JD Vance says he is ‘a little bit disgusted’ by Republicans who criticized Ramaswamy campaign ad – live

Nancy Pelosi’s office received “a suspicious letter” on Wednesday in what appears to be the latest incident of dubious mailings targeted at US Congress members ahead of the midterm elections.

Earlier this week, the Guardian reported that the offices of more than three dozen members of Congress across the political spectrum received envelopes containing white powder. One lawmaker’s office said preliminary tests indicated the powder was not hazardous.

A spokesperson for Pelosi said the letter was “consistent with mailings reported by other congressional offices” and that everyone in the office was safe.

“Speaker Pelosi remains focused on serving the people of San Francisco and is concerned for the Members and staff whose offices have experienced similar incidents,” Nicholas Martin, a spokesperson for the speaker emerita, said in a statement.

“She is grateful for the efforts of the US Capitol Police, the San Francisco Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to thoroughly investigate this series of intimidation across America.”

More than 100 letters thought to contain white powder were reportedly thought to be circulating in the US mail system. Election offices across the US have also reported receiving suspicious mail.

The mailings are under investigation by the FBI, Capitol police and US Postal Inspection Service. The FBI declined to confirm “specific instances or letters”, but said in a statement earlier this week: “The FBI and US Postal Inspection Service are investigating a series of suspicious mailings sent to various addresses nationwide, including secretary of state offices and their related election offices, and congressional offices.”

The controversy around Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad continues to grow as it emerged that another Republican candidate in Ohio had asked him not to run the spot featuring his Democratic opponent’s estranged mother.

A Republican operative told CNN that a candidate “personally asked” the GOP gubernatorial candidate not to air the ad, and that “Republicans in the state probably couldn’t be more pissed at him”.

In the ad, the mother of Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s opponent, called her daughter a liar. Amy Acton was sexually abused by her mother’s husband when she was 12, her brother Phillip Stearns said. After his arrest, their mother, Donna Arthur, remained married to her husband, even though Acton and Stearns were removed from her care.

The ad has drawn criticism from some prominent Republicans although others have defended it, including vice-president JD Vance, who told Republicans “stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days”.

Meanwhile, footage surfaced on Wednesday of Ramaswamy describing Acton as a candidate who has no vision “other than to complain about what someone else did to her”.

Aipac, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US, will cease issuing endorsements and directly contributing to candidates through its political action committee, according to a report from Jewish Insider.

Since 2022, the group has been directly involved with elections through its Pac and Super Pac and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on US races, though its brand has become increasingly toxic in recent years.

“To win the fight for the future of the country and the US-Israel alliance, we must build a more strategic, consequential, and nimble political operation. We will prioritize increasing direct, organized contributions from individual Americans to candidates – expanding upon our current efforts – and maximizing the emerging political fundraising tools,” Aipac leadership said in a letter, according to Jewish Insider.

“Endorsements, direct PAC contributions, and earmarking will no longer be part of our approach so we can expand individual giving and utilize new tools to help our friends win.”

Historically the group has spent most in Democratic primaries, and donated more to Democrats, rarely backing Republicans in competitive races during general elections. It emerged this week, however, that Aipac made a significant donation to Republican Mike Rogers, who is running against Abdul El-Sayed. The group, which spent tens of millions to defeat El-Sayed in the Democratic primary, plans to donate as much as $9m to support Rogers, the New York Times reported.

Speaking earlier, JD Vance also chided Republicans for their outrage over the controversial campaign ad from Vivek Ramaswamy,featuring his Democratic opponent’s estranged mother.

Amy Acton was sexually abused by her mother’s husband when she was 12 years old, according to her brother Phillip Stearns. Their mother, Donna Arthur, remained married to her husband after he was arrested, even though Acton and Stearns were removed from her care.

Vance said he wasn’t going to weigh in on whether the spot was “appropriate or not”, instead he said that his “message” for fellow elected Republicans is to “stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days”.

At a campaign stop in Cincinnati, the vice-president added:

I have to admit that I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.

Elon Musk – the tech billionaire, Trump ally, and founder of Tesla and Space X – has threatened to home in on Democrats who pursue him in the next Congress.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022. “Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.”

This comes after Politico reported earlier today that Democratic lawmakers were considering how best to investigate Musk, and his businesses, if the party gains control of Congress following the midterm elections.

• US envoy Steve Witkoff announced this morning that Russia authorities had freed Stephen Hubbard, the first American known to be convicted of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine. Hubbard was arrested when the Russians briefly took over the Ukrainian city of Izium at the start of the ongoing conflict in 2022.

• Donald Trump welcomed the news, noting the prisoner release was the result of a direct request he made to Putin in a telephone call last week. Meanwhile, after Witkoff’s discussions with Putin in St Petersburg, he flattered the Russian president by calling him a “humanitarian”. The emissary’s comments drew bipartisan backlash, but Trump defended them: “I guess you could say for that particular purpose, for the purpose of allowing a man who was thinking he was going to be in prison for life, out,” the US president told reporters in the East Room.

