TV News LIES

Maine Senate Democratic candidate Graham Platner on Monday said his campaign is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward,” just minutes after Politico published a story in which a woman who previously dated the oyster farmer alleged he had sexually assaulted her.

“I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious and false allegations against me. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false,” Platner said in the two-minute video posted online.

Politico earlier on Monday reported that a woman Platner previously dated, Jenny Racicot, told the news outlet that Platner had forced her to have sex with him while he was intoxicated in 2021.

Platner vehemently denied accusations of sexual assault to Politico in his video.

The Hill has not independently verified the accusations. The Platner campaign did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment regarding the Politico story.

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The Atlantic on Saturday republished a JD Vance essay that dismissed Donald Trump as “cultural heroin” exactly 10 years earlier, bringing back to the fore his evolving from a critic of the president to his vice-president.

In an editor’s note, the magazine said it was republishing the essay on the occasion of its 10th anniversary – and the US’s semiquincentennial – “so that our readers can judge for themselves how well his assessment [of Trump] … has stood the test of time”.

The original essay was published during Trump’s first victorious presidential run, when Mike Pence was his running mate and before Vance entered politics. He worked at Mithril Capital Management, Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, at the time and had just published Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling memoir of his upbringing in the Rust belt that also served as a social commentary on the white working class.

In the essay, Vance said many Americans turned to Trump as a “pain reliever” in the midst of a social crisis in which mounting distrust in the government and economic decline were coming to a head. He invoked the phrase “cultural heroin” to describe Trump’s political appeal at the time – and said his supporters would eventually realize he was not the answer to their problems.

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President Trump reportedly called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to discuss the red card given to Team USA’s Folarin Balogun during Wednesday night’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, two outlets have reported on Sunday. Trump later cheered the reversal, calling it an “injustice.”

FIFA said its independent panel overturned the red card suspension for Monday’s game.

The president on July Fourth marked the nation’s 250th birthday with a late Saturday night speech that blended the championing of American achievements with partisan rhetoric. His address lasted about 30 minutes — not as long as he promised days before extreme heat and weather impacted the celebrations in Washington.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5953858-live-updates-trump-fourth-of-july-speech-aftermath/After the president warned that the “evil of communism” is among the threats he believes the country is facing, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Sunday that “there are many Mamdanis popping up,” referring to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) in talking about democratic socialists winning recent Democratic state primaries. Democratic socialists are not communists.

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Lawyers for Donald Trump have requested more time to pay a $5m civil judgment to magazine columnist E Jean Carroll from 2023, days after the US supreme court declined to hear an appeal.

In a new filing, the president’s attorney said that since his former lead counsel, Justin Smith, took up a position as a federal judge last month (a post he was nominated to by Trump), his new lead counsel, Josh Halpern, needed more time “to become completely familiar with the facts and procedural circumstances” of the case.

A jury awarded Carroll damages after concluding that Trump had sexually abused her in 1996 and then defamed her after she publicly described the attack in 2019. Trump deposited money in an escrow fund to pay the award but is trying to delay the release of an amount that is now nearly $5.8m with interest.

Trump’s attorneys requested that the court extend the deadline for a response to Carroll’s request for payment to 14 July, arguing that the “plaintiff faces no risk of material harm as a result of granting this request”.

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President Trump on Friday issued a “fierce rebuke” of communism as part of his Independence Day kickoff speech, injecting partisan rancor into remarks commemorating America’s 250th birthday with Mount Rushmore as the backdrop. 

Speaking in Keystone, South Dakota, Trump declared that “such doctrines can be given no quarter,” issuing a thinly-veiled dark threat against less than a handful of rising Democratic candidates running as Democratic Socialists and progressives.

“As we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack,” Trump warned. 

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he continued.

“Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, everywhere in the world, never works, it’s the enemy of the Constitution, above all, it’s the enemy of July 4, 1776 – it is the enemy indeed.”

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A group of people wearing symbols of the White supremacist organization Patriot Front gathered and paraded in parts of the nation's capital on July 4.

The group was spotted at Union Station and the Eastern Market metro station in Washington, DC, on Independence Day. The Eastern Market station is one of the closest to the Capitol building.

Videos posted on social media captured the individuals marching in their signature blue shirts, chinos and white face coverings. Several wore hats with the Patriot Front logo. The group marched to a drum beat outside Union Station, the city's main train station, and carried flags that included an upside-down American flag and a Confederate flag in a video shared on social media by WTOP reporter Mitchell Miller.

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