Vice President Harris has stated that President Biden is completely fit to finish his term and serve another, despite his debate and interview performances, after having had more than 80 publicly documented encounters over the past year, a Fox News Digital investigation found.

From July 18, 2023, to July 17, 2024, Harris, who is now the presumptive Democrat presidential candidate now that Biden has dropped out, shared at least 25 meetings, eight lunches and 46 events with the president, and they spent two times traveling together. That makes Harris one of the people most capable of speaking to the president’s mental acuity.

Those dozens of meetings are also only the ones listed on public schedules. Not everything the president or vice president does is listed on these, such as time spent in the Situation Room, where Biden and Harris attend briefings together. They likely would have done so after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel, for example.

After Biden’s stumbling and stalled debate performance against former President Trump in Atlanta this past June, Harris sat down with CNN’s Anderson Cooper to try to hold the line for the commander in chief. 

‘Yes, there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish. And what became very clear through the course of the night is that Joe Biden is fighting on behalf of the American people on substance, on policy, on performance. Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong,’ Harris said last month. ‘I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last 3.5 years of performance.’

Harris earlier this year decried Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report that described Biden as a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’ as nothing but ‘gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate’ criticism. But the June 27 debate publicly put Biden’s mental fitness on display, sending vulnerable Democrats in Congress and the donor class into a tailspin over the viability of the aging president’s candidacy.

Biden, who had been self-isolating with a reported case of COVID-19, announced on July 21 via a letter posted on X that he would no longer seek a second term and endorsed Harris as the presidential nominee.   

Harris, however, spent months before the debate defending Biden’s mental competency after a series of gaffes and public trips and falls.

In November, Harris was confronted at the New York Times Dealbook Summit about how former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Biden was confused and needed cue cards during debt negotiations.

‘I would say that age is more than a chronological fact. I spend a whole lot of time with our president, be it in the Oval Office or the Situation Room and in other places. And I can tell you, as I just mentioned, not only is he absolutely authoritative in rooms around the globe but in the Oval Office, meeting with members of Congress, meeting with leaders in industry, meeting with community leaders,’ Harris responded.

‘Only one person sits behind the Resolute Desk,’ she added. ‘I’m not lying … I’m telling … but I’m telling you a fact.’

The Justice Department report by Hur released in February found Biden ‘willfully’ retained and disclosed classified information to a ghostwriter but did not recommend criminal charges. Hur said Biden displayed ‘limited faculties’ and described his memory as ‘significantly limited’ during interviews with the special counsel’s office, noting the president could not remember ‘even within several years’ when his son, Beau, died.

At an event on the White House grounds dedicated to discussing gun violence, Harris insisted that ‘the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous,’ adding that ‘when it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.’ 

It was then that Harris described the ‘countless hours’ she spent with Biden and the secretaries of defense and state and the leaders of the intelligence community after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists.

‘The president was in front of and on top of it all,’ Harris told reporters in February, ‘asking questions and requiring that America’s military and intelligence community and diplomatic community would figure out to know how many people were dead, how many are Americans, how many hostages, is the situation stable?’

‘He was in front of it all, coordinating and directing leaders who are in charge of America’s national security, not to mention our allies around the globe for days and up until now months,’ she said. 

Fox News’ Callie Cassick and Kevin Ferris contributed to this report.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of the country’s presidential election on Sunday after securing more than 50% of the vote, although the opposition contends that the results are not accurate.

The National Electoral Council said at around midnight that Maduro received 51% of the vote, while the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González, had 44% support, according to The Associated Press.

Elvis Amoroso, head of the National Electoral Council, said the results were based on 80% of voting stations and represented an irreversible trend.

Despite Maduro being declared the winner of a third term, the opposition claimed victory, setting up a showdown with the government over the results.

The electoral authority, controlled by Maduro loyalists, did not immediately publish the results from each of the 30,000 polling booths across the country, impeding the opposition’s ability to challenge the results after alleging it only had data for about 30% of the ballot boxes.

‘The Venezuelans and the entire world know what happened,’ González said.

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado claimed González’s margin of victory was ‘overwhelming.’ Machado said the opposition had voting results from about 40% of ballot boxes across the country and that more were expected overnight.

Officials and lawmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere expressed skepticism about the validity of Venezuela’s presidential election results after Maduro was declared the victor.

Speaking in Tokyo, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. has ‘serious concerns’ about the announced outcome.

