Michael Kovrig, one of two Canadian men detained in China for more than 1,000 days on alleged spying charges, has described being put in solitary confinement for six months and relentlessly interrogated in what he said was psychological torture.
Dubbed the “Michaels,” Kovrig and fellow Canadian national Michael Spavor were at the heart of a bitter tussle between Beijing and Ottawa that continues to sour diplomatic relations to this day.
“It was psychologically, absolutely, the most grueling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” Kovrig told CBC News in his first extensive public remarks since being released from Chinese prison three years ago.
Kovrig said he was walking home with his partner, who was six months pregnant at the time, from dinner in Beijing on December 10, 2018 when he was seized by Chinese authorities.
“We came up a spiral staircase right in front of the plaza in front of my apartment building, and boom,” Kovrig recalled. “There’s a dozen men in black with cameras on them surrounding us, shouting in Chinese, ‘That’s him.’”
Kovrig, a former diplomat who was working as a senior advisor for the International Crisis Group think tank, was detained at the same time as Spavor, a Canadian consultant who worked extensively in North Korea, on alleged spying charges.
The pair became embroiled in a three-year diplomatic row that began earlier that month when Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei, in Vancouver on US fraud charges.
Kovrig and Spavor were only freed after US prosecutors dropped the extradition request and agreed to release Meng, nearly two years later.
Beijing consistently denied any connection between the arrests of Meng and the Michaels and said Kovrig and Spavor were released on bail for health reasons.
Chinese officials did not publicly disclose any evidence against Spavor or Kovrig, or detailed information relating to their trials, which were held behind closed doors.
‘Chill down my spine’
After he was detained, Kovrig told CBC News he was handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into a black SUV, then taken to a padded cell that would be his home for the next six months.
“At that point they said, ‘You are under suspicion of endangering China’s state security. You are going to be interrogated,’” Kovrig said.
“A chill went down my spine.”
Kovrig said he was held in complete isolation in a cell under fluorescent lights for six months, in contravention of UN standards. He said he was interrogated for 6 to 9 hours daily, locked in a chair for hours on end, and at times was forced to survive on three bowls of rice per day.
“They are trying to bully and torment and terrorize and coerce you into accepting their false version of reality,” Kovrig said.
After six months, Kovrig said he was moved to a larger cell with plexiglass windows, which he shared with a dozen cellmates.
“That was kind of like moving from hell to limbo,” Kovrig said.
Kovrig and Spavor were released in September 2021. Kovrig stepped off the plane in Toronto and hugged his separated wife Vina Nadjibulla, who had campaigned tirelessly for his release, in a touching moment that reverberated across the country.
He also met his daughter, who his partner gave birth to while Kovrig was in prison, for the first time. He described the meeting as “the most fantastic, heartwarming feeling you can imagine.”
“I’ll never forget that sense of wonder, of everything being new and wonderful again, of pushing my daughter on a swing and her saying to her mother, ‘Mummy, I’m so happy.’”
Wole Soyinka became the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and is now one of the continent’s most revered authors. But two decades earlier, he was sent to prison without trial for speaking out about the civil war in his native Nigeria.
While in solitary confinement he scrawled notes and poems using meat bones, handmade ink and toilet paper. Those ideas became the memoir “The Man Died,” published in 1972, which is now the framework of a movie of the same name that recounts the playwright and novelist’s life at the height of the civil war.
The following interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Larry Madowo: What did it feel like to go to prison just because you were agitating for what you felt was right?
Wole Soyinka: It was a very testing period for me. Twenty-two months in total isolation, denied books, denied paper, my cell constantly searched, nothing at all to sustain my mind.
I think one of the most cunning categories of humanity that I’ve ever encountered is the prisoner. The prisoner has to survive. It’s a survival test, not a question of self-advancement.
And (in solitary confinement) what is the most space-economic enterprise you could undertake? The mental enterprise, calculations, mathematics. I made my own ink with dirt; I made my own pen from the bones in the meat of my food, creating a complete self-sustaining mental micro-world of my own. It was also a dangerous period for the mind.
