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Lawmakers Call for Video of 2nd Strike on Alleged Drug Boat

admin - Latest News - December 4, 2025
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Fallout is growing over the deadly U.S. attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in September with the Pentagon now facing calls to release video of the controversial second strike that killed survivors of the first hit. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is also facing new scrutiny for the information he shared on a Signal group chat in March about a pending military operation in Yemen. NBC’s Peter Alexander reports for TODAY from the White House.



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Dec. 4, 2025, 6:25 AM ESTBy Jennifer JettHONG KONG — A massive fire that tore through a Hong Kong apartment complex, killing more than 150 people, has ignited an upsurge in public anger that is testing Beijing’s control of the Chinese territory. The Nov. 26 fire at Wang Fuk Court in the northern district of Tai Po has deeply shaken Hong Kong’s population amid accusations of corrupt business practices and failures in government oversight. The blaze was the city’s first major manmade disaster since national security laws were imposed after huge anti-government protests in 2019, and there have already been several reported arrests and official warnings against “anti-China” forces accused of sowing discord.On Wednesday, Chinese national security authorities in Hong Kong issued their second warning in a week, saying that “external hostile forces” were using the fire to try to “recreate the chaos” of 2019 under the pretext of “petitioning for the people.”“Those who oppose China and disrupt Hong Kong will be punished even if they are far away,” the statement said.Investigators say the five-alarm fire spread rapidly because of substandard mesh netting that covered bamboo scaffolding erected around the buildings for renovations, as well as highly flammable polystyrene boards that were sealed to the windows. Residents also said fire alarms failed to go off.
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Nov. 13, 2025, 5:00 AM ESTBy Gary GrumbachALEXANDRIA, Va. — When acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan walks into federal court here in Virginia on Thursday morning, it will be Halligan — not the criminal defendants she hopes to prosecute — at the center of the court’s attention.Former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both frequent targets of President Donald Trump, filed separate motions in their respective cases, arguing that Halligan is unlawfully serving as acting U.S. attorney and therefore the indictments against them should be thrown out. In a rare joint hearing, attorneys for Comey and James will argue this together before U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, who is traveling up from the District of South Carolina.Currie is hearing this joint oral argument session, not a judge from the Eastern District of Virginia, to avoid any potential intradistrict conflict of interest.Halligan, who was part of Trump’s legal team in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case but has no prior prosecutorial experience, was sworn in to the job as interim U.S. attorney in one of the nation’s busiest federal court districts on Sept. 22. That’s three days after Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney who had been serving in the role since Jan. 21, resigned after being pressured to indict Comey and James.The indictments against Comey and James came after Trump publicly urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against Comey, James and another of the president’s adversaries, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. Comey and James both pleaded not guilty to their respective charges.“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” the president wrote in a Sept. 20 Truth Social post. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”According to federal statute, individuals may only serve for 120 days after being appointed U.S. attorney, unless confirmed by the U.S. Senate before then. The Senate had not confirmed him, but district judges of the Eastern District of Virginia exercised their own independent appointment authority to legally retain Siebert as an interim U.S. attorney beyond the 120-day limit.It is that 120-day limit that James and Comey’s attorneys argue should not start back at zero with the appointment of Halligan.“If the Attorney General could make back-to-back sequential appointments of interim U.S. Attorneys, the 120-day period would be rendered meaningless, and the Attorney General could indefinitely evade the alternate procedures that Congress mandated,” Comey’s attorney Patrick Fitzgerald wrote in a motion to dismiss the indictment against his client.Comey was charged in late September with making a false statement to Congress during a September 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Asked by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, about testimony he gave in 2017 asserting that he did not authorize the leak of information to the media about an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation, Comey said, “I stand by the testimony.”Trump first clashed with Comey during his first term over the then-FBI director’s handling of the federal investigation Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. Comey was fired in May 2017 and has been an outspoken critic of Trump since then.The Justice Department laid out in court papers that it believes the indictment of Comey — signed only by Halligan and unsealed days before the five-year statute of limitations expired — should survive this challenge to Halligan’s appointment regardless of what Currie decides, because of U.S. Code 3288, the statute that governs this very issue.“Whenever an indictment or information charging a felony is dismissed for any reason after the period prescribed by the applicable statute of limitations has expired, a new indictment may be returned in the appropriate jurisdiction within six calendar months of the date of the dismissal of the indictment or information,” the statute reads in part.This six-month grace period, legal experts tell NBC News, may be the DOJ’s key to a continued prosecution of the former FBI director. The bank fraud charge that James, who sued Trump and his businesses for fraud in 2022, is facing is well within the 10-year statute of limitations.Bondi has taken steps in recent weeks to shore up Halligan’s position.On Oct. 31, Bondi issued a formal order retroactively appointing Halligan to the position of “special attorney” within the Department of Justice as of Sept. 22 — three days before Comey was indicted — and wrote, “Should a court conclude that Ms. Halligan’s authority as Special Attorney is limited to particular matters, I hereby delegate to Ms. Halligan authority as Special Attorney to conduct and supervise the prosecutions” of Comey and James.”Halligan is also facing several Bar Association complaints in Florida and Virginia, filed by the left-leaning watchdog group Campaign for Accountability.“Ms. Halligan’s actions appear to constitute an abuse of power and serve to undermine the integrity of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and erode public confidence in the legal profession and the fair administration of justice,” the complaint says.Several other U.S. attorneys appointed by Trump are also facing legal challenges to their appointments.In late September, a federal judge in Nevada ruled that acting U.S. Attorney Sigal Chattah should be disqualified from serving in that role due to violating the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.In August, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled that Alina Habba was “not lawfully holding the office of United States Attorney” due to the 120-day interim appointment expiration, and that her actions since July as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey may be declared void.Gary GrumbachGary Grumbach is an NBC News legal affairs reporter, based in Washington, D.C.
