
Evening summary
As the results of last week’s midterm elections continue to roll out, the control of the House has not yet been decided. Joe Biden and others have deemed it unlikely Democrats will retain control of the House, though they have secured the Senate for another two years.
Here’s what else you need to know:
A federal court has blocked Joe Biden’s plan to relieve some student debt, putting the effort on hold while the administration considers other options.
Former vice-president Mike Pence has sat down with ABC News to talk more about his experience on January 6, calling Trump’s words on that day “reckless”.
Senators are pushing for a vote this week on a bill to codify same-sex marriage, saying they believe it has enough support to pass the chamber.
Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville said he will back Trump for president in 2024, if the ex-president announces.
Prosecutors say criminal charges are not expected from an investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine, in a move Giuliani’s team is calling “a total victory”.
Donald Trump on Monday attempted to revive his lawsuit against Twitter over his permanent suspension from the platform.
Updated
Trump seeks to revive fight to get back on Twitter
Former president Donald Trump on Monday asked a US appeals court to revive his lawsuit against Twitter over his permanent suspension from the platform, according to Reuters.
Trump was banned from Twitter over his role in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The former president was also indefinitely removed from YouTube and Facebook after the incident.
While other social media firms have not decided on whether Trump can return, the ban on Twitter was meant to be permanent.
However, when billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter last month, questions were raised about whether that ban would be reversed. Musk had previously stated that banning Trump had been “a mistake”.
The billionaire has not made any public decisions about whether to allow Trump’s return, stating that he may leave such policy decisions to an independent board.
Updated
Senate to vote on same-sex marriage bill this week
Senator Chuck Schumer is filing a bill to codify same-sex marriage today, setting it up for a Wednesday vote.
Schumer is filing the same sex marraige bill now, setting up a Weds vote
— Liz Goodwin (@lizcgoodwin) November 14, 2022
The Respect for Marriage Act passed the House this year, and CNN reported today a bipartisan group of senators believed the bill had enough support to pass the chamber.
Updated
Prosecutors say criminal charges not expected from Giuliani raid
New York prosecutors said in a letter to a judge on Monday they do not plan to criminally charge Rudy Giuliani following an investigation into his dealings with Ukrainian associates – a development Giuliani’s team called “a total victory”.
Prosecutors had been investigating whether Giuliani should have been registered as a foreign agent due to his dealings with figures in Ukraine in the run-up to the 2020 election.
The investigation, which resulted in raids on his residence in April 2021 and seizure of a number of electronic devices, has concluded, and that criminal charges would not be forthcoming.
“In my business, we would call that total victory,” Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, told the Associated Press. “We appreciate what the US attorney’s [office] has done. We only wish they had done it a lot sooner.”
Read the full story here.
Updated
Kari Paul here taking over for the next couple hours, stay tuned for updates.
Trump wasn’t keeping all those classified documents at Mar-a-Lago for the money, the Washington Post reports.
Rather, the motivation for his alleged retention of government secrets at his south Florida resort was more about Trump’s desire to hang on to keepsakes from his time in the White House, according to the Post, which cited federal investigators. That doesn’t mean he won’t face charges in the case, which is one of many inquiries the former president is involved in nearly two years after he left office.
Here’s more from the Post:
That review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump’s possession, these people said. FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell, or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property, these people said.
Several Trump advisers said that each time he was asked to give documents or materials back, his stance hardened, and that he gravitated toward lawyers and advisers who indulged his more pugilistic desires. Trump repeatedly said the materials were his, not the government’s — often in profane terms, two of these people said.
The people familiar with the matter cautioned that the investigation is ongoing, no final determinations have been made, and it’s possible additional information could emerge that changes investigators’ understanding of Trump’s motivations. But they said the evidence collected over a period of months indicates the primary explanation for potentially criminal conduct was Trump’s ego and intransigence.
A Justice Department spokesman and an FBI spokeswoman declined to comment. A Trump spokesman did not return a request for comment Monday.
