Suspect in second Trump assassination attempt left note saying he intended to kill ex-president, prosecutors say – live | US elections 2024

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Man suspected of second assassination attempt on Trump acknowledged plot – prosecutors

The man suspected of making a second attempt on Donald Trump’s life last week acknowledged that was his intention in a note discovered by police, prosecutors wrote on Monday.

“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” Ryan Wesley Routh wrote in the note, which was included in a package he gave to an unnamed witness before his arrest.

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Key events

President Joe Biden is scheduled to appear on ABC’s ‘The View’ talkshow on Wednesday, the network announced, adding that it will be Biden’s first interview since the Democratic National Convention and the July presidential debate.

The network added:

The exclusive appearance marks the first live appearance by a sitting president on the show and the second time a sitting president has visited, following former President Barack Obama’s history-making visit which aired July 29, 2010.

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Joanna Walters

Joanna Walters

The United States is sending additional troops to the Middle East during the sharp surge in violence between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon that has raised the risk of a greater regional war, the Pentagon said moments ago.

Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder would provide no details on how many additional forces or what they would be tasked to do. The US currently has about 40,000 troops in the region, the Associated Press writes.

The new deployments come after significant strikes by Israeli forces against targets inside Lebanon that have killed hundreds and as Israel is preparing to conduct further operations and the State Department is warning Americans to leave Lebanon as the risk of a regional war increases.

Due to the unpredictable nature of ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel and recent explosions throughout Lebanon, including Beirut, the US Embassy urges US citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available,” the State Department had cautioned on Saturday.

You can follow the latest updates on the Middle East in our dedicated live blog:

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The day so far

The man suspected of attempting an assassination of Donald Trump wrote a note where he acknowledged that he indeed intended to kill the former president, federal prosecutors revealed in a court filing. The document included several new details of the incident at a Florida golf course where Trump was playing last week, including that the FBI geolocated two cellphones belonging to Ryan Wesley Routh to the area around the former president’s properties in the weeks leading to his arrest. Meanwhile, a new poll shows Kamala Harris trailing the former president in three of the four Sun Belt swing states, while another survey has her seeing a historic spike in her favorability ratings.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

  • A government shutdown seems to have been averted, with Republican speaker Mike Johnson heading off the politically damaging disruption by agreeing to a spending deal that does not include measures against non-citizen voting, which Trump had demanded.

  • Harris won the endorsements of hundreds of former national security and military officials, who said Trump “has proven he is not up to the job”.

  • The White House laid out how Joe Biden will spend his final months in office, dubbing it the “sprint to the finish”.

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White House announces Biden’s ‘sprint to the finish’ in final months of presidency

Joe Biden is set to depart the White House next January, after he ended his bid for a second term and endorsed Kamala Harris. This morning, his administration’s communications director Ben LaBolt announced Biden’s “sprint to the finish”, a plan to spend his final months in office doing what he can to achieve his administration’s priorities.

“When the president decided to step back from the campaign and endorse the vice-president, he called his senior team together that day and said we need a plan for the next 180 days to finish as strong as we started,” LaBolt wrote, continuing:

Every day the president meets with his team, he is pushing to lay it all out on the field for the remainder of the term. His directives are:

Aggressively execute on the rest of his agenda

Look for new opportunities to put a stake in the ground for the future

Hit the road to highlight the Biden-Harris record

Show up as a president for all Americans and communicate directly with them on how the Biden-Harris Agenda will pay dividends now and 10, 20, 30 years into the future

LaBolt offered a preview of what Biden would be doing in the days and weeks to come:

The week of 9/23, the president will roll out new policy to combat gun violence. This is a president who has taken dozens of executive actions to counter the scourge of gun violence, established the first ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention – overseen by the vice-president, and signed the most significant gun violence prevention legislation in nearly 30 years.

The week of 9/23, the president will give a speech on the historic work he has done to tackle the climate crisis and the Biden-Harris administration will make new policy announcements to keep building on this progress

The president will keep traveling the country – highlighting the Biden-Harris record

The president will travel internationally as he continues to strengthen our alliances and partnerships on the world stage, which has been a top priority for him as president having restored American leadership on the world stage

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North Carolina has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 2008, but recent polls have shown Kamala Harris within striking distance of taking its 16 electoral votes. The Guardian’s George Chidi has a look at why:

Landon Simonini found himself standing in the middle of a Charlotte highway lane at 2.30 in the afternoon, stuck in an artificial traffic jam while drivers waited for Kamala Harris’s plane to land and the motorcade to clear for the rally later that day.

He was out of his car, because why not? He wasn’t going anywhere soon. His red Make America great again cap stood out among others cursing the traffic gods.

