Trump heads to Michigan after Jack Smith’s bombshell filing: Live updates

Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican antagonists, will join Democrat Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Thursday aimed at reaching out to moderate voters and rattling the former president.

Cheney was the top Republican on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, earning Trump’s disdain and effectively exiling herself from her own party.

Cheney lost her Wyoming seat to a Trump-endorsed candidate two years ago and she endorsed Harris, the Democratic nominee, last month. The two women will appear together in a historic white schoolhouse in Ripon, where a series of meetings held in 1854 to oppose slavery’s expansion led to the birth of the Republican Party.

Harris is opening a two-day stay in Wisconsin and Michigan, and Trump will be in Michigan on Thursday as the two candidates grapple for wins in the “blue wall” battleground states, which also include Pennsylvania.

Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has announced the launch of Wisconsin Republicans for Harris ahead of her visit to the state with former GOP rep Liz Cheney.

More than 20 Republicans from across the state lead the group and write in an open letter: “Donald Trump does not align with Wisconsin values. To ensure our democracy and our economy remain strong for another four years, we must elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the White House.”

Rhian Lubin has the story.

Democrats and Kamala Harris supporters, many of them military veterans, had descended on the home of Micaela Pond in Arlington, Virginia, to watch what is likely to be the final face-to-face clash between the two presidential campaigns before voters head to the polls.

National correspondent for NewsNation’s Cuomo, Ali Bradley, secured the first interview with Donald Trump following the unsealing of Jack Smith’s latest filing in the election interference case.

The former president said about the special counsel: “He’s a deranged person. I call him deranged Jack Smith. He just lost the big documents case. That was the biggest of them all. They said the documents case and they said that was the toughest of them all. Let me tell you, we just won it. And it was won strongly and completely. And it was a total victory in Florida. And he is a person who is trying and he works for Kamala and he works for Joe. This was a weaponization of government, and that’s why it was released 30 days before the election. And it’s nothing new in there, by the way. Nothing new.”

Here’s Alex Woodward’s report on what we learned from Smith’s new filing.

Speaking on his Risky Business podcast, Nate Silver – founder and former editor-in-chief of data-driven news outlet FiveThirtyEight – described RFK Jr’s endorsement the “most important” of the race so far.

In his latest post on Truth Social, Donald Trump continues to protest his innocence in reaction to what has come to light in the new filing made by Jack Smith in the 2020 election subversion case against the former president.

He also accuses the Justice Department of election interference.

Here’s what Trump posted:

FOR 60 DAYS PRIOR TO AN ELECTION, THE DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE IS SUPPOSED TO DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THAT WOULD TAINT OR INTERFERE WITH SAID ELECTION. THEY DISOBEYED THEIR OWN RULE IN FAVOR OF COMPLETE AND TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE. I DID NOTHING WRONG, THEY DID! THE CASE IS A SCAM, JUST LIKE ALL OF THE OTHERS, INCLUDING THE DOCUMENTS CASE, WHICH WAS DISMISSED!

JD Vance’s debate performance was “hated by hardcore MAGA social media,” according to a top former Republican strategist.

“Dive into hard core MAGA social media. A lot of them hated Vance’s debate. They wanted Vance to expose Harris as the devil,” Stevens said in a post on X.

“Instead he was on a personal rehabilitation campaign aimed at 2028.”