CNN was found liable on Friday for defaming U.S. Navy veteran Zachary Young.

Following roughly eight hours of deliberations, jurors found CNN both “committed defamation per se” and “committed defamation by implication.”

Jurors awarded Young $4 million in economic damages and $1 million in emotional damages and agreed that punitive damages are warranted, prompting phase 2 of the trial. Punitive damages will be awarded to Young to dissuade CNN and other networks from doing what CNN did.

The case arose after CNN aired a segment in November of 2021 on “The Lead with Jake Tapper” that falsely framed Young as exploiting Afghans by offering evacuations from Afghanistan on a “black market.” A court later found Young did nothing illegal. Young alleged the segment “rendered Young permanently unemployable” because the use of the term “black market” in the chyron implied Young was engaged in illegal conduct — something his defense contracts expressly prohibited.

Sir, why did you pause LNG exports? Liquified natural gas is in great demand by our allies, why would you do that? Cause you understand, we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you're fueling Putin's war machine?" And he looked at me, stunned, and he said, "I didn't do that." And I said, "Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order like three weeks ago." He said, "No, I didn't do that," he was arguing with me.

That's where things get even crazier. Biden went on to admit he signed an executive order, but he told Johnson that believed he had only authorized a study on the effects of LNG.

JOHNSON: I said, "No you're not sir, you paused it, I have the terminal, the export terminal in our state, I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, to our national security."

I thought, "We are in serious trouble." Who's running the country?" I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know. //

It wasnt me WesW
8 hours ago
I like Johnson, but imagine if he had walked out of that meeting to cameras outside the White House and repeated that in January of 2024.

And said, "Who lied to the President about what was in the EO?
If someone didn't lie to him Why doesn't he recall what was in it?
What other decisions was the President deceived about?
How can we be sure?". //

Charlie the Deplorable
9 hours ago
I originally planned to write a comment ripping the Speaker for not taking more forceful action somehow. And then I thought through his options. Impeachment requires “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Although there’s probably some bribery somewhere along the way, nothing impeachable seems relevant to the case. His other alternative is the 25th Amendment. But he would need to convince the VP and cabinet to stick out their necks and affirm his disability. They already were covering it up such that I wouldn’t have presumed they could be convinced to act. His third option would have been to go public, hoping for the press and the people to pressure him to resign. Yeah, good luck with that one. So I don’t see any path for him to have done anything about it.

And even if he had succeeded, we would’ve been left with VP Harris in the Oval Office. Which many could argue would be worse.

This episode points out the need for a vigorous, multi-sided press. RedState readers knew of his vegetative state somewhere in 2020-2022 depending on what you believed. That simply wasn’t enough to force a compliant democrat party to act. And that is why I’m a VIP Platinum. We need a fervent press, with both left and right having a strong voice.

It’s conservatives who don’t want the government to restrict our speech or gas-powered vehicles or Covid therapeutics. So why are we up in arms over what, according to the “science,” could be a fairly innocuous synthetic color additive made from petroleum, chemically known as erythrosine?

A better question may be: Why was this chemical with zero nutritional value put in our food in the first place? The artificial food coloring was added to make unhealthy food options attractive to kids. The ingredient is often found alongside sugar in foods such as candy, cereal, and juices. Removing the chemical does not deprive anyone of a positive good. Taste will not be sacrificed, simply one tactic to market junk food to kids. Natural ingredients that lack harmful effects, such as beets, are the alternatives to color foods in other countries where the dye has been banned. //

Furthermore, the debate also highlights the difference between conservatives and libertarians. Conservatives are not opposed to government intervention. We’re opposed to ill-defined government intervention, wielded by an unelected bureaucracy captured by corporations, that lacks the support of those who are supposed to have the ultimate say: we the people.

it’s past time for Republicans to provide a pithy answer to counter the Democrat’s deceptive question.

As I explained last year when the legacy media hounded then-Sen. J.D. Vance to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, there is a fundamental flaw in the question: “The query includes an undefined term — ‘lost’ — which holds a different meaning to Trump supporters and to the anti-Trump inquisitors.”

“If ‘lost’ merely meant Biden is the president of the United States, then that’s an easy answer: Yes, of course, Trump lost, as Biden was inaugurated,” and he is currently nearing the end of his four disastrous years in the Oval Office. But that’s not what those demanding an acknowledgement that Trump lost mean by “lost,” and yesterday’s hearings confirmed that reality, for Bondi repeatedly and expressly attested that, yes, Joe Biden is the president of the United States.

What Durbin, Blumenthal, and pretty much everyone else demanding a “yes” or “no” answer to whether Trump lost the 2020 election seek is a concession that Trump’s election challenges were frivolous, unfounded, or wrong. Democrats inject such concessions into their meaning of “lost.”

That’s why Bondi answered Durbin’s question as she did, by stating both that she accepted that Biden is president of the United States and that she saw firsthand issues in Pennsylvania’s election.

In other words, it depends on what you mean by “lost.”. //

“If asked whether Trump ‘lost’ the 2020 election, meaning that if all legal votes were counted and all illegal counts discarded — and the counting was done legally pursuant to controlling election law —” the answer should be a resounding, “I don’t know.”

As I wrote last year: “No one can possibly know the answer to that question because in 2020 there were too many election laws violated or ignored, and too many illegal votes counted. But the lawsuits challenging the election outcomes were tossed as moot once the votes were certified, so there was never a determination on the validity of the tallies, leaving uncertain the accuracy of the election results.” //

So, here’s a simple, soundbite for the next Trump nominee cornered with the query, “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘lose.’ Joe Biden is the president of the United States. But Biden did not win a free and fair election, and the country has suffered the devastating consequences for the last four years as a result of the Biden presidency.”

And the 2020 election was not free and fair: Not when the FBI pre-bunked the Hunter Biden laptop story, causing social media companies to censor the evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s pay-to-play scandal; not when the Biden campaign’s senior advisor, Antony Blinken, “set in motion” the release of a public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation; not when there were “systemic violations of election law” which “disparately favor[ed] one candidate,” and “allow[ed] for tens of thousands of illegal votes to be counted;” and not when illegal drop box were placed in Democrat-heavy precincts and Zuckbucks were used to get out the Democrat vote.

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, was illegal but stopped short of allowing a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Texas to go into effect. The three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruling on the case restricted the scope of the injunction to Texas to allow further appeals.

DACA is, in my opinion, the toughest part of the illegal immigration catastrophe facing the United States to solve. DACA enrollees arrived in the United States as very young children when their parents or guardians illegally immigrated. They are culturally American and frequently can't speak the language of their home country and have no family or social ties to it. There are an estimated 580,000 DACA enrollees. //

DACA started out as a 2012 memorandum signed by Obama DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. It was never an executive order. It never went through the rule-making process required by the Administrative Procedure Act. It has never been enacted into law by Congress. Ordinarily, any memo by a cabinet secretary ceases to have validity when they leave office, not so with DACA. When President Trump’s DHS secretary rescinded the DACA memo based on the advice of the Attorney General of the United States, the Supreme Court held, in a 5-4 vote (guess how the Chief Justice voted), that the Trump administration was required to follow the Administrative Procedure Act to withdraw a memo that was never subjected to that act, ... //

The case is headed back to the Supreme Court, minus the rather stupid issue of whether a single memo by a cabinet secretary can masquerade as the law of the land.