Donald Trump is trying to bob and weave his way back to power while Kamala Harris is finally daring to ditch the script as Democrats fret about her campaign.

The Republican and Democratic nominees on Tuesday offered voters an unusually self-reflective glimpse into their characters as they pursued dwindling bands of undecided voters in their neck-and-neck race that’s coming down to the wire.

Trump, fresh off a bizarre half-hour at a town hall on Monday when he danced on stage to his campaign soundtrack, made a clumsy attempt to repair his damaged standing among female voters. “I’m the father of IVF,” said the former president whose conservative Supreme Court majority unleashed chaos in reproductive health care.

And in a testy appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago, he made a virtue of his frequent incoherence, styling it as a sophisticated “weave” of multiple ideas that only a political genius would attempt. And he tried a fresh reinvention of history over his attempt to steal the 2020 election, declaring that his crowd in Washington on January 6, 2021, was infused with “love and peace.”

Harris also sought a second chance among a key voting bloc that is cool on her campaign. As she seeks to become the first Black woman president, she courted Black male voters who were last week rebuked by former President Barack Obama for flirting with Trump. In an interview with radio host Charlamagne Tha God, the vice president further sharpened her attacks on her rival, branding him as “weak” because he cozies up to dictators and agreeing with the host that his political creed equated to “fascism.”

While Trump flaunted his rambling rhetorical style, Harris rejected suggestions she’s too scripted. “That would be called discipline,”…

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Oklahoma schools may be buying 55,000 Trump-endorsed Bibles. Here’s why

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Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said Wednesday that she did not come lightly to her decision to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

In her first television interview after endorsing Harris, Caroline Rose Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett that she has had to navigate a painful “emotional storm” over the last couple of years, as her father contends with the fallout of his efforts to help Trump try to overturn the 2020 election. She said she had to figure out if she “had the fortitude to share” her thoughts, knowing it could hurt her relationship with her father, who is 80, “in the last years of his life.”

She said that she did not tell her father that she was writing an essay endorsing Harris over Trump, which Vanity Fair published earlier this week, but that she’s always made her opinions clear. Caroline Rose Giuliani previously endorsed Joe Biden and Harris over Trump in the 2020 election.

“I still worry that it will hurt him, and I do hope he knows that I love him. I hope that was clear, but yeah, we haven’t spoken about it yet and probably won’t for a while,” she said on “OutFront”.

In her Vanity Fair piece, Giuliani described being “well-suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be,” detailing how her father’s life has crumbled since “he joined forces” with the former president.

“The last thing I want to do is hurt him, especially when he’s already down. Plus we never know how much time we have left with our parents. The totality of that makes this the most difficult piece I’ve ever written. Yet this moment and this election are so much bigger than any of us,” she wrote.

Giuliani said in the essay…

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‘I just want to know about the dogs’: comedian Roy Wood Jr weighs in on Trump’s pet-eating claim

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The murders of six more Israeli hostages marked a critical new moment for Doug Emhoff, who’s speaking out on his own and Kamala Harris’ behalf, as only a Jewish American and the spouse of a presidential candidate can.

“In light of the retraumatizing of the tragedy of the weekend, speaking here, even though it’s so hard to do – this is a way that I can use this voice,” the second gentleman said Tuesday at a vigil for the hostages in Washington, DC.

For Emhoff, it’s a reflection of historical circumstances: he has spoken often about how he reconnected to his Judaism after seeing the response he received when Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris for the ticket four years ago. Then as second gentleman, he felt compelled first by the rise in antisemitism and then the October 7 Hamas terror attacks to speak up about how much hurt he felt.

Now, with his wife suddenly the Democratic nominee and both of them thrust more into the spotlight — and as the world approaches the anniversary of those attacks and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza — friends and advisers say they’re seeing a man continuing to search for his own response to an issue that is policy, politics and personal all at once. And advisers and campaign aides are trying to match strategy with a principal whose emotions and determination have struck them in both his private comments and public remarks.

As Donald Trump attacks Jews who vote for Harris as being self-hating, it was Emhoff who sat in the front row of Tuesday night’s vigil – brought together by an array of Washington-area Jewish groups and hosted at the Adas Israel synagogue – wiping tears from his eyes, then struggling to speak through his grief as he stepped to the microphone.

“This is raw,” he said, telling the hundreds assembled he was there “as a…

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The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Friday that the conviction of Adnan Syed should be reinstated because of procedural errors in how Syed’s conviction had been wiped away in 2022.

The ruling is the latest twist in the legal saga made famous by the podcast “Serial,” which examined the investigation that led to the 2000 conviction of Syed for the murder of Hae Min Lee.

On Friday, the state’s highest court agreed with an appeals court decision that said the rights of Lee’s family were violated because her brother Young Lee received inadequate notice of a 2022 hearing on the state’s efforts to vacate the case and was not afforded opportunities to fully participate in the hearing.

“In an effort to remedy what they perceived to be an injustice to Mr. Syed, the prosecutor and the circuit court worked an injustice against Mr. Lee by failing to treat him with dignity, respect, and sensitivity and, in particular, by violating Mr. Lee’s rights as a crime victim’s representative to reasonable notice of the Vacatur Hearing, the right to attend the hearing in person, and the right to be heard on the merits of the Vacatur Motion,” the Maryland Supreme Court said in the 4-3 decision.

