Did Hezbollah Just Spark a War?

Brad Milke
It's Monday, July 29, and wars have started over less. We start here.

An airstrike killing children threatens to open up a second front in Israel's war.

Jordana Miller
It's kind of like a deadly game of poker.

Brad Milke
Governments are furiously making calls to keep this from escalating. We'll take you to the mideast. A Supreme Court justice gets a lifetime appointment, right? Well, not if President Biden gets his way.

Stephen Portnoy
The president would have term limits put in place to end the service of a Supreme Court justice after 18 years.

Brad Milke
The new push from the White House this morning, and they warned about the shooter. But did anyone hear them?

Aaron Katersky
You had no contact, nothing?

Greg Nicholl
Nope.

Brad Milke
For the first time, the SWAT team on hand during the Trump assassination attempt gives their side of the story.

From ABC News, this is start here. I'm Brad Milke.

As far as residents of Gaza are concerned, the worst case scenario has already come true. This weekend, several more children died in israeli airstrikes that hit yet another school that the IDF says was used as a Hamas hideout. However, when you zoom out across the region, the worst case scenario to observers actually hinges on a second conflict, a potential all out war between Israel and Hezbollah to the north. If Israel is trading fire with militants in Lebanon, well, that could quickly involve Iran and other countries. To diplomats and generals, that is how this nightmare gets unimaginably even worse. On Saturday, a rocket strike hit civilians in the Golan Heights, the israeli controlled land that sits at the intersection of Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Nearly all of the victims of this attack were children, and they werent even israeli Jews. These were members of an arab community, israeli citizens who are native to this area, known as the Druze. International attention quickly turned to Hezbollah. And while the militant group denied it was them, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Israel would respond. The question was how we will prepare.

Greg Nicholl
For a response against Hezbollah. We will finish our assessments and we will act.

Brad Milke
The region has become very, very nervous. We saw emergency meetings throughout the weekend, and diplomats are now scrambling to keep this from turning into something bigger. So let's start the week with ABC foreign correspondent Jordana Miller, who is based in Jerusalem. Jordana, can you just break down what happened here?

Jordana Miller
Well, essentially Hezbollah, which has been firing on northern Israel for months, including the Golan Heights, where there are some of the most important IDF bases.

It appears that Hezbollah rocket, that they misfired one of these, and it slammed into a soccer field where a bunch of children and teenagers were just playing soccer. On a summer Saturday.

It killed twelve children, several from the same family and injured another 30.

And this community, I mean, everybody knows everybody there. It's small, it's Druze. It's a certain ethnic group of Arabs, and they are very loyal to Israel. They serve in the israeli army. They consider themselves full citizens, and Israel sees them as such. And so this is a tragedy not only for this town, but really for the whole country, because it was the largest number of civilians that have been killed, really since October 7.

Brad Milke
And then this is like an impossible question to ask you in our short podcast, but can you just quickly? Cause I think Americans get confused about the geography here. If Israel is like a long strip of land that goes from south to north, Golan Heights is what? Like this oval of territory that kind of sticks out from the very top right section. Right. So, I mean, why is Hezbollah firing there? And why did this sort of raise the stakes so much?

Jordana Miller
So the Golan Heights are a very strategic mountainous region. Israel captured the region from Syria back in 1967 during the Six Day war and has since set up very important IDF military bases surveillance. So it has been a major target of Hezbollah since the war started on October 7 because it is such a heavy military asset and also for the Syrians. The Golan Heights is still contested, disputed. Remember, former President Donald Trump kind of changed the way America defines the Golan Heights, saying it is now controlled by Israel.

Stephen Portnoy
Any possible future peace agreement, this agreement.

Greg Nicholl
Must account for Israel's need to defend.

Brad Milke
Itself from Syria, Iran and other regional threats.

Jordana Miller
But that is not a definition that the rest of the world has accepted. So there's, you know, both a military and a kind of political motivation for Hezbollah to target this area. Of course, they never would intend, I think, to hit Majdal jams. It's an arab community, and it has caused a lot of, should we say, publicity problems for Hezbollah as well, because these are arab citizens, right, and they're children.