The analysis of Trump’s likely motive in allegedly keeping the documents is not, strictly speaking, an element of determining whether he or anyone around him committed a crime, or should be charged with one. Justice Department policy dictates that prosecutors file criminal charges in cases in which they believe a crime was committed and the evidence is strong enough to lead to a conviction that will hold up on appeal. But as a practical matter, motive is an important part of how prosecutors assess cases and decide whether to file criminal charges.
The Guardian’s Kari Paul is now taking over the live blog, and will take you through the latest politics news over the remainder of the day.
Updated
Another notable Republican has reiterated his support for Donald Trump, Politico reports.
Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville said he will back Trump for president in 2024, if he announces:
Sen. Tuberville says he will endorse Trump for president when he announces. He also says he’ll support McConnell as GOP leader
— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) November 14, 2022
He also announced that he would back Mitch McConnell as Senate minority leader, the top office available for the GOP in that chamber after they failed to win control in the midterms.
CNN reports that the bipartisan group of senators pushing a bill to codify same-sex marriage believes it has enough support to pass the chamber:
Multiple sources say the bipartisan group working on legislation to codify same-sex marriage has the votes needed for the bill to pass and is urging leadership to put it on the floor for a vote as soon as possible.
— Daniella Diaz (@DaniellaMicaela) November 14, 2022
w/ @alizaslav
The Respect for Marriage Act passed the House earlier this year with some Republican support. Assuming all Democratic senators vote for it, it will need the votes of at least 10 Republicans to overcome a filibuster, but it’s previously been unclear if that support exists.
Ahead of the release of his memoir tomorrow, former vice-president Mike Pence sat down with ABC News to talk more about his experience on January 6.
Here was his reaction when asked about Trump’s tweet lashing out at Pence on the day of the attack:
"It angered me. ... The president's words were reckless. It was clear he decided to be part of the problem."
— The Recount (@therecount) November 14, 2022
— Former Vice President Mike Pence, in an ABC News exclusive as he promotes his new book, rebukes Trump's tweet attacking him on Jan. 6th as the mob stormed the Capitol pic.twitter.com/PqnqUH7vbQ
In their quest to understand why they performed so poorly in the midterms, some Republicans are pointing the finger at Donald Trump, arguing he has outlived his usefulness to the party.
Writing in The American Conservative, JD Vance, a Republican who just won a seat in the Senate representing Ohio, attempted to dissuade the GOP from casting blame on the former president. He argues that Trump serves as a unifying force for Republicans and can offset Democrats’ advantages in fundraising and voter turnout that are going to make it more difficult for the GOP to win House and Senate races.
Here’s more from his piece:
In the long term, the way to solve this is to build a turnout machine, not gripe at the former president. But building a turnout machine without organized labor and amid declining church attendance is no small thing. Our party has one major asset, contra conventional wisdom, to rally these voters: President Donald Trump. Now, more than ever, our party needs President Trump’s leadership to turn these voters out and suffers for his absence from the stage.
The point is not that Trump is perfect. I personally would have preferred an endorsement of Lou Barletta over Mastriano in the Pennsylvania governor’s race, for example. But any effort to pin blame on Trump, and not on money and turnout, isn’t just wrong. It distracts from the actual issues we need to solve as a party over the long term. Indeed, one of the biggest changes I would like to see from Trump’s political organization—whether he runs for president or not—is to use their incredible small dollar fundraising machine for Trump-aligned candidates, which it appears he has begun doing to assist Herschel Walker in his Senate runoff.
Blaming Trump isn’t just wrong on the facts, it is counterproductive. Any autopsy of Republican underperformance ought to focus on how to close the national money gap, and how to turn out less engaged Republicans during midterm elections. These are the problems we have, and rather than blaming everyone else, it’s time for party leaders to admit we have these problems and work to solve them.
Meanwhile in Georgia, the midterms are very much not over.
The Senate race is headed to a run-off election on 6 December, with Republican Herschel Walker challenging Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock for the seat.