The ruling will restart the efforts to clear away Syed’s conviction from the point that the 2022 motion to vacate the conviction was filed by Maryland state’s attorney’s office.

At the time, prosecutors said that they had uncovered evidence related to one of the other suspects in the case.

The reinvestigation of the case revealed evidence about the possible involvement of two suspects other than Syed, including a person who said they would make Lee “disappear” and that “he would kill her,” prosecutors previously said.

Syed’s attorneys said he and his legal team…

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Heading into the Democratic National Convention, new data suggests that the Trump campaign’s initial attempts to frame the conversation about Vice President Kamala Harris have so far gained relatively little traction.

Instead, the public’s attention has remained largely focused around the Democratic nominee’s selection of a running mate and other facets of her campaign – a dynamic that could be reinforced for another week as the Democratic Party gathers in Chicago. Meanwhile, the public conversation around the GOP nominee, former President Donald Trump, remains relatively unfocused in the quieter aftermath of a month of major news stories surrounding him.

The Breakthrough is a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential candidates throughout the campaign. Charting the words used to describe each candidate, the project finds that in the weeks since Harris entered the race, the word “campaign” has been mentioned more frequently regarding Harris than Trump – a break from earlier in the summer, when the Trump campaign drew as much or more attention than President Joe Biden’s campaign.

In the most recent survey – conducted August 9-12 by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of a research team from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan –Americans were more likely to report hearing about Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the Democratic vice presidential slot (and other news about the vice presidency, including her own current role) than any other topic. Slightly fewer mentioned other aspects of the Harris campaign, a broad category that includes the new ticket’s rally tour, fundraising totals, poll numbers or ads.

“I’ve seen her more on the news lately,” one poll respondent wrote.

…

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The Trump campaign’s attacks on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s military record are channeling the “swift boating” campaign 20 years ago against John Kerry, which accused the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee of lying about his Vietnam service and decorations.

The common denominator in both efforts: Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita.

LaCivita played a key role in the political advocacy group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which ran the TV ad campaign questioning Kerry’s military service. It’s a playbook that the Trump campaign appears to be re-running after Vice President Kamala Harris tapped Walz, a 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard, as her running mate.

Neither Harris nor Donald Trump ever served in the military. But Trump’s running mate – Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who is a Marine veteran – quickly zeroed-in on Walz’s military service, accusing him this week of abandoning his unit before it deployed to Iraq in 2006 and of falsely claiming he served in a war zone.

“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him,” Vance said at a campaign stop Wednesday.

Walz filed to run for Congress in February 2005 – before his unit was notified it could deploy to Iraq. He deployed with the Minnesota National Guard in August 2003 to Vicenza, Italy, as part of support for the US war in Afghanistan, according to a Minnesota Guard spokesperson, but not to a war zone.

The hits on Walz’s military service align with Trump’s penchant for personal attacks against his political opponents, while also harkening back to the effort to sully Kerry’s military record two decades ago.

LaCivita even connected the two in an interview with…

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The Supreme Court’s toughest cases during Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure have often generated internal suspense, with shifting votes, last-minute switches and the chief’s own push toward compromises that would lessen the appearance of politics.

Not so this spring, when the six Republican-appointed conservatives established a far-reaching immunity from prosecution for former President Donald Trump.

Sources familiar with the negotiations told CNN there was an immediate and clear 6-3 split, as the justices met in private in the oak-paneled conference room that adjoins the chief justice’s chambers.

Roberts made no serious effort to entice the three liberal justices for even a modicum of the cross-ideological agreement that distinguished such presidential-powers cases in the past. He believed he could persuade people to look beyond Trump.

In past decades, when the justices took up major tests of presidential power, they achieved unanimity. Certainly, today’s bench and all of Washington is far more polarized, but as recently as 2020, Roberts was able to broker compromises in two Trump document cases.

It was understandable for outsiders, and even some justices inside, to believe that middle ground might be found on some issues in the immunity dispute and that Roberts would work against any resounding victory for Trump.

The chief justice’s institutionalist tendency had been cemented over the past two decades. He often talked it up, famously admonishing Trump in 2018 that jurists shed their political affiliation once they take the robe, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have it an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

…

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Iran is using covert social media activity and related influence operations in an effort to undercut the candidacy of former President Donald Trump, a US intelligence official said Monday in an updated assessment of threats to the November election.

The US intelligence community has “observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive would increase tensions with the United States,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a statement.

The recent Iranian influence activity has come in the form of “covert social media accounts and related activity,” the official from ODNI said at a media briefing when CNN asked for examples of the activity.

Iran’s preference for a US presidential candidate has not changed since 2020, the ODNI official said. In the 2020 election campaign, Iran “carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects,” according to a declassified US intelligence report.

Russia’s preferences for the presidential race also haven’t shifted since 2020, when Moscow conducted a range of influence operations in support of Trump and aimed at denigrating Joe Biden, the ODNI official said.

“Iran does not engage in any objectives or activities intended to influence the U.S. election,” the Iranian Permanent Mission to the United Nations said in a statement to CNN. “A significant portion of such accusations are characterized by psychological operations designed to artificially pep up election campaigns.”

As president, Trump ordered the killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, and withdrew from a multilateral deal aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran has…

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