The Spectator

It’s been a banner week for armchair lawyers. Here’s what you need to know about Donald Trump’s trials in New York City and before the Supreme Court.In the Big Apple, where Trump has scored rave reviews in bodegas and from construction workers. This week, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, confirmed what Ted Cruz long suspected during the 2016 campaign — that the tabloid was deeply plugged-in with the Trump orbit, even to the point of manufacturing conspiracies that Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald and mashed the two together,” Pecker said. “And that’s how that story was prepared — created, I would say.

President Joe Biden signed the foreign aid package, which features $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, on Wednesday after the bill swiftly moved through Congress. The breakdown of aid is as follows: $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for Taiwan.Speaker Mike Johnson infuriated some of his Republican colleagues by even negotiating on the legislation, let alone bringing it to the House floor for a vote; he previously said he would not move any foreign aid until Democrats agreed to give additional funds for border security. Instead, after the Senate rejected the border security bill HR-2 and Johnson rejected the Senate-negotiated immigration package, the speaker made moves to go ahead with sending money abroad anyway.

Raucous anti-Israel protests at Ivy League Columbia University — which have spread to other campuses following the administration’s crackdown on encampments erected by student activists — are becoming a hot topic on Capitol Hill.Republicans are eager to point out the protests are merely a symptom of the larger rot within academia; college administrators for years tolerated left-wing activists breaking university policy (and often rewarded them for their efforts) while resisting the representation of conservative voices on campus. This posture has allowed radical, hate-filled movements to foment among increasingly progressive student bodies.

Did Iran’s ayatollah have the worst birthday ever? His eighty-fifth kicked off with a bang, as Israel retaliated after Iran’s unprecedented strike across the Jewish state that featured a failed barrage of lethal drones over the weekend. What comes next from Iran remains anyone’s guess — but the Israeli response, which struck an Iranian military but not nuclear site, served as an undoubted shot across the bow to the largest state sponsor of terrorism. The message was that it can’t attempt to directly attack Israel’s homeland without consequences and that Israel has the capability to attack Iran’s nukes if they so please. Iranian proxies, like Hamas, not only invaded Israel on October 7, but have been plaguing global shipping routes for months.

The Senate kicked off its impeachment trial for Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday as Democrats quickly dismissed the charges.House Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas in February for failing to enforce federal immigration law and lying to Congress when he said the border was secure. The two articles of impeachment were finally delivered to the Senate yesterday, and although Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that the body has a duty to hold a full trial, senators voted along party lines just a few hours after the start of the trial to dismiss Mayorkas’s alleged “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” They dismissed the second charge — “breach of public trust” — in short order, as well.

A week after the death of O.J. Simpson, America has a new Trial of the Century — perhaps the first of many. Jury selection is currently underway in a Manhattan courtroom as presidential candidate Donald Trump faces charges from New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg of faking business records to conceal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels says that she was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in order to not talk publicly about having sex with Trump a decade previously, shortly after his third marriage to Melania and the birth of their son Barron. This is the first trial of a former US president.

Forget closing the porous southern border: the Biden administration has decided instead to take aim at gun owners, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, by moving one step closer to closing the so-called “gun show loophole.” The “loophole,” as I’ve written before, refers to the federal law that originally prohibited people convicted of certain violent felonies from owning firearms. Over the years, the law has, unsurprisingly, been expanded, and by 1994, firearm buyers purchasing from a dealer (with a Federal Firearm License, or FFL) have been required first to receive permission from the government to do so via a federal background check.