TV News LIES

National guard troops sent to the nation’s capital will reportedly remain there through at least February.

The order was set to lapse at the end of November but was extended by Pete Hegseth, who leads the US Department of Defense. As of Wednesday, there are nearly 2,400 national guard troops in Washington DC, according to CNN. The network also notes that their presence costs about $1m daily.

This extension comes just a month after Washington DC officials sued the Trump administration over the deployments, which Brian Schwalb, the District of Columbia attorney general, described as “involuntary military occupation” and an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

A federal judge in California ruled in September that Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles after days of protests over immigration raids in June had been illegal. That ruling, however, does not directly apply to Washington, where the president has more control over the guard than in states.

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The Trump administration remains barred from deploying the national guard in Portland, Oregon, following a federal appeals court ruling.

The ninth circuit court of appeals agreed on Tuesday that it would rehear a case over the president’s authority with a broader court of 11 judges. The appeals court also vacated a ruling from a three-judge panel last week that sided with the Trump administration.

The order is the latest development in a long legal saga over whether Donald Trump has the authority and justification to deploy national guard forces in Portland. The Oregon city has had about 200 federalized guard members in limbo since late September when Trump attempted to mobilize in response to months of protests there.

The federal government has argued that federal officials working at the ICE facility in south Portland were under attack, while city and state officials argue that local officers have control of the situation.

In defiance of Trump’s characterization of Portland as “war ravaged”, locals have been sharing videos of the city’s lush hiking trails and thriving food scene, and drawing up plans for Emergency Naked Bike Ride against “the militarization of our city”.

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The Pentagon has pulled key protections for its civilian personnel, directing managers to move with “speed and conviction” to fire underperforming workers, according to a memo issued one day before the U.S. government shut down.

“Supervisors and human resources (HR) professionals are directed to act with speed and conviction to facilitate the separation from Federal service of employees performing unsuccessfully,” states a Sept. 30 memo signed by the Pentagon’s top personnel policy officer, Under Secretary of Defense Anthony Tata.

It also warns that managers will be held accountable if they don’t address “poor employee performance.”

The new guidelines, which became public Tuesday, have sparked fears that they could be used to push out anyone at the Pentagon who doesn’t agree with or toe the line on the Trump administration’s programs.

It’s unclear how many employees may have been fired since the memo took effect. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.

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Vice President JD Vance threw his full support behind President Donald Trump’s deadly military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean this week, saying that he did not even care if people call it a war crime.

“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vance wrote Saturday on X.

Political commentator Brian Krassenstein responded to say that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.” Various experts on international law and the laws of war have also said the strike could be considered a war crime.

“I don’t give a shit what you call it,” the vice president replied.

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An active-duty soldier opened fire at Fort Stewart military base in south-east Georgia on Wednesday, wounding five other soldiers before being taken into custody.

All victims are in stable condition and expected to recover. Three of the soldiers required surgery, and two were transferred to Memorial Health University medical center in Savannah, the top-level trauma center for coastal Georgia.

Brig Gen John Lubas, commander of the third infantry division and Fort Stewart-Hunter army airfield, said at a press conference on Wednesday that the alleged shooter was 28-year-old Sgt Quornelius Radford, who was assigned to Fort Stewart.

“The shooting occurred at the soldier’s place of work,” Lubas said. “It did involve his co-workers. We’re still not certain about the motivations, but again, he’s been interviewed by army investigators, and we believe we’ll gain more information here shortly.”

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Most of defense department’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 went to military contractors.

A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was descrhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/08/pentagon-military-spendingibed as a “continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing”.

Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War project at Brown University said that the Trump administration’s new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.

That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said.

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