TV News LIES

A US appeals court on Thursday handed a victory to Donald Trump in his effort to keep national guard troops in Washington DC, pausing a lower court order that would have ended the deployment in the coming days.

In a written order, the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit lifted an injunction that said the troops needed to leave the nation’s capital by 11 December.

The DC circuit’s order, while not a final judgment, allows Trump to continue a deployment he began this summer and has ramped up in response to a 26 November shooting of two national guard members near the White House.

The order came in a lawsuit filed by the DC attorney general, Brian Schwalb, a Democrat and the capital city’s top legal officer.

More than 2,000 national guard soldiers have been in Washington since Trump’s initial deployment in August, part of the president’s contentious immigration and crime crackdown targeting Democratic-orled cities.

The guard troops in the city include contingents from the District of Columbia, as well as Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia and Alabama.

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Donald Trump has replaced the architect originally selected to oversee his $300m planned gilded ballroom.

According to the Washington Post, which first reported the news on Thursday and cited three people familiar with the matter, architect James McCrery II and his boutique firm had been leading the project for more than three months, up until late October.

The president and McCrery disagreed at times, particularly over Trump’s interest in expanding the 90,000-sq-ft ballroom’s size, the Washington Post reported. However, it was ultimately the firm’s limited staff and missed deadlines that prompted the change, one person said.

It is unclear whether McCrery chose to step aside voluntarily. However, one source noted that he and Trump parted on good terms.

Trump has now selected Shalom Baranes as the project’s new architect, which the White House confirmed. Baranes, whose previous work includes significant federal projects such as the main Treasury building near the White House, received strong praise in a written statement from the White House spokesperson David Ingle.

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The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.

Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.

“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the statement added.

The latest strike comes as the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers with military strikes, with US lawmakers promising to investigate the first such attack, in September, in which two survivors clinging to wreckage were killed in a follow-on strike.

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Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has some thoughts on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the type of people who voted for him.

“You know, it’s so interesting, because I lived in Manhattan for a while, and I loved this city,” Kirk told The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit on Wednesday.

Sorkin had pointed out that Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the city’s first Muslim mayor, was someone who had “captured younger voters” but was on the “complete opposite end” of where Kirk’s late husband, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, would have stood politically. He then asked Kirk for her take on the new mayor.

Kirk answered that she wanted to approach the question “as a female voter,” due to the large number of women who voted for Mamdani.

“I think there’s a tendency, especially when you live in a city like Manhattan, where, again, you are so career-driven, and you almost look to the government as a form of replacement for certain things, relationship-wise, even,” she said. “You see things a little bit differently.”

“What I don’t want to have happen is women, young women, in the city look to the government as a solution,” she said. “To put off having a family or a marriage, because you’re relying on the government to support you, instead of being united with a husband, where you can support yourself and your husband can support [you], and you guys can all combine together.”

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The Supreme Court on Thursday came to the rescue of Texas Republicans, allowing next year’s elections to be held under the state’s congressional redistricting plan favorable to the GOP and pushed by President Donald Trump despite a lower-court ruling that the map likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The justices acted on an emergency request from Texas for quick action because qualifying in the new districts already has begun, with primary elections in March.

The Supreme Court’s order puts the 2-1 ruling blocking the map on hold at least until after the high court issues a final decision in the case. Justice Samuel Alito had previously temporarily blocked the order while the full court considered the Texas appeal.

The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The Texas congressional map enacted last summer at Trump’s urging was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats.

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The Justice Department on Thursday failed to secure an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The presentation to the grand jury came less than two weeks after the original criminal case against her was dismissed.

James, a frequent political target of President Donald Trump’s who had successfully brought a fraud lawsuit against him, had previously been indicted by a grand jury on one charge of bank fraud and another of making false statements to a financial institution.

James has denied any wrongdoing.

Lindsey Halligan, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and a former personal attorney to Trump with no prior prosecutorial experience, presented the case to a grand jury on her own in the first go-round — and that case was declared void on Nov. 24 when a judge found Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.

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Navy Adm. Frank Bradley, the commander who oversaw the Sept. 2 strikes on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, denied that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered his subordinates to “kill everybody” aboard the vessel during briefings to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The denial follows a report from The Washington Post last week that the Pentagon chief gave a spoken directive to “kill everybody” ahead of the U.S. military’s Sept. 2 attack against an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean, an operation where 11 “narco-terrorists” were killed.

Both Hegseth and the White House have denied that he gave such an order to Bradley, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command.

“Admiral Bradley was very clear that he was given no such order, not to give no quarter or to kill them all. He was given an order that, of course, was written down in great detail, as our military always does,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters after the Thursday closed-door, classified briefing with Bradley and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, Gen. Dan Caine.

“The admiral confirmed that there had not been a ‘kill them all’ order, and that there was not an order to ‘grant no quarter,’” Himes said on Thursday.

Still, Himes said that he was “deeply” troubled by the Defense Department’s attack on Sept. 2, in which the U.S. military conducted four strikes, killing 11 and sinking the boat.

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After a nearly five-year investigation, a suspect has been arrested for allegedly planting pipe bombs in Washington ahead of the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, federal authorities announced.

Attorney General Pam Bondi identified the suspect as Brian Cole Jr., 30, of Woodbridge, Virginia. She said he was charged with use of an explosive device and that more search warrants were still being executed on Dec. 4.

“There could be more charges to come,” Bondi told reporters. "There was no new tip. There was no new witness, just good diligent police work and prosecutorial work."

Officials noted the alleged pipe bomber was from Woodbridge, Virginia, a city roughly 25 miles from Washington. Bondi did not disclose Cole’s alleged motive, saying the investigation is ongoing.

On Don Trump Jr.’s podcast, Triggered, Patel repeatedly criticized the Biden administration's handling of the case.

Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said authorities focused on evidence they already had, rather than receiving new tips.

“You're not going to walk into our Capital city, put down two explosive devices and walk off in the sunset,” Bongino said. “Not going to happen. We were going to track this person to the end of the earth. There was no way he was getting away.”

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