NBC News cuts ties with ex-chair of RNC after staff firestorm
NEW YORK — NBC News has scrapped its plan to make former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel an on-air contributor to its political coverage.
“After listening to the legitimate concerns of many of you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor,” NBC News Group Chairman Cesar Conde said Tuesday in a memo to staff.
The decision to reverse course comes after a stunning rebuke of the plan by the division’s on-air talent.
On Monday, nearly every opinion host on NBC’s cable news channel MSNBC blasted the hiring of McDaniel because of her defense of former President Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
“The fact that McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News — to me that is inexplicable,” Rachel Maddow said on her MSNBC program. “You wouldn’t hire a wise guy, you wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work in a DA’s office.”
The onslaught of internal criticism of McDaniel came immediately after the announcement Friday that she would appear on political coverage across NBC News platforms including MSNBC.
McDaniel appeared on the Sunday edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where moderator Kristen Welker pressed her on her positions regarding Trump’s continued belief that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to voter fraud.
McDaniel for the first time publicly acknowledged that President Joe Biden won the election “fair and square.” She also broke with Trump’s plan to pardon the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters who have been convicted and imprisoned.
But her credibility was questioned Sunday by former “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd in the panel discussion after Welker’s interview.
Ukraine naval report: Ukraine has sunk or disabled a third of all Russian warships in the Black Sea in just over two years of war, navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk said Tuesday, a heavy blow to Moscow’s military capability.
Pletenchuk said the latest strike Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky, which was docked in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea. The ship was part of the Ukrainian navy before Russia captured it while annexing the Black Sea peninsula in 2014.
Pletenchuk has previously announced that two other landing ships of the same type, Azov and Yamal, also were damaged in Saturday’s strike along with the Ivan Khurs intelligence ship.
He said the weekend attack, which was launched with Ukraine-built Neptune missiles, also hit Sevastopol port facilities and an oil depot.
Russian authorities reported a massive Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol over the weekend but didn’t acknowledge any damage to the fleet.
A Moscow court Tuesday ordered Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, 32, to remain in jail on espionage charges until at least June 30, court officials said.
The U.S. citizen was arrested in late March 2023 while on a reporting trip and has spent nearly a year behind bars.
Gershkovich and his employer have denied the allegations, and the U.S. government has declared him to be wrongfully detained.
US reporter in Russia:
Haiti violence: Gangs have intensified their rampage in the downtown area of Haiti’s capital, setting fire to a school and looting pharmacies across the road from the country’s largest public hospital.
The attacks that began Monday and continued into early Tuesday mark nearly a
month since gunmen began targeting key infrastructure across Port-au-Prince including police stations, the main international airport that remains closed and Haiti’s two biggest prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates.
The number of children in Haiti estimated to suffer from severe acute malnutrition has increased by 19% this year, according to UNICEF. In addition, some 1.64 million people are on the brink of famine.
Violence has forced the closure of roads and some hospitals and prevented aid groups from delivering critical supplies at a time when they are needed the most.
Only two of five hospitals in Haiti are operational across the country, according to UNICEF.
Texas fraud deal: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution under a deal to end criminal securities fraud charges that have shadowed the Republican for nearly a decade.
The announcement by special prosecutors in a Houston courtroom came less than three weeks before Paxton was set to stand trial on felony charges that could have led to a prison sentence. It was the closest Paxton — who was indicted in 2015 — has ever come to trial over accusations that he duped investors in a tech
startup near Dallas.
Under the 18-month agreement, the special prosecutors would drop three felony counts against Paxton as long as he pays full restitution to his victims, and completes 100 hours of community service and 15 hours of legal ethics education.
Paxton had been accused of defrauding investors in a Dallas-area tech company called Servergy by not disclosing that he was being paid by the company to recruit them. He was charged with two counts of securities fraud and one count of not being registered as an investment adviser.
A former Hungarian government insider turned critic released an audio recording on Tuesday that he says proves that top officials conspired to cover up corruption, the latest development in a scandal that has shaken Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s domination of the country’s politics.
The country’s largest protests in years erupted in early February when it was revealed that the country’s then-president had issued a pardon to a man imprisoned for covering up child sexual abuses by the director of a state-run orphanage.
Close Orbán allies, including the president and Justice Minister Judit Varga, were forced to resign in the face of public outrage.