Simonini, born and bred in Charlotte, builds houses. His livelihood depends to some degree on Charlotte’s tremendous growth. But not all growth is great, he said.

“This is a traditionally southern state,” Simonini said. “Over 100 people move to Charlotte a day. That is changing the election map. I am born and raised in Charlotte, for 33 years. I have lived here my entire life. I went to school at UNC Charlotte. This is my city. It is a conservative city and I want to keep it that way.”

But in America’s nail-biting 2024 presidential election, North Carolina is now in play. It rejoins a select list of crucial swing states whose voters will decide if Harris becomes America’s first woman of color to win the White House or if Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office from which he wreaked political chaos for four years.

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Hundreds of former national security officials endorse Harris

A group of more than 700 former military and national security officials have released an open letter endorsing Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, who they write “has proven he is not up to the job”.

“Vice President Harris has proven she is an effective leader able to advance American national security interests. Her relentless diplomacy with allies around the globe preserved a united front in support of Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. She grasps the reality of American military deterrence, promising to preserve the American military’s status as the most ‘lethal’ force in the world,” reads the letter released by National Security Leaders for America.

As for Trump, the group writes:

Mr Trump threatens our democratic system; he has said so himself. He has called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He said he wants to be a “dictator,” and his clarification that he would only be a dictator for a day is not reassuring. He has undermined faith in our elections by repeating lies, without evidence, of “millions” of fraudulent votes.

He has shown no remorse for trying to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promises to pardon the convicted perpetrators, and has made clear he will not respect the results of the 2024 election should he lose again.

That alone proves Mr Trump is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

Here’s more:

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Days after the House of Representatives failed to pass a government spending bill coupled with legislation against non-citizen voting demanded by Donald Trump, the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, is making a new attempt to head off a government shutdown without bowing to the former president’s demands. Here’s more on the legislative maneuvering, from the Guardian’s Robert Tait:

US congressional leaders have agreed to a short-term funding deal in a move that averts a damaging pre-election government shutdown and also amounts to a snub for Donald Trump.

The prospect of a shutdown at the expiration of the current government funding on 30 September had been looming after Republicans insisted on tying future funding to legislation that would require voters to show proof of US citizenship – known as the Save Act and backed by Trump but opposed by Democrats.

After weeks of backroom maneuvering, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced a compromise that provides funding for another three months while decoupling it from the Save Act. Any other path would have been “political malpractice”, he added.

The new package continues present spending levels while also giving $231m in emergency funds to the beleaguered Secret Service to enable it to provide added protection for Trump – the Republican presidential nominee, who has been the subject of two failed apparent assassination attempts – as well as his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, before the presidential election on 5 November.

It represents a climbdown for Johnson, who had previously adhered to Trump’s demand that government funding be conditioned on passing the Save Act. The bill – has become an article of faith for the former president and his supporters due to their belief, unsupported by evidence, that electoral fraud is rife.

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Kamala Harris has seen a surge in favorability among voters and is increasingly viewed as the candidate most likely to bring change, a NBC News poll released on Sunday found.

Among registered voters nationwide, the vice-president is ahead by five percentage points, with 49% support against Donald Trump’s 44%. She is also seen as the candidate more likely to bring “change”, a potentially significant finding given that other surveys have found many Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. Among respondents, 47% say Harris represents change, while 38% say the same of Trump.

NBC News also found Harris’s favorability jumped 16 points since July, a surge comparable only to what George W Bush saw after the 9/11 attacks.

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Kamala Harris continued to goad Donald Trump over the weekend to debate her again. But, as the Guardian’s Joanna Walters and Edward Helmore report, the former president’s campaign insisted there would be no more debates:

Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.

“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.

“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”

Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.

Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.

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Donald Trump will hold a rally in Mint Hill, North Carolina, near Charlotte, on Wednesday afternoon, his campaign announced.

It will be the former president’s second rally in the swing state in recent days, after he spoke to supporters in Wilmington over the weekend. North Carolina Republicans are grappling with the fallout from last week’s report that Mark Robinson, their candidate for governor, had a history of making lewd and offensive statements on a pornography site’s message board.

The statements were bad enough that most of Robinson’s campaign staff has resigned. Here’s more on that:

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Here’s more on what we learned from prosecutors today about Ryan Wesley Routh’s motivations to make a suspected second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, from the Guardian’s Edward Helmore:

The man accused in the apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump at a golf course in Florida left behind a note saying that he intended to kill the former president and maintained in his car a handwritten list of dates and venues where the Republican White House nominee was to appear, the justice department said on Monday.

The new allegations were included in a detention memo filed ahead of a hearing on Monday at which the justice department was expected to argue that 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh should remain locked up while the case is pending.

