World
How a congressman’s challenge to New Jersey’s first lady is shaking up a key Senate race
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. (AP) — When New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy walked up to Rep. Andy Kim last weekend to congratulate him with a handshake after his third consecutive win in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat, the goodwill gesture represented a surprise within a surprise.
The Senate seat only became competitive because incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez had been unexpectedly indicted last year on federal corruption charges. And Kim’s wins in three state county committee votes so far have fueled sudden momentum for the mild-mannered three-term congressman, who is mounting a more formidable challenge than is typical against a well-connected political figure in a state where connections count for a lot.
That matters in the Democratic stronghold of New Jersey, where Democratic primaries often decide elections — and where primary winners are sometimes chosen by party leaders in behind-the-scenes gatherings well ahead of the primaries themselves. Kim sued this week in federal court to challenge the way counties draw ballots to favor candidates with party support.
As surprising as they were, Kim’s wins in three counties so far, including his and the first lady’s home turf, hardly settle anything. Murphy, who comes from the world of high finance and has spent years cultivating allies among state party leaders, has already secured the support of party bosses in the more populous counties of Bergen, Camden and Essex.
Menendez, meanwhile, has yet to declare whether he will seek another term, though the charges against him have generated spectacular headlines. They are seen by many to be career-ending, though he has pleaded not guilty and projected a defiant stance as turmoil suddenly engulfed a seat that had long been seen as safe for Democrats.
Tough race for Democratic nomination
Still, the wins by Kim suggest that the race for the Democratic nomination won’t be easy for anyone. It pits Kim, perhaps best known for being spotted cleaning debris from the U.S. Capitol after the Jan. 6 insurrection three years ago, against Murphy, who is married to Gov. Phil Murphy and has made maternal mortality her signature issue in her role as first lady.
Kim’s lawsuit signals that he still believes New Jersey’s way of giving better ballot positioning to candidates favored by local insiders could give Murphy an unfair advantage, a view shared by many political observers.
“We do not have competitive primaries. We in theory have them, but in practice we have party leaders who get behind closed doors and the nominee is presented to the public as a fait accompli. This is your candidate, love it or lump it,” said Daniel Cassino, executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll. “The fact that we’re actually having this primary is a sign something has gone awry.”
The competition between Kim and Murphy began almost as soon as the Menendez indictment was announced. It gave New Jersey a rare competitive Democratic primary for one of only three statewide seats — the others, for a second Senate seat and governor, aren’t on the ballot this year.
The seat may yet remain in Democratic hands, but a contentious campaign could consume energy and resources as the party gears up for a grinding presidential campaign and the larger fight to control Congress.
Kim cast his candidacy in terms of the public’s distrust of officials and party insiders, pointing specifically to Menendez’s indictments. A 2015 federal corruption indictment against Menendez ended in a hung jury and with prosecutors dropping the case. The concern, Kim said in an interview, is that progressive Democrats who oppose the party bosses’ influence and independents might sit out the November election if they think Murphy’s candidacy was foisted on them.
“If the Democrats don’t fix this and show that this is a credible and legitimate process, I think that this Senate seat could be in jeopardy this November. And I think that that’s something I absolutely refuse to see happen because I’ve been there in Congress. I know exactly what the Republicans would do if they have the majority in the Senate,” Kim said.
Tammy Murphy, who worked at Goldman Sachs briefly and helped start a policy think tank in New Jersey, pushed back at the notion that the support she has is based on her marriage to Phil. She said Saturday she isn’t asking for his help. She also defended her departure from the Republican Party, which she left shortly before her husband’s run for governor in 2017.
“I’ve been on the ground for the last eight years, literally building the party,” she said. “I’ve shown up serially in all these, all the red counties where they needed help. I showed up.”
She added: “Many people are leaving the Republican Party here now, and I will tell you, I have stood for the same values since day one. Absolutely the same values.”
GOP hopes
The possibility of Republicans picking up the seat in November is overblown, Cassino said, in large part because the state tilts so overwhelmingly Democratic and because it’s an election year. Ben Dworkin, who heads the Rowan Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship, echoed that sentiment, pointing out Republicans haven’t been elected to the Senate in New Jersey since 1972.
Republicans are grappling with their own primary, featuring southern New Jersey businessman Curtis Bashaw, Mendham Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner and former TV news reporter Alex Zdan. Also running in the Democratic primary are labor leader Patricia Campos-Medina and civil rights activist Lawrence Hamm.
