TV News LIES

President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify competing congressional memos about the validity of the so-called Steele dossier means the FBI has lost its authority to rebuff Freedom of Information Act requests about the bureau’s efforts to verify the report’s intelligence linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta previously blessed the FBI’s decision to refuse such FOIA requests by declining to confirm whether any records exist about aspects of its handling of the hotly contested dossier, prepared by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The judge ruled in January that Trump’s tweets about the dossier did not require the FBI and other intelligence agencies to be more responsive to public records requests on the issue.

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Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who has remained mostly tight-lipped about President Donald Trump's administration, on Friday signed on to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of former top intelligence officials criticizing the president's decision to remove former CIA director John Brennan's security clearance.

The letter, which came out Thursday, described Trump's decision as a political one and has "everything to do with an attempt to stifle free speech."

Prominent US climate scientists have told the Guardian that the Trump administration is holding up research funding as their projects undergo an unprecedented political review by the high-school football teammate of the US interior secretary.

The US interior department administers over $5.5bn in funding to external organizations, mostly for research, conservation and land acquisition. At the beginning of 2018, interior secretary Ryan Zinke instated a new requirement that scientific funding above $50,000 must undergo an additional review to ensure expenditures “better align with the administration’s priorities”.

All current and future students enrolled in New York University school of medicine's MD degree program will receive full-tuition scholarships, the school announced Thursday.

The scholarships are granted independently of merit or financial need for all enrolled students, the university said. Sticker price for tuition at the school is $55,018 a year.

The school has an acceptance rate of 6 percent, according to Princeton Review.

The former commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, who also oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, has a request for President Donald Trump: revoke his security clearance.

Retired Navy Adm. William McRaven on Thursday said in an op-ed that he would “consider it an honor” to have his clearance revoked so that he could add his “name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”

The Senate took a rhetorical shot on Thursday at President Trump's attacks on the media, passing a resolution affirming that the press is "not the enemy of the people."

The non-binding resolution, which cleared the chamber by unanimous consent, also touts the "indispensable role of the free press" and says an attack on the media meant to "systematically undermine the credibility of the press as a whole [is] an attack on our democratic institutions."

Spearheaded by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the resolution doesn't directly mention Trump, who has called the press the "enemy of the people."

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The Pentagon’s top spokesperson was ostensibly seeking to make peace with the media when she headed down to the building’s press bullpen about three weeks ago for an off-the-record discussion on how to improve relations.

But the meeting quickly grew combative, according to three people who were in the room. When reporters raised issues like vanishing access to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top officials, Dana White pushed back by criticizing the accuracy of press corps members’ reporting.

When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern Ukraine, to name just a few issues.

When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.

Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.

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