Psaki, who served as press secretary during the August 2021 withdrawal before leaving the administration for MSNBC, sat down for the interview with the House Foreign Affairs Committee on July 26. Lawmakers pressed her on false and misleading information she peddled from the podium during the withdrawal, the transcript shows.

Psaki, for example, called it “irresponsible” to say Americans were “stranded” in Afghanistan amid the withdrawal. One month after the administration’s hurried exit, in September 2021, she said “around 100” Americans were left there. By October, administration officials were privately relaying to lawmakers that nearly 400 Americans were left in Afghanistan and still attempting to leave.

Still, Psaki said during her interview that she considered the administration’s communication process during the withdrawal to be “sound.” She said she did not have a “mechanism” to “challenge the quality or veracity of the policymakers’ information” related to the withdrawal.

Psaki’s long-awaited testimony—the former press secretary sat down with the committee only after it threatened to subpoena her—appears to confirm longstanding suspicions that the White House intentionally downplayed the dire situation in Afghanistan as it pushed forward with an accelerated withdrawal that almost instantly brought the Taliban back into power and left hundreds of Americans stranded in the country under the terror group’s rule. […]

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So far in the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump has enjoyed consistent support from independents despite losing their votes by 13 points in 2020 . For example, the April New York Times /Siena poll had Trump winning likely voters overall by 1 point and likely independent voters by 4 points. The April Fox News poll of registered voters had Trump winning registered voters overall by 1 point and independent voters by 2 points.The same pattern is visible in the states. The May Bloomberg /Morning Consult poll of swing states had Trump winning independents […]

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The supreme court’s seven justices, all but one of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, said the ballot measure would take too much taxation power from the Legislature and declared that the measure’s backers would have to try to call a constitutional convention to push their proposal. The initiative proposed requiring a two-thirds voter majority approval of any new state and local special taxes, which Democratic legislators argued would make it too hard to raise revenue for emergencies.

“The measure would fundamentally restructure the most basic of […]

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“I apologize for my comments,” Bowman said during a radio show appearance, “and now we’re continuing to do the work to fight sexual violence and domestic violence in all its forms.”

A month after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli civilians that left 1,200 people dead, Bowman said, “There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women. But they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda,” Politico reported .

After initially refusing to address the remarks, Bowman did walk back the propaganda accusations but refused to apologize. “The UN confirmed that Hamas committed rape and sexual violence, a reprehensible fact that I condemn entirely,” Bowman said in March. “I also voted yes on Resolution 966, which officially condemns the rape and sexual […]

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For five Jewish students at Columbia, the texts were both astonishing, given their vitriol, and unsurprising, given the administration’s track record in the wake of Oct. 7. The texts, those students say, reflect an administrative indifference toward anti-Semitism that has fostered a hostile campus climate for Jewish students.”They’re all cut from the same cloth,” said Alon Levin, a third-year Ph.D. student. “They have a fake sweetness, like, ‘Yeah, we’re listening to you and you’re so brave for coming to us, but we’re not going to do anything.'”Levin and four […]

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According to various media outlets, the law review’s board of directors, composed of faculty and alumni, tried to censor an article critical of Israel . Except that’s not what happened at all. The true story involves a faction of the law review secretly breaking all procedural rules and customs to publish a piece of ideologically driven claptrap.

The claptrap in question is an article by graduate student Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” To say that the article is of poor quality not worthy of an elite law review like Columbia’s, considered one of the three or four most prestigious legal […]

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From 2020 through 2022, Tides transferred $8.7 million from the fund to Black Lives Matter Grassroots, an offshoot of the national Black Lives Matter group led by Melina Abdullah, a longtime activist and professor. But Black Lives Matter Grassroots reported to the IRS that it never received that money, and no one involved in the transactions will say what became of the funds. These discrepancies have left charity watchdogs mystified, while legal experts say they could lead to massive fines and penalties.

This story is based on interviews with Black Lives Matter activists and internal documents […]

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Drone footage shows the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, U.S., February 6, 2023 in this screengrab obtained from a handout video released by the NTSB. NTSBGov/Handout via REUTERS In one of his first public appearances since a massive train derailment released poisonous chemicals in eastern Ohio, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg avoided discussing the disaster—instead criticizing construction workers for being too white.

“We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color, that finally sees the project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats […]

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