The details are meant to buttress prosecutors’ assertions that Routh had set out to kill Trump before the plot was thwarted by a Secret Service agent who spotted a rifle poking out of shrubbery on the West Palm Beach golf course where the former president was playing on 15 September.

The note, addressed “Dear World”, was placed in a box that was dropped at the home of an unidentified person who contacted law enforcement officials after last Sunday’s arrest. It appears to have been based on the premise that the assassination attempt would ultimately be unsuccessful.

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In addition to the geolocation data tying two of his cellphones to the areas around Donald Trump’s properties, FBI agents also found in Ryan Wesley Routh’s possession a list of dates where the ex-president would be in August, September and October.

Prosecutors added that Routh had “a notebook with dozens of pages filled with names and phone numbers pertaining to Ukraine, discussions about how to join combat on behalf of Ukraine, and notes criticizing the governments of China and Russia”.

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Suspected second Trump assassin repeatedly visited area around golf course, Mar-a-Lago – prosecutors

Two cellphones found in the car Ryan Wesley Routh was driving when he was arrested were geolocated to areas near Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and his golf course in Florida in the weeks leading up to his apparent assassination attempt, prosecutors wrote.

The phones, part of six that FBI agents found in Routh’s vehicle, made repeated visits to the vicinity of the two Trump properties between 18 August and 15 September, the court document said.

Agents also examined the SKS rifle found in the bushes outside the golf course where Trump was playing, and discovered a fingerprint they matched to Routh.

The rifle was found in the bushes outside the fence line near the sixth hole of the golf course, and prosecutors wrote that Trump was playing on the fifth hole when a Secret Service agent saw the rifle’s gun barrel protruding from the bushes, and opened fire.

In addition to the rifle, prosecutors wrote that FBI agents found a backpack and shopping bag attached to the fence that contained plates “capable of stopping small arms fire”.

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FBI agents also reviewed a book they believe Routh authored in February 2023 called Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea, WWIII and the End of Humanity, according to the court document.

In the book, Routh stated that he:

Must take part of the blame for the [person] that we elected for our next president that ended up being brainless, but I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake and Iran I apologize. You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal. No one here in the US seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection.

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In a court document submitted today, prosecutors said Ryan Wesley Routh dropped off a box at a witness’s house months prior to making his attempt on Donald Trump’s life.

After learning of Routh’s arrest, the unnamed witness opened the box and contacted law enforcement. Prosecutors say the box contained “ammunition, a metal pipe, miscellaneous building materials, tools, four phones, and various letters.”

One letter was addressed to “The World” and read, in part:

This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.

He [the former President] ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled.

The note found in a box Ryan Wesley Routh gave to an unnamed witness prior to his arrest. Photograph: United States District Court Southern District Of Florida/Reuters
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Man suspected of second assassination attempt on Trump acknowledged plot – prosecutors

The man suspected of making a second attempt on Donald Trump’s life last week acknowledged that was his intention in a note discovered by police, prosecutors wrote on Monday.

“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” Ryan Wesley Routh wrote in the note, which was included in a package he gave to an unnamed witness before his arrest.

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Trump leads Harris in Sun belt battleground states, poll finds

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Broadly speaking, there are two groups of swing states expected to decide the presidential election: the Great Lakes states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and the Sun belt states of Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. The closely watched pollsters at the New York Times and Siena College today released new data from three of the latter group, showing Donald Trump preferred by voters over Kamala Harris, albeit to varying degrees. The poll finds the vice-president’s standing is weakest against Trump in Arizona, where she now has a five-point polling deficit after the same pollsters showed her with a five-point lead last month. The race in Georgia is tighter but the tightest state is North Carolina, which has not supported a Democratic candidate for president since 2008.

The survey is the latest sign of the the presidential race remaining in toss-up territory two months after Harris took over as the Democratic candidate from Joe Biden. The Times and Siena College poll is just one data point among many others, but if its findings bear out, it would leave the vice-president reliant on the Great Lakes states as well as Nevada, the fourth Sun belt state that was not surveyed, or a single Nebraska congressional district to win the White House.

Here’s what else is happening today:

  • The government appears to have dodged the threat of another shutdown, after congressional leaders reached a spending agreement that expires on 20 December, defying Trump’s demands that they also approve legislation to require voters to prove their citizenship when registering.

  • Biden honors women’s soccer champions Gotham F.C. at 10.30am ET, then meets with president Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates at 12.20pm before heading to New York City for the UN general assembly.

  • Israel has launched a volley of airstrikes at Lebanon today, again raising fears of a regional conflict. You can read out live blog all about it here.

  • JD Vance is delivering remarks in Charlotte, North Carolina at 5pm.

  • Trump will hold a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania at 7pm.

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