Stranger than Fiction:Actor and singer Jussie Smollett has been charged with  disorderly conduct for filing what the Chicago police now say was a false police report that he was the target of a racist and gay-hating attack last month. He faces up to three years in prison.

  The black and openly gay Smollett told the cops that two unknown men accosted him on Jan. 29th, beat him, put a noose around his neck, doused him with bleach, and said “This is MAGA country,” a reference to President Trump’s “make America great” slogan. His initial report garnered national sympathy and condemnation of such attacks.

  Now, two Nigerian brothers who live in Chicago have told the police Smollett paid them to stage the attack. The brothers told investigators that Smollett was behind a racist letter sent to him on the set of the television series “Empire,” and when that didn’t garner enough attention, he engineered a phony attack on the street.

  Why he might have done all this is yet to be explained.

In Thin Air: The avowed climate-change denier President Trump is appointing a 12-member panel to look into whether global warming is a threat to US security. One of the panelists will be a Princeton physicist who says carbon dioxide, which feeds atmospheric warming, is actually beneficial to human beings.

  The physicist is William Happer, who serves as Trump’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies. Happer once wrote, “More CO2 will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”

 Environmentalists say the Trump panel is probably expected to conclude what the President already thinks, that climate change isn’t real. 

  The memo announcing the panel claims that scientific and defense department reports warning about the effects of climate change haven’t been properly challenged. It says, “These scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security.”

The Justice Files: CNNreports according to sources that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is close to wrapping up his report on Russian election meddling and may deliver it as soon as next week.— President Trump’s former lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen was given a 60-day extension before he reports to prison. Cohen had shoulder surgery and needs physical rehab.—  The Trump administration is preventing an American-born woman who joined the Islamic State from re-entering the US. Hoda Muthana, 20, who was born in the US while her father was in the country as Yemeni diplomat, says she is sorry for her involvement with ISIS. Although Muthana was issued a US passport, the State Department says she’s not a citizen because there is an exception for children born to visiting diplomats. — A Coast Guard lieutenant and self-described white nationalist arrested in Maryland last week is accused of plotting to kill a long list of prominent journalists, Democratic politicians, professors, judges, and what he called “leftists in general.” He had a big stash of weapons.

The Money Ballot:In the first 24 hours after announcing his second run for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders raised $6 million from 225,000 donors. That’s millions more than any of the other Democrats in their first 24 hours after declaring their candidacy.

Off Air:Battle-hardened war correspondent Lara Logan, once a star of CBS Newsand a correspondent for “60 Minutes,” was quietly let go from the network sometime last year, it’s been revealed in the last couple of days. Her last appearance on “60 Minutes” was in May.

  Her employment status was outed over the weekend when she granted an interview to a conservative podcast in which she said the media in general skew politically liberal. Logan said, “This interview is professional suicide for me.”

  She had already killed herself. In 2013 she reported a story for “60 Minutes” about a security officer named Dylan Davies who claimed to be a witness to the 2012 fatal attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. His account was fiction and Logan failed to catch it. She and her producer were suspended, and her career was downhill from there.

Tabloid News: In  a rare moment of journalistic brotherhood, The Daily News today published a front-page headline in sympathy with The NY Times as the President calls the press the “enemy of the people.” The “wood” says, “Dear Mr. President: Free Press is Essential to Democracy. The News stands with the Times.”

-30-