished strong,” a Biden campaign official told Fox News Digital in an email early Friday morning. The Biden campaign referred to a “survey of undecided voters in a Midwest state” where “debate-watchers agreed that President Biden won the debate and the more they saw of Donald Trump’s erratic and vindictive behavior, the more they remembered why they voted against him in 2020.” “Over the course of the night, Trump continued to double down on unpopular policy positions and petty and vindictive personal anecdotes, while refusing to address the issues that undecided voters actually care about,” the official added.
Rep. Thomas Massie announces passing of his wife Rhonda
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky on Friday announced the passing of his wife, Rhonda. “Yesterday my high school sweetheart, the love of my life for over 35 years, the loving mother of our 4 children, the smartest kindest woman I ever knew, my beautiful and wise queen forever, Rhonda went to Heaven,” the Republican wrote on X. “Thank you for your prayers for our family in this difficult time.” Massie said just prior to Rhonda’s death, “We spent last week touring Mt Rainier with our grandson.” “She was valedictorian at our high school where we went to the Prom together, accepted at MIT and Harvard, earned a Mechanical Engineering degree from MIT, and devoted her life to our family,” he added, sharing images of the couple and their family. Rhonda Massie’s cause of death was not immediately available. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Can Biden be replaced as the Democratic nominee?
President Biden’s performance at last night’s CNN Presidential Debate has left the Democratic Party confronting the possibility of replacing their presidential nominee. This guide explains how such an extraordinary move could occur. BIDEN’S ‘DISASTER’ DEBATE PERFORMANCE SPARKS MEDIA MELTDOWN, CALLS FOR HIM TO WITHDRAW FROM 2024 RACE Biden is currently the presumptive Democratic nominee, because he has secured the overwhelming majority of pledged Democratic delegates awarded after each state’s primary election. Former President Donald Trump is also currently a presumptive nominee. Democratic National Committee rules give the power of the nomination to those delegates. Delegates must “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them,” meaning Democratic primary voters. In other words, as long as Biden wants to stay on the ballot, then those delegates are expected to vote for him. Since the rules do not impose any legal obligation on delegates to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged, a mass defection is at least theoretically possible. The party will formally nominate Biden when the delegates participate in a roll call vote. A RASPY BIDEN GETS OFF TO A HALTING START AGAINST TRUMP IN THE FIRST 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION DEBATE That normally takes place during a party convention, which for Democrats begins on the week of Aug. 19. But this year, the Democrats have said they will hold a “virtual” roll call vote by August 7 to comply with an Ohio ballot access deadline. Following legislation signed by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine that moves the deadline to Sept. 1, Democrats no longer need to hold this virtual vote ahead of the convention. But for now, the plan is that a willing Biden will become the nominee on August 7 at the latest. If Biden steps aside before the roll call, then his delegates will no longer be pledged to him, and it will be essentially “open season.” Any candidate who is eligible to be president could emerge, including candidates who did not run in the presidential primaries, and delegates could vote for them. Clearly, an endorsement from Biden would be critical for any one of those candidates. And while the most logical contender to receive an endorsement would be Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden could choose anyone. Any change in the nominee after the roll call vote would be even more of a political disaster. DNC rules give broad power to the committee to replace a candidate in the event of death, resignation or “disability” of a nominee: “In the event of death, resignation or disability of a nominee of the Party for President or Vice President after the adjournment of the National Convention, the National Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee shall confer with the Democratic leadership of the United States Congress and the Democratic Governors Association and shall report to the Democratic National Committee, which is authorized to fill the vacancy or vacancies.” The scope of “disability” will be a subject of intense debate if the party chooses to invoke that provision. But in the event of one of those three conditions, the party’s chair Jaime Harrison would consult with Democratic leaders. He would give a recommendation to the DNC. The committee would decide a new nominee. Again, the most likely contender would be Harris, given her current position within the Biden administration, but anything could happen. BIDEN MAKES STUNNING OMISSION WHILE CLAIMING NO TROOPS DIED ‘ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD’ ON HIS WATCH If one of these conditions occurs after general election ballots are printed – and/or it is too late to change the name of the candidate printed on those ballots – the mechanism for the DNC to replace Biden is the same. Under that scenario, the party would have to inform voters that even though they are voting for Joe Biden, the committee has chosen somebody else for the nomination. After the election, the party would have to try to instruct electors in the Electoral College to cast a ballot for that new candidate. The confusion that a last-minute move like this would cause among voters would make an already challenging campaign even more of an upward climb. And given the unprecedented nature of such a move, it would almost certainly be litigated at the U.S. Supreme Court. Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.
Jill Biden gushes over president’s debate performance despite poor reviews: ‘You did such a great job’
President Joe Biden was praised by his wife on Thursday following his first presidential debate appearance despite a widely-criticized performance. First Lady Jill Biden greeted her husband on stage at the debate after-party with a live audience, seeming to celebrate the mere fact that the president responded to moderators’ questions. “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question, you knew all the facts!” Jill Biden cheered to a smiling Joe Biden on-stage. JILL BIDEN SAYS HUSBAND IS ‘ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE PRESIDENTS’ IN MODERN HISTORY ‘BECAUSE OF’ HIS AGE “And let me ask the crowd. “What did Trump do?” the first lady continued, turning to the audience and gesturing before shouting “Lie!” The moment has gone viral since the debate, with many articles reporting on Jill Biden’s manner of speaking being reminiscent of praising a child. Biden’s performance at the debate has been almost universally panned by commentators due to his inarticulate speaking and unstable demeanor. BIDEN’S ‘DISASTER’ DEBATE PERFORMANCE SPARKS MEDIA MELTDOWN, CALLS FOR HIM TO WITHDRAW FROM 2024 RACE Repeated stammering, long periods of silence and facial expressions that conveyed intense confusion have convinced some of Biden’s loudest cheerleaders that the president must step down from the re-election campaign. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a longtime Biden ally, wrote the debate “made me weep” and realize Biden should step aside. “I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime — precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election,” he wrote. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP CNN commentator Van Jones, who cried for joy when Biden won the 2020 presidential election, offered an emotional plea for the president to step aside. “I love that guy as a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can. But he had a test to meet tonight, to restore confidence of the country and of the base, and he failed to do that,” Jones said. “And I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now.” Fox News Digital’s Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
‘Deeply biased’: India rejects US report on religious freedom, says, ‘it lacks understanding of…’
India on Friday categorically rejected criticism against it in an annual US State Department report on international religious freedom, describing it as deeply biased and visibly driven by vote-bank considerations.
Jharkhand ex-CM Hemant Soren walks out of jail after 5 months following bail from HC in land scam case
Jharkhand ex-CM Hemant Soren walks out of jail after 5 months following bail from HC in land scam case.