Some voter data obtained by foreign powers, says FBI – as it happened

• The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said that Russia and Iran had obtained some voter registration information in a rare evening news conference. The briefing came after Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, reported threatening emails, falsely claiming to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for Trump.
  
• Ratcliffe said Iran is also distributing video content “to imply that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, including from overseas”. He warned Americans not to believe the disinformation. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” he said.
• Republicans won key victories in their ongoing crusade to restrict voting access. In a Wednesday night decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama officials to ban curbside voting. The Iowa Supreme Court also upheld a Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending thousands of mail-in ballots, by making it more difficult for auditors to correct voter applications with omitted information.
  
• Donald Trump’s deputy communications director Julia Hahn had connections to white nationalism when she joined the White House as an aide, a new report shows. Leaked emails published Wednesday in a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center show Hahn, who previously worked at right wing propaganda site Breitbart News, was close with Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist hate group VDARE.
• Barack Obama campaigned for Joe Biden in Philadelphia, as polls show Biden pulling ahead in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. The former president delivered a blistering rebuke of Donald Trump at a drive-in, Covid-safe rally.
• Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee plan to boycott tomorrow’s vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court. The Democrats’ boycott will likely please their base, but it will not stop Barrett from being confirmed by the Republican-controlled panel. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell currently plans to hold a chamber-wide confirmation vote on Monday.
• The justice department has reached an $8 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin, which has been partly blamed for the opioid epidemic. Despite the massive financial penalty, some lawmakers criticized the agreement, saying the federal government failed to hold company executives accountable.
• Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions, a move that is likely to attract criticism from the pope’s conservative opponents. In an interview for a new documentary, Francis said, “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”
• Rudy Giuliani will make an embarrassing appearance in the new “Borat” film. In Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, the president’s personal lawyer is captured reaching into his pants and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of an actor posing as a TV journalist.

– Guardian staff

Donald Trump’s deputy communications director Julia Hahn had connections to white nationalism when she joined the White House as an aide, a new report shows.

The Guardian’s Kari Paul reports:

Leaked emails published Wednesday in a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center show Hahn, who previously worked at right wing propaganda site Breitbart News, was close with Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist hate group VDARE.

The group promotes the idea of “white genocide”, the conspiracy theory that suggests white people are systematically being replaced by non-white people. VDARE has also published commentary from a chief organizer of white supremacist ‘Unite the Right’ rally, an event in Charlottesville, Virginia that led to the murder of one counter-protestor.

Emails from Hahn revealed additional connections to white supremacist groups and individuals. The communications were leaked by her former colleague Breitbart News editor Katie McHugh. The trove included text messages, Google Chat transcripts, and more than 600 emails taken from Hahn’s private and Breitbart News work emails.

McHugh once espoused right wing views including anti-immigration hate and rubbed shoulders with open white nationalists, but has since renounced far-right extremism and racism.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment, but in a statement criticized McHugh and declined to deny the accusations of racism and extremism:

Julia Hahn rejects and condemns racism and hatred in all forms, and, as a Jewish American, finds bigotry of any kind to be truly abhorrent. Every story Julia wrote as a reporter at Breitbart is publicly available and has been since the day she left the publication nearly four years ago. These cherry-picked emails were leaked by a troubled individual who was terminated from Breitbart in disgrace, and SPLC has stooped to a new low by giving her a platform.

Hahn is 29 years old and joined the White House in March, replacing deputy communications director Adam Kennedy.

The Iowa Supreme Court delivered another win for Republicans seeking to restrict voting.

The court upheld a Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending thousands of mail-in ballots to voters who had information omitted from their absentee ballot applications. The law, passed after a record number of voters turned out during the primaries, casting mail-in ballots as the pandemic surged.

Auditors will not be allowed to fix minor errors in the applications for absentee ballots using Iowa’s voter registration system, as they have done in past elections. Instead, the auditors will have to call or email voters one at a time to obtain any missing information – which will be tedious and time-consuming.

Voters applying for absentee ballots in Iowa have to provide their driver’s license number or a voter pin number.

A voting rights group says Trump supporters in New Mexico tried ot intimidate voters at polling places in Albequerque. The intimidation took place in neighborhoods where most residents are people of color.

The AP reports:

Common Cause New Mexico Executive Director Heather Ferguson said Wednesday that the incidents took place early Saturday afternoon on the first day of balloting at voter convenience centers in the South Valley and western reaches of Albuquerque on Central Avenue — areas that are heavily Latino.

She estimated that dozens of potential voters in each location left without voting immediately as a result of the incidents. But she added that a poll judge intervened at the Central Avenue voting center to help ensure access and keep electioneering at a distance.

“I think we got to see that the process is working,” Ferguson said.

The Bernalillo County district attorney’s office is investigating the incidents, agency spokeswoman Brandale Mills-Cox said. She declined further comment.

State Republican Party spokesman Mike Curtis said he has no direct knowledge of the matter. Representatives for the Trump reelection campaign had no immediate comment when contacted.

Meanwhile, in the courts, Republicans have scored another victory in their ongoing crusade to restrict voting rights.

