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Story by Renee Anderson

Former U.S. Rep. George Santos was sentenced to more than seven years in prison on federal wire fraud and identity theft charges Friday in New York.

The judge handed down the maximum sentence of 87 months just before noon in Central Islip on Long Island.

Federal prosecutors say the former congressman exaggerated or fabricated large parts of his backstory to defraud voters and donors in New York's 3rd Congressional District. He faced nearly a dozen criminal charges before pleading guilty to two counts last August.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York John Durham spoke to reporters after the sentencing and called Santos' crimes an "affront to our electoral process, our representative government and the people of New York's 3rd Congressional District."

"But today, finally, Santos has been held accountable for his years of fraud, deceit and theft. He's going to federal prison and he's going to be punished for his staggering fraud, for the abuses he put on our electoral process, for mocking our democratic institutions and, most importantly, for betraying and defrauding his supporters, his voters, his donors, federal agencies, state agencies," Durham said outside the courthouse. "Today's sentence demonstrates that this egregious conduct will not, and never will be, tolerated."

"Come July 25th, George Santos will finally be where he belongs – behind bars, answering for these crimes," Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly said.
This is some BS. Anti-DEI is a racist attack on black and brown people and woman.

Story by Sharelle Burt

The Trump administration has initiated the return of exhibits from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture to their original owners, including the original 1960 Woolworth's lunch counter, according to Black Press USA.

The exhibit features sections of the original lunch counter where the sit-in protests began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Feb. 1, 1960, with four students from North Carolina A&T State University: Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Joseph McNeil. The HBCU students were attacked after sitting at the whites-only section and being denied service. North Carolina Democratic Congresswoman and A&T alum Alma Adams said Trump can take the exhibits down, but the people will never forget. "This president is a master of distraction and is destroying what it took 250 years to build. Here's another distraction in his quest for attention. Another failure of his first 100 days," she said.

"We are long past the time when you can erase history-anyone's history. You can take down exhibits, close buildings, shut down websites, ban books, and attempt to alter history, but we are long past that point. We will never forget!"

Trump attacked the museum, often referred to as the "Blacksonian," after signing an executive order targeting the nation's parks and museums.

“Museums in our nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn, not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history," he said, according to USA Today.  
Story by Jasper Ward / Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration appeared to have deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen “with no meaningful process,” a federal judge said on Friday, as the child’s father sought to have her returned to the United States.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty said the girl, who was referred to as “V.M.L.” in court documents, was deported with her mother.

“It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen,” Doughty said.

He scheduled a hearing for May 19 “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

V.M.L. was apprehended by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday with her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and older sister when Villela attended a routine appointment at its New Orleans office, according to a filing by Trish Mack, who said the infant’s father asked her to act as the child’s custodian.

According to Mack, when V.M.L.’s father briefly spoke to Villela, he could hear her and the children crying. During that time, according to a court document, he reminded her that their daughter was a U.S. citizen “and could not be deported.”
Story by Charisma Madarang

As part of Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, three U.S. citizen children were deported with their mothers by the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday morning. One of the children was undergoing cancer treatment and one of the mothers is pregnant.

Both families had lived in the country for years and had ties to their communities, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana, which warns that the circumstances of their sudden deportations raises grave due process concerns. The civil rights organization says that the first family was detained on Tuesday and the second family on Thursday, and that one of the mothers was given less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly dropped, after her spouse attempted to provide a phone number to legal counsel.
Story by Jake Brigstock

Elon Musk recently announced he will be "significantly" reducing the time he's spending leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) starting next month after it was confirmed Tesla's profit and sales nosedived at the start of 2025.

But what state is DOGE currently in and are the cuts in spending actually costing US taxpayers more than what the department is saving?

DOGE has a savings page on its website, updating weekly to show how much the department is saying it has saved.

The website was last updated on April 20 and claims to have so far saved a total of $160bn and each US taxpayer nearly $1,000, at the time of writing on April 26.

This is a "combination of asset sales, contract / lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings and workforce reductions".

However while DOGE said it is "working to upload all of our receipts in a digestible and transparent manner consistent with applicable rules and regulations", a breakdown of just 30 per cent of savings is currently detailed.

A CBS News investigation previously found some of this accounting has already been "overstated by billions of dollars" and a separate recent BBC News investigation has called into question figures from some of the receipts that have been uploaded so far.
Opinion by Thom Hartmann

In a Daily Take here on Hartmann Report, I mentioned Russell Kirk and the origins of today’s hard right GOP. A few people replied with, “Who’s that?” and similar questions; others were incredulous that Republicans actually believed the middle class created by FDR’s New Deal was a bad thing. So, here’s the backstory to what I mentioned.

I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer’s book “None Dare Call It Treason.” The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing.

Ironically, Stormer’s book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.

And it was started by morbidly rich men (it was all men back then) who wanted to use the threat of a “communist menace” to gut the union movement to increase their own corporate profits and CEO pay.