I remember when I used to hallucinate, so I would leap up and try and destroy those kinds of hallucinatory images that came out. But eventually, I mastered all that period, and after that, I began recollecting those formulae in geometry and trigonometry which I had hated, and I began pulling them back, making calculations on the ground.
Believe it or not, I rediscovered the theory of permutations and combinations. Those things I had hated in school became my sustenance.
LM: You wrote about those prison years in a memoir which has now been turned into a movie, “The Man Died.” Have you seen it yet?
WS: No. Let me put it this way, turning anything in my life into something other people can watch, pains me. I assisted them in trying to locate a house in which I hid and operated during the civil war. They were looking for something close to one we were using during that period.
But it’s not just about me alone, it’s also about a particular period. I might watch it eventually, but not immediately. Even this very interview we’re doing, I won’t watch. It always takes a while to bring myself to watch me.
Nigerian playwright, novelist and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Wole Soyinka poses for a portrait in Johannesburg on April 4, 2024.
MARCO LONGARI/AFP/AFP via Getty Images
LM: You don’t make a big fuss about your birthday, but you just turned 90, which is a big deal.
WS: Well, the annoying thing is that I don’t feel 90. But I will confess that I do share some kind of ritualistic aspect of the birthday. So it’s not a question of dislike, it’s just that I like to have it on my own. Usually what I do on my birthday is disappear into the forest. That’s my normal way of spending birthdays.
LM: Do you remember when you became politically active?
WS: I was a great eavesdropper on my parents’ conversation, especially around my father’s (a school principal and priest in the Anglican church) colleagues. I remember sitting behind an armchair listening.
My mother would arrive and report what had gone on. My father’s whole circle was also involved that way, so I would say that this was the beginning of my political involvement.
When the women rioted in this very town where we are now, Abeokuta, my mother was involved as a lieutenant of (women’s rights activist) Mrs. Ransome Kuti, (famed Afrobeat musician) Fela Kútì’s mother. So as a child, when all the rioting was taking place, I became a courier between the various women’s camps passing messages.
LM: Seeing your mother involved in this political activism appeared to have planted the seed for your life’s work.
WS: That’s correct. Being actually within the environment, that struggle of militancy against an unacceptable situation that these women were facing, how their goods were being seized by police in the marketplaces, if they didn’t pay taxes, some of them beaten up, roughed up, and so on.
Being part and parcel of this and seeing them set upon on their way to go and pass more oppressive legislation, I took the side of the women most naturally (and) that reflected in my writing. No question at all.
LM: There’s a legend about you sneaking into a radio station and swapping out a political speech for something more critical, what’s the truth?
WS: Well, the first thing I have to remind you is that I was tried and acquitted. Yes, it’s true, there’s no point in denying it any longer that I felt compelled to stop the further broadcast of false results.
I witnessed firsthand the destruction of polling booths, even the tearing up of results. I was already heavily politicized at that time, but when I saw this oppressive regime about to reinstall itself, and people have to remember, it was the most cynical regime, which went so far as to declare on radio to say, “we don’t give a damn if you vote for us,” it just triggered my already highly honed militant sense. So it was part of an ongoing struggle on so many levels. Yeah, guilty, but there was no alternative at that time.
LM: After receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, it took a long time for another (Black) African toreceive that honor. What did that feel like at the time?
WS: Isolated. I was most relieved when the next African came because so much was demanded of you. It was like overnight your constituency expanded simply because you come from the African continent. On the one hand, of course, a sense of recognition, which is very good. Opening certain doors, but then there were not many doors which I was looking to enter anyway, I just enjoyed my profession, full stop.
But at the same time, especially in societies like ours, it exposed you a lot more. I always remind people that one of the most brutal dictators we had here, Sani Abacha, would’ve gone to his grave a happy man if he hanged a Nobel Laureate, if he may be able to put that on his CV. As it is, he had to be content with hanging an activist, a writer, and his eight companions. I’m referring to Ken Saro-Wiwa.