Shortly before the Burlington Democratic Party results were announced Saturday, voters leaving the hall greeted each other with smiles and hugs. Kim and Murphy both stopped to chat with people.
Murphy had talked earlier in the day about needing to send “ticked off” moms to Washington to fight for families. Kim had focused on being a county native and said he’d fight for the state particularly in light of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and the threat to the country’s democracy.
A number of voters acknowledged the awkwardness of having the first lady and their congressman competing and declined to say which one they supported. But they sounded more certain about their resolve to win in November.
“We’ll come together,” said Gina LaPlaca, a local official in Burlington County. “The threat from Republicans is too much.”
World
Paramount Global Set to Unveil New Leadership Structure; Anxiety Runs High on Earnings Eve
As turmoil continues to surround the future of Paramount Global, details surrounding interim leadership and its proposed Skydance deal are coming to light, multiple sources told Variety.
Sunday was a consequential day in Shari Redstone’s ongoing exclusive bargaining window with David Ellison‘s Skydance, one that would see the Hollywood scion take majority ownership of Paramount Global and its owner National Amusements Inc. Skydance offered its “best and final” offer to Redstone on Sunday, sources added.
On the eve of its quarterly earnings call, two insiders familiar with Paramount Global said the board is expected to announce a new leadership committee to replace ousted CEO Bob Bakish. Expected to be named to these leadership roles are Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins, CBS chief executive George Cheeks and MTV Entertainment Group President Chris McCarthy, the sources said.
Multiple insiders close to Paramount’s ongoing sales process said that letting Bakish go was the right move, but the new leadership structure is problematic at this fragile moment. There will not be a sole leader guiding the corporation through a potential sales process, said the insiders, and Cheeks, Robbins and McCarthy are not accustomed to collaboration across their portfolios. All details that are raising internal and external anxiety. There is, of course, Redstone — who is being closely watched by Wall Street and the media sector.
A third source familiar with the company said Redstone has been resolute in preferring the Skydance bid, which promises to keep her family media empire in tact and on track to provide future shareholder value. Or, she could appease some of her shareholders and evaluate a competing offer from Apollo and Sony Entertainment — a deal that would call for major structural changes, with asset liquidation and job losses likely. And that’s if that scenario could survive inevitable regulatory scrutiny.
Heading into earnings, the company has yet to disclose whether its network carriage deal with Charter, the country’s second largest cable operator next to Comcast, has been renewed. It is set to expire April 30.
The flurry of weekend activity is sure to weigh heavy on Paramount Global’s share price on Monday, and change the economics of any potential sale. Paramount Global is scheduled to report first quarter 2024 results tomorrow after market close. The earnings call with analysts — sans Bakish but possibly with the new leadership team — is set to start at 4:30 p.m. ET.
World
Lawmakers call for release of Putin’s ‘political prisoner number one'
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers marked the two-year anniversary of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza’s imprisonment by calling for his immediate release.
Kara-Murza, who lives in solitary confinement in a Siberian maximum-security prison, was sentenced to 25 years last April for treason and other related charges as Russian authorities continue their crackdown on domestic dissent.
The Moscow City Court claimed Kara-Murza was guilty of “high treason“ for “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces” when he delivered a speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2022 that criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
His sentence is the longest term handed down to a political prisoner in the post-Soviet era.
Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., co-led a group of 80 bipartisan lawmakers urging the Biden administration to declare the Russian dissident as “unlawfully and wrongfully detained.”
Fox News Digital obtained a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Cardin and other lawmakers demanding Kara-Murza’s release and the aforementioned designation.
“There is little time left to end the ongoing and unjust detention of U.S. Legal Permanent Resident and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza,” the letter read in part. “Mr. Kara-Murza’s family has grave concerns that he may not survive much longer. His situation is even more perilous following the killing of Alexei Navalny. Mr. Kara-Murza is the most prominent imprisoned democracy activist still alive in Russia.”
The State Department referred Fox News Digital to spokesperson Matthew Miller’s remarks on Kara-Murza’s two-year imprisonment anniversary but did not provide specifics when asked about efforts to give the Russian opposition leader the designation sought by U.S. lawmakers.