Blinken said the U.S. feared the result did not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people, and called for election officials to immediately release the full results. He also said the U.S. and the international community would respond accordingly.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio wrote on the social media platform X that the ‘Maduro regime in #Venezuela has just carried out the most predictable and ridiculous sham election in modern history.’

Chilean President Gabriel Boric Font also wrote on X that ‘the delivery of the results of this transcendental election in Venezuela must be transparent, timely and fully reflect the popular will expressed at the polls.’

‘The international community, of which Chile is a part of, will not accept anything else,’ he said.

Opposition representatives in Venezuela said tallies they collected from campaign representatives at 30% of voting centers in the country showed González defeating the president.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris has gained significant ground on former President Trump in the election betting markets in the week since taking over at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Trump entered Sunday with a 54.6% to win the election, while Harris came in at 39.2%, according to the Real Clear Politics betting average, a spread of a little over 15.2 percentage points.

While the market still favors Trump, the 15-point gap represents a significant shift over the last week. On July 20, the days before President Biden announced his decision to drop out of the race, Trump had a 61% chance to win the election, the Real Clear Politics average showed, while Harris came in with an 18.2% chance and Biden had a 9.5% chance, an almost 43-point gap between Trump and his closest competitor.

A similar trend has played out on PredictIt, a New Zealand-based prediction market that offers ‘shares’ of political outcomes, with Trump shares currently selling for 54 cents on the site and Harris shares selling for 48 cents. Since shares on the platform are priced between $0.01 and $0.99, the price of the share is essentially the percentage chance an outcome will happen, meaning Trump has a 54% chance to win the election.

Harris has gained significant ground on Trump over the last week on PredictIt, the platform’s historical trends show. On July 20, Trump shares were selling for 64 cents, Harris, 27 cents, and Biden 15 cents, meaning the price to bet on Harris has closed from 37 cents to six cents over the last week.

The tightening betting markets come as polls continue to show what could be a potentially close race between Trump and Harris. According to the Real Clear Politics national average, Trump holds just a 1.7 point lead over Harris in the polls. Polls in the main battleground states have been more sparse, but also show a tight race.

The Trump and Harris campaigns did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Sunday said former President Trump should swap out his ‘incredibly bad choice’ of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as his running mate.

During an appearance on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation,’ Schumer was discussing the upcoming presidential election when he decided to address ‘the addition of JD Vance’ to the GOP ticket.

 ‘It’s an incredibly bad choice,’ Schumer said. ‘I think Donald Trump, I know him, and he’s probably sitting and watching the TV, and every day, Vance, it comes out Vance has done something more extreme, more weird, more erratic. Vance seems to be more erratic and more extreme than President Trump.’ 

‘And I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, ‘Why did I pick this guy?’ The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats,’ Schumer said. 

Referring to Trump, the former president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee, Schumer said ‘the president has about 10 days – 10 days before the Ohio ballot is locked in.’ 

‘And he has a choice: does he keep Vance on the ticket?’ Schumer said. ‘He already has a whole lot of baggage, he’s probably going to be more baggage over the weeks because we’ll hear more things about him, or does he pick someone new? What’s his choice?’ 

The left has gone after Vance in recent days over a 2021 interview in which the Ohio senator appeared to disparage ‘childless cat ladies’ in the Democratic Party.

‘We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,’ Vance said three years ago, specifically calling out Vice President Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as being part of that group. 

On an episode of Fox News’ ‘The Brian Kilmeade Show,’ Trump 2024 senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said Vance’s interview is being ‘blatantly taken out of context,’ adding that the Trump-Vance campaign is not against ‘childless women’ as the liberal media is saying.

Vance, the author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ a memoir adapted into a Netflix film about his time as a Yale Law School student reflecting on growing up in Appalachia, was propelled into national headlines when Trump announced him as vice presidential running mate at the start of the Republican National Convention. 

Republicans have billed Vance, whose mother is 10 years sober, as speaking to forgotten working class Americans. 

But the Harris campaign has attempted to counter that messaging. 

In a video shared weeks ago, Harris claimed Vance would be ‘loyal only to Trump, not to our country’ and a ‘rubber stamp for [Trump’s] extreme agenda.’

But Vance, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, shot back during a campaign rally with Trump in Minnesota Saturday. 

