TV News LIES

The FBI has deployed additional personnel and investigative resources to Minnesota to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs”, director Kash Patel said on social media on Sunday.

The FBI director said the agency had already dismantled a $250m fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during the Covid pandemic in a case that led to 78 indictments and 57 convictions.

Patel said the FBI believes “this is just the tip of a very large iceberg”. Some of those involved in the alleged scheme are being “referred to immigrations officials for possible further denaturalization and deportation proceedings where eligible”.

Patel’s comments comes after federal prosecutors estimate as much as $9bn has been stolen across schemes linked to the state’s Somalia population, a figure nearly equivalent to Somalia’s entire GDP.

The FBI director also said he was aware of recent social media reports in Minnesota, which appears to refer to an online report by independent journalist Nick Shirley about a daycare center in Minneapolis that received $4m despite reportedly having no enrolled kids. The 42-minute video has been viewed 84m times since it was posted on 26 December.

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New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (D) challenged Elon Musk for claiming that people will “die” over his appointment of a non-firefighter as the new head of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY).

“Experience does matter, which is why I appointed the person who spent more than 30 years at EMS. You know, the workforce that addresses at least 70% of all calls coming into FDNY?” Mamdani wrote in response to Musk in an X post Saturday.

Mamdani’s remarks came after the tech billionaire condemned the self-proclaimed democratic socialist’s decision to appoint Lillian Bonsignore in a Friday X post.

“People will die because of this. Proven experience matters when lives are at stake,” Musk wrote alongside a clip of Mamdani announcing Bonsignore’s new role.

Last week, Mamdani appointed Bonsignore, a FDNY veteran who helmed Emergency Medical Services Operations before retiring from the department in 2022, as FDNY commissioner. She is the second woman to hold the position and the department’s first openly LGBTQ+ commissioner.

Bonsignore is also the first woman to achieve a 4-star rank in FDNY history, Mamdani said in a separate X post celebrating her new position.

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When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set its sights on Chicago in September, Chicagoans sprang into action to protect their immigrant neighbors: teaching each other how to recognize and safely document ICE agents, setting up “know your rights” trainings, and distributing whistles en masse so people could loudly alert anyone in the vicinity when ICE was spotted.

In the months since, whistles have become a popular raid alert tool in other cities across the country – New Yorkers wear them around their necks to warn neighbors, the people of New Orleans blast them outside ICE facilities and Charlotte residents used them to ward off Customs and Border Protection officials. While strongly associated with Chicago, the tactic is actually one that city organizers learned in part from groups in Los Angeles. Its spread is illustrative of the many ways cities are helping inspire and equip one another in the face of often unlawful federal activities.

Rain Skau, a co-coordinator of the Fight Fascism campaign of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles, said Angelenos began to use whistles to alert neighbors about ICE presence when agents first started hitting the city in June. Despite the federal government’s claims that these raids were targeting hardened criminals, Skau described one of the first raids at a Home Depot as mostly snatching women vending food in the parking lot, stuffing them into vans as meat sizzled on the grills they left behind.

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The president of the Kennedy Center has demanded $1m in damages and fiercely criticized a musician’s sudden decision to cancel a Christmas Eve performance at the venue days after the White House announced that Donald Trump’s name would be added to the facility.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment – explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure – is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” the venue’s president, Richard Grenell, wrote in a letter to musician Chuck Redd that was shared with the Associated Press.

In the letter, Grenell said he would seek $1m in damages “for this political stunt”.

Redd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A drummer and vibraphone player, Redd has presided over holiday Jazz Jams at the Kennedy Center since 2006, succeeding bassist William “Keter” Betts. In an email Wednesday to the Associated Press, Redd said he pulled out of the concert in the wake of the renaming.

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd said. He added on Wednesday that the event has been a “very popular holiday tradition” and that he often featured at least one student musician.

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President Donald Trump urged the Justice Department to release the names of any Democrats in the Epstein files, saying the agency should “embarrass them,” even as he questioned the amount of time being spent on the issue.

Trump signed legislation Nov. 19 requiring the release of the federal government’s records related to Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The legislation set a 30-day deadline for the records to be released, and the Justice Department began making them public on Dec. 19. Hundreds of thousands of documents have been made available, but many more have yet to come out, prompting some lawmakers to accuse the Trump administration of violating the law.

The Justice Department said on Dec. 24 that the FBI and federal prosecutors found more than a million additional Epstein-related documents and that it would take weeks to review them.

“Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found,” Trump said in a Dec. 26 social media post. “DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE.”

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Whatever the worst-case scenario, Janessa Goldbeck has probably imagined it. In 2023 the US marine veteran consulted on a documentary that war-gamed a presidential candidate staging a military coup. Last year she advised local leaders on the hypothetical of troops being deployed to their streets for immigration enforcement.

Then Donald Trump won and Goldbeck’s nightmare came true.

“It’s a little surreal to see something that we’ve been talking about and thinking about and stressing out about,” the chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a non-profit advocacy organisation, says via Zoom from her home in San Diego, California. “When we first did War Game, the film, some folks would ask during our press tour, ‘Do you think you’re scaring people? This feels a little hyperbolic?’ It doesn’t feel good to say I told you so in this moment.”

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has sought to politicise the military like no other commander-in-chief before him and use it as a cudgel against Democratic-led states and cities. He has deployed thousands of national guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans and Washington DC, triggering protests from local officials and residents.

Having read the Project 2025 policy document, Goldbeck saw this coming. Last year Vet Voice Foundation, which mobilises veterans and military families to defend US democracy, ran exercises with local elected officials, activists and journalists to prepare for a second Trump administration conducting aggressive immigration enforcement. It has now become a vital resource for governors, state attorneys general and mayors trying to weather the storm.

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