Former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted on Wednesday that her party’s presidential nominating process after President Biden dropped out was ‘open,’ and Vice President Kamala Harris ‘won it,’ despite the absence of any such contest. 

Prior to Biden stepping down as the Democratic Party’s nominee in mid-July, Pelosi reportedly said she favored a competitive open primary process to replace him if needed. On Wednesday, Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked Pelosi if she had changed her mind after seeing all the ‘excitement’ Harris generated when she was tapped to replace Biden.

‘No, I didn’t change my mind. We had an open primary and [Kamala Harris] won it. Nobody else got in the race,’ Pelosi said. ‘Yes people could have jumped in – there were some people who were sort of preparing, but she just took off with it, and actually it was a blessing because there was not that much time between then and the election and it sort of saved time.’

‘But it wasn’t that we didn’t have an open primary,’ Pelosi added. ‘It’s just that nobody got in because she had a running start.’

Amid intra-party pressure, Biden dropped out of the race for president on July 21 and endorsed Harris as his successor the same day. Harris was the informal nominee from that point forward until the Democratic National Committee decided to implement an unprecedented virtual roll call ahead of its national nominating convention in August. The first-of-its-kind roll call vote ended with Harris getting 99% support from the party’s participating delegates. Harris was the only candidate who qualified for the virtual roll call vote, despite three challengers who wanted to run against her. The failed challengers were reportedly unable to collect the 300 delegate signatures necessary to gain access to the virtual ballot, according to Politico. 

Conservatives focusing on the election called Pelosi’s comments about Harris’ nominating process a ‘joke’ and a ‘lie.’ 

‘The votes of 14 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden were thrown away as Harris was installed as the Democrats’ nominee for president – a job for which she has never received a single vote,’ said Ryan Walker, executive director at Heritage Action For America, a conservative political advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. ‘Saying she won an open primary is a joke.’ 

‘Listening to Nancy Pelosi’s comments about Joe Biden, you could almost forget that she was one of many who lied to us about his condition, right up until the moment it was no longer to her political advantage to do so,’ Jenny Beth Martin, president of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, added. ‘It doesn’t surprise me at all that she’d now to try to lie about what she calls the ‘open nomination’ process that led to Kamala’s ascension.’

Meanwhile, academic elections experts told Fox News Digital that nothing illegal or undemocratic took place because ultimately it is each party’s purview how they go about nominating their candidate. 

‘You could probably sue the party for a civil tort and say, you know, ‘They did something wrong to me here.’ But it wouldn’t be a violation of election law,’ said Jeremy Mayer, a professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Public Policy and Government. ‘It’s not a coup, as some would say.’

American University professor Leonard Steinhorn, a political communications expert, questioned what other options the party had at that point with the election being less than four months away.

‘One has to ask themselves: What else would a party do?’ he asked. 

Mayer and Steinhorn also argued that the Republican Party would likely have done something similar with Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, if the GOP nominee faced some sort of hurdle preventing him from running. 

‘You can always talk in ideal circumstances about what’s best and what ought to be. But you know, as there’s that old 1980s expression, ‘Reality Bites,’ and you have to be able to adjust and adapt to the circumstances that you have,’ Steinhorn said. ‘In an ideal world, you may want to have the candidates vetted by the public more, whether it’s an open primary – which might have been impossible to set up in any number of critical mass states – or forums that would allow people to sort of evaluate different candidates. But at that point, Vice President Harris moved quickly with Joe Biden’s support, to consolidate her support and get the majority of the delegates. In which case, why would anyone else run?’

Mayer and Steinhorn also pointed out that, while the process did go against contemporary norms, it is not entirely unprecedented.  

‘She was picked in the way that we picked our candidates from 1832 to 1968 – the convention – and that produced some pretty good presidents, but we expect today for a president to be picked by the people of the party in an open primary process. And that’s not what happened with Harris,’ Mayer said. Meanwhile, Steinhorn pointed to former President Gerald Ford, who he said ‘did not once face any primaries or any national referendum at all.’

Last week, Pelosi also responded to questions on the fairness of the Democratic Party’s nomination process during an episode of ABC’s ‘The View.’

