TV News LIES

The Trump administration has threatened to suspend Snap food assistance to several Democratic-led states unless they turn over recipient data to the federal government.

The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, said on Tuesday that the USDA could begin blocking funds as early as next week if Democratic-led states continue to reject federal requests for Snap recipient data – information that includes immigration status and social security numbers.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting, Rollins said the USDA needed the data from each state to “root out this fraud, to make sure that those who really need food stamps are getting them, but also to ensure that the American taxpayer is protected”.

“Twenty-nine states said yes – not surprisingly, the red states, and that’s where all of that data, that fraud comes from. But 21 states including California, New York and Minnesota, blue states, continue to say no. So as of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and they tell us and allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and to protect the American taxpayer.”

In a separate statement to the Guardian, a USDA spokesperson said: “USDA established a Snap integrity team to analyze not only data provided by states, but to scrub all available information to end indiscriminate welfare fraud.

More...

Donald Trump on Tuesday called Somali immigrants “garbage” and said they should be sent back home in a rant that came as the administration is reportedly increasing immigration enforcement against undocumented Somalis in Minnesota.

In a xenophobic rant during a cabinet meeting, Trump went off on Somalis and Ilhan Omar, the congressional representative who is from Somalia and is a US citizen. He said Somalia “stinks” and is “no good for a reason”.

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. He called Omar “garbage” and said “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country”.

“These are people who do nothing but complain,” he said. “They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing … When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area, where most Somalis reside, would see stepped-up deportation efforts this week, focusing primarily on Somalis who have final deportation orders. It would use “strike teams” of ICE agents and other federal officers, bringing in about 100 agents from across the country, the Times reported. Other media outlets, including the Associated Press, have confirmed the reporting.

TVNL Comment:  Just when you think he can't go any lower...

More...

Tania Nemer is one of dozens of immigration judges fired by the Trump administration this year.

But a new lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., suggests what happened to Nemer — and why — has the potential to scramble the federal workforce and upend foundational civil rights laws.

Nemer alleges that despite top performance reviews, she was dismissed from her job because of her gender, her status as a dual citizen of Lebanon and the fact that she once ran for municipal office in Ohio as a Democrat. Those reasons, she says, are all in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment.

The government has responded by arguing that the president's power to oversee the executive branch under Article II of the U.S. Constitution essentially overrides that core civil rights law, Nemer's attorney said.

"This is a case in which the President of the United States has asserted a constitutional right to discriminate against federal employees," wrote her lawyer, Nathaniel Zelinsky, of the Washington Litigation Group. "If the government prevails in transforming the law, it will eviscerate the professional, non-partisan civil service as we know it."

The administration abruptly fired Nemer in early February, summoning her from the bench and escorting her out of a federal building in Cleveland. Both her supervisor and the chief immigration judge there told her they didn't know why she was being dismissed in the middle of her probationary period, the lawsuit said.

More...

He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine.

“[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state.

The description might sound like a sketch of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who Donald Trump’s administration has accused of being a “narco-terrorist” kingpin and is trying to topple with a $50m bounty and a huge display of military might off the South American country’s Caribbean coast.

But it is actually a portrait – painted by US prosecutors, no less – of the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who Trump last week pledged to pardon, despite the fact that Hernández was sentenced last year to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”.

“The people of Honduras really thought he was set up and it was a terrible thing,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “He was the president of the country and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country … and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”

Trump’s astonishing intervention in favour of Hernández, who is known by his initials JOH, has baffled many observers, with one Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent calling the move “lunacy”.

More...

A federal appeals court panel on Monday upheld Alina Habba’s disqualification as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, a blow to President Trump’s efforts to keep his preferred U.S. attorneys in their posts as their Senate confirmations stall.

The three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled unanimously that Habba, a former personal lawyer to Trump, is not lawfully serving as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey.

The judges also barred her from serving in the role in an “acting” capacity, after the Trump administration created a workaround to keep her in place.

“Its efforts to elevate its preferred candidate for U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, to the role of Acting U.S. Attorney demonstrate the difficulties it has faced — yet the citizens of New Jersey and the loyal employees in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deserve some clarity and stability,” he said.

“It is apparent that the current administration has been frustrated by some of the legal and political barriers to getting its appointees in place,” wrote Judge D. Michael Fisher, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, for the panel.

“Its efforts to elevate its preferred candidate for U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, to the role of Acting U.S. Attorney demonstrate the difficulties it has faced — yet the citizens of New Jersey and the loyal employees in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deserve some clarity and stability,” he said.

More...

John McAuliff, a 33-year-old small business owner and former civil servant, was one of the more unlikely Democrats to win election to Virginia’s legislature this month, after a campaign in which he could, at times, come off a bit like a Republican.

McAuliff was among the 13 Democrats elected to the legislature in Virginia’s elections earlier this month, as part of a blowout victory for the party that gives it firm control of the southern state’s government. Along with wins in New Jersey, California and elsewhere, the results put some wind back into Democrats’ sails nationwide, a year after their drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans.

The northern Virginia district of subdivisions, farmland and quaint little towns that he sought to represent had not elected a Democrat to the house of delegates in decades, so McAuliff would go door to door on an electric scooter, informing those who answered his knocks that he was running “to preserve their way of life”. He repudiated the term “woke” and decried the “chaos” coming out of Washington DC, an hour-plus drive away.

What he talked most about was a specific grievance in line with the focus on affordability many Democrats are taking these days, but with a unique twist: the deleterious effects of datacenters and their impact on electricity bills.

“Most of the year I spent knocking on the doors of folks we didn’t think were Democrats – either independents or Republicans, and once in a while, a Democrat. And so they would start to shut the door in my face,” McAuliff said.

More...