ELECTION INDICTMENT: Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows along with 11 fake electors were indicted by an Arizona grand jury on charges of illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

  Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, said in a video statement, “I will not allow American democracy to be undermined.”

  Donald Trump is anonymously listed as “unindicted co-conspirator 1.” Also indicted are Boris Epshteyn, a former White House aide still working closely with Trump, and lawyers John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, and Christina Bobb.

  The indictment describes a conspiracy “to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters.” Charges have previously been brought in Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada against people who signed on as fake electors.

  Some defendants are putting up the usual Trumpian defenses. A spokesman for Giuliani said, “The continued weaponization of our justice system should concern every American as it does permanent, irrevocable harm to the country.”

CAMPUS CLASHES: Police tousled with pro-Palestinian protesters yesterday at the University of Texas Austin and at USC, making as many as 120 arrests as colleges try to deal with encampments on campus.

  House Speaker Mike Johnson yesterday visited Jewish students at Columbia University and called for the resignation of the school’s president, Nemat Shafik, for what he said was failure to protect Jewish students. A news release from Johnson’s office said he was at Columbia to talk about the “troubling rise of virulent antisemitism on America’s college campuses.” 

  Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been held at as many as 23 campuses across the country, from Harvard to Berkeley. Some of the protesters have turned their support for embattled Palestinians in Gaza and the middle East into calls for the destruction of Israel and hatred of Jewish people here in the states. 

  Columbia has been holding back riot police while negotiating with pro-Palestinians encamped on a square of grass on campus. The New York cops already arrested some students in a roundup while arrests of protesters have also been made at Yale, New York University, Ohio State, and the University of Minnesota. Brown University is threatening to punish its protesting students.

ORANGE ALERT: Lawyers for Donald Trump are expected at the Supreme Court today to argue that a president of the United States has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office.

  The former president himself is expected back in a New York court today for his Stormy Daniels payoff case.

  Trump is campaigning for re-election partly on a platform of increased presidential power and he wants that cemented with a Supreme Court ruling. As he once said at a 2019 campaign rally, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

  Trump’s lawyers are expected to flip the facts today and argue that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election were actually official acts to protect the integrity of the vote and therefore he cannot be subject to federal prosecution.  They will try to convince the Supreme Court that Trump was acting as president, not a disappointed and defeated presidential candidate.

THE POLITICS OF CHOICE: Arizona’s Republican majority house yesterday voted to repeal the state’s 1864 ban on abortion, passing the issue along to the state senate. Three Republicans split with their party to vote with the Democrats.

  The 1864 law allows no exceptions for rape and incest, only for the life of the mother. It would replace the state’s 15-week abortion limit on June 8th. Democrats in the Arizona senate say they believe they also have enough Republican votes to pass a repeal.

  The mostly forgotten 1864 law passed before Arizona became a state was recently revived by the state’s Supreme Court, which ruled the law still in effect. 

ONE WORD, “PLASTICS”: Plastic is everywhere. Plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic parts. It’s estimated that 400 million metric tons of plastic are produced every year, much of it thrown by the roadside or into streams and oceans, ultimately breaking down into microplastics in water and plastic sand on beaches. It can also get into the human bloodstream.

  A new study published in the journal Science Advances has identified 56 companies around the world responsible for more than 50 percent of branded plastic waste globally.

  Volunteers scoured beaches, parks, and rivers looking for plastic waste with identifiable names brands. The single largest contributor to plastic pollution is Coca-Cola, which accounted for 11 percent of the pollution worldwide, followed by PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Danone.

  The companies say they are working on the problem with recycling programs and efforts to reduce production of plastics. But the researchers found that branded plastic waste ends up in the environment in the same proportion as its manufacturer’s market share. So if BrandX has an aggressive conservation program and has 5 percent of the soda market, 5 percent of the waste found was BrandX, meaning their conservation efforts are not working.

THE SPIN RACK: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American hostage taken in the October 7^th Hamas attack on Israel has been shown in a recent video, alive but missing half his left arm. He is believed to have been wounded throwing grenades back at militants who had hurled them into a bomb shelter. — The Heisman Trust has re-instated the college football trophy to former USC running back Reggie Bush, who won the award in 2005 and was stripped of it in 2010 when he was found to have accepted “impermissible benefits” as a college athlete. In the now nearly-professional world of college sports, the Heisman Trust decided to give Bush his trophy back.

BELOW THE FOLD:  The news website Gateway Pundit, a purveyor of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect itself from defamation suits. In a statement on the website, owner Jim Hoft blamed the “progressive liberal lawfare attacks against our media outlet.”

  He can dish it out …

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