Adelita Grijalva wins Democratic primary to replace her father in US House, CNN projects
Grijalva, a former county supervisor, is the daughter of the late Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva, who represented the district for two decades before his death in March.
She'll be favored to win the Sept. 23 general election in this heavily Democratic district against Daniel Butierez, who CNN projects will win the Republican primary
Grijalva defeated a field that included former state Rep. Daniel Hernandez and 25-year-old activist Deja Foxx.
Arizona's 7th Congressional District, which includes parts of Tucson and most of the state's southern border with Mexico, has been without representation since March, when Raul Grijalva died due to complications from cancer treatments. The late congressman and former Congressional Progressive Caucus chairman was first elected to the House in 2002.
Adelita Grijalva entered the race as the front-runner and garnered the lion's share of endorsements in the contest, including support from both of Arizona's US senators as well as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She also benefited from her family's longstanding recognition in the district, saying she would continue her father's legacy.
Like her father, Grijalva served on the Tucson Unified School District governing board and the Pima County Board of Supervisors before running for Congress.
She pushed back on her opponents' efforts to frame her as the establishment candidate, saying that she applied for and earned her endorsements from various groups and has her own record of advocacy work, including running diversion programs while working at Pima County's Teen Court.
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New York Times
34 minutes ago
- New York Times
New Reports on Russian Interference Don't Show What Trump Says They Do
The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump's first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning. That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the intelligence analysis process to deliberately discredit Mr. Trump's election. The administration has coupled that case with overheated and attention-grabbing claims. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Obama of treason, and his top officials have made criminal referrals about national security officials under Mr. Obama — all as the administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Still, even if the administration's use of the reports is wildly overstated, some of the information has not been made public before. It provides some messy details about how the intelligence community assessment was hurriedly produced during Mr. Obama's final months in office. The assessment said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had ordered a multifaceted information operation targeting the U.S. presidential election, including by hacking and releasing Democratic emails and by seeding social media with messages promoting Mr. Trump and denigrating his rival, Hillary Clinton. The assessment also attributed three motivations to Mr. Putin. Two have not been seriously challenged: He wanted to undermine public faith in democracy and to damage Mrs. Clinton, who until election night was widely seen as the next U.S. president. But Mr. Trump and his allies have long chafed at the third asserted goal — that Russia also hoped to help him win. Their case seeking to undermine the assessment has focused on the unusually rushed and tightly controlled process to complete the document, in which senior leaders like John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, played a more direct role than would is typical. And their criticism has focused on two main elements. One is the role played by the so-called Steele dossier. The dossier, a compendium of later-discredited claims about Trump-Russia ties compiled by a former British spy, was part of a Democratic-funded political opposition research effort. The other is how the intelligence agencies used information from a well-placed U.S. mole in the Kremlin, whom the C.I.A. later spirited out of Russia. The Dossier The government had already warned the public before the 2016 election that Russia was behind the hacking and dumping of Democratic emails. In early December 2016, after Mr. Trump's surprise victory, Mr. Obama directed the intelligence community to produce a comprehensive analysis of Russia's election meddling, drawing on all available sources of information. The terms of that mandate appear to have led the top officials overseeing the process to include material that might otherwise have been excluded. The Steele dossier is an example. It had been known that the F.B.I. thought the dossier should be used because the standard was to draw on all available sources, while C.I.A. analysts objected because the sourcing for the claims was then unknown. Ultimately, agency leaders negotiated a compromise and put a summary of it in an annex appended to the assessment. Mr. Brennan has publicly said the Steele dossier material was not incorporated or used in the assessment itself because of the C.I.A.'s concerns. In 2017, he told Congress that the dossier 'was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.' The newly disclosed material complicates that narrative. For one, it showed that Mr. Brennan internally defended appending a summary of the dossier to the assessment after C.I.A. analysts resisted the compromise, too. For another, the material has revealed that the classified version of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the annex. It did so in a fourth bullet point under the judgment that Mr. Putin aspired to help Mr. Trump's chances of winning. 'For additional reporting on Russian plans and intentions, please see Annex A: Additional Reporting from an F.B.I. Source on Russian Influence Efforts,' the bullet point said. Mr. Trump's allies have argued that this sentence means the information from the Steele dossier was incorporated into the assessment itself. 