A former Brooklyn prosecutor in the state attorney general's office accused Letitia James of wasting taxpayer dollars on a personal vendetta.
Page A5From§Eachthe milkman edition — 31 August 2026
Trump threatens FCC over anchor's 'inaccuracy' as his prosecutor was ordered to dig up dirt on rivals.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened here, because the coverage has gotten sloppy. The president asked the Federal Communications Commission to review an NBC anchor's reporting on endorsements, citing what he called purposeful inaccuracy. That is a citizen, admittedly a prominent one, invoking a federal complaint process that exists precisely so the public can flag broadcast standards violations. Nothing unusual about that. Every administration has sparred with the press. This is normal oversight of the public airwaves, full stop.
Separately - and I want to stress separately - a prosecutor formerly in the New York Attorney General's office has told reporters he was ordered to dig up material on the president's allies. That's a personnel matter, an internal office dispute, the kind of thing that happens in any prosecutor's office when priorities shift. It has nothing to do with the FCC complaint. I want to be precise about that, because I know where this is going, and it isn't - it isn't fair to connect an accuracy complaint about a news broadcast to an internal staffing dispute at a state prosecutor's office. Those are different institutions, different jurisdictions, different -…
…(cont) Actually, let me back up. Both of these are about the same thing, aren't they. One is a demand that an anchor be held to an accuracy standard the complainant did not apply to himself when he made the request. The other is an allegation that the machinery of a prosecutor's office was turned toward finding material on people the same complainant considers opponents. I said unrelated a moment ago. That doesn't sound right anymore, and I'm not going to pretend it does.
What's left, once you strip the framing, is two institutions - a federal broadcast regulator and a state prosecutor's office - both invoked in the same week, both aimed outward at people the president has named as adversaries, on the record, in his own public statements. The accuracy standard is real. The FCC complaint process is real. The prosecutor's account, on the record, is real too. Holding both of those next to each other isn't spin. It's just reading the two stories in the order they ran.
“He wants the FCC to go after a news anchor for getting something wrong, in the same week a prosecutor in his own orbit says he was told to go find dirt on the other side. One of those is called oversight. The other one has a name, and it isn't oversight.”
“The FCC complaint is about accuracy standards, plain and simple, protecting the public from purposeful inaccuracy on the airwaves. The opposition research thing - that's a separate matter, unrelated, allegedly ordered by - well, it's under review, and I shouldn't have connected those two in the same breath just now.”
The receipts
Trump announced on Truth Social that Kristen Welker will be reported to the FCC after she described his primary endorsement record as mixed results.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.