Trump World: Former President Donald Trump took home to Florida more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation’s most covert intelligence operations, according to a letter the National Archives sent to Trump’s lawyers.

  The  May 10^th letter  written by the acting US archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, described the documents as very sensitive and necessary for government operations while batting down Trump’s claims of executive privilege as a former president. The letter details more than a year of resistance by Trump to returning the documents. Informing Trump’s lawyer that a former president cannot withhold documents from a sitting president, the letter says, “The question in this case is not a close one.”

  The letter also suggests that Trump could be implicated in a crime by having kept at Mar-a-Lago documents related to Special Access Programs, some of the nation’s most closely held secrets. 

  Trump is trying every defense in his book, from claiming that he’s cooperated to calling himself a victim of legal persecution. He has argued that documents can be unclassified on his say-so.

  He’s scrambling for decent lawyers. Yesterday a Florida judge told two lawyers representing Trump, neither of them licensed in the state, that they had messed up fairly routine paperwork to represent him regarding  the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The judge told the lawyers in her order, “A sample motion can be found on the Court’s website.” 

It’s Political: Florida Rep. Charlie Crist, who once served as the Republican governor of his state, won the nomination yesterday to run as a Democrat  against Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a rising star in the Republican party.

  It promises to be an interesting race this fall. DeSantis has been waging a war on “woke” culture, signing his state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and supporting a ban on abortion while fighting the rarely taught “Critical Race Theory” in schools.

  Crist left the Republican party in 2010 because it had become “anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-minority, anti-gay, anti-education, anti-environment,”  and displayed racial animus to the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama.

  Crist said last night that, “the truth is this governor couldn’t care less about your freedom. He’s abusive. He is a bully. And he’s dangerous, he is dangerous.” 

  Also in Florida, Rep. Val Demings won the Democratic nomination to try to take the senate seat from the Trump-loving Marco Rubio. Demings, who is Black, was on Joe Biden’s short list for vice president. She served as an impeachment manager in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. 

  In New York City, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the powerful West Side Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, won a nasty primary, pushing out his veteran ally Carolyn Maloney for a merged congressional district. It got ugly in the past few weeks, but it’s Nadler who moves on to the fall election.

  Up the Hudson River, Democrat Paul Ryan crushed Republican Marc Molinaro to fill a congressional seat left vacant by the state’s now Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado. The two run again in the fall.

The War Zone: Ukraine celebrates its independence day today under threat of increased Russian attacks that have yet to materialize.

  In a speech to the nation, President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulated his country for having resisted the Russian invasion for six months.

  “Every new day is a new reason not to give up,” he said. “Because, having gone through so much, we have no right not to reach the end. What is the end of the war for us? We used to say, ‘Peace.’ Now we say, ‘Victory.’”

  Mass gatherings were prohibited out of caution against Russian missiles.

  So far in the war, 5,587 Ukrainian civilians are confirmed dead but the real number is believed to be much larger. Roughly 6.6 million have become refugees.

  In the fighting, about 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 25,000 Russians. 

  Ukraine has been kept alive by Western military aid against the much better equipped yet not equally motivated Russian army. The latest US package of arms is on its way. The Biden administration has sent $9 billion worth of military assistance.

The Spin Rack: A federal jury yesterday found two men guilty of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. Prosecutors argued that Adam Fox was the ringleader of a plot to kidnap the Democratic governor from her summer home and Adam Croft was a part of the plan by preparing explosives. They face possible life sentences.  — Former Louisville detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty in federal court yesterday to helping falsify the search warrant. that led to the police killing of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose death sparked protests over police violence against people of color. — Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pled guilty to drunk driving for a car accident he had in May. He has to serve one day in a work program and pay $1,700 in fines. — Europe’s Danube River, drying up with drought, has exposed the wrecks of a dozen German warships sunk during World War II. In Texas, a dry river in Dinosaur Valley State park has revealed tracks that are 113 million years old.

Political Snacking:  They didn’t vote in Pennsylvania yesterday, but the hoody-wearing regular guy John Fetterman is duking it out for a Senate seat with television celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz, who carpet bagged from New Jersey to make his run. Not all the campaigning has been about ideas or the welfare of the voters. Oz complained about the rising cost of “crudité” at the grocery, to which Fetterman responded “in PA, we call this a veggie tray.”

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