Now Hear This: Former Vice President Mike Pence spent at least five hours yesterday testifying before the grand jury considering President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His inside knowledge could be decisive in shaping Trump’s legal and political future. 

  Trump tried to get Pence to block or delay certifying the election. Pence has written about some of this in his recent book and just getting that on the record in front of the grand jury could be very damaging to Trump. Prosecutors and the grand jury can’t go by Pence’s book. They have to hear it directly.

  Pence is expected to decide soon whether he will run against Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination.

Econ 101: Gross Domestic Product is down but still growing, the Commerce Department announced, indicating that consumer spending is still keeping the economy from sliding into recession.

  Gross Domestic Product rose at a 1.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter, down from a 2.6 percent rate in the last three months of 2022. It’s still a third straight quarter of growth.

  Despite continuing growth in the economy, businesses are laying off thousands of employees, which ultimately could drag down consumer spending, reduce inflation, and take the economy into recession.

J’Accuse: The lawyer defending Donald Trump in E. Jean Carroll’s rape and defamation trial yesterday got pretty quickly into her politics. Joseph Tacopina confirmed that Carroll votes Democrat, then asked if it was true that she was “almost in disbelief” when Trump was elected president. She answered, “not almost.”

  Carroll is suing Trump to be found liable for rape, and defamation for denying it and insulting her. She says Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the late 1990s and testified that she did not report the incident at the time because her mother was dying.

  Tacopina challenged Carroll about not remembering exactly when the incident happened, and in a testy exchange asked why she didn’t scream. “I’m not a screamer,” she responded. “I was fighting. You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.”

  With her voice rising, Carroll said that women often stay silent because they fear being asked why they didn’t stop the attack.. “They are always asked, ‘Why didn’t you scream?’” she said. Then she said emphatically,  “I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not.” 

Spy Games:  Prosecutors in the case of Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting classified documents in an online gaming platform, say the amount of sensitive information he took  “far exceeds what has been publicly disclosed.”

  After a hearing yesterday, a federal magistrate said he needs more time to consider whether  Teixeira should be released to his parents’ custody on $20,000 bond.  The 21-year-old Teixeira has an established fascination with violence and military paraphernalia. He surfed the internet for information about mass shootings and had a room at home made up like a bunker. A court filing said he had regular online discussions about violence and murder and that he surrounded his bed at his parents’ house with guns and tactical gear.

  Prosecutors argued that Teixeira should  be detained indefinitely because he poses a “serious flight risk” and might still have information that would be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states.”

The War Room: A wave of Russian missiles hit Ukraine today, killing at least 15 people. Worst hit was the central city of Uman, which is nearly 200 miles north of the front line and has not previously been a prime target.

The Obit Page: Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose claim that a black teenager had whistled at her led to the infamous 1955 lynching of  Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the open coffin funeral to reveal the horror of racial violence, has died at age 88.

  Then just a 21-year-old mother, Carolyn Bryant claimed that Till had also grabbed her and come on to her. Bryant’s then husband Roy, and his half-brother, were tried for murder and acquitted after just one hour of jury deliberations. Knowing that they could not be tried twice, the two men later admitted the murder in a paid interview with Look Magazine.

  In 2008, Donham admitted that she had elaborated her most inflammatory accusations under pressure from her husband and his  lawyers. She told a researcher at Duke University, “You tell these stories for so long that they seem true.”

— Tabloid talk show host Jerry Springer, whose rowdy broadcast lowered the standards of taste and acceptability for television in a quest for viewers, ratings, and money, died at home in Chicago at age 79.

  He succeeded. The “Jerry Springer Show” ran from 1991 to 2018. Springer offered up guests with unusual personalities and lifestyles to be hooted and jeered by his studio audience. Husbands battled wives, homewreckers were exposed, and sometimes it broke out into brawls with chairs hurled across the stage. Springer had a particular interest in sex, the more the bizarre the better. One of his most controversial shows involved a man he said he was “married” to a horse.

  Springer had previous careers in television news and politics. He was mayor of Cincinnati for a year and previously as a member of the Cincinnati city council in 1974 he was caught in a classic tabloid scandal himself, paying prostitutes for their services with personal checks. 

The Spin Rack:  CNN’s Dana Bash will be taking over the daily show “Inside Politics” from her former husband John King later this year, the network announced. They say King will take on a new role focused on voters in battleground states during the 2024 election campaign. — The Carolina Panthers picked Alabama’s Heisman trophy quarterback Bryce Young  as the NFL top draft pick of the year. 

Below the Fold: How the mighty fall. Fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson has started what he said will be a daily live show on YouTube.

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