‘It was an open [process],’ Pelosi insisted. ‘Anybody could have gotten in. She got in, and she won, and a president of the United States had endorsed her who was very respected. So, that meant a lot, but people don’t understand, other people could have gotten in. She just locked it up. Politically astute, as I said to you before.’

Fox News Digital reached out to Pelosi’s office for comment but did not receive a response. 

The Harris campaign addressed the revelation by federal agencies that individuals tied to the Biden campaign were targeted by Iranian actors with emails containing stolen Trump campaign materials, stating that they do not know of any materials sent ‘directly’ to the Biden campaign, but that some people received emails on their personal accounts.

‘We have cooperated with the appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation,’ Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said in a statement.

‘We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,’ Finkelstein added. ‘We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.’ 

In a joint statement released Wednesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said, ‘Iranian malicious cyber actors in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails.’ 

‘There is currently no information indicating those recipients replied,’ the statement continued. ‘Furthermore, Iranian malicious cyber actors have continued their efforts since June to send stolen, non-public material associated with former President Trump’s campaign to U.S. media organizations.’ 

The agencies said such ‘malicious cyber activity’ served as the latest example of Iran’s multipronged approach ‘to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.’ 

‘As the lead for threat response, the FBI has been tracking this activity, has been in contact with the victims, and will continue to investigate and gather information in order to pursue and disrupt the threat actors responsible,’ the statement said. ‘Foreign actors are increasing their election influence activities as we approach November. In particular, Russia, Iran, and China are trying by some measure to exacerbate divisions in U.S. society for their own benefit, and see election periods as moments of vulnerability.’ 

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s campaign spokesperson, said the development ‘is further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror.’

‘Kamala and Biden must come clean on whether they used the hacked material given to them by the Iranians to hurt President Trump. What did they know and when did they know it?’ she said in a statement.

A Harris campaign official told Fox News Digital that ‘the material was not used.’

Federal authorities said they have thwarted Iranian assassination plots against U.S. politicians in recent months. U.S. officials say Trump, as well as President Biden and Nikki Haley, were among the targets. Earlier this week, a Pakistani man with deep ties to Iran was arraigned in Brooklyn federal court for alleging paying undercover agents he believed were hitmen to carry out the assassinations this summer. 

Within two months, Trump has faced two assassination attempts at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and while golfing at his course in West Palm Beach, Florida, though authorities haven’t publicly linked either plot to Iran. 

Fox News’ Sarah Rumpf-Whitten and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report. 

This column began as a post on X/Twitter, one which resonated with the audience. Here is the revised and extended version of why former President Donald Trump should win your vote. 
 
Voting has begun in Pennsylvania, perhaps the single most crucial state in this election. 
 
Voting for president will accelerate on Saturday when Virginia opens its doors to early, in-person voting. Trump took to X on Tuesday, September 17, to urge Pennsylvania voters to get out and vote early. Republicans across the country seem to have fully absorbed the necessity of voting early — it is crucial in a race this close — but only the final tally will tell if they got the message. 

 
Analyst Nate Silver’s ‘prediction of victory odds’ gave  Trump a 59.7% chance of winning the election and Vice President Kamala Harris a 40% chance of winning on Tuesday morning, a week after the debate. (Note: Silver’s analysis is not a poll, but rather the widely respected Silver’s assessment of the odds of winning based on all the state polls and other crucial data.) 

Polls taken after the debate but before the second assassination attempt on Trump have Harris slightly ahead nationally but very much within the margin of error. Most analysts say she got a small bump from the debate but it is margin-of-error stuff at best and may be changing as she stumbles through the aftermath. (Her appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists was a fiasco for her if anyone sees it. She remains a jukebox with very few choices among her answers, all of them bad. A 7% cap on the cost of childcare?) The race is a frozen, jump ball of a race, with each candidate possessing a good chance of winning. 
 
The takeaway from all this, and what I emphasized in my opening monologue on Tuesday, is that ‘the choice,’ voters must make is underway is upon them even as it is very much being debated across the country. 
 
That ‘choice’ is between Trump/Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s national security team, and his 3,000 other political appointees and Harris/ Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her national security team and her 3,000 other appointees. 
 
