TV News LIES

It has become a familiar routine for the Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, and his deputies. Almost every Tuesday in recent weeks, the Federal Aviation Administration has posted to its website a formal “notice to airmen” advising of upcoming flight restrictions over south Florida, signaling once again to those who must protect him that Donald Trump is on his way to Mar-a-Lago for another weekend of golf.

The president is at his waterfront mansion again this weekend, his sixth visit to Florida and the beloved golf courses he owns since his 20 January inauguration.

His increasingly frequent and disruptive trips home are fast becoming a drain on county resources, obligating Bradshaw to put helicopters in the air, extra manpower on the ground, and boats on both sides of Trump’s opulent mansion sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway almost continuously.

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The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.

Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.

The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is using polygraph tests to figure out who could be leaking information to news outlets, with some agency officials contending the disclosed information has hampered immigration enforcement efforts, multiple outlets reported.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ordered in an internal directive, first reported by Bloomberg Government last month, that every polygraph exam done by the department has to feature questions about unapproved communication with nonprofit groups and media outlets.

“The Department of Homeland Security is a national security agency,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement to The Hill’s partner, NewsNation. “We can, should, and will polygraph personnel.”

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), part of the DHS, has previously utilized the so-called “lie detector” tests on new hires at the agency.

Both Noem and President Trump’s Border czar, Tom Homan, have pinned the blame for immigration enforcement raids being revealed ahead of time and the substandard U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) numbers of arrests on internal leakers.

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What happens when a whistleblower claims wrongdoing in the federal government?

Who investigates those allegations and who protects those federal employees?

The answer is an independent watchdog agency called the Office of Special Counsel.

Shortly after taking office, President Trump fired the head of that office — Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. Since then, Dellinger has been locked in a legal fight with the administration. A fight that he gave up on Thursday.

Dellinger was appointed by former President Joe Biden and has led the Office of Special Counsel since March 2024. He sued Trump over the legality of his firing last month, because the law states that special counsels can only be removed by the president for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."

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