Greg Nicholl
This rocket was a rocket called Falaq one. It is manufactured in Iran. It is delivered to Hezbollah.

Jordana Miller
Hezbollah has said they're denying it, but really, there's no other bad actor that fires from this area right near Majdal jams, except. Except Hezbollah.

Brad Milke
Well, and in the hours afterwards, we saw that Israel had actually fired a lot of airstrikes into Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based. Is that the response? Like, are we seeing the beginning of a further escalation or how should we interpret the return fire at this point?

Jordana Miller
I guess, well, hours later, the israeli army fired deep into lebanese territory. But that is kind of par for the course. Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire even deepen into each other's territory. For months.

We have not yet seen the israeli response. The prime minister cut his trip short in the United States, came back earlier.

Brad Milke
I can say that the state of Israel will not go over this in silence.

Jordana Miller
On the one hand, for Israel, it certainly crossed a red line. And Israel feels it needs to hit back hard and restore some kind of deterrence. But at the same time, Israel is not interested in hitting so hard that we will see this escalate into a declared war between Israel and Hezbollah. And remember, Hezbollah as well has signaled it is not interested in a war.

Brad Milke
I was gonna say you had some Israelis calling for, like, an actual ground invasion into Lebanon to discourage something like this. You're saying that's exactly what these diplomats do not want to happen?

Jordana Miller
Exactly. And of course, that's coming from Netanyahu's far right wing.

So the problem, Brad, with this is that it's kind of like a deadly game of poker where you're trying to read your opponent's intentions and you may get it wrong.

That's the slippery slope and something that is unpredictable.

I mean, it's one miscalculation. And by the way, it's already started. And now Israel has to make a very, really, it has to calibrate its response. So it does nothing lead to really a declared war. The danger, of course, is that it would bring in Iran.

Brad Milke
Well, and that's what we've seen reporting that you had some diplomats going over to Hezbollah this weekend being like, listen, Israel hasn't actually responded, but whatever they do next, please don't escalate from there. And to which Hezbollah goes, well, it depends. And that depends is what this all comes down to. Jordana Miller, thank you so much.

Jordana Miller
Thank you.

Brad Milke
Next up on start here. After years of pleas from democrats, President Biden is demanding Supreme Court rule changes. We're back in a bit.

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Stephen Portnoy
It's free.

Brad Milke
When President Biden announced he was no longer seeking a second term in office, he effectively became what every president dreads, being a lame duck. Usually you reserve this term when there's just been an election. A successor is now waiting in the wings. But the idea here is the same. You are a lot less likely to get buy in from people around Washington when you're not gonna be in the White House this time next year. Like if you're one of these lawmakers, why spend political capital on something that could be undone by your replacement or by the next Congress? Spend your time courting them instead. This is why when Biden made that announcement, people assumed time for his big actions is probably over. He's insistent, though, that it's not. And as we post this, President Biden is out with a new call to put some dramatic strictures on the US Supreme Court. Let's go to ABC's national correspondent Stephen Portnoy. Stephen, what does President Biden want to happen here?

Stephen Portnoy
Brad President Biden is proposing three significant reforms. He says in an op ed this morning that these changes would restore trust and accountability when it comes to not just the Supreme Court, but also the presidency itself.

When you look at everything from the Dobbs decision a couple of years ago, which ended the national right to abortion, to the most recent opinion from the Supreme Court, which said that Donald Trump enjoys some measure of immunity from prosecution for his official acts as president, President Biden says, quote, what is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public's confidence in the court's decisions. So he's proposing three key reforms. The first isn't so much a reform of the Supreme Court as it is a response to the courts decision. In Trump v. Us, he is proposing a constitutional amendment that would emphatically state that there is no immunity conferred upon someone who previously served as president by virtue of their service. Remember, in Trump v. US, the Supreme Court held that former President Trump is entitled to absolute immunity for his official acts and the presumption of immunity for other acts that are in some way related to his service as president.

