TV News LIES

The president of the Kennedy Center has demanded $1m in damages and fiercely criticized a musician’s sudden decision to cancel a Christmas Eve performance at the venue days after the White House announced that Donald Trump’s name would be added to the facility.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment – explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure – is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” the venue’s president, Richard Grenell, wrote in a letter to musician Chuck Redd that was shared with the Associated Press.

In the letter, Grenell said he would seek $1m in damages “for this political stunt”.

Redd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A drummer and vibraphone player, Redd has presided over holiday Jazz Jams at the Kennedy Center since 2006, succeeding bassist William “Keter” Betts. In an email Wednesday to the Associated Press, Redd said he pulled out of the concert in the wake of the renaming.

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd said. He added on Wednesday that the event has been a “very popular holiday tradition” and that he often featured at least one student musician.

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President Donald Trump urged the Justice Department to release the names of any Democrats in the Epstein files, saying the agency should “embarrass them,” even as he questioned the amount of time being spent on the issue.

Trump signed legislation Nov. 19 requiring the release of the federal government’s records related to Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The legislation set a 30-day deadline for the records to be released, and the Justice Department began making them public on Dec. 19. Hundreds of thousands of documents have been made available, but many more have yet to come out, prompting some lawmakers to accuse the Trump administration of violating the law.

The Justice Department said on Dec. 24 that the FBI and federal prosecutors found more than a million additional Epstein-related documents and that it would take weeks to review them.

“Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found,” Trump said in a Dec. 26 social media post. “DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE.”

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Whatever the worst-case scenario, Janessa Goldbeck has probably imagined it. In 2023 the US marine veteran consulted on a documentary that war-gamed a presidential candidate staging a military coup. Last year she advised local leaders on the hypothetical of troops being deployed to their streets for immigration enforcement.

Then Donald Trump won and Goldbeck’s nightmare came true.

“It’s a little surreal to see something that we’ve been talking about and thinking about and stressing out about,” the chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a non-profit advocacy organisation, says via Zoom from her home in San Diego, California. “When we first did War Game, the film, some folks would ask during our press tour, ‘Do you think you’re scaring people? This feels a little hyperbolic?’ It doesn’t feel good to say I told you so in this moment.”

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has sought to politicise the military like no other commander-in-chief before him and use it as a cudgel against Democratic-led states and cities. He has deployed thousands of national guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans and Washington DC, triggering protests from local officials and residents.

Having read the Project 2025 policy document, Goldbeck saw this coming. Last year Vet Voice Foundation, which mobilises veterans and military families to defend US democracy, ran exercises with local elected officials, activists and journalists to prepare for a second Trump administration conducting aggressive immigration enforcement. It has now become a vital resource for governors, state attorneys general and mayors trying to weather the storm.

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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce federal homeland security funding, including for disasters, for states that do not comply with immigration enforcement policies.

US district judge Mary McElroy of Rhode Island, a 2018 Trump appointee, ruled on Monday that the latest case was “another example” of the Trump administration tying state and local government assistance to its immigration crackdown.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) cut more than $230m in federal grants for Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and the District of Columbia. The grants were a part of $1b in annual funds given to states and local governments for counter-terrorism efforts.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on Wednesday shot a migrant who drove a van toward them while fleeing an immigration enforcement operation, resulting in a crash that injured his passenger, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The DHS said in a statement that ICE officers were conducting a targeted operation in the Baltimore suburb of Glen Burnie, Md., when they approached a van and asked the driver, whom they identified as Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins, to turn off the engine.

“The driver refused and attempted to flee, then weaponized his vehicle and began ramming his van into several ICE vehicles. He then drove his van directly at ICE officers, attempting to run them over,” the agency added in the statement.

“Fearing for their lives and public safety, the ICE officers defensively fired their service weapons, striking the driver. Sousa-Martins then wrecked his van between two buildings, injuring the passenger,” the statement continued.

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President Donald Trump's administration, which failed to meet a deadline to release records related to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, announced Dec. 24 that the process will take “a few more weeks" after prosecutors found more than a million additional documents,

The Justice Department, via its official X account, said that New York-based federal prosecutors and the FBI "have uncovered over a million more documents potentially related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.” The statement did not specify when those documents were discovered.

The department, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, said that despite having lawyers “working around the clock” to remove information that could jeopardize victims and accusers’ privacy, the release "may take a few more weeks."

The administration began releasing files related to criminal investigations of Epstein, the late American financier who was friends with Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s, to comply with a law passed by Congress last month.

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