The White House will review Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s lack of disclosure on his hospital stay Biden condemns white supremacy in campaign speech at church where Black people were killed
WASHINGTON ( AP) — The White House said Monday the administration will review what rules or procedures weren’t followed when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin did not disclose his hospitalization for days to President Joe Biden and top officials at the Pentagon and the National Security Council. The Pentagon maintained its silence on why Austin was hospitalized and said he has no plans to resign.
“We’ll do what’s akin to a hot wash and try to see if processes and procedures need to be changed at all or modified so that we can learn from this,” John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said when asked whether Biden wanted a review of what happened.
Austin, 70, was hospitalized on Jan. 1, which the Pentagon did not disclose to the public until Friday. Biden and Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, were not aware of Austin’s condition until Thursday.
The Pentagon still has not said what procedure Austin had on Dec. 22 that eventually put him in such pain that he was taken by ambulance to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on New Year’s Day and put into intensive care.
“He was conscious, but in quite a bit of pain,” Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The Republican Party of Florida ousted Chairman Christian Ziegler in a special vote on Monday as police investigate a rape accusation against him — a move that came a week before Gov. Ron DeSantis competes in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucus.
A majority of about 200 members approved the ouster in a voice vote during a closed- door meeting that Ziegler did not attend, according to Republican state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, who was there. He said no one spoke in favor of Ziegler. Evan Power, the vice chair of the state GOP, was chosen to replace Ziegler.
The party suspended Ziegler last month and demanded his resignation, saying he can’t effectively lead during a critical election year with the allegations, which Ziegler denies, swirling around him. DeSantis, U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, and other Republican leaders had called on Ziegler to step down, but
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional leaders have reached an agreement on overall spending levels for the current fiscal year that could help avoid a partial government shutdown later this month.
The agreement largely hews to spending caps for defense and domestic programs that Congress set as part of a bill to suspend the debt limit until 2025. But it does provide some concessions to House Republicans who viewed the spending restrictions in that agreement as insufficient.
In a letter to colleagues, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday the agreement would secure $ 16 billion in additional spending cuts from the previous reporters on Monday.
He said Austin, who has resumed his duties, is now out of intensive care and has been moved to a private room. He remains in recovery and his prognosis is “good,” but it is not known when he will be released from the hospital. Ryder said Austin has no plans to resign.
Austin spent the evening of Jan. 1 undergoing tests and evaluation. The next day, “due to the secretary’s condition and on the basis of medical advice,” some authorities were transferred to his deputy, Kathleen Hicks, through a standard email notification that often does he refused.
DeSantis is seeking the GOP nomination for president, but ahead of the Jan. 15 Iowa caucus he trails far behind former President Donald Trump, who also is a Floridian. Scott is running for reelection. Florida also will play a key role in determining control of the U.S. House.
“We have to move past this and have to focus on 2024,” said state Sen. Joe Gruters, who preceded Ziegler as party chair. agreement brokered by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden and is about $30 billion less than what the Senate was considering.
“This represents the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade,” Johnson writes.
Biden said the agreement “moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities.”
“It reflects the funding levels that I negotiated with both parties and signed into law last spring,” Biden said in a statement. “It rejects deep cuts to programs hardworking families count on, and provides a path to passnot provide the reason for transfer, Ryder said.
Ryder said he, Austin’s chief of staff and senior military adviser were notified of the defense secretary’s hospitalization on Jan. 2. Hicks, who was in Puerto Rico, was not told the reason for the transfer of authorities until Jan. 4.
The Pentagon has said the chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, did not inform the White House because she had the flu.
Kirby, speaking to reporters on Air Force One as Biden traveled to South Carolina, said there is an “expectation” among members of Biden’s Cabinet that if one becomes “Florida’s one of the most important states for the Republicans and we have to continue to bring home victories, especially for Rick Scott and the top of the ticket with Trump as our nominee, eventually.”
Talking to reporters while the meeting was ongoing, Ingoglia, a former chair of the state GOP, said he believed the scandal had harmed the state party, particularly among small donors, and that it needed to return to focusing full-year funding bills that deliver for the American people and are free of any extreme policies.”
The agreement speeds up the roughly $20 billion in cuts already agreed to for the Internal Revenue Service and rescinds about $6 billion in COVID relief money that had been approved but not yet spent, according to Johnson’s letter.
“It’s a good deal for Democrats and the country,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told colleagues in a briefing call.
Essentially, Democrats see the trade-offs they made as mild. In a description provided to reporters, they said the COVID savings would have “no significant impact on any current projects or hospitalized, “that will be notified up the chain of command.”
Still, White House officials on Monday emphasized that Austin continues to retain Biden’s confidence. White House press secretary Karine JeanPierre said Biden appreciated Austin’s statement on Saturday, in which he took responsibility about the lack of transparency on his hospitalization.
