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North Carolina, once considered deep red, showed how much of a swing state it has become in the 2024 election. Now-President Donald Trump defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by roughly 3.2 percent in North Carolina, but the state's residents also voted to replace a term-limited Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, with another Democrat: now-Gov. Josh Stein.

North Carolina isn't as Democratic-friendly as Virginia, which Harris carried by 6 percent. But it is a better state for Democrats than Florida, a state Trump carried by 13 percent.

Another North Carolina race that was close in 2024 was a state supreme court race, which found incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs narrowly defeating GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin. But Griffin and his allies are fighting to overturn the election results by throwing out more than 65,000 votes on technicalities — an effort that, many North Carolina Democrats allege, is comparable to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

READ MORE: 'Unchecked power': Trump himself ordered firings of prosecutors working criminal cases against him

Salon's Tatyana Tandanpolie, in an article published on February 4, describes the anger of North Carolina residents who voted for Riggs and believe that Republicans are trying to invalidate their votes for frivolous reasons.

"In his complaint," Tandanpolie explains, "Griffin accused the North Carolina Board of Elections of erroneously counting more than 65,000 votes that he claims are invalid for three different reasons. Some 60,000 of those votes, he claims, came from voters who did not provide driver's license information or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers on their voter registration applications; in some cases voters were not asked to provide that information."

The Salon reporter adds, "Around 5500 contested votes are absentee ballots from voters overseas registered to vote in four Democrat-leaning counties, who Griffin alleged failed to include photo identification with their absentee ballots."

Louis Caldera, who served as secretary of the U.S. Army under President Bill Clinton, is a scathing critic of Griffin's efforts.

READ MORE: What you shouldn't call President Trump

Caldera told Salon, "It's just fundamentally unfair to try to change the voting rules after the fact. These voters followed the rules that they were told they had to comply with to have their votes counted. It's particularly egregious to target the votes of many overseas military voters, but only in four of the state's 100 counties, for clearly partisan reasons. That kind of gamesmanship is what breeds cynicism about our electoral process."

One of the North Carolina residents whose vote is being challenged is Copland Rudolph of Asheville. Rudolph considers Griffin's action as "coordinated, concentrated effort to strip people of their voting rights."

Rudolph told Salon, "What is exhausting and infuriating is that someone who wants to show up as a public servant, allegedly, could then, in his own actions, create such unnecessary chaos for his own self-needs. I mean, it's even more reasons why the majority of North Carolinians didn't vote for him."

Another North Carolina voter who is speaking out, Spring Dawson-McClure, told Salon, "I'm frustrated. I'm in disbelief that this is actually happening these days."

President Donald Trump was personally behind the directive to fire career prosecutors who worked for special counsel Jack Smith on the criminal cases against him, The Guardian reported on Tuesday.

Smith handled the two federal cases prosecuting Trump — the election conspiracy plot and the illegal removal of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago country club.

Despite acting Attorney General James McHenry giving the formal order, reported Hugo Lowell, "The genesis for the firings was Trump himself, according to two people directly familiar with the matter, and a demonstration of Trump’s unchecked power as he implements a new order where the justice department is answerable to the White House.

"... Trump’s intervention to remove the prosecutors in Smith’s office was seen by some of his advisers as the start of their efforts to make it normal practice to have the attorney general work with the West Wing to enforce and enact its political agenda."

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Trump made Smith a major target of his attacks on the campaign trail, calling him "deranged" and accusing him of a political "witch hunt." He has never provided any evidence to substantiate the idea that the prosecutions were improper or politically motivated.

According to the report, "After Trump instructed his advisers that he wanted the prosecutors gone, the White House presidential personnel office, led by longtime Trump ally Sergio Gor, issued a memo that directed the justice department to proceed and gave the move a degree of legal cover" so that it would not appear the order came from Trump himself.

All of this comes at a moment when Trump and his allies, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, are instituting a massive takeover of the federal civil service, including Musk's seizure and apparent recoding of the Treasury Department's payment system.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) sounded the alarm on reports that President Donald Trump’s administration was on the verge of naming a former White House speechwriter to a top State Department role despite being previously fired over ties to white nationalists.

Murphy appeared rattled by what he called the “radical views” of Darren Beattie — who is expected to take on the role of acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs — but told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Beattie's reemergence in the new Trump administration isn’t surprising.

“My understanding is that he is up for this post,” Murphy said Monday during an appearance on CNN’s “The Lead,” adding that Beattie "sounds particularly dangerous.”

“The brazen chauvinism and racism – he also has been a very frequent apologist for the Chinese genocide of Uyghurs, he says the United States should have no interest in protecting Taiwan and we should in fact hand Taiwan to the Chinese – he has really radical views,” Murphy said.

