TV News LIES

The Trump administration laid off more than 4,100 employees Friday amid the ongoing government shutdown, according to a new court filing from the Justice Department. 

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston had ordered the administration to hand over the information in a lawsuit government unions filed just before the shutdown began.

Various agencies have since confirmed the layoffs, but the government’s new court filing provides the clearest picture yet of the breadth of the cuts.

The most significant layoffs took place at the Treasury Department, with 1,446 employees receiving RIF notices Friday.

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A grand jury in Virginia indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday, marking the second Trump foe to face federal prosecution in recent weeks.

James was charged with one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution. The indictment alleges that James bought a house in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2020 with a mortgage that required her to use it as a second home, but she ultimately rented it to a family and used it as an investment property. It accuses her of misrepresenting how the house was used to get a more favorable interest rate.

Lindsey Halligan, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement: "No one is above the law. The charges as alleged in this case represent intentional, criminal acts and tremendous breaches of the public's trust."

James called the charges "baseless" in a video statement.

"This is nothing more than a continuation of the president's desperate weaponization of our justice system," she said.

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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.

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New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ Sept. 28 announcement that he is dropping his bid for reelection raised hopes among conservatives that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, a socialist state Assembly member, can be stopped by former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani.

Adams, a centrist Democrat like Cuomo, was also making an independent bid after a federal indictment on corruption charges that were dropped by the Justice Department after Trump took office.

But it remains unlikely that Cuomo can surmount Mamdani's commanding lead in recent polls if Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa remains in the race.

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A loan estimate for an Atlanta home purchased by Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor accused of mortgage fraud by the Trump administration, shows that Cook had declared the property as a “vacation home,” according to a document reviewed by Reuters.

The document, dated May 28, 2021, was issued to Cook by her credit union in the weeks before she completed the purchase and shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence. The document appears to counter other documentation that Cook’s critics have cited in support of their claims that she committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence, two independent real-estate experts said.

Reuters was unable to reach Cook for comment. She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing regarding her properties, which also include a home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and an investment property in Massachusetts.

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Since the White House press office selected reporters from five pro-Trump, partisan news outlets to ask the president questions during his televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday, readers will not be shocked to learn that they largely avoided subjects he would prefer not to talk about.

In fact, two of them went even further than that, using the opportunity to help Trump make his point about crime in Washington DC by sharing their own stories of being assaulted or harassed.

The first to speak, in what was obviously a pre-planned moment, was Iris Tao of the conspiratorial Epoch Times.

Tao’s outlet, which was founded by Chinese exiles affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement that is repressed as a cult in China, has heavily promoted Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that China was responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I want to mention, you know about crime… we have a young lady here, Iris of Epoch Times,” Trump said, looked down at his briefing notes, where her name was written in large letters. “I heard you were very savagely mugged. Would you like to mention what happened?” he asked.

Tao then described the harrowing experience of being mugged at gunpoint outside her apartment building in January 2023, and struck in the face with a pistol by her attacker when she refused to hand over her phone.

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