In a speech today, Walker attacked Warnock for using campaign funds to pay for childcare – as US election law allows:
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R) criticizes Sen. Raphael Warnock's (D) parenting:
— The Recount (@therecount) November 14, 2022
"He paid himself for childcare, all that stuff — why don't he keep his own kids? Don't have nobody keep your kids. ... I keep my own, even though he lied about me." pic.twitter.com/C41IJUbA0F
Left unsaid were reports that Walker paid for two women to have an abortion, even though he supports a nationwide ban on the procedure, without exceptions. He also did not mention one of his son’s claim that he has not been much of a father.
It’s just one pollster in one state, but take a look at who CWS Research found was leading among Republican candidates for the White House in 2024.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis topped Donald Trump in the poll of Republicans and independents, with 43% support against Trump’s 32%. The survey was conducted from 12 to 13 November, after the midterm elections, and represents a change from a previous poll conducted in mid-October before the vote. Then, Trump led, with 46% support compared to DeSantis’ 29%.
Trump is widely expected to announce another campaign for office tomorrow, but DeSantis had a far better midterm election. The Florida governor resoundingly won another term on a day when Republicans performed well in the state overall. Trump, meanwhile, saw several of his handpicked candidates for office rejected by voters in states across the country.
Joe Biden’s plan to relieve some student debt has lost again in court and will remain on hold, Politico reports:
NEWS - 8th Circuit has blocked Biden's student debt relief program, siding with GOP states in a 3-0 decision. pic.twitter.com/6gn7UyxmLa
— Michael Stratford (@mstratford) November 14, 2022
The panel of two Trump appointees & a GWB appointee ruled unanimously that Missouri has standing to challenge debt relief program based on injury to the state via MOHELA. pic.twitter.com/FixeqTSmAa
— Michael Stratford (@mstratford) November 14, 2022
But the 10-page decision doesn't discuss the merits of the case much -- other than to say the GOP states have raised "substantial questions of law which remain to be resolved"https://t.co/2WkRX1ozkd pic.twitter.com/0Qs03zL7qh
— Michael Stratford (@mstratford) November 14, 2022
The Guardian’s community team wants to hear from Americans about what they think of the results of Tuesday’s midterm elections. Be you Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, independent or something else, let them know your thoughts:
The day so far
The dust is settling from Tuesday’s midterm elections. Control of the House is still up for grabs, but the GOP appears on course to eke out a majority, while Democrats have won themselves the Senate for another two years. The 2024 presidential race may very well kick off tomorrow, when Donald Trump is expected to announce another campaign for the White House.
Here’s what else is happening today:
Joe Biden doesn’t believe the House is winnable for Democrats, nor that there’s enough support for a measure to codify abortion rights into law.
The Senate plans to vote on a measure to codify same-sex marriage rights this week, after a conservative supreme court justice raised the possibility of the court reconsidering its ruling establishing the rights.
The January 6 committee is cleared to access the phone records of Arizona’s Republican party chair after the supreme court quashed a challenge to the lawmakers’ subpoena.
Mo Brooks was once one of Donald Trump’s closest allies, but has since joined the ranks of those who have fallen out with the former president.
The Alabama Republican congressman will retire at the end of this year, and in an interview with AL.com called on the party to dump the former president.
“It would be a bad mistake for the Republicans to have Donald Trump as their nominee in 2024,” said Brooks, who was the first congressman to object to the certification of the 2020 election. “Donald Trump has proven himself to be dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, crude and a lot of other things that alienate so many independents and Republicans. Even a candidate who campaigns from his basement can beat him.”
The bad blood between the two men stems from Trump’s withdrawn endorsement of Brooks for Alabama’s Senate seat, which was won last week by Republican Katie Britt. Brooks said Trump asked him to remove Joe Biden from office and elevate the ex-president back to power, which the congressman told him was illegal.
The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports on a new justice department filing in the Mar-a-Lago case, which claims Donald Trump kept classified documents at the resort, even after he left the White House:
Donald Trump retained documents bearing classification markings, along with communications from after his presidency, according to court filings describing the materials seized by the FBI as part of the ongoing criminal investigation into whether he mishandled national security information.
