ORDER IN THE COURT: Opening arguments are expected today in Donald Trump’s Stormy Daniels payoff case in the first trial in which a former president is exposed to a felony conviction.

  Although they have a lineup of witnesses and a paper trail of evidence that Trump paid off the porn star and hid it in his business records, prosecutors will have to overcome the slippery phenomenon of Donald Trump himself, a man who has spent a lifetime avoiding legal responsibility for his misdeeds.

  Defense lawyers will focus on the credibility of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who’s been convicted for lying under oath. They’ll be trying to hide Trump’s culpability while attempting to leave the jury lost in the forest of paperwork used to cover the payment to Daniels for her silence about an affair with Trump before he was president.

  On the downside for Trump, prosecutors do have a paper trail to back up Cohen’s testimony that he fronted the $130,000 payment to Daniels and was reimbursed through a series of billings for legal work he never did.

  Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is posing the case as a matter of election interference, that Trump paid off Daniels and hid the payments so the story would not break in October just before the 2016 election. 

  The trial has kept Trump off the campaign trail and he had to cancel a Saturday night rally in South Carolina because of bad weather.

COMPROMISE:  A congressional colleague of Mike Johnson said the House speaker listened to high level national security briefings, prayed on the matter, then said he wanted to come out “on the right side of history” before pushing through votes on military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

  The collection of bills adds up to $95 billion, $61 billion of it for Ukraine, which is dangerously low on ammunition and weapons as its troops are getting pushed back on the eastern front against Russia.

  About $26 billion goes to Israel for replenishing air defenses. About $9 billion of that would be dedicated to humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

  Attached to the Ukraine bill is a rider that would give the social media app TikTok nine months to separate from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or be banned in the United States. Some politicians fear that TikTok is being used by China to gather data on Americans. TikTok has been waging a television ad campaign claiming to be a vital service to Americans.

  Speaker Johnson’s push to pass these bills with the help of Democrats angered the far right isolationists in his party who in particular want to stop helping Ukraine. Texas republican Chip Roy said, “There is continued frustration with the fact that we are, frankly, allowing the House to be governed by Democrats.” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “a sellout of America,” but for now she’s holding fire on her threat to move for ousting Johnson from the speakership.

SWIMMING WITH SHARKS: Just 100 days before the opening of the Paris summer Olympics, competitive swimming has been rocked by the revelation that 23 Chinese swimmers, some of whom became medal winners, tested positive for a banned drug seven months before the Tokyo Olympics but were cleared to compete. One of them won four medals.

  The NY Times recently broke new details about what is now a burgeoning scandal. The Times reported that nearly half the swimmers China sent to the Tokyo Games tested positive for a banned heart medicine that can help athletes increase stamina and reduce recovery times.

   The Times identified five Chinese medalists who had tested positive for the heart drug, three of whom won gold. Swimmers from the US and other countries who finished behind Chinese medalists are calling for their awards to be revoked.

  China’s antidoping agency admitted the positive tests but said the swimmers had taken the banned drug unwittingly and in tiny amounts, and that no action against them was warranted. 

THE OBIT PAGE:  Terry Anderson, the journalist who was bureau chief for the Associated Press in Beirut when he was taken hostage by Islamic militants and held for six years, died in the Hudson Valley of complications following heart surgery. He was 76.

  Anderson was was snatched by gunmen shortly after dropping his tennis partner at home following a morning match. Militants in the Islamic Jihad Organization in Lebanon beat Anderson, blindfolded him, and kept him chained in as many as 20 hideouts for 2,454 days in Beirut, South Lebanon, and the Bekaa Valley.  He was held in solitary confinement on and off for a year or so.

  Anderson’s fiancé was pregnant at the time of his kidnapping with a daughter he didn’t meet until he was released. His fiancé waited for him and they married. 

  Anderson’s captivity was an international issue for all the years he was held. He won $26 million from impounded Iranian assets in a lawsuit, ran through all of it in seven years, and filed for bankruptcy. About his time as a hostage Anderson said, “The only real defense was to remember that no one could take away my self-respect and dignity — only I could do that.”

THE SPIN RACK: Israel’s military head of intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, resigned today because of his failure to foresee the October 7^th Hamas attack that sparked the current war in Gaza. — Police in riot gear arrived at the Yale University campus in New Haven this morning to confront about 200 protesters encamped in support of Palestinians. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University continued into their fifth day, ratcheting up tensions on campus.

BELOW THE FOLD:  Actor Michael Douglas, 79, revealed in a recent interview that when he went to visit one of his kids in college he was told, “‘This is not grandfather’s day, this is Parents’ Day.’”

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