TV News LIES

President Donald Trump commuted U.S. Rep. George Santos’ seven-year prison sentence, releasing him from jail on Oct. 17.

Santos, a 37-year-old Republican from New York, reported to the Federal Correctional Institution Flatiron Satellite Camp in New Jersey on July 25 to begin a seven-year prison sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. As part of the plea, he admitted to filing false campaign finance reports, charging donors’ credit cards without authorization and fraudulently receiving unemployment benefits, among other acts that began years before he ran for Congress in 2022.

Santos represented parts of Queens and Long Island for 11 months. He recently published an open letter directly appealing to Trump in fawning language.

“George Santos was somewhat of a “rogue,” but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” wrote Trump in a Truth Social post. “At least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN! George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated. Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life!”

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The US Chamber of Commerce has sued the Trump administration over its new policy of imposing a $100,000 fee on H-1B worker visas.

In a press release regarding the lawsuit, the Chamber said the new fee is unlawful since it “overrides provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that govern the H-1B program, including the requirement that fees be based on the costs incurred by the government in processing visas.”

Last month, President Donald Trump announced that he would increase the fee on the H-1B visa to $100,000 per year. The program allows US employers to hire foreign workers in speciality fields, and technology companies in particular rely heavily on workers who receive H-1B visas.

Critics of H-1Bs and other work visa programs say they are often used to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labour. But business groups and major companies have said H-1Bs are a critical means to address a shortage of qualified American workers.

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Indiana University has ordered its student-run newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student (IDS), to cease printing new editions and fired the school’s director of student media, who also served as the paper’s adviser, according to multiple reports. Students at the school are criticizing these moves as censorship.

The university’s directive to halt print editions came just hours after Jim Rodenbush, the school’s director of student media, was terminated, according to a letter from IDS editors.

The editors said Indiana University and the media school “previously directed the IDS to stop printing news coverage in our newspaper. Only the special editions, traditionally included as inserts in our paper. Telling us what we can and cannot print is unlawful censorship. The Student Press Law Center agrees and had told the university to reverse course.”

They wrote: “After former director of student media Jim Rodenbush resisted, IU fired him. When we asked them to rescind the order, it cut print entirely.”

Rodenbush confirmed to NBC News on Thursday that he was fired on Tuesday.

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A Washington, D.C., woman accused of assaulting a federal agent was found not guilty by a jury on Thursday, the latest embarrassment for Jeanine Pirro, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Prosecutors had alleged Sidney Lori Reid kicked a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent during an altercation outside the D.C. Jail in July. Reid had been filming Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while they were detaining a man who’d just been released from the jail.

Pirro’s office tried three times to indict Reid on a felony assault charge, but D.C. grand juries declined to return an indictment each time — a highly unusual occurrence that suggested the flimsiness of the government’s case.

After whiffing on the felony counts, prosecutors ended up trying Reid on a misdemeanor charge of assaulting or impeding a federal agent — but they couldn’t even win that case. The jury deliberated for less than two hours on Thursday before returning the verdict of not guilty, WUSA9 reported.

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John Bolton, a former national security adviser turned vocal critic of President Donald Trump, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information.

According to the indictment, from April 2018 to September 2019, Bolton shared over 1,000 pages of “information about his day-to-day activities” as national security adviser in “diary-like entries” with two members of his family; reportedly, according to CNN, Bolton’s wife and daughter. Some of the entries allegedly included top-secret information.

Commenting on the charges against his former national security adviser from the Oval Office on Thursday, President Donald Trump remarked, “I didn’t know that. I think he’s a bad person. I think he’s a bad guy, yeah. Bad guy. Too bad, but that’s the way it goes.”

Bolton has denied any wrongdoing. Abbe Lowell, Bolton’s attorney, told HuffPost on Thursday that the “underlying facts in this case were investigated and resolved years ago.”

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Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate to be the next mayor of New York, stepped into the lion’s den on Wednesday when he sat for an interview with Fox News, the rightwing news organization that has spent weeks demonizing him and his democratic socialist goals.

Speaking to host Martha MacCallum, Mamdani was asked about funding for his proposals, which include freezing increases on rent-stabilized apartments, providing free buses and offering free childcare – and whether other services would be cut to achieve those goals.

“I don’t think we have to cut,” Mamdani said. “I’ve spoken about raising taxes on the wealthiest. And, frankly, this is an issue that we have here in New York City, and, frankly, even across this country.”

Mamdani said he had spoken to people who voted for Donald Trump in New York who told him it was the “cost of living” that “drove them to vote” for the president.

Mamdani said that, despite that, “what we’re seeing time and time again is we’re more focused on the question of billionaires and the most profitable corporations than we are on people who can’t even afford to make ends meet in the city”.

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