TV News LIES

President Donald Trump has terminated two of the federal Election Assistance Commission's three members, eliminating the panel's ability to help local election officials prepare for the 2026 midterms.

The two commissioners selected by congressional Democrats, Chairman Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, each received an email dismissing them on July 9. USA TODAY has reviewed a copy of that email.

Christy McCormick, the commission's vice chair who was selected by congressional Republicans, resigned June 9.

“These removals leave the agency without leadership and unable to carry out its major responsibilities,” Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said in a statement.

More...

Federal agents killed a man at a Memphis motel on Wednesday morning in a Drug Enforcement Administration operation with the Memphis Safe Task Force, the fourth officer-involved death since the anticrime initiative began in September.

Donald Trump established the federal taskforce by executive order last year, amid a surge of troops and federal law enforcement agents to Democratic-run cities that he claimed were overrun with crime. All four of the deaths have occurred in the last two months.

Authorities said agents from the taskforce surrounded an extended-stay motel on Poplar Avenue, about 11 miles (18km) east of downtown Memphis, in support of a DEA operation.

“Federal and local law enforcement officers were attempting to serve a warrant on a wanted fugitive facing felony drug charges out of Shelby county,” said a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service, which is the lead agency for the taskforce. “After issuing numerous verbal commands for the individual to surrender, officers made a forced entry into the building.

More...

A Manhattan federal court judge on Wednesday ordered the release of the more than $5m Donald Trump owes E Jean Carroll following her successful 2023 sexual abuse and defamation trial against him. Less than an hour after the judge issued his order, Trump filed paperwork indicating he was appealing the decision.

Trump had deposited this $5m jury award, as well as 11% interest, into a court-held account some six weeks after Carroll’s courtroom victory. Judge Lewis Kaplan’s order directs the disbursement of these court controlled funds, which now total some $5.8m due to interest accrual.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/trump-e-jean-carroll-settlement

“The Clerk is respectfully directed to disburse … the value of the principle Judgment, which amounts to $5,000,000.00,” Kaplan’s order stated. “The Clerk is further respectfully directed to disburse … the value of the post-judgment interest.”

Kaplan’s decision comes more than three years after Carroll bested Trump in her bombshell civil case; jurors determined that he sexually abused the former Elle writer and unlawfully impugned her reputation with false, vitriolic denials. Trump denied all wrongdoing.

More...

Graham Platner, the oyster farmer whose populist platform took Maine by storm, dropped his Senate bid Wednesday night as controversies over his past stacked up, leaving Democrats without a nominee to take on Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) this fall.

“We’re suspending campaign operations,” Platner told his supporters in a lengthy video posted on social media Wednesday evening, at times growing emotional.

“I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw,” he added. “The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers, who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”

Platner’s decision comes after he easily won the Democratic primary last month despite a growing list of scandals, including revelations around a sexting scandal, since-deleted social media posts downplaying sexual assault and criticizing law enforcement and reports of problematic behavior with former romantic partners.

More...

In a blow to President Donald Trump's efforts to investigate the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge quashed a grand jury subpoena July 7 seeking information on 2020 election workers from Atlanta's Fulton County.

"The breadth of the Grand Jury Subpoena ... is staggering," targeting personal identifying information for "thousands of employees and volunteers," wrote Judge William M. Ray II, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018.

More...A series of audits, recounts and court cases have failed to produce evidence that would support Trump's assertions that Joe Biden beat him through widespread fraud, but Trump has continued to promote his unsubstantiated claims.More...

"The breadth of the Grand Jury Subpoena ... is staggering," targeting personal identifying information for "thousands of employees and volunteers," wrote Judge William M. Ray II, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018.

More...

Donald Trump’s latest attempt to delay payment of a $5.8m judgment for defaming a magazine columnist whom a jury determined he sexually abused has been emphatically rejected by a federal court judge.

In a single-sentence 4 July order, US district Judge Lewis Kaplan denied the president’s request for more time to pay the civil judgment owed to E Jean Carroll, who was awarded the damages after a New York jury concluded that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 – then defamed her after she publicly described the attack in 2019.

Trump’s move came days after the US supreme court, without explanation or reasoning, turned down his demand to review the jury’s 2023 verdict.

In a subsequent filing to Kaplan, the judge overseeing the case, Trump’s attorneys referred to how his former lead counsel, Justin Smith, had been confirmed to a federal judgeship in June on the president’s nomination. New lead counsel Josh Halpern therefore needed more time “to become completely familiar with the facts and procedural circumstances”, Trump’s attorneys contended.

More...