TV News LIES

Alleging First Amendment free speech violations, TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block a new law that would force the sale or a nationwide ban of the popular short-form video app.

The law “will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025, silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere," the petition said.

The TikTok lawsuit, which challenges the law on constitutional grounds, also cites commercial, technical and legal hurdles as well as opposition from Beijing.

Divestiture is “simply not possible,” especially within 270 days, the petition claims. According to the petition, the Chinese government "has made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine that is a key to the success of TikTok in the United States."

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Judge Aileen Cannon suspended a key deadline in former President Trump’s documents case after his attorneys suggested that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had “failed to preserve critical evidence” in the case after prosecutors disclosed some classified records may not be in the original order in which they were found.

The suspension marks yet another delay in a prosecution where Cannon has yet to even set a new trial date, casting further doubt on the chances the case will come before a jury ahead of the election.

The twelfth day of Donald Trump's New York hush money trial began with the judge threatening the former president with jail time.

Judge Juan Merchan opened proceedings Monday morning by telling Trump that the $1,000 fines for gag order violations evidently aren't deterring the former president. "Going forward," Merchan said, he will have to consider jail time for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Merchan had issued nine $1,000 fines for each violation of the gag order barring Trump from commenting on the participation of potential witnesses or jurors with the intent to interfere in the trial. He added a 10th fine on Monday.

The D.C. Court of Appeals has temporarily suspended the law license of former President Trump’s ex-lawyer following a similar order made in late March by a California State Bar Court.

Former Trump attorney John Eastman’s license is suspended in D.C. pending a final disposition in the California court proceedings, chief judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals, Anna Blackburne-Rigsby, said in an order filed on Friday.

Gregory Pflugfelder had just finished the final class of his career at Columbia. In 28 years at the university, he achieved many accolades as a professor of history who taught a popular course on Japanese monsters – mostly focused on Godzilla and "the role of the monstrous in the cultural imagination."

He didn't know it, but a cultural monster of sorts would soon be at his door.

The next night, on Tuesday, the 64-year-old silver-haired scholar stepped outside his apartment building, located off campus across the street from Columbia. He wanted to record iPhone video of hundreds of police responding to historic student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Fifteen minutes later, the NYPD arrested him.

Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign press secretary, broke into tears on Friday while testifying in the ex-president’s New York criminal hush-money trial, hours after she described his complete control over the campaign.

Hicks, who cut a skittish figure in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, is a key prosecution witness. She described Trump campaign staffers’ panic when a recording emerged in which Trump bragged about groping women. “This was a crisis” for his presidential bid, she said, describing the sentiment among the campaign staff.

Hicks also placed Trump squarely at the center of his campaign media strategy, telling jurors “we were all just following his lead”. The testimony marks a turning point for prosecutors, as she is the first Trump staffer with intimate knowledge of Trump’s campaign to testify about his alleged misconduct.

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