TV News LIES

A federal judge has been cleared of wrongdoing for going on CNN to speak out against threats made against members of the judiciary and respond to President Donald Trump's comments about the daughter of the judge who presided over the New York case in which Trump was convicted last year.

The Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit Judicial Council threw out two ethics complaints against Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton in Washington. It found that Walton did not talk about the merits of any legal case but instead commented only on Trump's statements made on social media about Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the New York criminal case, and his family.

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Chagares said Walton warned about the "unintended consequences" of public remarks like those made by Trump and "also emphasized the importance of the independence of judicial officers in maintaining the rule of law and ensuring that laws are applied equally to all who appear before a judge."

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President Trump early Wednesday renewed his attacks on a federal judge who ordered the administration to turn around flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members, despite pushback from the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

“If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The post was referring to U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, who over the weekend ordered flights carrying Venezuelan migrants who were allegedly linked to the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador to be turned around. The administration has said the flights were already out of U.S. territory at the time, while also suggesting Boasberg did not have the authority to intervene in the matter.

Trump in an interview that aired late Tuesday with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham similarly criticized Boasberg’s decision, saying it was “terrible” and “not for a local judge to be making that determination.”

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Donald Trump has “declared war on the rule of law in America” and is pitching the country into a constitutional crisis, a prominent former conservative federal judge said.

“The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America,” J Michael Luttig told MSNBC. “In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system and the nation’s legal profession.

“When the president of the United States wages a war on the rule of law and the federal judiciary alley, America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment. Most constitutional scholars have long agreed that a constitutional crisis exists at least when the president defies a court order. That’s essentially what the president is doing today and what it appears he intends to do in the future.”

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A stand-off between President Donald Trump's administration and an independent nonprofit came to a head this week in a dramatic public scene involving police.

Since Friday, members of Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency had sought and been repeatedly denied access to the U.S. Institute of Peace office in Washington. After arriving again unannounced on Monday, the staffers were able to enter with assistance from Metropolitan Police Department officers.

The initial months of Trump's second term have been marked by his and his billionaire ally's endeavor to slash bureaucracy, consequently turning much of the federal government on its head. The president and Musk have purged department workforces and aimed to shutter entire agencies.

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The Trump administration has taken steps to reinstate thousands of probationary workers who were fired in its effort to downsize the federal government, according to court filings in one of two cases where the terminations were deemed unlawful.

U.S. District Judge James Bredar, an appointee of former President Obama, last week ordered the mass reinstatement of fired probationary workers at 18 federal agencies after determining the government’s claims its terminations stemmed from “performance” issues “isn’t true.”