TARGET TRUMP: The Justice Department “target letter” to Donald Trump suggests that he could be charged with conspiracy to defraud the government, obstruction of an official proceeding, and violations of a law dating back to the Civil War Reconstruction era that makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

  That last law was passed to prevent Southern whites from terrorizing former slaves to stop them from voting. In effect, if Trump is charged under that law, it means that prosecutors will try to prove that while he was claiming the 2020 election was rigged against him, Trump was trying to rig it for himself.

  Legal developments are breaking fast. In Manhattan yesterday, a federal judge denied a request by Trump’s lawyers to move the business fraud case against him brought by the Manhattan district attorney to federal court. In that case, stemming from the hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

  Yet another federal judge rejected Donald Trump’s motion for a new trial in the civil defamation and sexual abuse case he lost to writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million and US District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that they did not reach “a seriously erroneous result” and its verdict is not “a miscarriage of justice,” as Trump had claimed.

  Kaplan also clarified that although the jury rejected Carroll’s claim of outright rape and found it to be a case of “sexual abuse,” it was in fact a rape as commonly understood. “Mr. Trump’s attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Ms. Carroll’s breasts through her clothing is frivolous,” Kaplan wrote. He said that the jury verdict under New York law clearly means they believe Trump raped Carroll with his fingers.  

THE WAR ROOM: Russian attacks have been hitting grain facilities in the port of Odesa and along the Black Sea coast, attempting to shut off exportation of grain. As many as 60,000 tons of grain have been destroyed.

  Russia declared that any ships on the Black Sea bound for Ukrainian ports will be presumed “hostile” and intending to help the Ukrainian war effort. Russia did not say what it would do about such ships, but the implication is that they would be turned around or even sunk to blockade Ukraine.

  This came just two days after Russia pulled out of the agreement to allow Ukraine to continue exporting its grain through the Black Sea, a blow not only to Ukraine but also to countries dependent on the grain. As a result, grain prices shot up. 

KREMLINOLOGY: The head of Britain’s intelligence agency, MI6, said during a speech in Prague that Russian President Vladimir Putin of Russia had “cut a deal” with the rebelling mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin to save himself during the brief uprising last month. 

  MI6 boss Richard Moore, said of Putin that, “Prigozhin was his creature, utterly created by Putin, and yet he turned on him. He really didn’t fight back against Prigozhin; he cut a deal to save his skin using the good offices of the leader of Belarus.”

  “Prigozhin started off that day as a traitor at breakfast, he had been pardoned by supper, and then a few days later, he was invited for tea,” Moore told his audience. “So, there are some things that even the chief of MI6 finds a little bit difficult to try and interpret, in terms of who’s in and who’s out.”

IT’S POLITICAL: The House Oversight Committee spent hours yesterday delving into the question of whether President Biden’s son Hunter was given preferential treatment by the Justice Department and is having his hand slapped for financial crimes rather than face serious charges.

  Two former IRS officials have come forward claiming whistle-blower status to say that it’s so.

  Little was accomplished and it all ground to a halt when Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene displayed blow-ups of sexual images featuring Hunter Biden taken from his infamous abandoned laptop. “Parental discretion is advised,” Greene said before revealing the pictures that, however embarrassing, have nothing to do with whether Hunter Biden committed a crime.

THE OBIT PAGE: Kevin Mitnick, the notorious hacker at the dawn of the internet age who stole data and credit card numbers from computer networks across the country, has died of pancreatic cancer at age 59. Following a stint in prison, he was released in 2000 and became a security consultant, writer, and public speaker.

THE SPIN RACK: Following a spike during the Covid pandemic, murders in 30 US cities have dropped 10 percent according to a new survey. — Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced that he’s resigning as the result of an investigative report that found he had failed to correct mistakes in years-old scientific papers and overseen labs that had an “unusual frequency” of manipulations of data. The report did not go so far as to accuse him of academic fraud, but that he had co-authored papers with “serious flaws” and failed on multiple occasions to “decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes.” — The wife of accused Long Island serial killer Rex Heuermann filed for divorce yesterday from her jailed husband.

BELOW THE FOLD: In-N-Out Burger announced it will ban employees in five states from wearing masks, emphasizing the “importance of customer service.”

Employees in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas and Utah who want to wear a mask must have a valid medical note “exempting him or her from this requirement,” a company memo says. Otherwise, they’re just going to have to smell the burgers.

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