'Counting On' Mr. Obama's mandate to take account of all available information also led the C.I.A. to draw upon some raw intelligence that it might otherwise not have seen fit to publish, or disseminate for analysts to use. The newly disclosed material shows that after Mr. Obama's direction, Mr. Brennan ordered a 'full review,' including the publication of any relevant intelligence that had been collected before the election but not disseminated. The C.I.A. then published 15 additional reports containing raw intelligence it had previously gathered. Three became support for the assessment's judgment that Mr. Putin's motives included wanting to bolster Mr. Trump's chances of winning the election. C.I.A. officials had previously held back each of those three, according to a newly declassified 2020 report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, because of tradecraft concerns about the information within them. It said the assessment did not flag those worries. The most important of them was something the U.S. mole in the Kremlin had said: that Mr. Putin made public the hacked Democratic emails after deciding that Mr. Trump, 'whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.' The 2020 House committee report said the statement had originally not been disseminated because analysts were not sure what the mole had meant or who specifically the mole had heard that from. The report criticized the assessment for interpreting that phrase to mean Mr. Putin hoped Mr. Trump would win, without flagging that its reading was disputed. Separately, a review of the procedures and analytic tradecraft that went into the assessment, commissioned by John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump's current C.I.A. director, argued that the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. should not have put the judgment that Mr. Putin was trying to help Mr. Trump at 'high confidence' when only one source explicitly and directly backed that finding. But the review did not challenge the judgment itself as the best reading of the available evidence, instead praising the National Security Agency's view that it merited 'moderate confidence.' And the review acknowledged that analysts might infer support for the judgment from other evidence, including the public behavior of senior Russian officials and state-controlled media — and logic. 'Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump; they reasoned that in a two-person race the trade-off was zero-sum,' it said. 'This logic train was plausible and sensible, but was an inference rather than fact sourced to multiple reporting streams.' Contrary Findings The reports released by the Trump team are limited to evaluating the use of intelligence that was available in December 2016, and do not address subsequent developments. That includes Mr. Putin's statement at a news conference with Mr. Trump in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018, in which he said through a translator that he had indeed wanted Mr. Trump to win the election 'because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.' Others who have had access to the previously classified information and files from that period have reached different conclusions. John Durham, a special counsel appointed in Mr. Trump's first term who hunted for a basis to fault the actions of law enforcement and intelligence officials early in that investigation, already scrutinized the drafting of the 2017 intelligence assessment and did not criticize anything about it in his final report. And in a five-volume 2020 report, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee — led by then-Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who is now Mr. Trump's secretary of state and national security adviser — reached its own conclusion that Russia's motivations had included aspiring to improve Mr. Trump's chances of winning. Indeed, citing one aspect of the interference — the social media operation by a Russian entity known as the IRA — the Senate report suggested that the 2017 intelligence assessment's judgment was, if anything, understated. 'However, where the intelligence community assessed that the Russian government 'aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him,' the committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment of Secretary Clinton's campaign,' the Senate report said. Overstated Claims The finely tuned distinctions and marginal questions raised by the newly available information in the documents sharply contrasts with the overstated and sometimes sensationalized claims Trump administration officials keep making about them. This month, when Mr. Ratcliffe rolled out his review, he also blamed the assessment for establishing a narrative that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia, leading to the inquiry led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. 'They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it,' Mr. Ratcliffe told The New York Post. 'This led to Mueller. It put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our lifetime.' In reality, the Mueller investigation grew out of an F.B.I. investigation that began in July 2016, five months before the assessment, and its basis was a lead from the Australian government, not the Steele dossier. Mr. Ratcliffe also made a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan that accuses him of lying to Congress, leading the Justice Department to open an investigation. Last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, released an 11-page timeline and some underlying documents that misleadingly conflated different types of hacking. In a Fox News appearance, she cited the newly declassified existence of 2016 intelligence reports assessing that Moscow was not trying to hack into vote-tallying machines as somehow undermining the fact that Russia hacked and released Democratic emails to affect the election. Ms. Gabbard also said that the materials used for her timeline were proof of a 'treasonous conspiracy' by Mr. Obama and his national security team, and that she, too, was making a criminal referral. Mr. Trump reacted gleefully, reposting materials on social media based on her timeline and remarks, including a fake video of Mr. Obama being led off to prison. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said, 'Whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama's been caught directly.' The next day, it came to light that Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Mr. Trump in May that his own name appeared in the Epstein files. Hours later, Ms. Bondi announced the creation of a 'strike force' to assess the information provided by Ms. Gabbard.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
