TRUMP ON TRIAL: Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testified in the former president’s criminal trial that Trump personally approved the $130,000 payment to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels and approved the plan to reimburse Cohen for fronting the money.

  Cohen recalled Trump saying, “Just do it.” 

  This is the key link that could prove the payment to Daniels was intended to affect the outcome of the 2016 election and was therefore an illegal campaign contribution.   Cohen said Trump was upset on the eve of the 2016 election about the possibility of the story getting out that he’d had a sexual fling with Daniels. He said Trump’s concern was for the election, not for his marriage with his third wife, Melania. “He wasn’t even thinking about Melania, this was all about the campaign,” Cohen testified.

  Cohen quoted Trump saying: “This is a disaster, a total disaster, women are going to hate me. This is really a disaster. Women will hate me. Guys, they think it’s cool. But this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.” 

  Trump told Cohen to stop Daniels’ story from getting out, he testified. Cohen again quoted Trump saying, “I want you to just push it out as long as you can, just get past the election, because if I win it will have no relevance because I’m president, and if I lose, I don’t even care.” 

   For much of the day Trump was seen sitting placidly with his eyes closed

  Present in court yesterday were Ohio Republican Sen. Senator JD Vance, who’s considered a possibility to be Trump’s 2024 running mate, and Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who’s dumb as a brick. Trump said after court that the two showed up voluntarily because the think the trial is a scam. 

THE ABORTION BEAT: Legislators in Baton Rouge tacked an amendment onto a Louisiana Senate bill that would make the state the first in the country to categorize the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances. Anyone in possession of the pills without a valid prescription or outside of professional practice would face a prison sentence. 

  The primary purpose of the law under consideration is to make it a crime to give a pregnant woman the pills without her consent, an act of “coerced criminal abortion.” 

THE WAR ROOM: Ukraine’s military is short on troops and facing a “critical” situation in the country’s northeast, The NY Times reports after a video call with a general. “The situation is on the edge,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said in a video call from a bunker in Kharkiv, The Times reports. “Every hour this situation moves toward critical.”

  Russian troops attacked across the border last week near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, capturing at least nine settlements and villages and forcing thousands of civilians to flee.

  The situation for Ukraine became more dire as help from the US was held up in Congress. Much needed artillery shells are just beginning to arrive from America.

  The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) says the Ukraine defense is hampered by being forbidden to use US-supplied weapons over the border in Russian territory. George Barros writes for ISW that, “US policy has effectively created a vast sanctuary in which Russia has been able to amass its ground invasion force and from which it is launching glide bombs and other long-range strike systems in support of its renewed invasion.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Susan Backlinie, the actress and stunt woman who played the first shark victim in the opening scene of the 1975 movie blockbuster movie “Jaws,” died over the weekend at home in California. She was 77 and the cause was given as a heart attack.

  Backlinie played a young woman skinny dipping at night and suddenly pulled under by an unseen shark. She bobs up and clings to a buoy before she is snatched under for good.

  She recalled in an interview that Director Steven Spielberg told her, “When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubble gum.” Backlinie said, “I think we did that.”

   She said for years after that people used to tell her that her scene made them terrified of swimming in the ocean.

THE SPIN RACK: President Biden yesterday ordered the shutdown of a China-connected cryptocurrency mine built just a mile from a Wyoming Air Force base that controls nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. The President’s executive order said the facility “presents a national security risk because its equipment could be used for surveillance and espionage. — Smoke from early-season Canadian wildfires has once again dipped into the lower 48, casting a pall over Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin. — After Miss Teen USA resigned citing discomfort with the pageant organization, the runner-up says she doesn’t want the job either. — Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof says he left his home country for Europe after a court in Iran sentenced him to a flogging and prison on national security charges. One of the accusations was that women appeared in his latest film without wearing a head covering.  Rasoulof said in a video: “If geographical Iran suffers beneath the boots of your religious tyranny, cultural Iran is alive in the common minds of millions of Iranians who were forced to leave Iran due to your brutality and no power can impose its will on it. From today, I am a resident of cultural Iran.” 

BELOW THE FOLD: Bob Ferguson, the Democratic frontrunner for his party’s nomination to be governor was suddenly confronted last week with two other entries to the race … both of them named Bob Ferguson.

  The original Ferguson said it was a scheme to split the vote and spoil his chances so the state’s attorney general ordered the second two Bob Fergusons to “cease and desist.” The attorney general is Bob Ferguson.

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