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Nov. 29, 2025, 7:00 AM ESTBy Tyler Kingkade and Ben KamisarDuring a segment on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in August, activist Christopher Rufo astonished the studio audience when he said the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon “was a setup from start to finish.” The crowd hooted. Maher retorted that there were plenty of “smoking guns” showing the late president’s guilt. But Rufo insisted that there were federal agencies that had had illegal backdoor meetings and that there was a judge who was “out to get Nixon.”Maher muttered, “Oh, geez,” to which Rufo replied with a grin and a prediction: “Nixon vindication by 2035.”The Watergate scandal has long been viewed as a defining moment in presidential corruption and accountability, prompting a series of government transparency reforms and influencing generations of journalists. It became a shorthand comparison for political scandal and lent the omnipresent “-gate” suffix to many that followed.But those lessons are now being flipped by some of the most influential right-wing figures, including people known to have President Donald Trump’s ear, who insist that Watergate was actually an underhanded scheme by the “deep state” and the press to take down a popular Republican president.Watergate has often been invoked in comparison to Trump’s scandals, in both his first and current term. Many people — from historians to former Nixon officials — argue that were Watergate to happen in today’s media landscape, with the influence of conservative outlets and in particular Fox News, Nixon most likely would have survived it.“In some ways, the reframing of Watergate seems like an attempt to try and rehabilitate the current president’s image,” said Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning initiatives at the American Historical Association, a nonprofit professional organization. “In a lot of ways, it’s about what’s happened the last few years.”Michael Koncewicz, a historian who has been sounding the alarm on Watergate revisionism and who formerly worked at the Nixon presidential library, said the scandal has always been remembered as one in which “the system worked.” But if these pundits “can make Americans believe that that story is bulls—,” he said, “then they can ensure that another Watergate will never happen again.”Beyond Rufo, the conservative media personalities Tucker Carlson, Michael Knowles and Steve Bannon have pushed this revisionist Watergate narrative in the past year. Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan, promoted and endorsed a Carlson podcast episode that described Watergate as a “scam.” Even actor Bill Murray suggested this year on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Nixon might have been “framed.”Republican-controlled states like Idaho and Louisiana have approved a video for use in public school social studies classes that was produced by the conservative media organization PragerU, in which the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quotes a historian who argues that Watergate was the media’s attempt to reverse an election.Hewitt, who serves on the board of the Nixon Foundation, contends that the media and the “East Coast liberal elite” had it out for Nixon in part because of his “staunch anti-communist” views. PragerU worked over the past two years with many Republican-led states to get its content into public schools, and it recently partnered with the Trump administration on a civics education initiative. After Rufo’s proclamation on HBO, Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, said he is “right about Nixon!” and directed people to watch Hewitt’s video on X.Through a spokesperson, Streit declined an interview request. In response to specific questions, PragerU said people should watch its Watergate content.Rufo also declined an interview request, but said in an email that the Nixon era is crucial to understanding why he believes politics has been in a loop since 1968. “To understand our moment — and to move beyond it — we must understand Nixon and learn from his experience, his successes, and his failures. BLM, Russiagate, gender ideology, left-wing terrorism: all of our current challenges can be understood through the prism,” Rufo said, of Nixon, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest presidents.”Hillsdale College, Hewitt and Idaho and Louisiana’s education agencies did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson and Bannon’s shows.Kenneth Hughes Jr., a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who is considered one of the foremost experts on the audiotapes from Nixon’s White House, said the recordings clearly demonstrate that Nixon was “the ring leader of the abuses of power that we group under the heading of Watergate.” “They do show Nixon deliberately, consciously and illegally weaponizing the government against those he considered political threats,” Hughes said.Nixon has always been a conflicted character in American consciousness. His congressional career defined him as a strident anti-communist, but as president he opened diplomacy with China. Liberals have praised him for signing Title IX and the Environmental Protection Agency into law but criticized his administration for launching a “war on drugs.”After losing the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Nixon famously told reporters that they “won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” only to then become president in 1968 and subsequently win every state except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in his 1972 re-election.The scandal that brought down Nixon, in oversimplified terms, centered around his complicity in attempts to cover up the involvement of members in his administration in a botched break-in to bug the Democratic Party’s headquarters. The fallout from the episode then exposed other illegal activity he authorized to go after political enemies.While the twists and turns were widely covered by multiple national media at the time, the scandal was immortalized by the book and film “All the President’s Men,” based on the work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — relying in part on an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat” — to expose the plot.Nixon resigned in August 1974, once it became clear he’d lost the support of many Republicans in Congress and would likely face impeachment.