TV News LIES

FBI Director Kash Patel announced he is ending the bureau's partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, saying he disliked former FBI Director James Comey's approving comments about the Jewish advocacy group.

"James Comey wrote 'love letters' to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them," Patel alleged in the Oct. 1 post on X. He accused the organization of spying on Americans, without providing specific details.

The Anti-Defamation League, which describes itself as the "leading anti-hate organization in the world" with a mission to stop the defamation of Jewish people and secure justice for all, said in a statement that it has "deep respect for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and law enforcement officers at all levels across the country."

"In light of an unprecedented surge of antisemitism, we remain more committed than ever to our core purpose to protect the Jewish people," the league said.

More...

Retired US supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy fears “democracy is not guaranteed to survive” as “partisanship is becoming much more prevalent and more bitter” in the legal opinions coming from his former institution, he tells NPR in an upcoming interview.

Strikingly, for the interview set to publish in October, NPR’s Nina Totenberg said she asked Kennedy whether he was still sure the supreme court’s major decisions would remain intact – as he told a small group of journalists that he was when he retired in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first presidency.

NPR reported that Kennedy “demurred”, seven years after that prediction – and three years after the federal abortion rights once granted by the Roe v Wade ruling were eliminated by a supreme court with a conservative supermajority anchored by three Trump appointments.

“We live in an era where reasoned, thoughtful, rational, respectful discourse has been replaced by antagonistic, confrontational conversation,” Kennedy, who was appointed to the supreme court during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, remarked.

More...

The Trump administration has filed a first-of-its-kind civil rights lawsuit against pro-Palestinian groups and activists, accusing the advocates of violating a law that has traditionally been used to protect reproductive health clinics from anti-abortion harassment and violence.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday by the justice department’s civil rights division, alleges that two advocacy groups and six people broke the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (Face) Act when they protested against an event at a West Orange, New Jersey, synagogue in November 2024. The event at the Ohr Torah synagogue promoted the sale of property in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely considered illegal under international law. Similar events have sparked protests in the years since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, but this event escalated into violence.

One man, a pro-Israel counterprotester, pepper-sprayed a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, while another counterprotester bashed the same demonstrator in the head with a flashlight, according to a local news outlet. Local New Jersey prosecutors ultimately filed charges against the two counterprotestors on multiple counts, including aggravated assault. (The pair have denied the accusations against them.)

More...

Zohran Mamdani on Monday hit back at Donald Trump’s vow to withhold federal funds to New York City if he becomes mayor.

Trump on Monday raged on his Truth Social platform that democratic socialist Mamdani “needs the money” from him to “fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises” but “won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the point of voting for him?”

CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Mamdani if he was “OK if New York City loses” the $7.4 billion it receives in federal funding each year.

“No,” Mamdani replied, then he defiantly promised: “We will fight for every single dollar that the city currently receives from the federal government.”

“I look for examples across this country that showcase the best way to respond to Donald Trump’s... threats rather is responding with strength,” he continued. “And what we see in California is an attorney general of the state has estimated that for every dollar they spent on lawsuits against the federal government’s threats to withhold funding, they won more than $30,000 in what would otherwise have been lost.”

More...

A federal judge has blocked Voice of America CEO Kari Lake from firing 500 employees and warned in a blistering decision that her agency’s “disrespect” toward the court merited a trial for civil contempt.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote that the only reason he was not initiating contempt proceedings was that the plaintiffs in the case hadn’t asked for them.

The court’s decision not to pursue contempt of its own accord “should not be mistaken for lenience toward the defendants’ egregious erstwhile conduct,” he wrote.

In March, the congressionally established U.S. Agency for Global Media—overseen by Lake, a former anchor for a Fox affiliate in Arizona—moved to fire about 600 of its 1,040 full-time employees and place another 400 on administrative leave.

More...

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s effort to deport pro-Palestinian academics is a deliberate attack on free speech meant to “strike fear” into non-citizen students and chill campus protests.

“The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day,” U.S. District Judge William Young concluded, in a scathing, 161-page opinion that he described as tYoung, a Reagan appointee based in Boston, did not immediately order changes to administration policies, but said he will hold further proceedings on how to rein in the practices he found to violate First Amendment free-speech rights.

The ruling is the long-awaited result of a lawsuit brought by university professors who say the Trump administration is illegally chilling free speech by targeting prominent pro-Palestinian campus activists — like Mahmoud Khalil — and others who have expressed pro-Palestinian views. It followed a two week trial that featured testimony from top Trump administration officials, who described orchestrating the arrests of these activists and taking cues from an anonymously run website.

More...