So it exposed me to very great dangers because I refuse to back down on my beliefs, on my activities simply because I’ve become a Nobel laureate. Why should I stop things which preoccupied me before the Nobel?
But it was grand when one after the other (African Nobel winners) began to come in. Now, I’ve been able to enjoy for some time now being a Nobelist rather being feeling sometimes like a showpiece.
LM: You told some students of an exchange program named after you that you still hope to go to space. What’s your fascination with space?
WS: It began as a child, and I was just fascinated by the stars and constellations. I wrote in one of my essays that I used to close my eyes and imagine a state of total nothingness, and from that, the notion of actually going to space. I recollect when Armstrong stepped on the moon, I was in prison at the time, so that childhood exercise also served me in good stead. My prison bars dissolved overnight just imagining them on the moon. Then space exploration began.
One day, by mail, one of the associations of human development that I belong to had some free tickets for a zero-gravity flight simulator; by then I was 70 years old. I went to San Jose (California) and had my space experience and that is one of the most thrilling experiences of my life.
LM: Richard Branson is taking people to space these days.
WS: If Branson came now and said, I’ve found space for you, I would terminate this interview right now. I’m still in reasonably good shape and I think I can take the gravity stress; I’m convinced I can. I’m willing to do anything. Shoot me into space, I don’t even mind if something happens over there, that’s okay. Then I’ve experienced that childhood obsession.
Some of the country’s most notorious cold cases could be solved with the help of an artificial intelligence tool that can do 81 years of detective work in just 30 hours.
Avon and Somerset Police are trialling the technology which can identify potential leads that may not have been found during a manual trawl of the evidence.
The Soze tool – developed in Australia – can analyse video footage, financial transactions, social media, emails and other documents simultaneously.
An evaluation showed it was able to review the evidential material in 27 complex cases in just 30 hours – which it is estimated would have taken up to 81 years for a human to do.
Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said the technology could be used to help close some of the country’s oldest and most notorious unsolved cases.
“I could imagine this sort of thing being really useful for cold case reviews,” he told reporters.
“You might have a cold case review that just looks impossible because of the amount of material there and feed it into a system like this which can just ingest it, then give you an assessment of it. I can see that being really, really helpful.”
It comes after Sky News reported fewer police officers from the UK’s largest force are working on unsolved murder cases, while last week the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley described his force as “dangerously stretched”.
Five Met officers are moving from a specialist cold case department investigating the 30-year-old murder of Atek Hussain to bolster basic command units.
Mr Hussain, 32, was stabbed in the heart as he returned from work in September 1994. He managed to stagger to his home and tell his family that his attackers were Asian before collapsing.
The Met said the case is not currently active, but no unsolved murder investigation is ever closed and Mr Hussain’s case was last reviewed by its Serious Crime Review Group in August.
Mr Stephens said the Soze tool is one of “dozens of ground-breaking programs” which could soon be rolled out across the UK.
They include an AI tool to build a national database of knives, which could be used to put pressure on retailers, and a system that allows call handlers to focus their attention on speaking to domestic abuse victims.
“If all of those 64 examples were adopted all across England and Wales and had similar gains to those of the forces using them, we’d get something like 15 million hours of productivity back to spend on things like investigations or responding to emergencies, which equates to more than £350m in costs,” the chief constable said.
But he said AI and other technology such as facial recognition and robotic automation procedures are “not a replacement” for police, with an officer “involved in the final decisions”.
Police chiefs also recognise the pace of its implementation and use must be in line with what the public is comfortable with.
“This isn’t handing over our responsibilities to technology but what the technology is helping us to do better,” said Mr Stephens.
TikTok has said it’s removed accounts associated with Russian state media for “engaging in covert influence operations”.
It’s part of the site’s efforts to prevent disinformation in the run up to November’s US presidential election.
Accounts affected are those from media group Rossiya Segodnya, which owns the RIA Novosti and Sputnik news services; and TV-Novosti, the parent body of the RT news channel.
TikTok said the accounts were previously restricted in the UK and EU, and that their worldwide content was marked as state-controlled media.
However, they are now understood to have been permanently banned.