“If Donald Trump and his advisors and his supporters, in the media and within his administration, can alter the history of Watergate, then they can pretty much change anything, and that’s why the history of Watergate matters so much,” said Koncewicz, associate director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.The revisionism arguments generally concede that the president’s aides and campaign staff were involved in boneheaded and nefarious activities. But they contend Nixon was oblivious to much of it until after it happened. And they say the true scandal was that Nixon’s due process rights were violated by prosecutors who secretly met with judges and by the release of confidential grand jury testimony to Congress.“It sends chills down your spine about how close this is to what they’re trying to do to President Trump right now with this radical judiciary,” Bannon said on his podcast in August.Monica Crowley, a Trump administration official and former Fox News host, said on a New York Post podcast in July that “the full vindication, I think, of President Nixon is coming to pass.” She said Trump passes Nixon’s portrait every day, and she sees the two men as similarly “forging their own path, which inevitably put them in a collision course with the deep state.”Many of these conservative commentators rely on or feature Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon administration lawyer, who’s written for decades about ways he believes the president was wronged in the Watergate investigation.Bannon, who helped run Trump’s first campaign and remains a loyal booster, provided his streaming subscribers with free access this past summer to a new documentary based on Shepard’s work. In September, a historian spotted one of Shepard’s Watergate books displayed prominently at the gift shop of the National Archives, which is currently managed by the former head of the Nixon Foundation.A key piece of Shepard’s argument is that the “smoking gun” tape is misunderstood. The tape is typically interpreted as showing that Nixon approved White House interference in the FBI probe into the DNC break-in, but according to Shepard, it was actually a narrow question as to whether investigators could look into donations the Department of Justice had deemed outside of the Watergate case. In other words, he writes on his website, it “did not remotely prove that Nixon was in on, much less directing, the cover-up from its outset.”Shepard, who is also on the Nixon Foundation’s board, declined an interview request, but said in an email that his focus has always been on ways he believes the Watergate Special Prosecution Force violated the due process rights of the president and his aides.“In short, lawfare (the misuse of criminal law to undercut political opponents) didn’t begin with President Trump; it began with President Nixon,” Shepard said.Jill Wine-Banks, an assistant Watergate special prosecutor, said these arguments are nonsense. Nixon’s team distributed cash as hush money payments, the president is on tape approving it, the grand jury testimony was provided to Congress through a judicial process and there were no secret meetings with a federal judge, she said. And the smoking gun tape includes Nixon giving instructions on how to tell the FBI to avoid questioning certain people that would expose where hush money payments came from.“That’s him directing an action,” she said in an interview. “How much more do you need than that for him to be guilty of the cover-up?”The Nixon Foundation, which gave Trump an Architect of Peace Award last month, has welcomed the newfound interest in dismantling the mainstream narrative around Watergate. On social media, the organization has amplified examples of popular pundits defending Nixon. It recently published a video featuring podcast host Michael Knowles describing him as “the first president taken down by the deep state.”Speaking at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, this month, Knowles said the investigations into Trump during his first term started the process of exonerating Nixon by demonstrating “the lengths to which ‘deep state’ would go to undermine the will of the electorate.” “Was it so crazy that the man whom they dubbed ‘Tricky Dick’ might be the target of their shenanigans?” Knowles said in his speech, later adding, “The forces that sought to destroy him are the forces that threaten us again.”Knowles was unavailable for an interview. Historians, however, argue that the only person who set up Nixon was Nixon himself.Hughes, from the University of Virginia, said Nixon pursued a cover-up to protect himself because he had committed crimes to target political enemies, and it’s what makes his actions most relevant today.“What Nixon hid, Trump is doing much more blatantly,” Hughes said. “He’s weaponizing the government against people who he deems political threats, and that’s just something that America has not allowed, and something that America came together against during Watergate.”Tyler KingkadeTyler Kingkade is a national reporter for NBC News, based in Los Angeles.Ben KamisarBen Kamisar is a national political reporter for NBC News
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