TV News LIES

President Joe Biden has directed the U.S. Secret Service to protect independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the Homeland Security secretary said Monday.

Kennedy is a longshot to win Electoral College votes, much less the presidency. But his campaign events have drawn large crowds of supporters and people interested in his message.

“Thank you, President Biden, for extending me Secret Service protection,” Kennedy said in a statement. He also thanked his private security firm, Gavin de Becker & Associates, “for keeping me safe for the past 15 months of my presidential campaign.”

Donald Trump has named JD Vance, the Ohio senator who has aligned himself with the populist right, as his running mate at the Republican national convention on Monday.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

When Trump first ran for office, Vance’s eventual nomination to run alongside him would have seemed implausible. Vance, a venture capitalist who rocketed into the public eye with his 2016 memoir turned Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy, was once among Trump’s conservative critics.

“I’m a never-Trump guy, I never liked him,” Vance said during an October 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. Trump was, by Vance’s estimation at the time, a “terrible candidate”.

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A Florida federal judge dismissed the criminal case against former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents, writing that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith in the case was unlawful.

Smith was appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. The recent prosecution of President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was also backed by a special counsel, a role providing greater independence from Justice Department oversight. Hunter Biden was convicted of lying about drug use when he purchased a gun.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the federal bench by Trump, agreed with the former president's argument that Smith's appointment in the case violated a constitutional provision requiring “Officers of the United States” to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

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President Joe Biden called on Americans to cool down partisan fervor in the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, encouraging peaceful debate but decrying any form of political violence in a Sunday evening address to the nation.

"There's no place in America for this kind of violence or any violence, ever, period, no exceptions," Biden said. "We can't allow this violence to be normalized."

Trump said Sunday that "God alone" had spared him from Saturday's brazen assassination attempt, the likes of which America had not seen since an attack on President Ronald Reagan's life 43 years ago. Trump, who was injured in the right ear when a sniper opened fire, traveled to Milwaukee on Sunday for this week's GOP convention.

Former President Donald Trump was rushed off stage with blood dripping on his face after gunshots rang out at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One spectator at the rally is dead, and two are in serious condition.

The incident is being investigated as an assassination attempt, a source told Reuters. Trump, in an email sent to reporters late Saturday night after the shooting, declared "I will never surrender."

Secret Service Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that the suspected shooter, who officials confirmed is dead, fired multiple shots toward the stage at approximately 6:15 p.m. He said the shooter was in an elevated position outside the rally.

A major conservative thinktank previewed rightwing efforts to overturn the 2024 election on Thursday, with a top official saying there was a “0% chance of a free and fair election”.

Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, made the comments at an event in Washington sharing the results of a hypothetical exercise mapping out several implausible scenarios that could take place after the election. The outlandish scenarios involved Barbara Streisand being kidnapped by Hamas, antifa-BLM protesters taking over a detention facility and the FBI arresting Donald Trump after winning the election.

The effort was designed to muddy the waters over the threat to the 2024 election posed by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results and tried to overturn the 2020 vote. Instead, the Heritage Foundation, which is also behind the extreme Project 2025, wanted to suggest that it was Joe Biden who could try to overturn the result of the election, echoing the ex-president’s repeated claims that it is actually Biden who is the threat to democracy.

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