“There is no plan for anything other than for Secretary Austin to stay in the job and continue the leadership that he’s been demonstrating,” Kirby said. ing on grassroots campaigning and fundraising.
“Anytime you have a scandal, it’s going to affect fundraising,” Ingoglia said.
Ziegler and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, have admitted to police that they previously had a consensual sexual relationship with Christian Ziegler’s accuser. Bridget Ziegler is an elected member of the Sarasota School Board and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a national conservative activist group that has successfully gotten members elected to school boards across the U.S. She has not been accused of a crime.
Bridget Ziegler also was appointed by DeSantis last year to the board of the governing district for Walt Disney World. DeSantis and the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature last year took control of the district in retaliation after Disney publicly opposed a state law banning classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. The law was championed by DeSantis. activities in motion.” And they said that moving all of the $20.2 billion in IRS cuts to this year instead of over two years would still leave the agency able to maintain “critical investments” that Congress provided in 2022. At the time, Congress provided the IRS with an additional $80 billion that could be spent over 10 years.
Overall, the agreement calls for $886 billion in defense funding. It would provide $772 billion in domestic, non-defense spending, when including $69 billion called for in a side deal to the debt ceiling bill that McCarthy had reached with the White House, Democrats said.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Courting Black voters he needs to win reelection, President Joe Biden on Monday denounced the “poison” of white supremacy in America, declaring at the site of a deadly racist church shooting in South Carolina that such ideology has no place in America, “not today, tomorrow or ever.”
Biden spoke from the pulpit of Mother Emanuel AME Church, where in 2015 nine Black parishioners were shot to death by the white stranger they had invited to join their Bible study. The Democratic president’s speech followed his blunt remarks last Friday on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which he excoriated former President Donald Trump for “glorifying” rather than condemning political violence.
At Mother Emanuel, Biden said “the word of God was pierced by bullets of hate, propelled not just by gunpowder, but by poison.”
“White supremacy,” he said, the view by some whites that they are superior to everyone else is a “poison that for too long has haunted this nation. This has no place in America, not today, tomorrow or ever.”
It was a grim way to kick off a presidential campaign, particularly for someone known for his unfailing optimism and belief that American achievements are limitless. But it’s a reflection of the emphasis Biden and his campaign are placing on energizing Black voters amid deepening concerns among Democrats that the president could lose support from this critical constituency heading into the election.
Biden’s campaign advisers and aides hope the visit successfully lays out the stakes of the race in unequivocal terms three years after the cultural saturation of Trump’s words and actions while he was president. It’s a contrast they hope will be paramount to voters in 2024.
Biden also used the speech, his second major campaign event of the year, to thank the state’s Black voters. After an endorsement by Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of the highest-ranking African Americans in the U.S. House, the state made Biden the winner of its Democratic presidential primary in 2020. That, in turn, set him on a path to become the party’s nominee and defeat Trump to win the presidency.
“I owe you,” he said.
Biden was briefly interrupted when several people upset by his staunch support for Israel in its war against Hamas called out that if he really cared about lives lost he would call for a cease-fire in Gaza to help innocent Palestinians who are being killed under Israel’s bombardment. The chants of “cease-fire now” were drowned out by audience members chanting “four more years.”
The president also swiped at Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, and Trump, though he did not name either one.
Haley spent several days on the defensive for not explicitly naming slavery as the root cause of the Civil War when the question was posed to her by a participant at a campaign event. Her campaign responded with a list of comments attributed to Biden that it said showed he’s racially insensitive.
Biden called it a “lie” that the war was about states’ rights. “So let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. There’s no negotiation about that.”
He also noted the scores of failed attempts by Trump in the courts to overturn the 2020 election in an attempt to hold onto power, as well as the former president’s embrace of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“Let me say what others cannot: We must reject political violence in America. Always, not sometimes. Always. It’s never appropriate,” Biden said. He said “losers are taught to concede when they lose. And he’s a loser,” referring to Trump.
It was June 17, 2015, when a 21-year-old white man walked into the church and, intending to ignite a race war, shot and killed nine Black parishioners and wounded one more. Biden was vice president when he attended the memorial service in Charleston.
Biden’s aides and allies say the shootings are among the critical moments when the nation’s political divide started to sharpen and crack. Though Trump, the current Republican presidential front-runner, was not in office at the time and has called the shooting “horrible,” Biden is seeking to tie Trump’s current rhetoric to such violence.
Two years after the attack, as the “Unite The Right” gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in violent clashes with counterprotesters. Trump said merely that “there is blame on both sides.”
Biden and his aides argue it’s all part of the same problem: Trump refused to condemn the actions of the white nationalists at that gathering. He’s repeatedly used rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” yet insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words.