TV News LIES

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history has come to an end after 43 days.

President Donald Trump signed legislation on Wednesday night from the White House that reopens the federal government and starts to resolve the mass chaos the shutdown created.

Trump's approval came after the House of Representatives voted 222-209 earlier in the evening on a funding package to turn the lights back on, moving past a political mess that has lasted for more than a month and left millions of Americans unable to travel or afford food.

After weeks without pay, hundreds of thousands of government workers will head back to work in the coming days. Under the terms of the funding package, federal employees will be compensated retroactively even though they have not been on the job.

Shuttered preschool and food benefit programs will reopen. So will federal agencies and national landmarks. Despite delays, government data that's crucial to understanding the American economy will start circulating again.

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A ruling by a federal judge could impact hundreds of Chicago and Midwestern immigrants who were arrested and detained by U.S. law enforcement.

A release order was issued Wednesday morning from District Judge Jeff Cummings, and came from a lawsuit brought by civil rights groups against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) after Operation Midway Blitz resulted in the arrests of thousands of allegedly undocumented immigrants.

Those arrests were allegedly in violation of a consent decree prohibiting the detention of individuals arrested without a warrant on immigration charges in the state of Illinois, with that alleged violation prompting a lawsuit challenging the detentions.

The judge ordered the release of 13 individuals before Friday, while another 615 individuals could be released on bond in coming weeks.

A stay was issued on the release of those 615 individuals until at least Friday, November 21, and a stay was also issued on deportations for any of those impacted individuals, according to court filings.

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Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker, wrote that President Donald Trump "spent hours at my house" with one of his victims, according to emails House Democrats released Nov. 12.

The White House called the release of emails a "smear." Trump attended parties and flew on Epstein’s plane during the 1990s. But Trump later ousted Epstein from his club and forcefully denied knowing about the sex trafficking. Epstein died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial.

The Democratic revelations came as the House prepares to swear in a new lawmaker from Arizona, Democrat Adelita Grijalva. She is expected to provide the final signature needed to force a vote on legislation that would release all Department of Justice records about the Epstein investigation.

Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight committee, called the emails "serious and disturbing."

"We won’t stop until we end this White House cover-up," Garcia said on social media Nov. 12. "Release the files, NOW."

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Ethics officials at Fannie Mae were removed from their jobs as they investigated whether a top Trump ally improperly accessed mortgage documents of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and other Democratic officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

William Pulte, a staunch Trump defender and the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), has accused James, Adam Schiff, a California senator, and Lisa Cook, a federal reserve governor, of mortgage fraud. All three have denied the accusations and James was indicted on specious federal charges last month.

Experts have raised questions about all three referrals and see them as a thinly veiled effort by Trump to target political rivals.

After Pulte made the referrals, former agency officials and experts told the Guardian they were highly unusual. Individualized mortgage data is highly sensitive and protected. And investigations into mortgage fraud are not typically handled by the FHFA inspector general, an agency watchdog staffed with investigative agents.

Ethics and internal investigation officials at Fannie Mae, the mortgage financing provider, had received internal complaints that senior officials at FHFA had ordered employees to access the mortgage documents of James and others, the Journal reported on Tuesday. They passed on their investigation to the inspector general’s office, who subsequently forwarded it to the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. Trump installed an ally, Lindsey Halligan, in that job last month.

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The Supreme Court is staying out of the fight over funding food benefits for now as a deal in Congress to end the government shutdown appears likely to be approved.

The court on Nov. 11 said it would not immediately rule on an order directing the Trump administration to fully fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits during the government shutdown − which lawmakers could resolve as soon as Wednesday.

The court kept a district judge's funding order on hold through Nov. 13, freezing action without considering which side has the better legal arguments.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had previously paused the district judge's funding deadline while the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was considering it. The request went to Jackson, the justice who handles emergency appeals from that part of the country, putting one of the court's three liberal justices in the awkward position of granting a request from the administration on an issue of top concern for Democrats.

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Department of Justice officials said they’re launching civil rights and terrorism investigations into protests outside a Turning Point USA event on the University of California, Berkeley campus on Nov. 10, in another escalation by the Trump administration to combat what it views as left-leaning dissenters in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death.

Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, shared clips of the protest on social media and said an investigation was on the way. Attorney General Pam Bondi followed with her own post, announcing the incident is under "full investigation by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force." Both suggested an antifa, or anti-fascist movement, connection.

"The @CivilRights will investigate what happened here, and I see several issues of serious concern regarding campus and local security and Antifa’s ability to operate with impunity in CA," Dhillon said on X.

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