“The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful. When making assessments, the Department conducts a legal, fact-based review that looks into the totality of the circumstances for each case individually,” a spokesperson said.
Russian human rights lawyer and the Center for European Policy Analysis’ Democracy Fellow Grigory Vaypan told Fox News Digital that Kara-Murza is now Russia’s “prisoner number one.”
AMERICAN BALLERINA WITH DUAL CITIZENSHIP ARRESTED IN RUSSIA, FACING LIFE IN PRISON FOR DONATING $51 TO UKRAINE
“He’s definitely political prisoner number one on Putin’s list, and his life is certainly in danger now that we see with the murder of Navalny that Putin’s regime demonstrates to the world that it’s willing to kill political prisoners in Russia,” Vaypan said.
He added that Kara-Murza, who was reportedly poisoned twice in 2015 and 2017 by agents of the Russian state, is essentially on “Putin’s death row.”
“His health is deteriorating. He has never fully recovered from the effects of those two poisonings. Now, he is not only in prison, he’s on solitary confinement, which is basically indefinite. He can be in his tiny prison cell for many months, and with the effects of those two poisonings, his health is getting worse,” Vaypan explained. “This is why it would be fair to say that he’s essentially on Putin’s death row now.”
Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, counts roughly 700 political prisoners in Russia today.
Political prisoners are further isolated and punished in an effort to prevent them from continuing to speak out against the Russian authorities. They can be put into solitary confinement, deprived of food, mail, phone calls with relatives or family visits.
RUSSIAN POET SENTENCED TO 7 YEARS IN PRISON FOR RECITING VERSES AGAINST WAR IN UKRAINE
“There’s a wide array of those measures that the Russian prison authorities can resort to. And we’re increasingly seeing that, especially after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion [of] Ukraine, we’ve seen more people jailed for exercising their right to free speech,” Vaypan told Fox News Digital. “And we’ve seen an increasing number of people being further harassed and pressured even while in prison.”
Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, reflected on the deaths of other Russian opposition figures like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov at the hands of the Putin regime.
“[They] target the most courageous, the most principled, those Russians who risk not only their freedom but very often their lives to show you that Russia can be different,” she said at an event on Capitol Hill.
“As my husband put it, and I quote, ‘It is my hope that when people in the free world today think and speak about Russia, they will remember not only the war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but also those who are standing up to them because we are Russians too.’”
World
At least four dead in US after dozens of tornadoes rip through Oklahoma
Hospitals across the state reported about 100 injuries, including people apparently struck by debris.
At least four people were killed and dozens more injured after multiple tornadoes wreaked havoc in the central state of Oklahoma in the United States.
The tornadoes caused extensive damage in the town of Sulphur, home to about 5,000 people, flattened buildings, threw vehicles into the air and ripped the roofs from houses.
“You just can’t believe the destruction,” Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt said during a visit to the hard-hit town on Sunday afternoon. “It seems like every business downtown has been destroyed.”
A four-month-old baby was among the dead, Hughes County Emergency Management Director Mike Dockrey told Oklahoma television station KOCO.
Stitt said about 30 people were injured, including some who were in a bar when the tornado struck.
Hospitals across the state reported about 100 injuries, including people apparently cut or struck by debris, and more than 20,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening.
Stitt issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency in 12 counties due to the severe weather, while in a call with the Oklahoma governor, President Joe Biden offered the federal government’s full support with recovery efforts, the White House said in a statement.
The National Weather Service (NWS) reported that 38 possible tornadoes hit the area and that the worst of the storms rolled through Central Oklahoma on Saturday into early Sunday morning, spreading into northwest Texas, western Missouri and Kansas.
-
Kentucky1 week ago
Kentucky first lady visits Fort Knox schools in honor of Month of the Military Child
-
World1 week ago
Shipping firms plead for UN help amid escalating Middle East conflict
-
News1 week ago
Is this fictitious civil war closer to reality than we think? : Consider This from NPR
-
Politics1 week ago
ICE chief says this foreign adversary isn’t taking back its illegal immigrants
-
Politics1 week ago
'Nothing more backwards' than US funding Ukraine border security but not our own, conservatives say
-
News1 week ago
The San Francisco Zoo will receive a pair of pandas from China
-
World1 week ago
Two Mexican mayoral contenders found dead on same day
-
Politics1 week ago
Republican aims to break decades long Senate election losing streak in this blue state