August 13, 2024, presidential campaign news

In the hours after President Joe Biden’s historic decision to step aside from the 2024 presidential race last month, journalists across three major US newsrooms began receiving emails from an anonymous person claiming to have tantalizing new information about the election. 

The individual, who identified themself only as “Robert,” sent a trove of private documents from inside Donald Trump’s campaign operation to journalists at Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Beginning on July 22, Politico reported, it began receiving emails from an AOL email address that contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a research dossier the campaign had put together on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The dossier included what the Trump campaign identified as Vance’s potential vulnerabilities. Politico was also sent portions of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who had been among the contenders to join Trump on the GOP ticket.

The Times and The Post later reported that they, too, had been sent a similar cache, including a 271-page document on Vance dated Feb. 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” that the outlets said was based on publicly available information.

But despite receiving the sensitive campaign files, the three outlets opted to not publish reporting on the trove they’d been handed, even as the the person suggested they still had a variety of additional documents “from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.”

Read more about the decision by news outlets here.

Imam Asad Zaman speaks to the media on May 17, 2023, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Muslim community leader who appeared alongside Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at several events told CNN in a statement he does not have a “personal relationship” with Walz and explained previously sharing antisemitic content on Facebook by saying he sometimes shares links on social media “without fully looking at them.” 

Asad Zaman, a Minnesota imam and executive director of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, echoed the Harris campaign’s statement on the nature of the relationship between him and Walz in a series of answers to questions emailed to him by CNN. 

When asked about previous social media posts in which he shared a neo-Nazi propaganda film and a Hamas news release, Zaman attributed sharing the posts to a tendency to “pass along social media items without fully looking at them.” 

When asked about his opinions on the Harris-Walz campaign’s stance toward the Israel-Hamas war, Zaman said he wasn’t familiar with its views on the conflict but expressed solidarity for those experiencing “enormous human suffering.” 

Some background: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during a campaign event in 2018 praised Zaman as a “master teacher” and briefly touched on their shared history, according to video newly revealed by the Washington Examiner. In a statement to CNN, Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said that Walz and Zaman do not have a “personal relationship.”

Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday he had been briefed about the hack on his campaign when asked if the FBI had briefed him and what the agency had told him about the breach. 

Trump’s campaign said Saturday that it had been hacked. Politico reported earlier Saturday that it had received emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s campaign operation. Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social later that day that his campaign was informed by Microsoft that it had been hacked by the Iranian government. 

It is not clear whether Iran was responsible for the hack. The Iranian mission to the United Nations said it does “not accord any credence to such reports.”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin speaks at an event in Green Bay with the Wisconsin Education Association Council on

Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin touted Democrats’ education agenda to Wisconsin teachers on Tuesday, speaking to a round table of educators on the same day voters cast ballots in the statewide primary elections, including in the race for Baldwin’s seat. 

The senator engaged with teachers and social workers for nearly an hour, hearing their personal experiences on issues including staffing shortages, teacher pay and school funding. She asked questions and took notes by hand throughout the roundtable.

Baldwin vowed to continue to fight to increase funding for public education and protect the Department of Education from the “existential threat of Donald Trump and Eric Hovde,” referencing her likely Republican opponent in the state’s competitive Senate race.

Hovde has been endorsed by Trump in Wisconsin’s Republican Senate primary in his race against two GOP challengers. Polls close in the state at 8 p.m. central time. Baldwin, a two-term senator, is unopposed in her primary.

:Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Montana State University on August 9, in Bozeman, Montana.

Some of those most eager to quiet Donald Trump are those who want to him back in the Oval Office.

Appearing dazed and flustered by an unfamiliar and fast-changing political landscape, Trump in response has unleashed a torrent of mean-spirited missives, race-baiting insults and conspiratorial broadsides that even close allies and donors acknowledge as unproductive. Some have privately expressed serious concerns that the former president’s recent inability to stay on message has wasted an early opportunity to blunt the momentum of his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

For Trump, staying on message has rarely been easy, as illustrated by the former president’s return to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where he was once a towering figure. Ahead of his Monday interview with Elon Musk, Trump’s account posted for the first time in a year, featuring a series of slickly edited videos that articulated the case for another Trump presidency in a way that regularly eludes the candidate himself. One post asked, “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?”

