TV News LIES

Another federal judge in the nation’s capital has blasted the Justice Department for filing federal felony charges it couldn't convince a grand jury to approve, this time in the case of a man accused of threatening to kill President Donald Trump.

The failure to secure an indictment is another setback for Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, whose office has repeatedly disproved the axiom that a grand jury will indict even a ham sandwich.

“It's not fair to say they're losing credibility. We're past that now,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said of Pirro's office and the broader Justice Department during a Sept. 4 hearing for the accused man, Edward Alexander Dana, a person in attendance confirmed to USA TODAY.

“There's no credibility left,” Faruqui later said, according to that person.

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The U.S. Justice Department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud probe into Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and has issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan, according to documents seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the matter.

The investigation followed a criminal referral from Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, and is being conducted by Ed Martin, who was tapped by Attorney General Pam Bondi as a special assistant U.S. attorney to assist with mortgage fraud investigations involving public officials, along with the U.S. Attorneys’ offices in the Northern District of Georgia and the Eastern District of Michigan, according to the person, who spoke anonymously since the matter is not public.

Pulte, who was appointed by Trump, has accused Cook of committing fraud by listing more than one property as a primary residence when she applied for mortgages, potentially to secure lower interest rates. Cook owns properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts.

Trump terminated Cook over Pulte’s mortgage fraud allegations against her, prompting her to file a lawsuit challenging his effort to oust her.

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A dozen federal judges across the political spectrum have spoken out against the Supreme Court’s handling of cases involving President Trump amid intense public scrutiny of lower court rulings.

The 12 judges spoke to NBC News on condition that they not be identified out of fear of retaliation, so it’s unclear who they are or where they located. NBC reported the slate includes judges “appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump, and serving around the country.”

They pushed back on what they described as a pattern of emergency rulings from the conservative-leaning high court in response to lower court decisions on contentious cases involving the Trump administration. Three of the Supreme Court justices were picked by Trump during his first White House term.

Federal judges who spoke to NBC News said the Supreme Court should better explain its emergency rulings.

They told NBC News they fear that the Supreme Court’s handling of cases involving Trump has validated the president’s criticism of lower court judges.

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Religious colleges that require students to sign a statement of faith cannot be excluded from a popular Minnesota program that lets high school students take college courses for credit, a federal judge has ruled, tossing a state law that she called an unconstitutional violation of religious freedom.

The ruling late Friday from U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel was a victory for two conservative Christian colleges in the state: Crown College in St. Bonifacius and the University of Northwestern in Roseville. Those two institutions require their students to pledge to follow the school’s values and conduct rules, effectively barring students who aren’t Christian or who are LGBTQ+ from campus activities.

The 2023 law was sought by the state Department of Education and advocates for LGBTQ+ rights. In defending the change at a hearing in December, the state argued that it rightly protected high school students who are not Christian, straight, and cisgender — those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Religious colleges that require students to sign a statement of faith cannot be excluded from a popular Minnesota program that lets high school students take college courses for credit, a federal judge has ruled, tossing a state law that she called an unconstitutional violation of religious freedom.

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A so-called “missing minute” of CCTV footage, a key ingredient of conspiracy theories surrounding the prison death of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has been found, contradicting the assertion of Pam Bondi, the attorney general, that it was recorded over.

The video was in a cache of material, including 33,000 pages of records relating to the disgraced financier and former Donald Trump associate, released late on Tuesday by the US House oversight committee. The panel has been looking into Epstein’s August 2019 death at Manhattan’s Metropolitan correctional center.

In July, the same month as a government review confirmed Epstein died by suicide, the FBI released hours of surveillance footage taken from outside Epstein’s jail cell on the night he died. Observers quickly realized from time stamps that a block of one minute, from 11.59pm to midnight on 10 August, was not there.

Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at 6.30am.

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A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday ordered the reversal of the Trump administration’s cuts to more than $2.6 billion in funding for research grants for Harvard University.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with the Ivy League school, ruling the cuts amounted to illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of White House demands for changes to its governance and policies.

The ruling delivers a significant victory to Harvard in its battle with the Trump administration, which also has sought to prevent the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

The government had tied the freezes at Harvard to delays in dealing with antisemitism on its campus, but the judge said the federally funded research had little connection to antisemitism. “A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote.

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