‘Now, I saw the other day Kamala Harris questioned my loyalty to this country. That’s the word she used, loyalty. And it’s an interesting word. Semper Fi, because there is no greater sign of disloyalty to this country than what Kamala Harris has done at our southern border,’ Vance said. ‘And I’d like to ask the vice president, what has she done to question my loyalty to this country?’

‘I served in the United States Marine Corps. I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for this country. And my running mate took a bullet for this country. So my question to Kamala Harris is, what the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America?’ Vance added. ‘And the answer, my friends, is nothing.’ 

Asked about how Harris should handle Republican criticism of her immigration policy, Schumer told CBS host Robert Costa that Democrats in Congress and the Biden-Harris administration ‘put together the toughest border policy that would have stopped the flow from the border that we’ve seen in a very long time.’ 

He said the plan was initially supported by Republicans but claimed Trump wants chaos at the border so he can run on it during the election.

‘We’re happy to bring that up. And case after case, when we bring that up, the voters side with us, not with their policies. We were willing to fix the border. Trump and his Republican minions said, ‘Don’t fix it, we want chaos for political purposes.’ Who do you think’s going to win the argument?’ Schumer said. 

Fox News’ Garbriel Hays contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris has seen her favorability among American voters rise dramatically in the aftermath of President Biden dropping out of the race, a new poll shows.

Harris’ overall favorability rose from 35% to 43% compared to a week earlier, while the vice president’s unfavorability rating fell from 46% to 42%, according to the results of an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted on Friday and Saturday.

The poll comes just a week after Biden made the decision to drop out of the 2024 race and endorse Harris, who quickly consolidated support among her fellow Democrats to essentially lock up the nomination by the middle of last week.

The news brought a jolt of enthusiasm to Democrats, who donated record-setting fundraising numbers to the Harris campaign in the aftermath of her taking over at the top of the ticket, enthusiasm that was reflected in the new poll.

Among Democrats, 88% indicated that they were enthusiastic about Harris (63% very and 25% somewhat) becoming the party’s nominee. The level of enthusiasm for Harris in her own party outstrips that of former President Trump among Republicans, with 82% of those respondents indicating that they were enthusiastic about him being the nominee.

Trump also saw his favorability rating drop in the poll, falling from 40% last week to 36% in the most recent poll. The former president’s unfavorable rating also ticked up slightly in the new poll, rising from 51% to 52%.

The poll also tackled the ongoing ‘veepstakes’ for Harris, who has yet to choose a running mate. While Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (54%) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (54%) enjoy the highest name recognition among respondents, candidates such as Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., (22% favorable) and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (17% favorable) have the highest favorability rating among respondents who were familiar with them.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted between July 26-27, surveying 1,200 U.S. adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Sunday marks one week since President Biden’s political landscape-altering announcement that he was suspending his re-election rematch against former President Trump and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him as the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee.

And early Sunday morning, the Harris campaign showcased that the vice president has hauled in a stunning $200 million in fundraising in just under a week since Biden bowed out.

In a release, the campaign touted what they called a ‘record-shattering haul’ and noted that two-thirds of the contributions came from first-time donors, which they argued was ‘further proof of the tremendous grassroots support for the Vice President.’

Biden made his move last weekend amid mounting pressure from within the Democratic Party for him to drop out after a disastrous performance in last month’s first presidential debate with Trump.

The embattled president’s immediate backing of Vice President Kamala Harris last Sunday ignited a surge of endorsements for the vice president by Democratic governors, senators, House members and other party leaders. Within 36 hours, Harris announced that she had locked up her party’s nomination by landing the verbal backing of a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates to next month’s Democratic National Convention. 

Former President Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama on Friday became the final major party leaders to endorse the vice president.

The Harris campaign has been spotlighting their surge in fundraising over the past week. The haul includes money raised by the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees.

On Monday the Harris campaign spotlighted that they hauled in $81 million in the 24 hours following Biden’s announcement.

The one-day haul easily topped the nearly $53 million former President Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee announced that they brought in nearly two months ago through their online digital fundraising platform in the first 24 hours after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in his criminal trial in New York City.

The Biden campaign and the DNC enjoyed a fundraising lead over Trump and the RNC this year. But Trump and the RNC topped Biden and the DNC, $331 million to $264 million, during the April-June second quarter of 2024 fundraising.

The Trump campaign tells Fox News that they ‘continue to have robust fundraising’ and that they’ve ‘demonstrated a level of fundraising that we’re satisfied with.’

The Trump campaign highlights that their fundraising efforts are ‘doing what we need to do.’