Author: FOX24 US

FOX 24 US This story was originally published by ProPublica. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Minutes after a federal agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in a Chicago suburb last September, a group of police officers stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out the answer to a question of protocol: Who would investigate the shooting? “Wouldn’t it be state’s, at a minimum?” one Franklin Park officer asked, according to body camera footage. Chief Mike Witz shook his head. “No, because it’s a federal shooting,” he said. “You’re not going to investigate a federal…

FOX 24 US House Republicans barely passed a funding package on Tuesday, voting after more than a day of wrangling to approve five full-year funding bills plus a two-week continuing resolution to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Senate Democrats last month had demanded that, in exchange for their votes on funding packages, reforms and constraints be placed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. That prompted a standoff over the DHS funds and a short-lived partial government shutdown, which is now over.  But for how long? Members of Congress now have a behemoth task ahead of them: rein in…

FOX 24 US President Donald Trump last Friday announced his intent to nominate former Federal Reserve Board Governor Kevin Warsh to chair the central bank, tapping a Republican economist with industry and government street cred, but whose public displays of political obsequiousness could contribute to distrust in Fed independence. Trump’s insistence that federal agencies previously immune to presidential interference now bend to his desires have been made manifest across the government. His attempts to strong-arm the Fed into interest rate cuts began during his first presidential term, but Trump II has seen the political pressure on the central bank ratcheted…

FOX 24 US WASHINGTON, DC–Federal District Court Judge Richard Leon expressed shock Tuesday that the Trump Justice Department was asking him to break new First Amendment ground, the better to punish Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for speaking out against the administration.  “You’re asking me to do something that the Supreme Court has never done — that’s a bit of a stretch, is it not?” the George W. Bush-appointed judge asked DOJ’s John Bailey. The Trump administration tried during the hearing to argue that the diminished speech rights that apply to the active duty military — meant to preserve obedience and…

FOX 24 US Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, handed down an often contradictory ruling Monday night lifting his order requiring the preservation of evidence surrounding Customs and Border Protection agents’ killing of Alex Pretti last month.  On one hand, he acknowledged that statements from Trump officials absolving the agents of any culpability for the killing immediately after they shot Pretti are “troubling.”  “They reflect, not a genuine interest in learning the truth, but snap judgments informed by speculation and motivated by political partisanship,” he wrote.  But the connection between the administration’s stance on the fatal shooting, and its intentions…

FOX 24 US Coming off the heels of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s demand for access to Minnesota voter rolls and the state’s decisive refusal to comply with that demand, President Trump is now spreading conspiracy theories about the state and is again threatening to try to exert control over the nation’s election systems. Last month, Bondi attempted to tie the Trump administration’s months-long campaign to seize sensitive voter information from various states across the country, with the recent killing of a U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. In a letter to Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz following…

FOX 24 US Across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his political enemies. It represents a dramatic departure from how the Justice Department has historically used the federal material support for terrorism statute. For decades, counterterrorism prosecutors have largely reserved the statute — 2339A — for the kinds of audacious plots that wreak real, lasting damage or whose ambition forms the stuff of movie screenplays. It’s been used in recent years to charge the leadership of Hamas over the Oct. 7 attacks, pursue…

FOX 24 US This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers — and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans — for her resignation or impeachment. The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti,…

FOX 24 US In the 104 minutes of the movie “Melania,” there are only two real hints of how dangerous our world and politics have become.  The supposed documentary on First Lady Melania Trump is largely set in the 20 days before her husband, President Donald Trump, returned to office for the second time last January. At one point, the couple are seen with staffers discussing grand plans for “a million” people to line the streets of Washington for the swearing-in ceremony. Staffers inform the family that they will ride in a motorcade along Pennsylvania Avenue and that, as per…

FOX 24 US President Trump is bringing back the most bizarre conspiracy theory for why he lost the 2020 election. It’s ItalyGate, which pins his loss to Joe Biden that year on an elaborate conspiracy in which Barack Obama and China teamed up to use Italian military satellites to zap the election away from him. Trump boosted the idea this week in a series of posts on Truth Social. In one, he posted a link to a QAnon-promoting X account which laid out the very entertaining theory in detail. The timing was propitious. Trump made the posts after FBI agents…