Morning Report — Trump faces revised indictment; CNN lands Harris interview 

Amid the politics of the unpredictable this year, here’s another daily dose.

Former President Trump learned Tuesday that he faces an updated federal indictment for allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. This year’s political contest is less than 10 weeks away, and special counsel Jack Smith is making it clear he is unblinking about the calendar while pursuing his evidence against the former president. He also has the conservative-majority Supreme Court in mind.

The first Jan. 6, 2021, rioter to breach the Capitol, Michael Sparks, 47, was sentenced Tuesday to more than 4 years in prison following his March conviction on six felony counts. Trump had been listed as a possible guest speaker for a fundraiser planned next week at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., to benefit Jan. 6 defendants, but his campaign says he won’t attend.

Also in the headlines: Trump pushed past his reluctance and agreed to debate his election opponent, Vice President Harris, on Sept. 10, after pondering his reservations for a day.

Harris, now more than a month into her presidential campaign, said she’ll be interviewed Thursday in Georgia by CNN’s Dana Bash. It will be the vice president’s first such sit-down since President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the contest.

The Democratic nominee has been pressured, most especially by GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), to field some tough questions and explain why she changed her policy aims since 2019 about fracking and single-payer, government-run health care.

Trump and Vance are betting that Harris’s campaign surge will fall apart if the former prosecutor and former senator from California stumbles while under the CNN klieg lights.

Harris will be joined during the 9 p.m. EDT discussion by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), her running mate. The duo, barnstorming in an attempt to block Trump’s momentum in the Peach State, are traveling by bus today through South Georgia and will hold a rally Thursday evening in Savannah.

Also in today’s newsletter: Mark Zuckerberg (handing a political gift to House Republicans while skewering the Biden administration); Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (with a whale and a chainsaw), plus Trump and Georgia’s GOP governor (they declared détente, but maybe not).

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LEADING THE DAY

CAMPAIGNS & POLITICS

IN THE MUST-WIN STATE of Georgia, Trump and Gov. Brian Kemp (R) are patching things up for now as Republicans look to put on a united front. The Peach State has been in focus since Harris replaced Biden, moving Georgia back into the conversation for Democrats. But Trump’s spat with Kemp heightened concerns that, once again, the state could prove problematic for Republicans — just as it did four years ago, when the former president narrowly lost the state and launched a vendetta against its GOP leaders (The Hill).

“There was a three-week period where there was a lot of nervousness among the ranks. … Whether the damage has already been done, at least we’ve stopped the bleeding,” one Georgia-based Republican strategist said about the Trump-Kemp detente. “There definitely was a concern there. It reminded a lot of people what happened in 2020.”

Kemp, days after receiving a public endorsement from Trump, is exploring the possibility of removing three members of the State Election Board — following controversial decisions made by its right-wing majority (Newsweek).

REGRETS, ZUCKERBERG HAS A FEW: Meta’s chief executive sent a letter Monday to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee saying the Biden administration “pressured” Meta in 2021 to “censor” content during the pandemic, which he said he regrets. Trump, who once threatened to throw Zuckerberg in jail, wrote Tuesday on social media that the chief executive’s information backs his assertion that the 2020 election was “rigged.” Zuckerberg has been complimenting Trump of late, favorably describing the GOP presidential nominee as a “bada–” during a July interview with Bloomberg News.  

Zuckerberg said in July and again this month that he will not endorse candidates and plans on “not playing a significant role in the election.” 

CNN: Zuckerberg’s election-season gift to Republicans. 

AS POLLS WEAKEN in Texas for Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R), Republican Gov. Greg Abbott boasts of removing 6,500 “ineligible” noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, citing no evidence, told a conservative talk show personality last week that Biden and Harris tried to move masses of undocumented voters into critical states to vote illegally. State Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa charged Republican leadership this week with “fear tactics and misinformation to suppress voter turnout and cling to power, knowing that our movement for a blue Texas is gaining momentum every day.”

