TV News LIES

At least six of the nine featured musical acts set to play in a concert series organized by the Trump administration to mark the United States’ 250th anniversary have dropped out, just one day after the lineup was announced.

The first to drop out, hours after Wednesday’s announcement, was Morris Day, who called his scheduled participation in the summer concert series on Washington DC’s National Mall a baseless “rumor”.

Later on Wednesday, Young MC posted a message that began: “I have informed my agents that I will not be performing at the Freedom 250 event.”

“The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event,” he added, before casting doubt on the claim from Freedom 250, the group created by Donald Trump to organize the celebration of the US’s semiquincentennial, that the series was nonpartisan.

And on Thursday, the Commodores, C+C Music Factory, Martina McBride and Milli Vanilli all either dropped out or expressed surprise that they had ever been booked.

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When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism. 

The president’s eldest son said through a spokesperson that he wasn’t involved. The Pentagon said Trump Jr. played no role in the record-setting deal. And the startup’s founder told reporters that his company, Vulcan Elements, received no political favoritism.

But interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, who accused President Trump of sexual assault, according to multiple reports.

CNN was the first to report Wednesday night that the DOJ’s probe focuses on whether Carroll committed perjury while speaking at a deposition as part of her two civil lawsuits against Trump.

A spokesperson for the DOJ told The Hill on Thursday that the department does not comment on investigations.

Prosecutors are reportedly focused on Carroll telling then-Trump attorney Alina Habba in a 2022 deposition that she received no outside funding for the lawsuit. However, two weeks before the trial, Carroll’s attorneys informed the judge and Trump’s legal team that billionaire Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit covered some of her legal fees and expenses.

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A company run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, hired by the Israeli government to push pro-Israel views on a major conservative media network, has directed $13 million from Israel to several Republican digital strategy firms and allies, according to a previously unreported document filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. 

Parscale was hired in part to influence major right-wing Christian media company Salem Media Group, where he is also an executive. His firm spent hundreds of thousands on ads with a Salem subsidiary. As part of the contract, Parscale’s firm also sent millions to other firms run by some of his closest political allies.

The new filing sheds light on a more detailed web of interconnected companies and political operatives capitalizing on Parscale’s contract with the Israeli government. Many of the companies getting work as part of Parscale’s Israel contract are being reported here for the first time.

Among those that received millions of dollars’ worth of payments related to the contract are ventures like SparkFire, an AI chatbot company leading a mass texting campaign, and a shadowy firm run by longtime mainstream Republican strategist Mike Shields. (None of the figures or firms in this story responded to requests for comment.)

Israel initially directly hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, last September with a contract worth $6 million. The new filing reveals that his firm has received over $15 million from Havas Media Network, an international media company, on behalf of the Israeli state.

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A federal judge has declined to temporarily block President Trump's executive order that calls for restricting voting by mail.

The ruling released Thursday by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump nominee based in Washington, D.C., leaves in place — at least for now — an executive order on voting that tests the limits of the president's power under the Constitution. A separate, 2025 executive order on voting was halted by courts.

The latest executive order, issued March 31, calls for the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to create lists of adult U.S. citizens in each state, and to send those lists to state election officials. It also calls for the U.S. Postal Service — a federal agency that's independent of a president's administration — to come up with lists of eligible voters and to only deliver mail-in ballots to people on those lists.

"The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws. Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur. Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted," Nichols wrote about the decision not to block the order.

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The US Treasury Department confirmed the removal of Albanese's name from its sanctions list in an update on its website on Wednesday, under the heading “International Criminal Court-related Designation Removal”.

The move came a week after US district judge Richard Leon issued a temporary injunction against the sanctions, finding that the Trump administration had sought to regulate Albanese's speech because of the "idea or message expressed".

In an opinion granting the preliminary injunction, Leon said "protecting the freedom of speech is 'always' in the public interest".

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in February by Albanese's husband, Massimiliano Cali, a senior economist for the World Bank in Tunisia, which argued that the measures were intended as a punishment for her public criticism of Israel's genocide in Gaza.

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