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Biden meets with Alexey Navalny’s wife and daughter to express “heartfelt condolences”
Washington — President Biden met with the wife and daughter of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny in California on Thursday to express his “heartfelt condolences” over his death, the White House said.
“The President expressed his admiration for Aleksey Navalny’s extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to everyone,” the White House said, using a different spelling of Navalny’s first name in a summary of the meeting with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya. “The President emphasized that Aleksey’s legacy will carry on through people across Russia and around the world mourning his loss and fighting for freedom, democracy, and human rights.”
The White House posted photos of the meeting on social media, showing the president embracing Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow. Yulia Navalnaya, who lives in exile from Russia, posted on Instagram earlier in the day that she was visiting her daughter, a student at Stanford University.
Navalny was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent domestic opponent and critic, exposing corruption among the Russian elite and advocating for democratic reforms. Russian authorities announced his death last week, leading to an outpouring of grief around the world. Mr. Biden soon blamed his death on the Kremlin and has vowed to implement harsh new sanctions to punish Russian leadership.
In the meeting with Navalny’s family, the president “affirmed that his Administration will announce major new sanctions against Russia tomorrow in response to Aleksey’s death, Russia’s repression and aggression, and its brutal and illegal war in Ukraine,” the White House summary said.
Navalny’s death remains shrouded in mystery. He had been detained since 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from an unsuccessful poisoning attempt. He was most recently held at a penal colony in Russia’s far north, where he died. Russian authorities have said the cause of his death is still unknown.
On Thursday, Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said officials had allowed her to see his body but pressured her to agree to a quiet burial.
“They are blackmailing me, they are setting conditions where, when and how my son should be buried,” she said. “They want it to do it secretly without a mourning ceremony.”
Yulia Navalnaya accused the Russian authorities of killing her husband with a Soviet-era nerve agent and delaying the release of his body until traces of the poison had vanished. A Kremlin spokesman said the allegations were “absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state.”
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Sen. Mark Kelly says feds need to do a “better job” of letting Americans know “there’s a huge amount of misinformation” on election
Washington — Sen. Mark Kelly said Sunday that the federal government needs to do its part to inform Americans of the vast swath of election misinformation that’s being consumed on social media platforms like X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.
“It’s up to us, the people who serve in Congress and in the White House to get the information out there, that there is a tremendous amount of misinformation in this election, and it’s not going to stop on Nov. 5,” Kelly said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
Kelly, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he’s seen these misinformation operations target not only his state of Arizona, but also other battleground states.
“There is a very reasonable chance I would put it in the 20 to 30% range, that the content you are seeing, the comments you are seeing, are coming from one of those three countries: Russia, Iran, China,” Kelly said.
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In a committee hearing last month on foreign threats to the 2024 election, Kelly presented screenshots of Russian-made web pages showing fabricated headlines designed to look like Fox News and The Washington Post, targeted at voters in battleground states.
“So my constituents in Arizona and others — they seek to influence the outcome of these elections, and that is absolutely beyond the pale,” Kelly said at the Sept. 18 hearing. “We’ve got to do something about it.”
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump each have the support of 49% of Arizona voters, according to CBS News’ battleground tracker as of Sept. 30.
In another battleground state, Pennsylvania, Trump returned Saturday to hold a rally in Butler three months after an attempted assassination on him. He was joined by members of his own party and billionaire Elon Musk, who said Trump was the only way to preserve democracy and warned of a last election if he does not win in November.
Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Kelly called the social media mogul a hypocrite.
“He’s standing next to the guy that tried to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, saying that this is somehow going to be the last election and they’re going to take away your vote,” Kelly said. “And you know, it just doesn’t pass the logic test.”
At the White House press briefing on Friday, President Biden – speaking from the podium for the first time since taking office – said he’s confident of a free and fair election but alluded to the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol in his concerns on whether it will be a peaceful transfer of power.
“The things that Trump has said and the things that he said last time out when he didn’t like the outcome of the election were very dangerous,” Mr. Biden said. “If you notice, I noticed that the vice-presidential Republican candidate did not say he’d accept the outcome of the election, and they haven’t even accepted the outcome of the last election.”
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