TV News LIES

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, on Thursday revealed that her legal team plans to ask a federal judge to dismiss the criminal charges against her on the grounds that the US attorney in eastern Virginia who obtained the indictment was unlawfully appointed, according to a court filing.

James’s legal team made the move the day before James is scheduled to be arraigned in the US district court in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is expected to plead not guilty to one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution.

Lindsey Halligan was appointed by Donald Trump last month as US attorney for Virginia’s eastern district, after her predecessor was forced out of his job after he expressed concerns with the strength of the evidence against both James and the former FBI director James Comey.

Comey has also since been indicted in the same district on charges of obstructing Congress and making a false statement.

Trump has promised to seek retribution against people he alleges used the justice system against him in an effort to prevent him from returning to power, including Comey and James.

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President Trump said Thursday he would not deploy federal troops to San Francisco, reversing course on plans to implement anticrime and immigration enforcement in the Bay Area.

Trump in a post on Truth Social said friends of his called him to ask him not to go forward with the surge after arguing the city’s Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie “was making substantial progress.”

The president said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff were among “great people” who urged him not to deploy the National Guard to the city. 

He added that he spoke to Lurie on Wednesday evening, saying the mayor asked him “very nicely” to give him a chance to turn the situation around.

“I told him I think he is making a mistake because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the law does not permit him to move,” Trump said. “I told him, ‘It’s an easier process if we do it, faster, stronger, and safer, but let’s see how you do?’”

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This brings our live coverage of the final New York mayoral debate to a close.

We will have analysis from our politics team shortly.

Overall, the 90-minute event seemed unlikely to have changed many minds, with the main focus being an extended argument between Zohan Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, and Andrew Cuomo, the former governor he defeated in the primary, now running as an independent.

Cuomo kept hammering the point that his experience should make him the right choice, given his long career in government at the state and federal level, as opposed to Mamdani, the state assemblyman who is almost exactly half his age.

Mamdani, for his part, cast himself as the candidate of change, focused on affordability and trying to reverse a situation in which New York is becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live”.

Sliwa is an engaging presence on television, but did little to change the perception that he remains more of a quirky cultural figure than a likely government administrator.

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The University of Virginia (UVA) has become the latest institution to agree to the Trump administration’s demands concerning discrimination in admissions and hiring following significant pressure from the justice department.

The deal, which the department announced on Wednesday, comes after the president of the esteemed public university resigned in June to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

If the president, Jim Ryan, had stayed in the job, he was told “hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”, according to Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia.

The deal means the justice department will end its investigation into the school, while the school agreed “not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in its university programming, admissions, hiring or other activities. UVA will provide relevant information and data to the Department of Justice on a quarterly basis through 2028,” the announcement states.

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The University of Arizona has become the seventh US university to reject a Trump administration proposal that would grant schools funding priority if they agreed to support the administration’s conservative agenda.

The decision follows the administration’s push for nine universities to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which seeks to make sweeping changes to campus culture, hiring and admissions practices and foreign student enrollment. Demands from the Trump administration’s 10-point compact include reforms to the way race or ethnicity are used in admission and hiring practices, as well as a commitment to strict definitions of gender, among others.

The deadline for universities to provide their initial feedback on the draft of the compact is 20 October.

In a letter to the Department of Education sent Monday, Suresh Garimella, the University of Arizona president, said that “principles like academic freedom, merit-based research funding and institutional independence are foundational and must be preserved”.

“We seek no special treatment and believe in our ability to compete for federally funded research strictly on merit,” Garimella said in the letter.

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Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s embattled nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, told a group of fellow Republicans in a text chain the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell” and said he has “a Nazi streak,” according to a text chat viewed by POLITICO.

Ingrassia, who has a Senate confirmation hearing scheduled Thursday, made the remarks in a chain with a half-dozen Republican operatives and influencers, according to the chat.

“MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in January 2024, according to the chat.

“Jesus Christ,” one participant responded.Using an Italian slur for Black people, Ingrassia wrote a month earlier in the group chat seen by POLITICO: “No moulignon holidays … From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” then added: “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”

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