Proposed amendment that President Biden is putting forward would essentially aim to undo that. A second reform proposed by the president speaks to some of the stories we've been reading for the last couple of years about Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito taking trips without fully disclosing that they took these trips and who paid for them. The president is urging Congress to pass binding, enforceable ethics and conduct rules that would have the justices disclosing gifts and recusing themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have conflicts of interest.

The final piece of all this is, I think, going to be viewed as most controversial. Certainly within the legal and political realms, the president would have term limits put in place to end the service of a Supreme Court justice after 18 years.

Brad Milke
Wow.

Stephen Portnoy
President Biden says that this would help ensure the court's membership regularly changes and that nominations for Supreme Court justices can become more predictable. He says it would also reduce the chance that any single presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come. In his mind, President Biden would see to it that every two years, the president is nominating and the Senate is confirming a new Supreme Court justice. Now, it seems to me that this is quite reminiscent of something that Franklin Roosevelt tried to enact a few years before Joe Biden was born.

Theres an infamous period in the history of the Supreme Court that was known as the Lochner erade. And this period lasted from the late 18 hundreds to the late 1930s. And during this period, the justices of the Supreme Court were much more likely to rule in favor of business interests and against laws and regulations that aim to control markets. The justices of the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down a number of FDRs New Deal programs that were aimed at digging the country out of the Great Depression and infrastructure stymied by the Supreme Court. As he began his second term, FDR proposed what he called the judicial procedure reforms bill.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
What is my proposal?

It is simply this. Whenever a judge or justice of any federal court has reached the age of 70 and does not avail himself of the opportunity to retire on a pension, a new member shall be appointed by the president, then in office.

Stephen Portnoy
And in a nationwide radio address, Roosevelt said his aim was to restore the court to its rightful and historic place in our system.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
This plan will save our national constitution from hardening of the judicial artery.

Stephen Portnoy
Of course, critics labeled this a court packing scheme, and it ended because the court moved to the left a bit. The point in telling the story, Brad, is the idea that there are eras of the Supreme Court that have defined beginnings and endings, and the next president is very likely to have the opportunity to replace one or more Supreme Court justices. Look at the two oldest justices on the bench now, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito representing the far right flank of the Supreme Court. The next president could replace both of them in theory. And so you could see the court, which is now a six to three conservative court. If it's a democratic president who appoints liberal justices, the court could swing right back to the left, five to four.

Brad Milke
I see. So there are actual considerations here of, like, what would actually, if this went through, what would actually happen? And you could totally imagine, like, new justices getting selected and appointed.

But how likely is any of this to happen, Stephen, because we're talking about a constitutional amendment. There's, like a huge process to getting something like that through, and then to get Congress to agree on anything, let alone Supreme Court terms, seems like a tall order.

Stephen Portnoy
Well, especially at this stage where you have Republicans in control of the House, Democrats in control of the Senate, and of course, it's divided government. And as you rightly pointed out, Brad, Joe Biden is a lame duck president, which means his political clout on Capitol Hill is at an ebb.

Brad Milke
Right.

Stephen Portnoy
So I think it's fair to say that this is highly unlikely to happen under this president in this congress. But if it's something that the democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, were to run on, it might bolster calls for her election, and you could see a groundswell of support on the left, and this could become the new platform for the democratic party when it comes to how the Supreme Court should operate. When it comes to the practicality of how to actually get term limits for Supreme Court justices, the easiest way, I guess, legally, would be for the Congress to, on a two thirds vote in both houses, pass a constitutional amendment, send it to the states for ratification. Right now, the Constitution says that judges and justices serve on good behavior, which has been interpreted since the founding to mean its a lifetime appointment. But there are some liberal legal minds who believe that that phrase on good behavior can be defined by statute and that the Congress could pass a law that does impose term limits. Of course, if there were any dispute over the constitutionality of such a law, it would be the Supreme Court, the one currently sitting, that would rule on it.

Brad Milke
You could imagine they might overturn that congressional rule even if they did get the votes. The last thing, Steve, and you kind of touched on this, but there have been so many of these ideas thrown around in recent years, particularly from the left.

The one that interests me is the one that has not been included here. It's the idea of, like you said, with FDR adding a number of seats to the court so that six to three could be six to six or six to seven. Why are 18 year term limits okay to this president? But that idea seems to be off the table for him.

