TV News LIES

Byron Donalds, a congressman backed by Donald Trump, won the Republican nomination for governor on Tuesday in the race to succeed Ron DeSantis.

Donalds, who has represented south-west Florida since 2021, trounced three reasonably prominent Republican rivals, including Jay Collins, DeSantis’s handpicked lieutenant governor.

If he wins the November election, as he is expected to do in the conservative stronghold, Donalds would become the first Black governor in any southern US state.

So confident was Donalds of victory that his television advertisements in the weeks leading to the primary ignored his Republican challengers and focused on former Republican congressman David Jolly, who secured the Democratic party’s nomination on Tuesday.

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In an upset for the Democratic establishment, progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.

Nixon, a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had significantly less funding going into the primary – with $975,000 to Vindman’s $16.3m at the end of July, according to Florida Politics.

Vindman served on the national security council in Donald Trump’s first term and became a well-known whistleblower and witness in the president’s first impeachment, centered on Trump pressuring Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, to investigate Joe Biden.

Democrats have their sights set on upsetting Republican Ashley Moody in the US Senate general election. Moody, picked by DeSantis to replace Marco Rubio when he became secretary of state last year, won what was almost a token primary election to run in November to serve the remaining two years of Rubio’s term.

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The Supreme Court rejected for the second time an effort by President Donald Trump to avoid paying more than $5.6 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexually abusing and defaming her.

The court on Aug. 17 declined to reconsider Trump’s appeal of a 2023 jury verdict in a civil suit brought by Carroll.

Trump had to pay Carroll the $5 million judgment plus interest after the court first rejected his appeal on June 29.

It’s rare for litigants to ask for a second look and even rarer for the court to grant one.

Trump’s lawyers said reconsideration was warranted because the case is connected to another appeal involving Carroll that they have asked the Supreme Court to hear.

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A federal appeals court panel on Monday upheld an order that disqualified Sigal Chattah from the top federal prosecutorial job in Nevada, ruling that the Justice Department’s effort to sidestep Senate confirmation is unlawful. 

A three-judge panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in a 36-page opinion that Chattah cannot continue to oversee criminal prosecutions for a group of defendants who challenged her appointment.

The ruling rejects the Trump administration’s legal maneuvers that attempted to keep Chattah in the job by leveraging vacancy rules for key government positions.  

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, the first assistant to a Senate-confirmed officer assumes the acting role by default when a vacancy occurs.

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In Iowa, one of the key battleground states in November’s midterm elections, just about every political candidate agrees on one thing: something must be done about the state’s rising rates of cancer.

The midwestern state has the second-highest rate of cancer nationwide and, together with Utah and West Virginia, is one of only three states where incidences of the disease are rising, according to cancer rate monitoring from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Promises to address the issue are now top of mind for candidates ahead of the 3 November elections, in which Iowa may play an important role in deciding control of Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump’s term.

Republicans hoping to preserve their party’s dominance of the state and Democrats who believe conditions are right for them to win key races have pledged to make fighting the disease a priority. Where they differ is in their views over the degree to which the state’s powerhouse farm economy has contributed to making Iowans sick, and what to do about it.

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Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would consider President Donald Trump's views on prosecutions, rejecting the notion of an independent Department of Justice.

"Will I take the president of the United States’ view on something into consideration? Yes, of course," Blanche said in an Aug. 16 interview on NBC News' "Meet the Press." When asked if he would act independently from the White House, Blanche answered: "No, I’m not going to pledge that."

The Department of Justice has largely operated independently of the White House since the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has overseen major changes at the Justice Department, including the firing of dozens of officials and the departure of thousands of lawyers. Critics contend the DOJ has become a tool for targeting Trump's political opponents.

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