It follows a similar move last week by Instagram and Facebook owner Meta, which banned Rossiya Segodnya, RT and others for “foreign interference activity”.
RT – which lost its UK broadcast licence in March 2022 – told Sky News the US firm was “censoring information flow to the rest of the world”.
The Kremlin said Meta was “discrediting itself” by banning the networks.
There’s been no response so far to Monday’s announcement from TikTok.
The bans come after the US filed charges this month against two RT employees for allegedly trying to hire an American company to produce online content to influence the election.
In July, the US Department of Justice also shut down nearly 1,000 social media bot accounts it said were created to spread Russian disinformation.
The Russian state was infamously accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, with a Senate committee concluding there was a sophisticated campaign to help get Donald Trump elected.
Ironically, TikTok is itself on shaky ground in the US, where a new law threatens to ban it over concerns it might share data with the Chinese government.
A conservative super PAC backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk launched a website over the weekend, enabling supporters to canvass in support of Republican presidential nominee former President Trump and other GOP candidates.
America PAC operates in key battleground states like Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. The PAC also operates in more than a dozen competitive districts within normally Democratic strongholds like California and New York.
According to its website, America PAC aims to ‘promote free speech, free markets, and a merit-based society.’
‘Together, we’ll ensure that every vote counts towards a stronger, more vibrant America,’ reads America PAC’s website.
The new website enables anyone in the U.S. to sign up and be deployed to one of these key states or districts for canvassing.
Now the largest ‘get out the vote’ outside group in the U.S., America PAC was formed early in the summer and has, according to sources, amassed hundreds of canvassers. The super PAC believes the new website will help scale operations going into the November election, which is just over six weeks away.
Filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show America has already invested at least $2.4 million in more than a dozen key congressional races.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is putting the U.S. intelligence community on the spot after Iranian hackers tried to disseminate private information from former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
‘Congress is outraged by the Biden-Harris Administration’s inaction and unwillingness to hold Iran accountable for its cyberattacks on the Trump campaign,’ Johnson wrote in letters to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
‘As you have shared, Iran hacked into the Trump campaign and distributed private information directly to the Biden campaign and to American media, which, like Iran, favors Kamala Harris.’
In his letter, he also claimed Harris was Iran’s ‘preferred candidate’ in the race.
Last week, the three agencies released a rare joint statement, revealing that ‘Iranian malicious cyber actors’ sent stolen Trump campaign materials to people linked to President Biden’s since-defunct re-election campaign, beginning in June. They also sent non-public materials to U.S. media organizations, the agencies said.
However, Johnson told their directors that ‘several unanswered questions remain.’
‘The American people must be informed of how the cyberattacks and distribution of information happened, the timeline indicating when the attacks occurred and were verified, and the concrete steps your agencies have taken to deter future attacks,’ Johnson wrote.
He accused the Biden administration of failing to deter election interference efforts by Iran or other hostile foreign powers and pointed out that Iran has also recently been accused of trying to kill the former president.
‘To date, the Biden-Harris Administration has not offered or executed any meaningful action to show our enemies such interference will not be tolerated, nor shared what steps, if any, it has taken to deter future attacks on Donald Trump or his campaign,’ Johnson wrote.
‘With less than 45 days until the election, much more needs to be done to protect our nation’s sovereignty and stop Iran from tipping the election in favor of its preferred candidate.’
He gave the agencies a deadline of Oct. 4, roughly a month before Election Day.
Multiple outlets reported earlier this month that the Justice Department and FBI are planning to file criminal charges against those involved with the Trump campaign hack.
FBI Director Christopher Wray warned in February that foreign adversaries posed a threat to the U.S. having ‘free and fair elections.’
‘The U.S. has confronted foreign malign influence threats in the past, but this election cycle, the U.S. will face more adversaries, moving at a faster pace, and enabled by new technology,’ he said during a national security forum.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign, as well as the FBI, CISA and the DNI, for comment.
A group of Republican lawmakers is introducing a new bill that would cease all aid dollars to Afghanistan over concerns of interception by the Taliban.
