Political Glance
Members of the National Park Service removed signage around the President’s House historic site on Independence Mall on Thursday afternoon, in what appeared to be the fulfillment of an executive order from the White House meant to remove displays in America’s national parks that “disparage” the nation.
The signage was part of the exhibition “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” which was unveiled in December 2010. It provided information about the nine enslaved people who then-president George Washington brought with him to the Philadelphia presidential residence and Washington’s ties to slavery.
Starting after 3 p.m., placards were ripped from the wall around the site with crowbars as people walked by, some heading to the Liberty Bell Center. Signs were unbolted from the poles overlooking the dig site where America’s first “White House” had stood until 1832. They were stacked together alongside a wall, and then taken away around 4:30 p.m. in a park service truck. No indication was provided where the signs and exhibition parts will go.
“It’s a damn shame,” said one onlooker who didn’t wish to be identified as he walked by. “All because of one man.”
Billy Penn reached out to both the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior by email Thursday, but neither had responded by the time this article was published.
Video recorded by witnesses to the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday shows that the 37-year-old registered nurse was holding a phone, not a gun, when he was tackled and shot, directly contradicting the claims of senior Trump administration officials that he threatened to “massacre” officers.
Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen, who were arrested and charged for their role in an anti-ICE demonstration that disrupted Sunday church services in St Paul, Minnesota, have been released.
The decision by Donald Trump’s justice department to conduct no investigation into the deadly use of force by Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, a Minneapolis resident who was moving her car out of the way of federal agents when he opened fire, reportedly distressed federal prosecutors and a leader of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, according to reporting from MSNOW and the New York Times.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is facing scrutiny over its assertion that federal officers can forcibly enter a home without a judicial warrant – a move constitutional scholars, immigration experts and a federal judge say is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Former special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday staunchly defended his stymied efforts to prosecute President Trump, saying in his first public testimony that he doesn’t regret taking on the failed probes — even as he stares down the threat of prosecution himself. 