The former US president kept in the desk drawer of his office at the Mar-a-Lago property one document marked “secret” and one marked “confidential” alongside three communications from a book author, a religious leader and a pollster, dated after he departed the White House.
The mixed records could amount to evidence that Trump wilfully retained documents marked classified when he was no longer president as the justice department investigates unauthorised possession of national security materials, concealment of government records, and obstruction.
Mike Pence will on Tuesday release a memoir detailing his time in the Trump White House, and Martin Pengelly takes a look at what the former vice president reveals:
In his new book, Donald Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, protests his loyalty to his former boss but also levels criticisms that will acquire new potency as Trump prepares to announce another presidential run and the Republican party debates whether to stay loyal after disappointment in last week’s midterm elections.
According to Pence, Trump mishandled his response to a march staged by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in August 2017, a costly error that Pence says could have been avoided had Pence called Trump before a fateful press conference in which Trump failed to condemn “the racists and antisemites in Charlottesville by name”.
Also in Pence’s judgment, “there was no reason for Trump not to call out Russia’s bad behaviour” early in his term while beset by investigations of Russian election interference on Trump’s behalf and links between Trump and Moscow.
“Acknowledging Russian meddling,” Pence writes, would not have “somehow cheapen[ed] our victory” over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Pence does not stop there. Among other judgments which may anger his former boss, he says Trump’s claimed “perfect call” to Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine in 2019, the subject of Trump’s first impeachment after he withheld military aid in search of political dirt, was in fact “less than perfect” – if not, in Pence’s judgment, impeachable.
Supreme court lets January 6 committee access phone records of top AZ Republican
The January 6 committee can access the phone records of the chair of Arizona’s Republican party after the supreme court turned down an attempt to block the lawmakers’ subpoena:
NEW: Supreme Court rejects bid by Ariz GOP Chair Kelli Ward to block a Jan. 6 committee subpoena for her phone records. Thomas and Alito dissent. pic.twitter.com/g3IoSuuRuk
— Greg Stohr (@GregStohr) November 14, 2022
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are two of the court’s most conservative justices, and objected to the court’s order.
Arizona was one of the states targeted by Donald Trump and his allies in the weeks after the 2020 election, as part of their effort to tamper with Joe Biden’s election victory.
Later this week, Republicans in the House and Senate are set to vote on who their leaders will be for the next two years, but the party’s weak showing in the midterms has sparked calls to delay the election.
It appears rightwing lawmakers are trying to punish top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell for failing to retake the chamber, and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy for the party’s weak showing there. According to Axios, conservative figures outside of Congress will soon release a letter backing the calls for a delay:
Per source: collection of prominent conservative movement figures — incl Heritage President Kevin Roberts — will be releasing a letter calling for delay to House and Senate leadership elections. pic.twitter.com/ON8c1dvIyl
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) November 14, 2022
Among the signatories: Ginni Thomas, wife of rightwing supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. She’s a prominent denier of the facts surrounding Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, and was interviewed by the January 6 committee earlier this year. Lawmakers on the panel said she didn’t have much to offer, and there wasn’t evidence she played a significant role in the insurrection.
Senate to vote on same-sex marriage measure this week
The Senate will this week vote on a bill to codify same-sex marriage rights, Semafor reports.
Same-sex marriage rights are currently established nationwide by a supreme court ruling, but Democrats are trying to pass a law protecting the rights after rightwing justice Clarence Thomas in June mulled overturning the ruling.
The House passed the Respect for Marriage Act earlier this year with the support of 47 Republicans in addition to all Democrats. While all Democratic senators are expected to vote for the legislation, it’s unclear if it will receive the votes of 10 Republicans necessary to overcome a filibuster in the upper chamber. In September, the Senate’s Democratic leadership delayed voting on the bill until after the midterm elections.
The GOP’s failure to capture the Senate majority in last Tuesday’s election has sparked a public feud between two of its top lawmakers and their allies.
The Republicans needed to pick up just one seat to take the chamber from the Democrats. Instead, Joe Biden’s allies took a seat in Pennsylvania from the GOP, while almost all sitting Democrats won reelection.