At the end of his first term, Trump had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and many more who are expected to return in a second Trump term in some role. Harris’s national security choices are almost a complete unknown save for Philip Gordon, her current National Security Advisor (a very unsettling prospect according to people who I know who know his record.) 

A key consideration for voters should be the national security team Trump or Harris will bring with them, along with the 3,000 appointees they will also place in every agency of the vast federal government beginning in late January. 
 
Trump’s appointees will be center-right to conservative men and women and Harris’s appointees are almost wholly unknown but, in many if not most cases, will be out-and-out radicals, far to the left of the mainstream. That’s the San Francisco way. That’s why San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley are in such ruins. They are all run by extreme ‘progressives,’ which really means radicals. 
 
Each candidate would also get to nominate judges and perhaps a Supreme Court justice or two, though there are no vacancies on the highest court now as there was when America voted in 2016. 
 
Trump’s and Harris’s views on judges as well as every other big issue are so completely different –on the need for a defense buildup, for the continuation of the 2017 tax cuts (they expire in 2025 if not extended and Trump wants to extend them and Harris does not), of whom our most deadly enemies are and how to deter them, on how to close the border (Harris simply won’t), on energy production including fracking, on Israel and its right to strike at its enemies, on the nature and specific threats posed by our enemies in China, Iran and Russia — that the choice should be very easy. Mine was. It is Donald Trump. I hope yours is too and that you forward this column to everyone you know. 

My choice to vote for Trump is driven by my faith in the Constitution and deep unwillingness to amend it, explicitly or via expansion and packing the Supreme Court by congressional legislation about the number of justices. Amendments to the Constitution’s provisions about the Supreme Court or underhanded laws expanding the number of justices, which has been fixed at nine since shortly after the Civil War, would mark the beginning of the rapid end of the rule of law in the country.  

Harris is pledged to radically changing the court. Trump is opposed to court-packing. That imperils the most important general feature of the Constitution — separation of powers — as well as the First Amendment specifically, the right to free speech and especially the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. This should matter to every person of faith, no matter their religious views or no views at all. 
 
My choice is also driven by knowledge — first-hand, personal knowledge gained while serving in the executive branch from 1984 to 1989, and by experience gained since 1989 when I left the Beltway for California to become a journalist, lawyer for clients needing land use permits from the federal government and a law professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law.  
 
My years as a young lawyer fresh off a clerkship with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, began as a member of the Reagan administration in 1984. The jobs 40 years ago showed me how the federal government actually runs. I worked as a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office, for two attorneys general at the Department of Justice, and at the Office of Personnel Management.

I went through the ‘advice and consent’ process in the Senate and helped run OPM first as its general counsel, then as it’s confirmed deputy director and finally as it’s acting director at the close of the Reagan administration. From 1984 to early 1989, I had the highest security clearance level available — TS-SCI (though I was not read into every compartment of ‘Specialized Compartmented Information’ because my work was on counterintelligence matters and domestic security issues, not overseas surveillance and operations.) 
 
Five of my seven jobs from those years long ago were from among those 3,000 jobs that appointees of incoming presidents do not require Senate confirmation. A vast majority of the appointees of a president do not require Senate confirmation, and the policies all appointees ought to be pursuing are directed at least in theory by the president. Those are the actual results of the election. To repeat: Very few of the 3,000 are confirmed by the Senate to an ‘Executive Level’ position. (I held two of those.) 
 
If a voter grasps how many people leave and arrive with a change of presidents, they should approach the choice in November with that legion of appointees in mind. Harris’s appointees will be far, far to the left of the American mainstream. Trump’s are a jumble of what used to be called ‘Rockefeller Republicans’ and ‘Goldwater Republicans.’  

Trump is the least ideological president since Richard Nixon, period. He innovated on the domestic level — setting up the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and staffing his White House within all comers from all camps, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Henry Kissinger to George Schultz and Donald Rumsfeld. Trump’s few critics in the GOP — a list of 200 people out of tens of thousands who served GOP presidents have endorsed Harris are mostly opposed to Trump and not to his policies.  