Stephen Portnoy
I'm not sure. And perhaps as he speaks today at the LBJ library in Texas, the president will explain more about his thinking on this.

But it occurred to me that the whole idea of court packing carries a stigma that has been in place in american political history since the late 1930s, since around the time Joe Biden was born. So perhaps the man who served as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that perhaps Joe Biden didn't want to propose his own court packing scheme.

Brad Milke
All right. And that op ed out today from the president himself. And of course, we'll see who, if anyone, actually signs on board because he cannot do any of this by himself. All right, Steven Portnoy in Washington. Thank you so much.

Stephen Portnoy
You bet, Brad.

Brad Milke
The more we learn about how former President Donald Trump was shot earlier this month by a would be assassin's bullet, the more questions there are about what law enforcement was doing leading up to the shooting. After all, we now know the shooter, 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was spotted at several points during the day, even after he got up onto the roof where he shot from with his AR 15 style rifle.

And yet, within the security bubble where Trump was speaking, this appeared to catch every agent around Trump by complete surprise. By the time the Secret Service surrounded the former president, several shots had been fired and he was already bleeding. So why did word never get from the outer perimeter, which was patrolled by local police, to the inner bubble where the feds had control? Well, in a detailed interview, the local SWAT team on duty there says they never had the chance. ABC senior investigative correspondent Aaron Katersky has spoken exclusively with the SWAT team that was guarding this event. Aaron, who are these folks, and what are they telling you?

Aaron Katersky
This is a SWAT team from Beaver County, Pennsylvania, the neighboring county, to Butler, where the rally took place.

And these were the people who first said they recognized Thomas Matthew Crooks as suspicious.

Greg Nicholl
Noticed a young man. He was walking close to the building.

He was looking up and down the building and just wandering around, and it just seemed out of place.

Aaron Katersky
Remember, this is a local SWAT team, including snipers, positioned on the outer perimeter of the event. They're inside the building where Crooks ultimately perched to take shots at former President Trump. And that's by design. That was the assignment. At any point, did you see him with it, with a firearm?

Greg Nicholl
No.

Aaron Katersky
Greg Nicholl is a sniper who was positioned on the second floor of the building that crooks ultimately used as a perch.

Greg Nicholl
I was looking through binoculars. I brought him down to about waist height. And at that point, I looked down, and he was literally sitting right the window below me. Like I said, it was two floors up.

Aaron Katersky
He snapped photos of the young man as he said something in his gut told him something's off about this guy.

He became even more concerned when he saw crooks reach into his pocket and pull out a rangefinder. And what happens with those images and your concerns?

Greg Nicholl
The first thing I did, I sent those pictures out to a. We had a text group between the local snipers that were on scene, and then was text back. It said, call it into command. I then called it into the command via radio, and they acknowledged where it went from there, I have no idea.

Aaron Katersky
There were secret service snipers that may have had a better vantage point of the rooftop. But for nickel and his partners, they could not see the roof. They were inside the building. They would have had to stick their head out the window, contort their body, look up. They never had a clean shot at even seeing crooks with a gun, let alone taking some kind of defensive measure.

Greg Nicholl
I noticed people looking at the building, and, you know, President Trump at this time was speaking. I could hear him. And just like I said, I noticed a crowd looking at the building, not looking towards the stage. And I was just like, that's weird. I moved down a little bit further, and I still noticed that in my head. I thought, oh, they must have found this guy we were looking for out there.

Aaron Katersky
And everybody is watching, watching the police.

Greg Nicholl
Yeah, watching, interacting, deal with him. That wasn't the case. And that's when I heard the gunshots.

Aaron Katersky
The suspect is directly above us.

This is also the team that encountered the shooter's bloodied. Body at the end. And as you're scrambling onto that roof, you don't know for sure whether he's dead or alive or whether you'll encounter fire at that point.

Stephen Portnoy
No.

Greg Nicholl
There's a ladder right here.

Can we use this ladder? Yes. Yes.

Aaron Katersky
Rich Gianvito's helmet camera captured the moment of him rushing onto the rooftop, looking at the body, accompanied by the team's medic.

