TV News LIES

The executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, a mainstay at the Kennedy Center, is leaving to head the Los Angeles-based Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

It’s the latest departure from the Kennedy Center since Donald Trump began asserting control over the storied performing arts venue in Washington.

The Department of Justice released FBI interviews with a woman who said she was introduced to Donald Trump by Jeffrey Epstein and that Trump sexually and physically abused her when she was a minor, accusations the White House called “completely baseless.”

The release came after multiple news reports about documents related to the accusations against Trump being withheld. The Department of Justice said it had withheld records that had been “incorrectly coded as duplicative.”

The woman, whose name has been redacted, said in a 2019 interview with the FBI that she traveled to New York or New Jersey with Epstein when she was between 13 and 15 years old and met Trump “in a very tall building with huge rooms,” according to a summary of one of the interviews. She stated multiple people were present and that Trump asked everyone to leave the room and then sexually assaulted her.

“These are completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement on March 6.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his associations with Epstein. He has not faced any charges related to the investigation.

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A federal judge has decided that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cannot unilaterally designate the largest Muslim-American civil rights organisation as a "terrorist" group because it infringes on First Amendment rights. 

The temporary injunction on Wednesday blocks DeSantis's executive order signed in December, designating the Council on American Islamic Relations (Cair) as a terrorist organisation, and opening up a potential pathway for state prosecutions of anyone believed to be supporting them.

“The question before this Court is whether the Governor can, in a non-emergency situation, unilaterally designate one of the largest Muslim civil rights groups in America as a ‘terrorist organization’ and withhold government benefits from anyone providing material support or resources to the group,” judge Mark Walker wrote in his order.

“This Court finds he cannot.”

He said his decision is based on DeSantis's "coercion of third parties to cut ties with Plaintiff" because Cair had lost contracts with Florida companies while other advocacy groups severed ties with them.

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Just months after President Trump's mass pardons for Jan. 6 rioters freed him from prison, a Florida man repeatedly sexually abused two middle-school aged children.

On Thursday, the man, Andrew Paul Johnson, was sentenced to life in prison, after a Florida jury found him guilty of five criminal charges, including molestation, lewd and lascivious exhibition and transmission of material harmful to a minor.

Police reported that Johnson, 45, tried to keep the children quiet by telling them he would share millions of dollars in restitution money he expected to receive from the Trump administration in connection with his Jan. 6 case.

"He said not to tell anybody," one of Johnson's victims testified.

Both children later testified that they were too afraid to tell any adults about what they had endured, according to trial records obtained by NPR.

"We were scared," Johnson's other victim testified. "Like, we didn't realize that this stuff was not okay because we were 12 years old."

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The Justice Department has published additional Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor after an NPR investigation found dozens of pages were withheld.

They include 16 new pages that cover three additional FBI interview summaries with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor. Also included are two pages of an intake form documenting the initial call to the FBI from a friend who relayed the claims.

NPR's investigation previously found 53 pages that appeared to be missing from the public database.

Now that these documents are published, there are still 37 pages of records still missing from the public database, including notes from the interviews, a law enforcement report and license records.

The Justice Department has repeatedly told NPR that any documents withheld were "privileged, are duplicates or relate to an ongoing federal investigation."

Last week, after NPR's initial story, the Justice Department said it was determining if records had been mistakenly tagged as duplicates and if any were found, "the Department will of course publish it, consistent with the law."

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Bernard LaFayette, the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died.

Bernard LaFayette III said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85.

On 7 March 1965, the beating of future congressman John Lewis and voting rights marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge led the evening news, shocking the nation’s conscience and pushing Congress to act. But two years before “Bloody Sunday”, it was LaFayette who quietly set the stage for Selma and the advances in voting rights that would follow.

LaFayette was one of a delegation of Nashville students who in 1960 helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the south. SNCC crossed Selma off its map after some initial scouting determined “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared”, LaFayette said.

But he insisted on trying anyway. Named director of the Alabama voter registration campaign in 1963, LaFayette moved to the town and, with his former wife, Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of the local people, convincing them change was possible and creating momentum that could not be stopped. He described this work in a 2013 memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.

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