• Witkoff also said that his discussions with Putin were “constructive”, and “will continue with trilateral talks between the United States, Russia and Ukraine at the technical level”. This comes after Trump’s reignited feud with Zelenskyy after he urged Kyiv to end its attacks on Russian refineries and waived sweeping sanctions against Moscow.

• New polling from the New York Times and Siena University shows that likely voters prefer Democratic candidates over Republicans running for office by 11 percentage points. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating dropped to a new low for this particular survey – 36%.

• At a campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, JD Vance criticized the media and Democrats for focusing on Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent ad for his gubernatorial campaign, which features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. The vice-president defended Ramaswamy for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar”. Donna Arthur, Acton’s mother, claimed in the spot that her daughter “lied her entire life” about living in a tent during her childhood. However, Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said on Tuesday that his sister is estranged from her mother, who had married a man that sexually abused Acton when she was 12 years old. Arthur, he said, remained in the marriage even after her husband was arrested and her children were taken away from her.

• The supreme court has refused to allow the Trump administration to immediately deny gender-affirming care for transgender people in federal prisons. The decision leaves in place a lower-court block on the policy while a legal challenge plays out. It was adopted after an executive order from Trump, who’s taken several steps to roll back transgender rights during his second term.

• With 13 days until the midterms, Trump will continue his campaign blitz by heading to Clemson, South Carolina, where he’ll rally for Darline Graham – the Republican nominee for US Senate who is hoping to secure a full term for her late brother’s seat. Darline was appointed by the South Carolina governor to carry out the remainder of Lindsey Graham’s time in office after his death in July. However, she now faces a competitive race against Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and the Democratic nominee, in a contest that has become increasingly rancorous in recent months.

In the East Room today, Trump defended Steve Witkoff’s comments, noting that the release of Steven Hubbard might warrant praise for Putin.

“I guess you could say for that particular purpose, for the purpose of allowing a man who was thinking he was going to be in prison for life, out,” Trump told reporters.

Earlier, we noted that Thom Tillis, the outgoing Republican senator from North Carolina, slammed special envoy Steve Witkoff for calling Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian” today – following the release of detained US citizen Steven Hubbard.

Now, more GOP lawmakers are pushing back.

“Vladimir Putin is not our friend, and he is certainly no humanitarian,” said retiring Republican senator Joni Ernst.

She added: “His relentless attacks on innocent civilians in Ukraine show his total disregard for human life. Appeasement won’t end this war. Pressure will.”

With 13 days until the midterms, early voting data is rolling in nationwide. Democrats need to net four Senate seats and hold 218 House seats to reclaim a congressional majority. Here is where the numbers stand so far:

• Turnout is surging in key battlegrounds: Over 16 million Americans have already voted in person or by mail. According to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, battleground states -including Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Florida and North Carolina – have each passed 700,000 ballots cast as of 21 October. Turnout is being driven in part by widespread voter frustration, reflected in Donald Trump’s record-low approval ratings.

• Democrats lead in early returns: Registered Democrats account for 47% of early ballots cast, compared with 29% from Republicans (tracking returned ballots, not candidate selection). The party gap is most pronounced in North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa. While Republicans traditionally favor election day voting, strategists worry this widened margin signals a “red undertow” – GOP voters staying home due to frustration over high gas prices, the conflict in Iran and sweeping tariffs.

• Early votes are pacing well ahead of 2022: In Georgia, early votes already represent nearly 30% of the total turnout from the 2022 midterms. Florida sits at 18%, with similarly high paces recorded in North Carolina, Michigan and Ohio.

• Mail-in voting remains resilient: Over 56m mail-in ballots have been requested or sent nationally – greater than the 52m requested in 2022, according to NBC News (using data from TargetSmart). Despite executive orders from the Trump administration attempting to restrict mail-in voting, which the supreme court struck down in September, voters continue to utilize the process at pre-pandemic rates.

A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25bn in penalties, on after a jury found the company had misled consumers in a case arising from allegations that Cambridge Analytica – a political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign – obtained data from millions of Facebook users ⁠without their consent.

The state’s attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, ⁠a British political consulting firm, had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.

“Facebook’s wrongdoing – ⁠over the course of ​years and systematically broadcast to the public – goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order following the verdict.

Mathew found that a penalty of more than $219bn was warranted, based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $25bn.

In Maine, Susan Collins, the moderate Republican incumbent senator vying for a sixth term in office, joined the growing list of GOP lawmakers to urge the Trump administration to reverse the waiving of Russian sanctions.

“First of all the law is very clear, that we wanted additional sanctions to be imposed on Russia, by cutting the deal on diesel with Russia. [Trump] is not going to increase the supply to the United States in any measurable way. But what he is going to do is to get more funding for Russia to use to attack Ukraine,” Collins told reporters in Lewiston, where she was joined by former independent senator Joe Manchin for a campaign stop.