BROAD ATTACKS: Trump and his campaign are trying to blunt Harris’s momentum. He’s holding multiple events a day and stopping in key battleground states, and aides are putting him in front of smaller crowds to discipline his message, including policy critiques on crime and immigration — with mixed results. 

GOP allies have pleaded with Trump to focus more on policy and less on personal attacks, a concept the former president has dismissed (The Hill).

Among Trump’s tactics is to attack Harris as a strawman for the failures surrounding the U.S. pullout of Afghanistan in 2021, a chaotic and deadly event that cast a dark shadow over Biden’s term in office but succeeded in ending America’s longest war.

“It’s a perfect political attack,” Chris Tuttle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who previously served as policy director of the majority staff of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations under Chair Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), told The Hill. “I think the campaign feels like it’s a good time to remind the general public of what happened and the chaos that ensued as a good line of attack.” 

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ZOOM IN

POLICY

SHUTDOWN WATCH: A conservative-backed push for stricter proof-of citizenship requirements to vote could threaten efforts to avert a government shutdown next month. While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have acknowledged a stopgap will be necessary next month to keep the government funded past a Sept. 30 deadline, calls are growing among House conservatives to use that measure to force consideration on a partisan bill aimed at barring noncitizens from voting.

The move sets up a clash with the Democratic-controlled Senate. The Biden administration vowed to veto it when the House considered it last month, noting it’s already a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections (The Hill). 

AI IN CA: Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and several other California lawmakers have come out against SB 1047, a California bill that would create new safety rules for artificial intelligence (AI). In a statement earlier this month, Pelosi said “many” in Congress view the legislation as “well-intentioned but ill informed.” California Senate Bill 1047 would require powerful AI models to perform safety testing before they could be released to the public and would hold developers liable for severe harms caused by their models (The Hill).

Reuters: Shares of cannabis companies sank Tuesday after the Drug Enforcement Administration postponed its cannabis reclassification hearing to December.

A BIPARTISAN SENATE GROUP frowns on Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposed constitutional reform, which would upend the country’s judiciary and independent oversight apparatus. The package would disrupt elements of the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship, the single largest country-to-country trade partnership, lawmakers point out (The Hill).

PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION PROCESS: By law, the federal ins and outs to prepare for a January shift from one chief executive to the next have begun, but candidate Trump and Harris are behind, The Associated Press explains. 

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ELSEWHERE

INTERNATIONAL

PROSECUTOR TO POLITICIAN: As she enters the home stretch of the race, Harris can find inspiration across the pond. Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s new Labour prime minister, was also a prosecutor before embracing politics. The two share a few other traits — from shaking off some of their earlier positions as they try to broaden their party’s appeal to operating in a volatile environment, where law and order is threatened.

“These are different countries with different political systems, but there often seem to be parallels in their political trajectories,” Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham, told The New York Times.

Israel’s military carried out raids and airstrikes in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday in an operation that appeared to cover a large part of the territory. The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least nine people had been killed in the attacks, and Israel’s foreign minister suggested that some residents would need to evacuate their homes (The New York Times).

A United Nations agency is warning that an Israeli evacuation order in central Gaza has displaced humanitarian workers and “severely impacts” the organization’s ability to deliver “essential support and services” (The Washington Post).

Russia launched another wave of pre-dawn missile and drone attacks Tuesday on Kyiv and several other large cities in Ukraine, marking the second day of a far-reaching bombing campaign. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the war with Russia would eventually end in dialogue, and that he would present a plan to Biden and his two potential successors (The New York Times and Reuters).

Foreign Policy: What’s next for U.S. policy in Venezuela?

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THE CLOSER

And finally … 🎾 High school student Iva Jović of California made history Monday at the U.S. Open by trouncing Australian Open semifinalist Magda Linette of Poland in straight sets at the age of 16. She put away a 32-year-old player ranked in the top 20 and became the youngest American to win a woman’s main-draw match at the tournament since 2000.

Her reaction: “Surprised, but not surprised.” 

Today, Jović is scheduled to play a second-round match against Ekaterina Alexandrova of Russia, ranked 31 in the world.

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