Donald Trump turned years of election lies into orders.
He stood in the East Room Thursday night repeating claims his own declassified documents don’t support, the same story he’s told since 2016. The orders came after: he directed DHS to tell states to purge their voter rolls and told the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department to investigate, fire, and possibly charge the intelligence officials he says hid the evidence. The midterms are four months away.
No president is allowed to give those orders. Elections belong to the states, and the fraud he described has lost in every courtroom that heard it. What changed is that he believes his power is unchecked. That’s why he threatened the broadcast licenses of ABC and NBC when they wouldn’t carry his speech live.
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Trump fires the U.S. attorney federal judges appointed in Seattle less than an hour after his swearing-in, without responding to two weeks of outreach.
Today’s GovBrief News
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Source: CNN
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Source: CBS News
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Source: USA Today
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Source: NBC News
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Epstein survivor Annie Farmer calls Blanche abrasive and condescending after the meeting a GOP senator required before voting on his confirmation as attorney general.
Source: ABC News
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Trump orders voter roll purges and criminal probes of intelligence officials in a primetime address airing debunked election claims four months before midterms.
Source: UPI
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Appeals court lets the Pentagon keep requiring government escorts for journalists, overturning a judge who found the restrictions defied his prior order.
Source: Reuters
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Trump demands ABC and NBC lose their broadcast licenses for declining to air his election address live, while merger-seeking CBS carried it.
Source: Axios
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Federal judge scolds Justice Department lawyers for citing an apparently AI-fabricated case while opposing an ICE detainee's release petition.
Source: Mediaite
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Source: Kentucky Public Radio
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DHS lets immigration officers weigh food, housing, and health benefit use against green card applicants, reversing a 2022 rule limiting reviews to cash welfare.
Source: NOTUS
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Family and court records show the ICE officer who killed a Colombian man in Maine has a history of violent threats and abuse allegations.
Source: The Associated Press
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ICE arrests an Alaska state government attorney and ships him to Washington state detention, declining to say how he violated his admission terms.
Source: The Alaska Beacon
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Plainclothes ICE agents abandon a 57-year-old Vietnamese man half-handcuffed on the Las Vegas airport floor after a bystander starts filming.
Source: KVVU Las Vegas
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Source: The Independent
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Trump's teleprompter operator faces a federal probe for allegedly winning nearly $100,000 betting on which words the president would say in speeches.
Source: NPR
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Source: WRNJ Hackettstown
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Source: The Wall Street Journal [gift link]
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