TV News LIES

A career federal prosecutor in Virginia has told colleagues she does not believe there is probable cause to file criminal mortgage fraud charges against New York attorney general Letitia James, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The prosecutor, Elizabeth Yusi, oversees major criminal cases in the Norfolk office for the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia and plans to soon present her conclusion to Lindsey Halligan, a Trump ally, who was installed as the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia last month. Yusi’s thinking was first reported by MSNBC on Monday.

The justice department declined to comment. The US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia did not return a request for comment.

The case sets up another high-profile confrontation between the justice department and Trump, who has fired attorneys who have refused to punish his enemies. Halligan, who has no prosecutorial experience, was put in the role at the urging of Trump after her predecessor concluded there wasn’t probable cause to file criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director. Halligan personally presented the case against Comey to a grand jury after she was appointed and secured a two-count indictment.

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The Supreme Court on Oct. 6 declined to decide whether Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell was wrongly prosecuted for sex trafficking, avoiding a politically sensitive issue that has bedeviled President Donald Trump.

The justices rejected an appeal from Maxwell, who argued that a deal Epstein struck with federal prosecutors in Florida should have prevented her from being charged in New York.

Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for trafficking a minor to engage in sex acts with Epstein, has also sought help from Trump.

Maxwell’s attorneys want Trump to pardon or commute her sentence in exchange for her cooperation in the Epstein investigation and broader sex trafficking issues.

She spent two days talking to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in July as the administration scrambled to respond to calls for more transparency over what Epstein did and who else may have been involved. Around that time, federal officials moved Maxwell from a federal prison in Florida to a lower-security facility in Texas.

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Every 74 seconds, someone in the US is sexually assaulted. And every nine minutes that ‘someone’ is a child, according to statistics collated by the anti-sexual violence non-profit Rainn.

Instead of sending alleged sex offenders to court, the Trump administration seems more interested in putting them in positions of power. Less than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults and child sexual abuse allegations in certain cities across the country ever lead to a sex crime conviction, an NBC News investigation from earlier this year found. To reiterate: that’s reported assaults. By some counts, nearly 80% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.

Don’t be too hard on the justice system, though. After all, police and prosecutors have got far more important things to think about than rapists. Namely: locking up pregnant women. According to new research by Pregnancy Justice, prosecutors in 16 states charged 412 people with pregnancy-related crimes in the first two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.

What, you may be wondering, is a pregnancy-related crime? Good question! Most of the cases included in the new report involved low-income women and allegations of substance use during pregnancy. In one case described to the Guardian, a woman was arrested for felony child neglect after giving birth when a drug test came back positive for marijuana. The woman in that case had a medical marijuana card. While substance use during pregnancy is obviously a serious issue that can result in long-term harm to the baby, research suggests that criminalization actually worsens health outcomes.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he's suing President Donald Trump, claiming the commander in chief deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Oregon. 

“After a federal court blocked his attempt to federalize the Oregon National Guard, Donald Trump is deploying 300 California National Guard personnel into Oregon. They are on their way there now,” Newsom said in a post on X on Oct. 5, adding “We are taking this fight back to court.”

Newsom’s comments come after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump from deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to Portland on Oct. 4. The decision was made in response to a Sept. 28 lawsuit from Democratic Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield’s office. 

The lawsuit was filed a day after Trump said he would send troops to Portland to protect federal immigration facilities from “domestic terrorists” amid protests outside an ICE field office in the area.

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A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego García on human-smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador.

The case of Ábrego, a Salvadorian national who was a construction worker in Maryland, has become a proxy for the partisan struggle over Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration policy and mass deportation agenda.

US district court judge Waverly Crenshaw granted a request late on Friday by lawyers for Ábrego and ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in Ábrego’s effort to show that the federal human-smuggling case against him in Tennessee is illegally retaliatory.

Crenshaw said Ábrego had shown that there is “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive”. That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed.

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A federal appeals court ruled against President Trump on Friday, barring the administration from ending birthright citizenship.

The three-judge panel on the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court injunction that barred the administration from enacting a January executive order, signed by the president, that would curtail birthright citizenship.

“The ‘lessons of history’ thus give us every reason to be wary of now blessing this most recent effort to break with our established tradition of recognizing birthright citizenship and to make citizenship depend on the actions of one’s parents rather than — in all but the rarest of circumstances — the simple fact of being born in the United States,” the court wrote in the 100-page ruling.

The federal appeals court in Boston became the latest court to say that the president’s push to end birthright citizenship, which states that anyone born in the U.S. are citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status, is likely unlawful. 

“Our nation’s history of efforts to restrict birthright citizenship — from Dred Scott in the decade before the Civil War to the attempted justification for the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Wong Kim Ark — has not been a proud one,” the court’s top judge wrote in the ruling.

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