That question strikes at the heart of his campaign’s message to voters – but Trump failed to pose it until near the end of his two-hour conversation with Musk, during which he aired familiar grievances about the 2020 election, commented on Harris’ beauty on Time Magazine’s latest cover, remained fixated on President Joe Biden and, according to a CNN tally, told at least 20 falsehoods.

Read more about the frustrations some Trump allies here.

The Harris-Walz campaign is discussing holding a rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday during the Democratic National Convention, according to a source involved in the discussions. 

With Milwaukee just 90 miles from the site of the DNC, the move is seen as an opportunity to log a visit to a critical battleground state during an unscheduled portion of the convention’s programming.

The New York Times first reported news of the rally.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, is digging in on his attacks against Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s military record, as the Minnesota governor defended himself during a campaign event in Los Angeles today.

Earlier today, Walz said, “I am damn proud of my service to this country, and I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person’s service record.”

Walz caught heat from Vance last week for saying in 2018 that he handled assault weapons “in war.” Harris’ campaign acknowledged Saturday he “misspoke” during this event. As CNN reported, Vance also accused Walz of ducking service in Iraq.

Vance defended his comments earlier this week, telling CNN’s Dana Bash: “I’m not criticizing Tim Walz’s service; I’m criticizing the fact that he lied about his service for political gain.”

Georgia’s Secretary of State announced on Tuesday that independent presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West have submitted enough valid signatures to qualify, the next step toward appearing on the ballot in the key battleground state.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office announced it verified both Kennedy and West, along with Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate Claudia De La Cruz, have submitted more than the minimum 7,500 valid signatures needed to qualify for the state’s ballot in November. 

Both West and Kennedy face objections to their petitions backed by the Georgia Democratic Party that allege both candidates incorrectly submitted their petitions by filing under their own names, rather than their slates of electors as required by Georgia election law. The Georgia Democratic Party also alleges West did not file his petition before the state’s independent candidate filing deadline.

In the statement, Raffensperger’s office said hearings on the challenges will take place next week. An administrative law judge will determine whether Kennedy and West appear on the ballot following the hearings.

While Kennedy and West have yet to qualify for the ballot in Georgia, their presence on the ballot could alter the dynamics of the contest in a state where President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by less than 12,000 votes.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance holds a press conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 6.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is doing very well financially for someone who just turned 40, new federal disclosures reveal.

The Ohio senator, whom former President Donald Trump chose as his running mate last month, has roughly between $4 million and $11 million in assets to his name, with only $750,000 to $1.5 million in liabilities. He owns a home, has a stake in two businesses and has three 529 education savings accounts for his children.

His biggest single asset is his Schwab brokerage account, which he values between roughly $2.2 million and $7.5 million – with investments largely in passively managed exchange-traded stock and bond funds.

Outside of that, while hardly his largest holding, Vance does include among his assets $250,000 to $500,000 worth of bitcoin. With Trump promising to implement crypto-friendly policies if elected, it’s unclear how that will affect his holdings, but it does stand out in a portfolio made up largely of diversified ETFs.

Vance’s financial disclosure form was released Tuesday by the Office of Government Ethics and the Federal Election Commission. CNN has reached out to the Vance campaign for comment about the new disclosure.

CNN’s Steve Contorno, Kit Maher and David Wright contributed to this report.

Read more about what else Vance’s disclosures show here.

This November, many voters across the country could take to the polls to determine the future of abortion access in their state, with organizers working to secure a wave of measures on the 2024 ballot.

Most of the proposed ballot measures aim to enshrine the right to an abortion in state constitutions. They follow a series of restrictive trigger laws that went into effect after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, along with abortion policies that were handed down by politicians or decided by state supreme courts since the decision. Some are up against a handful of counter-measures aimed at restricting abortion access.

Here are the states with abortion measures:

Read more about the ballot measures as voters prepare to weigh in this fall