TV News LIES

Saying it's time to act "because that's what faith and morality require us to do," President Biden on Tuesday signed four executive actions aimed at advancing racial equity for Americans the White House says have been underserved and left behind.

Biden said Tuesday that the measures follow one of his core campaign promises: to restore "the soul of the nation," as he often said during the presidential race.

"Our soul will be troubled," he said, "as long as systemic racism is allowed to exist."

In announcing the actions, Biden cited the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a Minneapolis police officer last May, which touched off demonstrations in cities across the United States. Biden called the killing "the knee on the neck of justice," and said that because of it, "the ground has shifted. It changed minds and mindsets."

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lex Azar, the Health and Human Services Secretary, resigned earlier this week, citing the violent Capitol riot inflamed by President Donald Trump in his resignation letter obtained by NBC News.

Azar said his resignation would become effective on Jan. 20th — the same date he would have been leaving office once President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in. The letter was dated Jan. 12, almost a week after the riot.

He said that the attack — which left five people dead and many injured — and the president's slow response to condemn it, threaten to "tarnish" the achievements the administration has made over the past four years. In particular, Operation Warp Speed, which led to the creation of two vaccines to combat the raging coronavirus pandemic.

“The president needs to be investigated and does have real potential criminal liability for incitement for essentially spurring people on, motivating people to go in there and commit these crimes,” said CNN legal analyst and former prosecutor Elie Honig.

“It's not an easy case to make,” he added. “But if you look at his words, if you look at the language he used, the way he not only urged people to do it, but applauded them after they did it, while they were doing it, that suggests to me he knew exactly what it was leading them into.”

An early test for the Biden administration will be whether DOJ chooses to pursue any of the various investigative threads leading to Trump, or if it will opt to turn the page on the Trump era and sidestep the political baggage that might come with prosecuting a former president.

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Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock shattered fundraising records by hauling in more than $100 million each in the past two months, significantly outraising GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the final stretch of the two Georgia Senate races that will decide control of the chamber next month.

The massive fundraising for the two Democrats was driven largely by small-dollar donations, continuing the pattern this year of the party’s Senate candidates tapping into online donors across the country to fund their challenger campaigns, although Democrats underperformed expectations in November despite the fundraising edge.

Ossoff became the best-funded Senate candidate in history, hauling in $106.8 million in two months. The Democrat spent $93.5 million from Oct. 15 through Dec. 16, and ended that period with $17.5 million in the bank for the closing weeks of the runoff.

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President Trump, in his final days, is turning bitterly on virtually every person around him, griping about anyone who refuses to indulge conspiracy theories or hopeless bids to overturn the election, several top officials tell Axios.

The latest: Targets of his outrage include Vice President Pence, chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Secretary of State Pompeo and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Why it matters: Trump thinks everyone around him is weak, stupid or disloyal — and increasingly seeks comfort only in people who egg him on to overturn the election results. We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are by the conversations unfolding inside the White House.

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Lara Trump, President Trump’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, served on the board of a limited liability company through which the Trump political operation has spent more than $700 million since 2019, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. She was also named on drafts of the company’s incorporation papers.

The arrangement has never been disclosed. One of the other board members and signatories in the draft papers of the L.L.C., American Made Media Consultants, was John Pence, the nephew of Vice President Mike Pence and a senior Trump adviser. The L.L.C. has been criticized for purposefully obscuring the ultimate destination of hundreds of millions of dollars of spending. Ms. Trump is married to Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons.