Crime Beat: Well then. It seems everybody’s in trouble with the law.

  Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort faces the likelihood that the Manhattan district attorney will charge him with loan fraud, attempting to ensure that Manafort will go to prison even if President Trump pardons him for his federal convictions. 

  Singer R. Kelly has been charged in Chicago with sexually abusing  four women, three of them minors. Prosecutors say the incidents took place from 1998 to 2010 and the minors were between 13 and 16. 

  Kelly obviously has a taste for jail bait and he’s been able to skate for years. Several women described their experience with Kelly in the recent Lifetimetelevision documentary “Surviving R. Kelly.” But Kelly hasn’t been charged with a crime since he was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008.

  Also in Chicago, following charges of filing a false police report, actor and singer Jussie Smollett has been suspended from the cast for the last two episodes of this season’s television  series “Empire.” The police have a devastating amount of evidence to show that Smollett staged the attack upon himself.

  And last — today anyway — seventy-seven-year old Robert Kraft, owner of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, has been charged in Jupiter, Fla. with paying for sex. It happened at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, a name that tells you the orchids are not flowers.

 Police say the spa has connections to human trafficking and the women who worked there lived in the building and were not allowed to leave. 

  Now — this seems pertinent to the story in a way that begs explanation for his behavior  — Kraft has a 39-year-old leggy blonde girlfriend to die for. What was he thinking and what part of his body was doing the thinking? 

The Insider: President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen has given federal prosecutors in Manhattan new information about possibly “irregular” activity by the Trump Organization, The NY Timesreports. 

  Cohen also gave information about a donor to the President’s inaugural committee, a growing target of inquiry by the feds. There’s nothing in the story that suggests Trump did anything illegal himself.

Tough Boss:The NY Times has dug into the reputation of presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar for being a paranoid and abusive boss. It isn’t pretty.

  The Timesinterviewed two-dozen former aides of the Minnesota senator and reports that, “Many of these former aides say she was not just demanding but often dehumanizing — not merely a tough boss in a capital full of them but the steward of a work environment colored by volatility, highhandedness and distrust.”

  The story acknowledged that female politicians are often criticized for the same behavior admired in men, but the paper says many of the aides interviewed deny this is the case with Klobuchar. They say she’s a nightmare.

  She has thrown telephones and binders at employees and demanded that low-level staffers wash her dishes, a possible violation of Senate ethics, the paper reports. She once ate a salad on an airplane using a comb for a fork and told her aide to clean it afterwards.

  She sends emails and makes phone calls at all hours and is brutal when disappointed. One email said, “This is the worst press staff I ever had.”

  Now she’s getting the worst press she ever had.

Appointed:President Trump announced last night that he will nominate Kelly Knight Craft, the US ambassador to Canada and a major Republican donor, to be the US ambassador to the United Nations. Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman, withdrew from consideration.

Political Meltdown:Venezuelan security forces shot and killed protesters at the Brazilian border yesterday as the politically-challenged government of socialist President Nicolás Maduro nears economic collapse. The government is preventing foreign food aid from crossing the border.

  Maduro is blocking aid in an act of denial that his people are beginning to starve. Venezuela’s opposition, led by Juan Guaidó, has vowed to deliver tons of donated humanitarian aid from other countries, an embarrassment to Maduro.

  The US and other countries recognize Guaidó as the legitimate leader of the country, but Maduro refuses to step aside.

Parenting:The bizarre couple who kept their 13 children ages 2 to 29 imprisoned in their home Perris, Calif. home have pleaded guilty to false imprisonment, cruelty to an adult dependent, and cruelty to children.

  David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 50, kept their children shackled to beds and starving in what was described a little over a year ago as a “house of horrors.” The children were allowed to shower only once a year.

   The Turpin’s 17 year-old-daughter escaped and told authorities about her family. She was so malnourished and underdeveloped, they though she was just 10.

  The couple faces prison terms of 25 years to life.

In the Woods:Survival expert Bear Grylls is a hero to men who would like to think from the comfort of their armchairs that they too could kill and eat a snake if they were lost in the mountains. 

  Now the survivalist himself is in hot water for boiling a frog on his show, “Running Wild.” Grylls set an episode in a national park inBulgaria’s Rila mountains, where the wildlife and even the water is protected. The Bulgarians are angry that Grylls swam in a lake, lit a campfire, and ate the frog. Grylls will probably survive this, too.

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