TV News LIES

By the time Maria Ruhtenberg was fired from her job last September for posting about Charlie Kirk's assassination, few people even knew what she had written.

The posts and comments she had made on Facebook were only visible to her friends. Just one person, a Facebook friend she barely knew, complained to her employer. "I don't even know how we became Facebook friends, honestly," said Ruhtenberg.

After the conservative activist was shot, Ruhtenberg wrote things like "live by the sword, die by the sword" and "you reap what you sow" and that she disagreed with Kirk's views about the Second Amendment. Ruhtenberg also said that "whoever shot [Kirk] should go to prison."

Two days after that complaint, a right-wing outlet in Iowa emailed Ruhtenberg's employer to ask for a comment about her posts. The next day, she was terminated, less than five days after her initial post. Ruhtenberg had spent 15 years as a public defender for the state of Iowa.

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Several staff members have reportedly been fired from the US office of the director of national intelligence (DNI), multiple outlets have reported. These firings come less than a week after Donald Trump appointed Bill Pulte as the acting director after former director Tulsi Gabbard announced she was leaving the post in late May.

CBS reported on Tuesday that more than 50 career and political staff members had been dismissed, with six individuals fired and 45 “sent back to their home agencies”.

The DNI has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment on the reported firings.

CNN first reported that Pulte, who also leads the federal housing finance agency, was considering the dismissal of hundreds of staff members on 19 June on the same day he assumed the role of acting director.

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A federal ⁠judge in California vacated the ⁠Trump administration’s ​nationwide policies expanding arrests at immigration courthouses and the duration for detaining noncitizens in short-term facilities, finding the actions of US Immigration ⁠and Customs Enforcement and another government arm “arbitrary and capricious”.

US district judge P Casey Pitts of the northern district of California on Tuesday vacated ICE’s ⁠policies that had rescinded previous strictures on arrests at immigration courthouses and allowed detainees to ​be held in short-term cells for up ‌to 72 hours. He ‌did the same for a similar policy undertaken by the US Department of Justice’s ‌executive office for immigration review that removed limits on courthouse arrests.

The 71-page ruling, issued in a case brought by an asylum seeker arrested upon departing a routine hearing at a San Francisco immigration court, struck down key parts of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies. Judge Pitts, appointed by Joe Biden, in effect reinstated Biden-era policies ‌that limited arrests at immigration courthouses to narrow circumstances and capped detentions in short-term facilities to 12 hours.

SinceDonald Trump retook office ​in January of last year, his administration has ramped up arrests of immigrants suspected of being in the US illegally as part of an aggressive deportation push.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is riding the wave of his candidates challenging mainstream Democrats from the left, as all three of his congressional primary endorsements came up big.

Brad Lander was quickly projected as the winner against incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the state's 10th Congressional District Democratic primary race. State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez was the primary winner in New York's 7th Congressional District Democratic primary against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Queens Councilwoman Julie Won.

And, a third Mamdani-backed candidate, Darializa Avila Chevalier, also won, defeating five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat for New York's 13th Congressional District, which makes up parts of Harlem, Washington Heights and The Bronx.

Mamdani's slate – a trio who favor abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and label Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide – has shown how the mayor's influence could impact the national political scene.

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A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped version of an immigration database for checking the accuracy of state voter rolls, dealing a blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to boost the role of the federal government in elections ahead of the midterm elections in November.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security revamped a system it uses to verify individuals’ citizenship and immigration status to make it easier for state and local officials to use it to make sure voters were U.S. citizens.

In a 75-page decision on Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., sided with voting rights and privacy advocates who argued that the overhaul of the system, known as SAVE, made it less accurate and risked disenfranchising eligible voters.

“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” wrote Sooknanan, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

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The Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook faced more than $1.3m in legal and security fees after coming under attack from the Trump administration, according to ethics disclosures that were filed on Wednesday.

The White House targeted Cook last summer as Donald Trump ramped up his unprecedented campaign to push the Fed to cut interest rates.

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who is set to become acting US intelligence chief on Friday, accused Cook of mortgage fraud. On social media, Pulte accused Cook of misleading lenders by listing a second home as her primary residence, which would get her a better mortgage rate.

Cook was appointed by Joe Biden in 2022, becoming the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Her term is set to end in 2038.

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