‘The Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous withdrawal has plunged the country back under Taliban rule, and now it turns out that our taxpayer dollars are being used to the benefit of the Taliban,’ Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., sponsor of the legislation, told Fox News Digital.
‘This legislation is needed so we can ensure that no more of our tax dollars are being irresponsibly used in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.’
The House bill is co-sponsored by Republican Reps. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Nick Langworthy of New York, Barry Moore of Alabama, Erlic Burlison of Missouri, Matt Rosendale of Montana and Randy Feenstra of Iowa.
The U.S. is the largest donor to Afghanistan. It spent a total of $21 billion on the nation and Afghan refugees who have been evacuated since the withdrawal. However, critics say much of that aid ends up in lining the pockets of the Taliban, who they say have taken control of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the country.
The United Nations (U.N.), meanwhile, has flown in some $2.9 billion in U.S. currency cash to Afghanistan since the Taliban seized control, the bulk of that being from funds allocated by the U.S., and at least some of which ends up in the Taliban-controlled central bank, according to the SIGAR report from July.
The Taliban ‘taxes’ this cash at multiple points of distribution.
The bill would prohibit federal agencies from giving any direct cash assistance to Afghanistan and prohibit any taxpayer dollars from going to the U.N. for the purpose of assisting Afghanistan. It also prohibits Federal Reserve Banks from selling U.S. currency to the U.N. for the purpose of direct cash assistance to Afghanistan.
In a briefing to the U.N. Security Council on March 6, Roza Otunbayeva, the U.N.’s special representative for Afghanistan, did not mention the money going to Da Afghanistan central bank but said it was necessary to get medical care and food for Afghans.
The shipments have ‘injected liquidity to the local economy that has in large part allowed the private sector to continue to function and averted a fiscal crisis,’ Otunbayeva told the council.
In a letter provided in response to the SIGAR report, the State Department said the U.N. was in charge of managing the cash transfer program.
‘We remain committed to providing critical, life-saving humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people. We will continue to monitor assistance programs and seek to mitigate the risk that U.S. assistance could indirectly benefit the Taliban or could be diverted to unintended recipients,’ the letter said.
For 20 years prior to the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan received some $8 billion in foreign assistance per year, representing 40% of its gross domestic product and financing three quarters of the government’s public expenditures. When the U.S. and other foreign entities stopped supplying aid, the country fell into an economic crisis – and aid dollars began flowing once again.
In June, the House passed a bill that would force the State Department to investigate which countries give aid to the Taliban – and also get U.S. assistance themselves.
It would also force the secretary of state to weigh if those countries should keep getting U.S. dollars and develop a strategy to discourage them from continuing aid to the Taliban. However, that bill did not cease all aid to Afghanistan.
The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee is pushing back against the Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity ruling, suggesting Democrats are eyeing ways to limit former President Trump’s abilities that were expanded by the high court’s decision.
‘It is up to Congress, the representative branch of the people, to defend the constitutional order against presidents who would trample the freedoms of the people,’ Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said at a press conference alongside former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh.
‘This declaration is about protecting the freedoms of the people by closing statutory loopholes that could allow a president to exploit the executive power to trample constitutional freedom and liberty.’
He’s helping to spearhead an effort urging members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to sign a ‘No Dictators Declaration.’
Raskin, who held the press conference backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Monday, did not mention Trump by name.
The website for the effort similarly stresses that ‘this isn’t a partisan issue.’
When explaining the ‘five pillars’ of the pledge, however, Raskin alluded to a host of accusations that have been lodged against the former president.
‘It’s got five main pillars to it – one, limiting the president’s power to declare bogus domestic and foreign emergencies to seize power and bypass congressional authority. Two, restricting the president’s ability to use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military domestically against the people,’ Raskin said.
‘Three – preventing the adoption of partisan, personal and ideological loyalty tests, loyalty oaths and similar authoritarian measures designed to purge the professional civil service, and replace qualified workers with unqualified party loyalists and sycophants.’