The founding premise of the modern conservative movement tracks back a generation before Stormer’s book to a Republican thought leader named Russell Kirk. He laid it out in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.
Story by Travis Gettys

President Donald Trump admitted he was enjoying his second presidency more than his first during a lengthy, sit-down interview.

The president agreed to an interview with The Atlantic, whose editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently involved in a war planning group chat that has plunged the administration into scandal. But correspondents Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer found him eager to strike a bargain with them.

"As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal," they wrote. "If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again."

“'Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,'" he said, according to the reporters.

The correspondents had been hearing for weeks, both inside and outside the White House, that Trump was having more fun this time around.
Story by Corbin Bolies

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the Trump administration would consider arresting high-ranking judges—including Supreme Court justices—at a press briefing Monday.

“As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?” Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked.

Leavitt said no judge is safe from the administration’s crackdown on the judiciary.

“Anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials is putting themselves at risk of being prosecuted, absolutely,” she said.

But, calling the question a “hypothetical,” Leavitt said it was ultimately up to the Department of Justice to make calls on which judges to go after.

“I’d refer you to the DOJ for individuals they are looking at,” she added.
Story by Miranda Nazzaro

Tech billionaire Elon Musk and his numerous companies could avoid more than $2.37 billion in potential legal liability as a result of his influential role in the federal government, a new Senate report alleges.

The report, published Monday by the Democratic staff for the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, found Musk and his companies faced at least 65 “actual or potential” actions from 11 federal agencies and at least $2.37 billion in potential liability as of Inauguration Day.

“The nature of Mr. Musk’s businesses, as well as their substantial earnings from government contracts, mean that he is deeply entangled in the regulatory functions of the government he is now empowered to shape,” the report stated. “President Trump could not have chosen a person more prone to conflicts of interest.”
Story by Josh Fiallo

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has infiltrated two confidential computer networks used to transmit nuclear weapons secrets and other sensitive information, NPR reported.

Engineering wunderkind Luke Farritor, 23, and Miami-based venture capitalist Adam Ramada—both of whom work for DOGE—have had accounts on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Enterprise Secure Network (ESN) for at least two weeks, the public radio network reported Monday.

ESN is “responsible for transmitting restricted data about America’s nuclear weapons designs and the special nuclear materials used.” The NNSA uses the network to transmit technical information from nuclear laboratories to production facilities that store, maintain, and upgrade the country’s nuclear arsenal. Such communication must be sent and received in secure rooms, however, which are not accessible to most users who have accounts on the network.

They also reportedly have had access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network for at least two weeks, which the Department of Defense uses to communicate with the Department of Energy about nuclear weapons.
The administration has been sued over nearly every element of Trump's agenda.
By Peter Charalambous

Since Donald Trump took office 100 days ago, the president and his administration have faced an average of more than two lawsuits per day, challenging nearly every element of his agenda.

The breakneck pace of the president's policies has been matched in nearly equal force by a flood of litigation -- at least 220 lawsuits in courts across the country -- challenging more than two dozen executive orders, the firing of twenty high-ranking government officials, and dozens of other executive actions.

While the Trump administration has had some victories in the courts, federal judges have blocked key parts of Trump's agenda ranging from parts of his immigration policy and military guidelines to his effort to roll back diversity and equity initiatives.

"The administration has basically gone on a shock-and-awe bombing campaign," said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University. "There is a huge amount of what they are currently doing that they probably could have achieved lawfully, but they have crashed through any of the existing legal guardrails in an attempt to do everything, everywhere, all at once."

The suits have come at a steady clip -- 20 in January, approximately 70 in both February and March, and about 50 so far in April -- as the Trump administration has rolled out its new policies.
Story by Mychael Schnell

House Republicans moved on Tuesday to block Democrats from forcing votes on the Trump administration’s use of Signal, potential conflicts of interest involving Elon Musk and other controversial topics.

The move by the conference — which was approved in a 216-208 vote — marks the latest instance of Republicans using procedural rules, which govern debate for legislation, to shield President Trump.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defended the effort shortly before its approval Tuesday, saying the conference was “using the rules of the House to prevent political hijinks and political stunts.”

“They showed us over the last four years, last eight years — they used lawfare, they used conspiracy theories, all these political weapons to just go after the president and make his life miserable,” Johnson added. “That’s not what the American people voted for, that’s not what they deserve. We can do better, so we’re preventing this nonsensical waste of our time. We don’t have time to waste.”

On Monday afternoon, House GOP leaders added language to a rule for a series of unrelated measures that sought to prevent Democrats from forcing votes on resolutions of inquiry from Tuesday through Sept. 30.

Resolutions of inquiry allow lawmakers to demand information from the president or for heads of executive departments to hand over specific information that the administration has. They are significant, however, because they have special parliamentary status, meaning they can be forced to the House floor for a vote after a certain number of days. The rules for such a move are stringent.
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