GOP senator objects to second Democratic request in eight days to release Epstein files
Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R) on Thursday objected to a Democratic resolution demanding the Department of Justice release all files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego (D) went to the Senate floor Thursday at lunchtime to demand for the second time in eight days that Attorney General Pam Bondi release all files related to Epstein, something that MAGA-aligned activists have demanded for months and has divided the Republican Party. But Mullin, who had blocked the resolution the first time, stepped in to object again, dismissing Gallego's call as 'political theater.' He said Republicans want 'transparency' into Epstein's illicit activities, including alleged sex trafficking, but he argued it's not Congress's role to dictate to the Justice Department what sensitive files must be released to the public. 'We want to know what happened, the American people want to know what happened. What this resolution does is it's actually a blurred line between the separation of powers,' Mullin said. 'When we start dictating to the Department of Justice what they can and can't do, there's a clear separation of power.' 'We're the legislative branch. That's what we do. We make laws. We can't dictate to other branches on what they must and how they must do their job,' he added. The Oklahoma Republican then offered an alternative resolution calling on a Florida federal judge to release grand jury documents related to the criminal investigation into Epstein. The judge, Robin Rosenberg, this declined the Justice Department's request to unseal the grand jury transcripts, saying the standard invoked by the Trump administration to request grand jury documents was on the basis of public interest and not to meet the needs of an ongoing judicial proceeding. Mullin argued that judges have the power to release more information about Epstein and asked Gallego to agree to his resolution. But Gallego instead suggested combining his resolution with Mullin's to demand both the Department of Justice and the judicial branch to release files and grand jury documents that might shed light onto Epstein's activities. The Arizona Democrat tried to ratchet up the pressure on Mullin to accept the modified request by suggesting that objecting to it would amount to an effort to 'protect the powerful elites.' Mullin, however, objected to combining the two requests and needled his Democratic colleague over the failure of the Biden administration to release the Epstein files. 'Let's be honest. We know these files have been out there forever. I don't remember a single time the Biden administration called on these things to be released. And I don't remember my colleague from Arizona asking for the files to be released,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Congressman Ralph Norman officially joins the 2026 race for South Carolina governor
U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) launched his campaign for governor ahead of a kickoff event in Rock Hill on July 27. The fifth district congressman teased a campaign launch in a social media post. 'Make plans to join me Sunday the 27th to hear some exciting news about the future of South Carolina.' He has since changed the account name to "Ralph Norman for Governor" and launched his campaign website for the gubernatorial race. More: U.S. Reps. Nancy Mace, Ralph Norman hint at upcoming announcements on state's future "Ralph Norman believes we must finally clean up Columbia and pass term limits, so we can prepare South Carolina for the future by fixing our roads and improving our schools," Norman's campaign team said in a statement. "He's the political establishment's worst nightmare.' Who is Ralph Norman? Norman was first elected to represent the fifth congressional district in South Carolina in a 2017 special election. He has held the seat ever since. He is also a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a coalition of conservative representatives that supports "open, accountable and limited government," according to its Facebook page. Before he was elected to Congress, Norman was first elected to the South Carolina State House of Representatives in 2004. He served one term and did not run in 2006; instead, he ran for the open fifth congressional district seat. After losing the 2006 congressional race, he won re-election five times at the state level before moving to the U.S. House of Representatives. Norman's campaign is focused on fixing South Carolina roads and infrastructure, letting residents elect judges and creating a South Carolina Department of Government Efficiency. His website also states that he is "100% Pro-Life and 100% Pro-Gun." "Ralph doesn't just talk a big game about being a conservative," his website states. "He has the record to prove it." Upcoming campaign kickoff in Rock Hill Norman's campaign kickoff event will be in Rock Hill at the Magnolia Room. Doors to the event open at 2:30 p.m. and it starts at 3:30 p.m. The congressman is the fourth candidate to officially enter the race for South Carolina's governor. His competitors for the 2026 GOP primary nomination are Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, Attorney General Alan Wilson, and State Senator Josh Kimbrell. Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace of the first congressional district has hinted at joining the governor's race, with a recent X post referencing an upcoming "big decision." State Rep. Jermaine Johnson (D-Richland) also said he is considering a run for governor. Bella Carpentier covers the South Carolina legislature, state, and Greenville County politics. Contact her at bcarpentier@ This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Republican Ralph Norman announces run for South Carolina governor