The feud is between Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and senator Rick Scott, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) tasked with getting the party’s candidates elected. While McConnell hasn’t commented on the matter publicly, Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to the majority leader, said Scott made strategic errors and failed to communicate with his fellow Republicans.
The NRSC “was run basically as a Rick Scott super PAC, where they didn’t want or need to input any Republican senators whatsoever,” Holmes told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s a huge break from recent history where members have been pretty intimately involved.”
In particular, he said a proposal by Scott released earlier this year to force the re-authorization of all federal laws, including those establishing the social security and Medicare programs, was a misstep because it made the party seem as if it was going after benefits popular with voters.
On a Sunday appearance on Fox News, Scott went directly after his party’s leader in the chamber, accusing him of holding Republicans back. “The leadership in the Republican Senate says, ‘No, you cannot have a plan. We’re just going to run against how bad the Democrats are’ and actually then they cave in to the Democrats,” Scott said.
Meanwhile, Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the NRSC, told the Journal McConnell’s allies undermined their work by “constantly trashing our candidates publicly and privately, and telling donors not to give to us or our campaigns.”
Perhaps the most cutting words were from Curt Anderson, an adviser to Scott. He blamed everyone for Republicans’ failure to take the Senate, including McConnell, Scott and the GOP candidates. “But insecure small people never accept responsibility for failure,” Anderson told the Journal.
Updated
Support from young voters was a big reason for Democrats’ strength in Tuesdays’s election. Alaina Demopoulos looks at how the party was able to connect with Gen Z:
Democrats avoided a predicted “red wave”, and they have Gen Z to thank. Tuesday night’s big wins can largely be attributed to young voters, who showed up en masse and overwhelmingly voted blue.
Exit voting polls found that one in eight midterm voters were under 30, and 61% of those between the ages of 18 and 34 voted for Democrats. The results pushed the Fox News pundits Jesse Watters and Laura Ingram to suggest that the legal voting age should be increased to 21.
Partly responsible for high youth turnout was a new generation of political consultants who had been stumping behind the scenes for months, challenging the generalization that Gen Z is too lazy or disillusioned to bother casting ballots.
Jim Marchant was one of the election deniers on Tuesday’s ballot, standing for the post of secretary of state in Nevada. He ended up losing his race to Democrat Cisco Aguilar, The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:
Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, was elected Nevada’s top election official, beating Jim Marchant, a Republican who is linked to the QAnon sought to spread misinformation about the results of the 2020 race.
His victory is a significant win against efforts to sow doubt in US elections, a growing force in the Republican party.
The Nevada secretary of state race was one of the most competitive in the country and closely watched because of Marchant’s extreme views. It was also one of several contests in which Republican candidates who questioned the election results were running to be the top election official in their state.
Marchant, a former state lawmaker, said during the campaign that if he and other like-minded secretary of states were elected, Donald Trump would be re-elected in 2024. He has also said that Nevada elections are run by a “cabal”, and that Nevadans haven’t elected a president in over a decade.
He also has pushed Nevada counties to adopt risky and costly hand counts of ballots and leads the America First Secretary of State coalition, a group of secretary of state candidates running for key election positions who pledged to overturn the 2020 race.
Aguilar had never run for elected office, but cast himself as a defender of Nevada’s democracy. His campaign emphasized the extremist threat Marchant posed. He far outraised Marchant and was much more present on the campaign trail.
Many Democrats may have been surprised by how well their party did in the midterms, but Michael Moore wasn’t. In an interview with The Guardian’s Edward Helmore, the liberal documentary maker explained why he believed the party was stronger than it appeared:
In the lead up to last week’s midterm elections in America, the punditocracy of commentators, pollsters and political-types were almost united: a “red wave” of Republican gains was on the cards.
But one dissenting voice stood out: that of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Against all the commonplace predictions, he had forecast Democrats would do well. He called it a “blue tsunami”.
