TV News LIES

Donald Trump has urged a controversial loyalist he installed as the country’s top intelligence official to fire “a lot of people” overseeing intelligence for the US federal government.

The US president said Bill Pulte, who has no previous experience in the intelligence sphere, is “less shackled” because he has only been appointed director of national intelligence temporarily.

Amid bipartisan concern over his appointment, Trump has told Pulte that he believes the office of the director of national intelligence – which oversees more than a dozen intelligence agencies and departments – is “unnecessary and/or too big”, the president told the Wall Street Journal.

“I’d like to see it smaller,” Trump told the Journal. “I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there.”

Asked whether he was calling on Pulte to fire people, Trump replied that he wants his ally to “start the process”, adding that whoever he nominates to take the job permanently can continue it.

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Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for the US Senate, has rejected an explosive new report about his treatment of women, insisting that allegations of abusive behavior are “politically motivated”.

Platner, a progressive running for election in Maine, was responding to a New York Times article published on Thursday that included an interview with a Republican operative who accused him of womanizing, physical misconduct and making troubling comments about rape.

The claims prompted fresh calls for Platner, 41, who has faced scrutiny over past social media posts and a tattoo recognized as a Nazi symbol, to withdraw from next week’s Democratic primary in Maine, though he gave no hint of doing so.

Platner also addressed the story in an interview on Thursday with MS Now’s Chris Hayes.

“There are some allegations in this piece that are simply not true. Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of somebody politically motivated,” Platner said. “That is not true.”

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A major gun control group is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Justice Department over the federal agencies' refusals to release documents and other information about who the largest sellers of crime guns in the U.S. are.

Brady is demanding in its lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia this morning that the court compel the ATF to release information related to what the agency calls Demand Letter 2s. These are letters ATF sends to gun dealers and other sellers that have been identified as selling at least 25 or more guns recovered at crime scenes in a calendar year.

"This is information that will save lives. It is information that helps us be able to analyze how our government is regulating the gun industry, particularly the largest sellers of crime guns, and it's information that we need to improve public safety in this country," said Josh Scharff, Brady's general counsel and senior director of programs.

Democracy Forward, a legal group that has sued the Trump administration over several policies and actions, is representing Brady in this case.

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Donald Trump has signed an executive order making it easier to fire thousands of the best-paid workers in the US government aspart of a broader drive by his administration to overhaul the federal workforce.

The order, released by the White House and the office of personnel management (OPM) on Wednesday, strips job protections from a mostly senior group of federal workers – about 8,000 employees – earning up to almost $200,000 a year, and who are deemed to be “influencing” government policy.

In a call previewing the move, Scott Kupor, director of the OPM, which oversees the government’s human resources policies, said the administration needs to employ people willing and able to carry out orders to achieve the administration’s policy priorities.

“You can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism obviously for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will,” he said.

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Americans who receive Social Security checks could see benefit checks cut by $500 a month on average if the program is allowed to hit its projected “go-broke” date in late 2032, according to a new analysis.

That amount represents the 24% benefit cut that would be necessary to allow Social Security Administration (SSA) payments after the retirement fund is exhausted, according to fiscal policy think tank Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

“Applying this projected reduction to current state-level data, we estimate an across-the-board monthly cut would range from $459 to $556 across the 50 states and the District of Columbia,” the report says.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for Alabama Republicans to remove the state’s second majority-Black congressional district for the midterms, handing the party a pickup opportunity in an apparent 6-3 vote.

Alabama chastised a lower court for keeping its map blocked, insisting it should move ahead in the wake of the Supreme Court narrowing the Voting Rights Act.

The justices’ emergency order allows Republicans to do so over the objections of Black voters and other challengers, who contended the design should be halted for an independent reason and it was too late for the Supreme Court to intervene, anyways.“While federal courts should not impose changes close to an election,” the justices wrote in their unsigned ruling, “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests.”

“Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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