Such lists of endorsements are neither significant nor influential because most voters do not care about endorsements, whether it is 20, 200 or 2,000. They want to know whether the candidates and their policies and appointees will impact them and their children and grandchildren and the quality of their lives, particularly the economy and their personal security. 
 
On security, our enemies fear Trump and cannot possibly fear Harris, who simply lacks the minimum skills to be president, much less restore American defenses and deterrence. 
 
Harris won’t. She is afraid of interviews! How could our most serious enemies fear her if she fears the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the major networks? 
 
Understand what that means: She has given two interviews in the two months since she became the selected nominee of the Democrats, and both were disasters even though neither CNN’s Dana Bash nor Philly TV journalist Brian Taff pushed her hard or posed any follow-ups, much less pointed ones on her non-responsive answers to their questions.  

She’s become a parody of herself, a jukebox with a half dozen bad choices of answers, none of them responsive to the direct questions asked her. Again and again, she refuses to answer questions. It is probably because she lacks the knowledge to do so. 
 
In the one debate Trump and Harris held, neither ABC/Disney’s duo of David Muir and Linsey Davis, primed to ‘fact check’ Trump, said a word about Harris’s startling, indeed disqualifying, answer that no American troops were in combat zones. (Either she doesn’t know or she just wanted to lie to get a talking point out there — either way it should be disqualifying for anyone who aspires to be commander-in-chief.)  

There was not one question in that debate about the People’s Republic of China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, repression of Hong Kong, threatening Taiwan and the Philippines, its spying in the U.S. or its influence campaign on TikTok. (This void may have been imposed on Muir and Davis because of Disney’s vast business interests in Communist China including two theme parks). That debate should be forever embarrassing to ABC/Disney and the moderators.  

It is as though a debate in 1940 between FDR and Wendell Wilkie did not feature a question about Imperial Japan. The good news is that this ambush of Trump did not significantly halt his momentum but may have done so to Harris because of the troops-in-combat zone and the attention it brought to Springfield, Ohio, and other communities staggering under sudden, massive influx of migrants who have been granted protected status by President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris. 

The election is very close, and it should not be. There are many people, people whom I respect greatly, who have been so unsettled by the aesthetic that the former president brings with him that they won’t vote for him. I can’t change their minds, and some of those minds have been closed to Trump since 2015 and some since January 6, 2021. They simply cannot get past their last issues with Trump, even though some of them surely know Harris lacks the very minimum skills needed to be president. 
 
Their sunk costs cannot be unburdened from themselves, but the vast, vast majority of voters are not frozen in time or particular enmity toward either candidate. Thus, for the next 45 days, I am going to devote every hour on air and every appearance on other programs and every column I write to making the case for Trump. It is a very easy case to make. 

 
I believe the future of my grandchildren depends greatly on this election. The CCP led by Xi Jinping is a mortal threat to every American. Our ally Israel needs every assistance we can provide to it to defeat Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Iran is very close to obtaining but must not get a nuclear weapon. 

I fear Harris on all counts far more than I fear Trump cutting off aid to Ukraine which I do not believe will happen. The Constitution will be stressed by an influx of Harris radical judges and directly assaulted by her ‘court reform’ plan, which is really court packing. Her prosecutors will continue the weaponization of the law against political opponents and will ignore crime in the way that prosecutors in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other cities have done so. 

My choice to vote for Trump is driven by my faith in the Constitution and deep unwillingness to amend it, explicitly or via expansion and packing the Supreme Court by congressional legislation about the number of justices.

Next, ‘energy is freedom’ is one of my favorite sayings, not only because it is true — from putting gas in your car to drive to revenues to the U.S. Treasury, revenues which depend heavily on American productivity which is built on the cost of energy. The only way to really bring down prices is to bring down the cost of their production and the cost of their transportation to market.  

The U.S. must absolutely ‘drill, baby drill,’ but also throw everything at the new generation of nuclear power plants and the export of liquified natural gas. Our ‘AI’ (and super-computing) future depends on our soaring base load of energy production. China will dominate artificial intelligence and super-computing and thus the world if we do not at least keep pace with them and that means vastly more domestic energy production. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.