That proved to be true in his home state of Michigan, where Democrats won governor, house and senate for the first time in 40 years, often by large margins. It’s been more of a blue wall across the rest of the country, where Republican gains mostly failed to materialize, with the exception of Florida. But even so, the strong Democrat performance has stunned people on both sides of the US political divide, delighting the left and sparking hand-wringing on the right.
With the Democrats retaining power in the Senate, and a chance that even the House could remain in their control, suddenly Moore is looking like a prognosticator par excellence.
“I never doubted it – there was no way the Republicans were going to have some kind of landslide,” Moore said in an interview.
While they appear set to lose control of the House, Democrats nonetheless took a victory lap over the weekend after the midterms went much better than they expected, The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland reports:
As the balance of power in the US House of Representatives remained unresolved on Sunday, Democrats are celebrating the projection that they won control of the Senate, marking a significant victory for Joe Biden as Republicans backed by his presidential predecessor Donald Trump underperformed in key battleground states.
While senior Democrats remained guarded Sunday about the chances of keeping control of both chambers of Congress, House speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the party’s performance in the midterms following months of projections indicating heavy losses.
“Who would have thought two months ago that this red wave would turn into a little tiny trickle, if that at all,” Pelosi told CNN.
She added: “We’re still alive [for control of the House] but again the races are close. We don’t pray for victory… but you pray that God’s will will be done.”
Prior to the midterms, Joe Biden vowed that if Democrats keep control of Congress, the first piece of legislation he will send to lawmakers will be a bill to codify abortion rights established in Roe v Wade.
Speaking in Indonesia, the president downplayed the likelihood of that legislation going anywhere in the new Congress, since it appears that the GOP is on track to capture the majority in the House.
“I don’t think there’s enough votes to codify unless something happens unusual in the House,” Biden said.
Referencing Democrats’ chances of preserving their majority in Congress’s lower chamber, Biden said, “I think it’s going to be very close, but I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
Election results prove 'democracy is who we are': Biden
Last Tuesday’s midterm elections confirmed the strength of America’s democracy after voters rejected candidates who denied the outcome of the 2020 election, Joe Biden said.
“The American people proved once again that democracy is who we are,” Biden said on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia.
“There was a strong rejection of election deniers at every level, from those seeking to lead our states and those seeking to serve in Congress and also those seeking to oversee the elections. And there was a strong rejection of political violence and voter intimidation. There was an emphatic statement that in America, the will of the people prevails.”
If a president’s party can only keep one chamber of Congress, the Senate is the one to have.
The Senate is tasked with approving the White House’s nominations, including cabinet secretaries, federal judges and most crucially, supreme court justices. With Democrats holding the majority for the next two years, Joe Biden is once again guaranteed the ability to get his cabinet secretaries and judges confirmed to post across the government. That will increase the chances Biden’s legislative accomplishments – and those of future Democratic presidents - survive court challenges.
But if the House falls to Republicans, Biden’s days of big legislating may have come to an end, at least for now. The chamber’s GOP leadership has shown little interest in working with the president, and it’s unlikely any of their bills make it through the Senate and to the president’s desk. Control of the House also gives the GOP the ability to conduct investigations and issue subpoenas. Expect them to do that to officials involved in the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, and to Hunter Biden.
Counting continues in House races as Democrats’ hope of keeping chamber fade
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Ballots are still being counted in races that will determine control of the House of Representatives, and things are not trending in Democrats’ direction. They’re behind in several districts needed to secure control of Congress’ lower chamber for another two years, which would be an unprecedented victory for Joe Biden’s allies, if they pull it off. Over the weekend, Democrats secured enough seats to retain the majority in the Senate. We may find out today if they have the votes to do the same in the House.
Here’s what else is happening today:
Joe Biden has just concluded his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia, and will give remarks and take questions from reporters in the next few minutes.
Congress returns for the first time since the midterm elections and Democrats have a heaping plate of legislation they’d like to accomplish before the end of the year, including a government funding bill, codifying same-sex marriage and reforming electoral laws to prevent another January 6.
Former vice-president Mike Pence spoke about his experience during the Capitol attack and relationship with Donald Trump in an interview with ABC News.