After Hutchinson’s devastating testimony, numerous media outlets — including The Post — also reported Tuesday afternoon that unnamed sources at the U.S. Secret Service claimed agents in Trump’s vehicle would dispute her account that Trump assaulted an agent or grabbed the steering wheel after being told that he couldn’t go to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Certainly the House Jan. 6 Select Committee should hear from all relevant witnesses under oath. But Bobby Engel, the head of the president’s protective detail who was in the car at the time, had already spoken at length to the committee. He confirmed the gravamen of her account — that Trump was irate about not be able to going to the Capitol.

The media lack any basis to parse Hutchinson’s claim that Trump lunged toward the agent, which might not mean that Trump assaulted him, as the Secret Service sources put it. The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig also provided the desperately needed context Tuesday evening that many Secret Service agents, including Engel, “are viewed as being aligned with Donald Trump.”.....

Creating a false equivalence between detailed testimony under oath and an anonymous source vouching for Trump is misleading at best and at worse serves the Trump camp’s disinformation machine. Be prepared for more of this kind of frenzied chatter as the mainstream media fall back into bad habits — repeating Trump’s lies, shrugging at the mind-bending complicity of GOP officials such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and treating statements from known Republican dissemblers as equally credible as those with no motive to lie and no history of disinformation.

The media would better serve the public if it followed two rules: First, unless they have new factual information that meet the standards for anonymous sourcing, respectable publications should not afford anonymity to those offering takes from Trump’s camp. Second, if a source is going to contest testimony under oath, the outlet should determine if the source already met with the Jan. 6 committee and consider the credibility and relevance of the source’s story (or testimony).

Grocery retailer H-E-B and the Butt Family have committed $10 million to the Uvalde school district to build a new school to replace Robb Elementary, the site of the mass shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers last month.

The donations were made to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s new nonprofit arm, the Uvalde CISD Moving Forward Foundation, which is seeking donations to make the district’s schools more secure, help build the new school and build a memorial park at the Robb location.

“It’ll definitely be part of the healing process,” Hal Harrell, Uvalde CISD superintendent, said of the donation.

A fictional Dallas Observer article about the arrest of a 6-year-old girl for a book report was satire and didn't libel two Denton County officials who sued the newspaper, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday.

The 8-0 ruling in favor of the Dallas Observer and three journalists stated that Denton County Court-at-law Judge Darlene Whitten and District Attorney Bruce Isaacks, who sued the alternative weekly paper, will get nothing.

The article in question was published in 1999 under the headline "Stop the Madness." It was a parody of the actual arrest of a 13-year-old Ponder student for reading a graphic Halloween story in class. The fictional article was about a girl jailed for a school book report on Maurice Sendak's children's story "Where the Wild Things Are."

Whitten and Isaacks said the fictional article was presented as news and damaged their reputations. Their attorney said that some people _ even lawyers, college professors and other journalists _ thought the story was true.

"It attributed quotes to them that they did not say, and it made them appear as if they had committed actual crimes and unethical conduct with regard to a child, who turns out to be fictional," said Mike Whitten, the attorney representing the two officials and the husband of Darlene Whitten.

A Florida judge on Thursday ruled that Florida's new law that bans abortions at 15 weeks is unconstitutional and "violates the privacy provision of the Florida Constitution."

The law, which was set to go into effect on Friday, does allow exemptions in cases where a pregnancy is a "serious risk" to the mother or a fatal fetal abnormality is detected if two physicians confirm the diagnosis in writing.

In a verbal ruling, Second Judicial Circuit Court Judge John Cooper said he would be issuing a temporary statewide injunction that will go into effect once he signs the written order in the challenge brought by some Florida abortion providers. He said he will not be signing the order on Thursday.