The Ham Sandwich: Donald Trump yesterday became the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges. The indictment has not been opened, so we don’t know what the charges are, but this comes from the New York grand jury investigating the hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels on the brink of the 2016 election.

  Maggie Haberman reports for the NY Times that, “Mr. Trump and his aides were caught off guard by the timing, believing that any action by the grand jury was still weeks away and might not occur at all.” Trump will have to surrender next week, be fingerprinted, have his mugshot taken, and maybe even be handcuffed.

  This morning, the entire New York City police department is on alert. The former president, who claims to be the first and the greatest at everything, has managed to break the precedent that presidents and former presidents are off limits to criminal prosecution. Trump in a statement called the indictment “Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history.” Another superlative.

Russia, No Love: Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia and accused of espionage for “trying to obtain secret information,” according to authorities. It’s the first time an American journalist has been detained on accusations of spying in Russia since the Cold War. 

  “The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation has stopped the illegal activities of US citizen Evan Gershkovich, born in 1991, a correspondent of the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal,” the FSB, said. 

  The Journal says it “vehemently” denies the accusation.

  Gershkovich was on assignment in the Ural mountain city of Yekaterinburg, where the Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered. Gershkovich covers Russia, Ukraine, and the former Soviet countries, according to the Journal’s website. He has previously worked for Agence France-Presse, the Moscow Times, and the New York Times.

   His arrest is a serious matter, given the state of US-Russia relations during the Ukraine war. American Paul Whelan, arrested on espionage charges, has been held by Russia since 2018.

The Fox Fraud: Only 10 days after the 2020 election, the Fox News “Brain Room” research department determined that there was no election fraud even though the network continued to air such clams, according to documents revealed in the $1.6 billion defamation suit brought against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems.

   One internal Fox document dated November 13, 2020, says, “Claims about Dominion switching or deleting votes are 100% false.”

  Digging into a Trump claim that Dominion “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” the Brain Room responded that, “There’s no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election or of major problems with Dominion’s systems. Election officials from both parties have stated that the election went well and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.”

  Fox is defending its right to be wrong, even to be deliberately wrong, testing the limits of First Amendment protections. A network statement said, “The foundational right to a free press is at stake and we will continue to fiercely advocate for the First Amendment in protecting the role of news organizations to cover the news.” 

Eye on Transgender: CBS News executives have banned their staff from using the word “transgender” when reporting on the Nashville school shooter, saying in a memo that, “The shooter’s gender identity has not been confirmed by CBS News.”

  This comes despite the police identifying Audrey Hale as transgender from female to male. The question is whether Hale’s sexual identity had any relevance to the crime any more than her race.

  What CBS really needs to do is ban use of the word “healing” in the aftermath of a school shooting.

The Obit Page: Gladys Kessler, a federal judge who delivered an historic  2006 ruling that the tobacco industry had violated civil racketeering laws by “repeatedly, and with enormous skill and sophistication” deceiving the public about the health hazards of smoking, died on March 16 in Washington at age 85.

  Kessler presided over a number of big cases, but she sat for 10 years on United States v. Philip Morris, filed by the Justice Department in 1999 against the major cigarette makers. Her 1,653-page opinion said the cigarette industry had a history of misleading the public and “have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal.” She said they did it  “with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.” 

  Her ruling resulted in the stern health warnings on cigarette packages. 

The Spin Rack: Following the Nashville school massacre this week, anti-gun protesters stormed the steps of the Tennessee capitol yesterday. — Nine solders died in the collision of two Black Hawk helicopters Wednesday night along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, according to the 101^st Airborne Division. The choppers were reported to be on a routine training exercise. — Former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg is no longer represented by lawyers paid for by the former president’s company, feeding speculation that Weisselberg may finally have turned on Trump. — With a gun held to its head by The Walt Disney Company, ABC News is letting go of as many as 50 people, many of them in executive positions. Some have been with ABC for 20-30 years or more. Included is Los Angeles bureau chief, David Herndon, a friend of The Rooney Report, who’s been with the network since 1999. It can be a heartless business.

Below the Fold: Actress Gwyneth Paltrow yesterday won the lawsuit in which a 76-year-old retired optometrist claimed she had run into her on a Utah ski slope causing permanent damage. In a case of “he said, she said,” Paltrow said it was Terry Sanderson who ran into her and she countersued for legal fees. The jury believed her. Paltrow said in a statement, “I felt that acquiescing to a false claim compromised my integrity.” 

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