TV News LIES

The Defense Department’s relationship with reporters has gone from bad to worse following a string of missives from Secretary Pete Hegseth and his office aimed at controlling the Pentagon press corps.

Hegseth’s war on the media includes taking desks away from legacy outlets, locking the doors to one of the few places reporters have access to the internet in the Pentagon, and restricting their movement within the building.

Compounding the breakdown in media relations is a staffing shortage in the Pentagon’s public affairs shop, with at least 12 officials in the office reportedly leaving in recent weeks. The office officially held 32 people at the start of the year.

That has left one of the government’s largest agencies often unresponsive amid a steady stream of scandals and public relations snafus, though it maintains an active “DOD Rapid Response” account on the social platform X, which posted on Saturday, “we will always deliver on our promise of transparency.”

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The Supreme Court on June 6 rejected a Republican challenge to a Pennsylvania court’s ruling on provisional ballots, a case that could have restricted how much leeway state courts have to interpret federal election rules.

During the 2024 election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said voters should be able to cast provisional ballots if they failed to encase an absentee ballot in the required secrecy sleeve.

State and national Republicans argued that would give voters an “unauthorized do-over” for “naked ballots” or for other mistakes on mail-in votes.

And they said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision usurped the power the Constitution gives state legislatures to set federal election rules.

In November, the U.S. Supreme Court declined the GOP’s emergency request to intervene as ballots were being cast.

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A professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says the university violated her freedom of speech rights by suspending her for her online comments about Israel’s war in Gaza in a new lawsuit.

The suit was filed by Rupa Marya, an internal medicine physician and professor at UCSF, identified as an expert in decolonial theory. Marya was placed on leave in September 2024 and had her clinical privileges briefly suspended by the UCSF executive medical board following comments she made on X that questioned the impacts of Zionism as “a supremacist, racist ideology” on healthcare.

Without naming Marya directly, the university subsequently published a statement across its social media accounts that said such comments were a “tired and racist conspiracy theory” that “Zionist doctors were a threat to Arab, Palestinian, South Asian, Muslin and Black patients, as well as the US healthcare system” and should be condemned.

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The Supreme Court, on Friday, for now gave the DOGE team launched by Elon Musk unfettered access to information collected by the Social Security Administration, data that includes Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, and family court information.

In an unsigned order, the court, acting at the request of the Trump administration, temporarily overturned actions by two lower courts that had limited the DOGE team's access to sensitive private information at the Social Security Administration. The high court sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond to rule on the merits.

Ben Schrader, announced his resignation as the chief of the criminal division at the US attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee in a LinkedIn post on 21 May, the same day the indictment of Ábrego García was signed by the acting US attorney for that district.

Sources told ABC News that Schrader stepped down because of concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons.

Elon Musk floated a new political party on Friday after falling out with President Trump over the big, beautiful bill.

He launched a Thursday poll on the social platform X, which he owns, asking about whether or not the country needed a new faction for political nominees.

“The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle! And exactly 80% of people agree. This is fate,” Musk wrote, citing numbers from his survey.

He followed up with a potential name for the group, “The America Party.”