The Supreme Court allowed Alabama officials to ban curbside voting, ruling against the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union and other challengers of the ban said that curbside voting would help the state slow the spread of Covid-19 while allowing those most vulnerable to the disease to vote safely.

The state attorney general argued that curbside voting “comes with a host of logistical, safety and ballot secrecy concerns” even though the system has been used before to assist voters with disabilities.

Alabama Republicans also earlier won a legal challenge to their requirement that voters using absentee ballots attach affidavits signed by two witnesses or a notary, and copy of their photo ID.

The decision came down 5-3, with three liberal justices noting their dissent. In a dissenting statement, justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “The Alabama secretary of state... has prohibited counties from offering curbside voting, even for voters with disabilities for whom COVID– 19 is disproportionately likely to be fatal. If those vulnerable voters wish to vote in person, they must wait inside, for as long as it takes, in a crowd of fellow voters whom Alabama does not require to wear face coverings.”

Note: A previous version incorrectly said the requirement to apply included affidavits signed by two witnesses and a notary.

Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee took issue with John Ratcliffe’s emphasis that Iran was sowing disinformation to harm Trump, characterizing him as a “partisan hack”.

Ratcliffe is a former Republican congressman – and Democrats have been critical of his choice to selectively declassify documents to help Trump.

Ratcliffe recently declassified a letter outlining the claims about Trump’s 2016 political rival Hillary Clinton that Russian intelligence services.

Before the FBI news conference began, the top members of the senate intelligence committee released a statement warning, “As we enter the last weeks before the election, we urge every American – including members of the media – to be cautious about believing or spreading unverified, sensational claims related to votes and voting.”

The statement came from Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, and Mark Waner, a Democrat of Virginia.

“State and local election officials are in regular contact with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals, and they are all working around the clock to ensure that Election 2020 is safe, secure, and free from outside interference,” the said.

“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said during the press conference. “You may have seen reporting on this in the last 24 hours.”

Earlier Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that officials in Florida and Alaska were investigating emails sent to Democratic voters in several states that appeared to be from the Proud Boys – the far-right group that Donald Trump told to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate – threatening them to vote for Trump or “we will come after you”.

Ratcliffe said Iran is also distributing video content “to imply that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, including from overseas” – and warned Americans not to believe the disinformation. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” he said.

Trump and his advisers have reportedly considered whether to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray, the Washington Post reports:

The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but [attorney general William Barr] as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, or other Biden associates are under investigation, these people say. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions.

In the campaign’s closing weeks, the president has intensified public calls for jailing his challenger, much as he did for Hillary Clinton, his opponent in 2016. Trump has called Biden a “criminal” without articulating what laws he believes the former vice president has broken.

People familiar with the discussions say that Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey, who informed Congress he had reopened an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state after potential new evidence had been discovered.

The FBI director warned against buying into misinformation about election results. “You should be confident your vote counts. Early unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism,” said director Christopher Wray.

Donald Trump and many of his supporters have been among those spreading misinformation that votes aren’t going to be counted and alleging baselessly that ballots can easily be thrown out.

Russia and Iran have obtained some voter registration data, the FBI announced in a rare evening news briefing.

“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. “This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion so chaos & undermine your confidence in American democracy.”

22 Oct 202019.17 EDT

Sam Levine

Florida’s top election official is facing accusations of voter suppression after two last-minute moves critics say will lead to intimidation and confusion.

Alarm bells went off last week after the office of Florida’s secretary of state, Laurel Lee, abruptly notified election officials the state was beginning to flag voters for potential removal from the voter rolls if they owed money related to a felony conviction. In a second letter, the state offered an extremely restrictive view on how localities needed to operate ballot drop boxes, which voters are increasingly turning to this year amid United States Postal Service delays.

Both notices threaten confusion and chaos in one of the most important swing states in the 2020 election. Mail-in voting started weeks ago and in-person early voting started on Monday. Polls show an extremely tight race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in Florida, a state where elections are routinely decided by just thousands of votes.

Lindsey Graham, the Senate judiciary committee chair, responded to Democrats’ decision to boycott Thursday’s vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court.

“Judge Barrett deserves to be on the supreme court and she will be confirmed,” he wrote in a statement. “As to my Democratic colleagues’ refusal to attend the markup, that is a choice they are making. I believe it does a disservice to Judge Barrett who deserves a vote, up or down.”

Graham also – very hypocritically – accused Democrats of hypocrisy for changing Senate rules to block Republican filibusters of nominees to lower courts. Graham, who is currently fighting the toughest re-election race of his Senate career in South Carolina, famously said, as he opposed Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia: “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

Barrett, who Trump nominated to her current position as a judge at the US court of appeals for the seventh circuit, was only able to do so because Republicans blocked Obama’s nominee to that seat, Myra Selby.

Selby, who would have been the second Black woman to serve on the seventh circuit, never received a hearing.

“Let’s go make it happen – I love you Philadelphia!” Obama said. And the car horns at the Covid-safe rally went wild.

The former president famous for bringing a message of hope, tried to bring some of that feeling back after a blistering speech highlighting the dangers of Donald Trump. “I am asking you to remember what this country can be,” Obama said.

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