Tennessee governor halts executions after second botched lethal injection attempt this year – US politics live

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Trump officials abandon effort to investigate election threats, experts warn

The Trump administration has abandoned key security bodies meant to investigate direct threats to US elections by foreign actors and domestic terrorists, according to former officials and a recent report.

While administration officials have been actively focused on unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens, other credible election threats appear to have been overlooked, the officials say.

Between 2021 and 2024, the justice department’s election threats taskforce prosecuted 21 cases, like that of Solomon Peña, a failed candidate for the New Mexico house of representatives who organized shootings at the houses of election officials, or Quintez Brown, who shot up a campaign meeting of Louisville’s mayor.

Democrats and Republicans faced prosecution for harassing, intimidating and threatening elections workers, noted Nikki Fisher, former chief election security officer for the Oregon secretary of state, now the executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association.

Since then, the taskforce seems to have gone quiet.

“While officials are being trained to handle threats, the federal deterrent meant to punish the people making them appears to have gone quiet,” Fisher said. “To date, no new cases have been prosecuted, and the DoJ’s election threats taskforce appears to be defunct in practice.”

Tennessee governor halts executions after second botched lethal injection attempt this year

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Tennessee governor Bill Lee has halted the state’s remaining executions for the rest of the year after officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death yesterday.

Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition.

She had been scheduled for execution at 10am on Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

Governor Lee said that he was halting the one remaining execution for the rest of 2026 and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”

“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” Lee said in a statement.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution. In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.

In other developments:

• The latest in a series of pro-Trump ads the Trump administration is using taxpayer funds to air on television in the run-up to the the midterm elections is a 1-minute spot that celebrates his decision to go to war with Iran.

• Pete Hegseth announced that Elon Musk will co-lead a government project to study the future of warfare, with Palmer Luckey, CEO of the defense tech company Anduril, and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House.

• An internal watchdog said the Federal Reserve mismanaged costs associated with a $2.4bn renovation of its Washington DC headquarters, but noted that no criminal violations occurred, according to a report released Wednesday.

• Trump said South Korea plans to invest about $54bn in a natural gas project in Alaska.

• Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton, the candidates running to be California’s next governor, clashed Wednesday over taxes, immigration and regulating artificial intelligence in a testy debate held days before voters begin receiving their ballots in the heavily Democratic state.