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The Connecticut senator then seized the opportunity to unleash a forceful condemnation of Department of Government Efficiency Chair Elon Musk, who he wrapped up as cut from the same “racist” cloth as Beattie.

“I don't know, they don't seem super different than Elon Musk, who has amplified vicious antisemitic information on Twitter [now X], who gave the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute on Inauguration Day,” Murphy said about the views of Beattie and Musk, before revealing what he believed to be a key qualification for serving in the Trump 2.0 administration.

“It seems to be standard that the qualification to serve in the Trump administration is affection for racist and misogynist philosophy," he said. “So, this guy is dangerous, but there seems to be people like him being peppered throughout Trump's government.”

Watch the clip below or at this link.

Hundreds of US government websites were offline on Monday, an AFP review showed, including that of the humanitarian agency USAID which President Donald Trump's administration is shutting down.

From a list of nearly 1,400 federal sites provided by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), more than 350 were unavailable on Monday afternoon.

These included sites linked to the departments of defense, commerce, energy, transportation, labor as well the Central Intelligence Agency and the Supreme Court, the review showed.

The exact time when the sites became unavailable was not clear. Nor was it known whether the sites were temporarily offline or taken down at the instruction of Trump's administration.

But the development comes amid the administration's controversial drive to radically shrink the US government.

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Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive and the world's richest person, is leading Trump's federal cost-cutting efforts under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

On Monday, Musk said USAID will be shuttered, calling the agency which runs relief programs in about 120 countries a "criminal organization."

USAID's website was offline as employees were instructed by email not to go to their offices on Monday.

A slew of US government websites, including top public health agencies, have also scrubbed references to LGBTQ after a Trump directive last week instructing them to terminate all programs funded by taxpayers that promote "gender ideology," US media reported.

Trump has already issued executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion in the government.

Key information and datasets related to HIV and LGBTQ youth have also disappeared from the website of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), alarming health experts.

On Monday, the CDC's landing pages for both topics said: "The page you're looking for was not found."

"The removal of HIV- and LGBTQ-related resources from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies is deeply concerning and creates a dangerous gap in scientific information and data to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks," the Infectious Diseases Society of America said in a statement.

Public access to this information was "especially important as diseases such as HIV, mpox, sexually transmitted infections and other illnesses threaten public health and impact the entire population," it added.

Salvage crews on Monday recovered part of the fuselage of a passenger plane that plunged into the Potomac River last week after colliding with a US Army helicopter, killing 67 people.

A large crane assisted by a smaller one gingerly pulled the twisted wreckage of the Bombardier CRJ-700 operated by American Eagle airlines out of the water and placed it on a barge.

An engine from the regional passenger jet was also recovered from the icy waters.

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Sixty passengers on the plane and four crew members were killed in Wednesday's accident along with three soldiers aboard the US Army Black Hawk helicopter.

Fifty-five bodies have been recovered and identified so far, according to local authorities, who have expressed confidence they will locate all of the victims.

"We will absolutely stay here and search until such point as we have everybody," Washington fire chief John Donnelly said Sunday.

The plane was on a flight from Wichita, Kansas, to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington when the collision occurred.

President Donald Trump was quick to blame diversity hiring policies for the accident although no evidence has emerged that they were responsible.

According to US media reports, the control tower at the busy airport may have been understaffed at the time of the accident.

The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to compile a preliminary report within 30 days, although a full investigation could take a year.

National security expert Marcy Wheeler dropped the hammer on a pro-Trump commentator who proclaimed victory over President Donald Trump largely caving on one of his signature issues.

At the last minute on Monday, Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a deal that postponed tariffs on Mexico for a month in return for Sheinbaum sending 10,000 troops to secure her side of the border with the United States — with Trump seemingly unaware that Mexico did the same for former President Joe Biden after he took office. Social media users quickly pointed that out to Trump.

But far-right commentator Matt Walsh had a different perspective on the matter in a post to X.

"No country in Latin America has any power or leverage over the United States. There is literally nothing they can do when we make demands. We hold all the cards. They have none. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, or delusional," he wrote. "There is a VERY small list of countries that have real power in the world and who we actually have to negotiate with. None of them are in Central or South America."

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Wheeler, who runs the security analysis blog EmptyWheel, replied to Walsh with a reality check.

"Oh honey. You're sitting in a puddle of your own drool," she wrote. "Trump got his a-- handed to him, by a woman. And you poor boys are so stupid you don't even know she gave him what Joe Biden got years ago. PLEASE for the sake of your self-respect stop drooling."

Trump's deal to postpone tariffs on Mexico does not affect the tariffs against Canada and China, which are still moving forward and prompting legal action and retaliation threats from both countries.