Rich Gianvito
I put my gloves on. I checked his pulse from his carotid on his right side. I did not feel a pulse.

I also noticed a wound to the.

Aaron Katersky
Back of his head who pronounced the shooter dead.

Brad Milke
So then, I mean, do they think of this then as, like, where were the failures here? From their point of view then, as the local guys that are sort of watching the feds come in and do their thing?

Aaron Katersky
The way they describe it, the failure started almost from the outset. They were given an assignment to go into the AGR building complex, and they had to let themselves in. They said they were never really met by anybody. To help explain the rationale, we were.

Greg Nicholl
Supposed to get a face to face briefing with the secret service snipers whenever they arrived, and that never happened.

Aaron Katersky
They took a look at the Overwatch situation and actually said they thought they were misplaced from the outset. It sounds like you had a feeling or a thought that this wasn't quite arranged right. Is that fair?

Greg Nicholl
Yes.

Brad Milke
Fair?

Rich Gianvito
Yes.

Aaron Katersky
You're all nodding.

They were going to be inside the building looking into a crowd that had already been screened, rather than looking out for threats that may be coming toward the rally. So why not go higher? Why not get up on to the roof and perhaps look downward?

Greg Nicholl
So in this particular instance, we were called in as a support element, and those were the areas that was designated for us and given to us as our responsibility, and we were told to cover those areas. So that's. That's what we did.

Aaron Katersky
You were told to go to the second floor of the building?

Greg Nicholl
Yes.

Aaron Katersky
And they can't freelance. Right. Because if somebody with a sniper's rifle is suddenly out of position, the Secret Service isn't going to like that. So they were curious, but they said they never were able to talk to anybody about that because that was the assignment. That's what they did. Could you ever tell anybody or call the Secret Service and say, I don't know if this is the best place for me?

Greg Nicholl
No, we had no contact with the Secret Service at all.

Aaron Katersky
You had no contact, nothing?

Greg Nicholl
Nope.

Aaron Katersky
And it turns out that none of the warnings ever reached the decision makers on the ground. In fact, there's reporting now from the Washington Post that members of Trump's secret Service detail complained they were never made aware of the warnings from the Beaver County SWAT team.

Brad Milke
I was about to say that seems like a whole thing, Aaron, is like, why the people around Trump wouldn't know. Like, there's a guy on the roof, six for six minutes or something.

Aaron Katersky
And in fact, the SWAT team members tell us that they did not have an open line of communication with the Secret Service. They didn't have an open line of communication with the Pennsylvania State Police. They had radios that talked to each other, but not to the on scene commanders necessarily. And so there never was a real mechanism in place from the start to transmit warnings that ultimately proved to be crucial.

Whose failure was this?

Rich Gianvito
I don't think we're the ones to assign any blame.

I think that's bigger than us. I think we were doing our job and that's all we can really speak to.

Aaron Katersky
This is not an inexperienced team. These are veteran officers that are drawn from different departments around western Pennsylvania that come together to do this kind of protective work when called upon. They've all done it before and they say they are willing to accept their share of failure.

Greg Nicholl
I think we all failed that day.

Aaron Katersky
How so?

Greg Nicholl
Life is lost. Yeah. People died.

And if there's anything that we could have done to stop that, we should have done.

Aaron Katersky
What they don't want to accept, though, is untoward blame. They said they were given an assignment, they carried out the assignment. They gave warnings that they weren't necessarily heeded or properly communicated, isn't necessarily on them.

Brad Milke
Right. And then there's the protectees themselves because we know the Secret Service thinks indoor rallies are more secure. Trump apparently is still refusing to stop doing outdoor rallies. In fact, he says he's going back to western Pennsylvania in the near future to do this again. The US Secret Service says it is still cooperating with the FBI and Congress as it examines what went wrong here. But Aaron Katersky, really great interview. Thank you.

Aaron Katersky
Thank you, Brett.

Brad Milke
Okay, one more quick break. When we come back, your favorite characters are never truly dead, but is that a good thing? One last thing is next.

