NOTUS

Lucas Kunce, Josh Hawley AP-24228572911397

Senate

Emails Show Josh Hawley Once Apparently Took Advice From His Dem Opponent

Emails obtained by NOTUS show that Democratic Senate candidate Lucas Kunce once fed hearing recommendations to a Hill adviser who worked for Josh Hawley, one of the most prominent Republicans in the Senate.

Ben T.N. Mause

September 05, 2024 06:46 PM

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From Today’s Newsletter

From the Notebook

A medical helicopter is seen in front of Apalachee High School after a shooting at the school Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, in Winder, Ga.

The school year was just days old when reports started coming in Wednesday of a school shooting at a high school in Georgia with multiple casualties. The Democratic condemnations and calls for gun reform were swift, if predictable.

“This is a senseless tragedy — and it does not have to be this way,” Vice President Kamala Harris posted on X. “We must end the epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.”

But leading gun safety groups and candidates have griped this campaign cycle that Democrats should actually press the issue harder on the trail — seeing it as an underutilized winner.

“The issue of ending gun violence has not been nearly as prominent as it should in this election cycle,” former Rep. Mondaire Jones — who is running again in a contentious House race — told NOTUS earlier this summer.

Meanwhile, Trump on Wednesday focused on the shooter versus on gun policy itself. “These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster,” he said on Truth Social.

—Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.

Absentee ballots start going out to voters in North Carolina on Friday. But even before those ballots have been cast, there’s been a flurry of legal activity related to the election.

That includes a lawsuit filed by the North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee accusing the State Board of Elections, which is majority-Democrat, of allowing more than 200,000 people to register to vote using an application form that did not collect sufficient ID information. The form was updated to require driver’s license or social security numbers last year, but Republicans want the court to make the board remove any ineligible registrants that may exist, arguing some of them may not be citizens of the U.S.

A spokesperson for the NCSBE told Fox News Digital the lawsuit “asks for an impossible solution,” explaining that it “vastly overstates” voter roll issues. The NCSBE representative also said federal law cuts off voter removal programs within 90 days of an election, adding voters would be asked to show a photo ID when they cast their ballots anyway.

Republicans challenging the legitimacy of voter registrations are not limited to North Carolina. In almost a quarter of states, AP reports, courts are grappling with disputes about voter data.

—Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.

Deal or no deal? The Biden administration is projecting confidence about ongoing cease-fire and hostage-release negotiations between Israel and Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar.

“The deal has 18 total paragraphs. Fourteen of those paragraphs are finished,” a senior administration official told reporters, stressing that much of those 14 paragraphs were nearly identical to what was agreed upon months earlier. “One paragraph has a very technical fix, and the other three paragraphs have to do with the exchange of prisoners to hostages,” they said.

They described prisoner exchange as being “quite complicated,” the focus of most of the time in Doha last week — an issue made more complicated after the Israel Defense Forces recovered the bodies of six hostages over the weekend. The killing of the six hostages recovered on Monday is still very much “coloring the discussions.”

—John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.

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