‘Four, ensuring that presidents who abuse their powers to commit crimes can be prosecuted like all other citizens. Because no one is above the law in America, and those of us who aspire and attain to public office are nothing but the servants of the people,’ he continued. ‘And fifth, constraining the president’s ability to use investigative and prosecutorial decisions and resources to pursue personal political vendettas against disfavored groups and perceived enemies of the president.’
Trump’s Supreme Court case stems from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe into the ex-president and his allies’ alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Smith filed an amended, superceding indictment against Trump in the case after the court’s conservative majority granted the office of the president broad immunity for ‘official’ acts, the specifics of which were to be determined by lower courts.
Asked by Fox News Digital whether the effort could turn into legislative action if Democrats win the House majority in November, Raskin suggested it was possible.
‘I hope that when we get back in, that we will be able to have at least a couple of serious hearings about the problem of overreach in the executive branch and weakness to potential tyrants and despots and dictators,’ Raskin said.
‘I hope that those hearings would lead us to create a legislative package to address these structural deficiencies in our statutory system.’
He added, ‘I would hope that Republicans would come along.’
Walsh, a Tea Party Republican who left office in January 2013 and who has been a vocal Trump critic, also heavily suggested Trump inspired the ‘No Dictators’ effort but noted it brought together himself and Raskin, despite their larger political disagreements.
‘We’re locked in arms right now because we have somebody running for president who has promised to be a dictator,’ Walsh said. ‘This is a bipartisan effort every member of the House and every member of the Senate should easily sign and pledge that they don’t want – we will not have a dictator as president.’
The campaign for former President Donald Trump said it is giving ‘maximum attention and resources’ to its ground game in battleground states, and it’s working.
In key battleground states where voters register by party, and where the margins in 2020 were razor-thin, Republicans have cut into Democrats’ voter registration advantage — in some cases by hundreds of thousands of registered voters.
During the 2020 election cycle in Pennsylvania, there were approximately 685,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. But going into Election Day 2024, that gap has been cut down significantly, with approximately 343,000 more Democratic voters than Republicans, according to the Trump campaign, which said it compiled the data from secretaries of state offices in Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona.
Similarly, in Nevada, there were 87,000 more Democratic voters in 2020 than Republicans. But going into Election Day 2024, there are just 19,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans.
North Carolina shows a similar shrinking gap for 2024, with just 126,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, down from the 391,000 Democratic voters last cycle.
And in Arizona, by the end of July, there were 259,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, doubling the GOP advantage since 2020.
‘Everyone who will vote in this election has lived through both administrations, and President Trump wins the comparison easily over Kamala Harris,’ Trump campaign senior adviser Tim Murtaugh told Fox News Digital. ‘The election will be won by those who show up, and that’s where the ground game comes in, which has been a combined effort of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and many Republican allies.’
Murtaugh told Fox News Digital that the ‘Democrats’ massive lead in voter registration in key states is gone.’
‘And in states where the winner will be decided by mere percentage points, it could make all the difference,’ Murtaugh said.
Neither the Harris campaign nor the Democratic National Committee (DNC) immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
The Trump campaign’s joint-ground game efforts are continuing to expand, but it is focusing its ‘Get Out the Vote’ efforts on low propensity voters and encouraging voters to vote early.
Across battleground states, the Trump campaign and RNC have hundreds of paid staff, with more than 300 Trump/GOP offices.
In July, the Trump campaign launched its ‘Trump Force 47‘ grassroots effort to recruit new voters.
The program, which the campaign says is focused on mobilizing ‘highly-targeted voters in critical precincts across the battleground states and districts,’ has already engaged tens of thousands of volunteers.
Trump campaign officials told Fox News Digital they already have more than 27,000 trained Trump Force 47 captains and continue to train daily, adding thousands per week.
The efforts stretch beyond the Trump Force 47 leaders, with hundreds of thousands more volunteers for phone banking, canvassing, postcard writing, community organizing and poll watching.
The joint effort and the Trump Force 47 model are focused on spending ‘maximum attention and resources’ on turning out infrequent or ‘sometimes voters,’ the campaign said.