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Brad Milke
And one last thing. Everybody loves a superhero movie.

This weekend, the unlikely buddy film Deadpool and Wolverine not only became the biggest global box office smash since Avatar, but it set the all time record for an r rated movie ever. Huge weekend for Marvel Studios, which, by the way, is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC. The other reason, though, it was such a huge weekend for Marvelous, was this.

Aaron Katersky
We missed you guys.

Brad Milke
San Diego Comic Con is famous for huge announcements to comic book fans. This is where you go to learn that Batman is gonna fight Superman. Well, we might have just seen one of the biggest reveals in the conventions history.

Jason Nathanson
They said, first, before Avengers secret wars, we're gonna do another Avengers movie, and it's gonna star Doctor Doom, which is one of the big baddies in the comics. And everybody's like, yeah, Doctor Doom. Woo.

Brad Milke
This is ABC's entertainment correspondent, Jason Nathanson, who knows a lot more about Marvel movies than I do. Am I gonna be able to understand a word you're about to say to me?

Jason Nathanson
Short answer, no.

Brad Milke
He promised to take it easy on me, as he described the literal unmasking of Marvel's next supervillain, Doctor Doom, the genius masked foe of the Fantastic Four, who has mastery over science and dark magic.

Jason Nathanson
And then they say, but only one person can play doctor doom. And they bring him out, and he has a mask on, and he rips off his mask, and it's Robert Downey Junior. And everybody loses their minds.

Brad Milke
This wasn't just a character reveal. This also marked the return of a Marvel legend. Robert Downey Junior is beloved by Comic Con audiences.

Jason Nathanson
So everybody was really excited about that. But then you go, especially if you're a casual Marvel watcher. Wait. Robert Downey Junior was Iron Man?

Greg Nicholl
I am Iron man.

Brad Milke
He has been a Marvel character, a main Marvel character.

Jason Nathanson
It started. It all started with the first Iron man movie. And Robert Downey Junior, that launched it, resurrected his career. It launched the Marvel films, made it this whole thing that it is.

Brad Milke
So RDJ is returning to play a villain. Well, one of the things at play here was Marvel needed a whole new bad guy.

Jason Nathanson
It was supposed to be a whole. The next phase of Marvel. And they all go in phases where they plan out years worth of movies and the bad guys and everything. And the next phase of Marvel was gonna be pretty much focused on a bad guy named Kang the Conqueror, who we first met in the Loki series.

And he was played by Jonathan Majors.

Brad Milke
Jonathan Majors, you might remember, was convicted of misdemeanor third degree assault and second degree harassment of his then girlfriend. And while he was also acquitted on some more serious charges and received no jail time. Disney cut ties with him. The decision to find a new character means they don't just have to change actors. They need whole new storylines.

The question now is, is Robert Downey Junior just sinking his teeth into a new acting challenge, or will his new and old characters intersect in these movies?

Jason Nathanson
And we don't really know the answer to that. There are, in the comic books, versions of Tony Stark in the multiverse, where Tony Stark becomes Doctor Doom, and this.

Brad Milke
Is where it becomes a gamble. Cause, yeah, you can imagine how cool it is to have characters reappear, but Marvel is using this device more often lately. Several years ago, the character Wolverine died in a movie, only to reappear this weekend because of a very confusing multiverse concept. Audience members wept when Iron Man's Tony Stark died. You don't want them getting frustrated, or even worse, bored, as characters get recycled.

Jason Nathanson
What do you do when you. When you have this big change? You go back to what works.

Brad Milke
Jason says that Downey is so beloved, Marvel will get the benefit of the doubt for now. But in the world of superheroes, sometimes the safe play carries its own dangers.

And I'm realizing this is happening all over the place, because at that same comic con this weekend, there was an announcement that Michael C. Hall is coming back to play Dexter again, even though he appeared to be dead when we last saw him. So it makes you wonder, like, how much emotion should I be putting into these on screen deaths, really? Hey, remember, for live news all day, check out ABC News live on Hulu or wherever you stream live news. I'm Brad Milke. I'll see you tomorrow.

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Did Hezbollah Just Spark a War?

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