‘We put a high premium on personal contacts with voters that are less likely to participate in the election and are more disconnected from politics than high propensity or persistent voters,’ a campaign official told Fox News Digital.
Campaign officials also said they are focused on ‘meeting voters where they are’ more than ever before.
‘From traditional voter canvassing like calls, doors, post cards, mail, to TikTok, to outside groups, our efforts to reach voters have never been more modern or efficient,’ the official said.
Fox News Digital has learned that the Trump campaign’s allied efforts will knock on approximately 15 million doors in the voting window across battleground states.
The Trump campaign’s field efforts have been focused on volume, where its in-house program is focused on reaching voters that were previously missed or less politically engaged.
‘We have to get our voters to do what they always do — show up at the polls and vote,’ the official said.
Meanwhile, specifically in Pennsylvania, Team Trump is registering voters at doors, campaign rallies, grocery stores, sporting stores, places of worship, college tailgates and more.
Officials told Fox News Digital that the team is reaching out to voters of all backgrounds through a wide variety of communities, including Hispanic voters, Jewish voters, Black voters, young voters and senior voters.
‘President Trump is well positioned to win in November thanks to our robust ground efforts and vast coalition of supporters and endorsers,’ an official said.
New polls published by The New York Times and Siena College on Monday showed Trump has gained a lead over Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona, putting the former president at 50 and Harris at 45. Trump is also ahead in Georgia, 49 to 45, and North Carolina, 49-45.
A RealClearPolitics Average shows Harris leading Trump by less than a point in Pennsylvania, and it shows Trump and Harris are tied in Nevada.
– Former Attorney General William Barr says he is ‘dumbfounded’ that the Justice Department released a chilling letter penned by would-be assassin Ryan Wesley Routh on Monday, calling the decision ‘rash’ and serving no purpose ‘other than to risk inciting further violence.’
Routh is the suspect in former President Donald Trump’s second foiled assassination attempt. The DOJ obtained the letter from a witness who says they received it inside a box delivered to them by Routh several months prior to the assassination attempt.
The box contained several handwritten letters as well as ammunition, among other things. One of the letters, addressed ‘Dear World,’ admitted to an assassination attempt on Trump. He also offered money to anyone willing to finish the job.
‘I was dumbfounded that the DOJ made public this morning the contents of the letter that, Ryan Routh, left with an acquaintance prior to the attempted assassination of former President Trump,’ Barr said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
‘The letter calls on people to ‘finish the job’ of killing President Trump, attempts to rouse people in incendiary terms to do so, and offers $150,000 to anyone who succeeds. There was no apparent justification for releasing this information at this stage,’ he continued.
Barr, who served during both the Trump and George H. W. Bush administrations, says that ‘DOJ had more than enough evidence to have Routh detained pending trial, without publicizing these details.’
‘Even if DOJ thought it important to provide the letter to the court, it could have redacted inflammatory material or arranged to have the letter submitted under seal. It was rash to put out this letter in the midst of an election during which two attempts on the life of President Trump had been made,’ Barr said.
‘It served no purpose other than to risk inciting further violence,’ he added.
The department’s detention memo revealed that Routh traveled from Greensboro, North Carolina, to West Palm Beach, Florida, on Aug. 14, a month before the Sept. 15 golf course incident. One of Routh’s cell phones pinged cell towers near Trump’s golf course and his Mar-a-Lago residence ‘on multiple days and times’ from Aug. 18 to Sept. 15, the detention memo alleged.
Investigators say they also found a book Routh had authored in 2023, titled ‘Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea, WWIII and the End of Humanity.’
The detention memo also provided a fresh detail on the witness who saw Routh flee the sniper’s nest. The witness made eye contact with the suspect before Routh jumped into a Nissan Xterra and sped away. The witness is credited with photographing the vehicle and reporting it to law enforcement.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Routh will likely face additional charges in the coming days, which could include aggravated assault for allegedly pointing the rifle at a Secret Service agent and making threats against a former president, State Attorney Dave Aronberg previously told Fox News Digital.
