May 3, 2026

02d Agit-Prop

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Excerpt from www.motherjones.com

Growing up, Myles Markham always felt like an outsider. Markham was multiracial in small, mostly white Florida towns. And they were queer. “I was swimming in water that told me that who I was, what I was, needed to change if I wanted to be safe,” they say. “I really believed, ‘I am a problem. I need to be fixed.’”

As a teen, a friend got them interested in evangelical Christianity, which seemed to offer the promise of ­transformation. They joined a church youth group and began studying the Bible. Soon after, Markham found an online forum for a ministry that supports “those affected by unwanted homosexuality.” Markham didn’t identify as transgender at the time, but to their mentors in the conversion therapy program, Markham says, sexuality was inextricable from gender identity. “A woman being attracted to women—she was confused about her gender identity, confused about what it means to be a godly woman,” they explain. “And so what they end up doing, therapeutically, is attempting to police and reform your gender presentation.”

Markham’s experience is far from unique. As professional and legal objections to conversion therapy grew in the 2000s, such “change efforts” were migrated from the clinical realm into religious settings. The vast majority of people who have gone through conversion therapy received it from a religious leader, according to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. The practice remains shrouded in secrecy, says Simon Kent Fung, a conversion therapy survivor and creator of an award-winning podcast on the subject, Dear Alana. “In religious settings, homosexuality is not just a pathology, but a spiritual brokenness,” he explains. “Conversion therapy today is psychologically manipulative.”

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Excerpt from scnow.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — An anti-abortion activist who led others on an invasion and blockade of a reproductive health clinic in the nation’s capital was sentenced on Tuesday to nearly five years in prison.

Lauren Handy, 30, was among several people convicted of federal civil rights offenses for blockading access to the Washington Surgi-Clinic on Oct. 22, 2020. Police found five fetuses at Handy’s home in Washington after she was indicted.

A clinic nurse sprained her ankle when one of Handy’s co-defendants forced his way into the clinic and pushed her. Another co-defendant accosted a woman who was having labor pains, preventing her from getting off a floor and entering the clinic, prosecutors said.

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Excerpt from www.newsbusters.org

CNN aired a special documentary entitled The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper: The Battle Over Transgender Athletes on Sunday that purported to be a nuanced look at the issue of transgenderism’s relationship with women’s sports. However, the program clearly had a preferred side, as it claimed there’s no evidence that men who think they are women have an athletic advantage despite showing examples of people climbing the leaderboard and setting records after their transition.

Despite his name being on the title, Cooper barely appeared during the show, instead, the documentary bounced around to various subjects who each said their own piece. In one clip, former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines was denouncing the movement in a speech, “A lot of world leaders, the message that they’re sending is that we as women don’t matter. Our safety doesn’t matter. Privacy: forget it.”

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Excerpt from www.theguardian.com

The prosecution asks Michael Cohen: Why in fact did you pay that money to Stormy Daniels?

To ensure that the story would not come out, would not affect Mr Trump’s chances of becoming President of the United States.

If not for the campaign, Mr Cohen, would you have paid that money? “No, ma’am.”

“At who’s direction, and on who’s behalf, did you commit that crime?” Cohen said:

On behalf of Mr. Trump.

He’s talking about his admission to an AMI-related charge, the Karen McDougal payment. Why did he do it?

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Excerpt from www.scientificamerican.com

Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling

With few states tracking who is being homeschooled and what they are learning, an untold number of U.S. children are at risk of a poor education or even abuse

The number of children being educated at home has been growing for the past few decades. No one knows by how much, and that is part of the problem. Home­school­ing is barely tracked or regulated in the U.S. But children deserve a safe and robust education, whether they attend a traditional school or are educated at home.

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Excerpt from crooksandliars.com

Fox’s Maria Bartiromo helps GOP Sen. Mike Lee promote the Republican’s false narrative that migrants crossing the border are going to vote in federal elections in droves and their latest voter suppression attempt based on that narrative.

Just like Speaker Mike Johnson, Lee has no proof that this is happening anywhere, but that didn’t stop him from pretending people would risk going to prison by voting illegally during his interview this Sunday:

BARTIROMO: Let’s talk about the bill that you are pushing, the SAVE Act, and I want to get your take on a free and fair election come November. Tell us about the SAVE Act.

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Excerpt from www.rawstory.com

Former President Donald Trump went on a Truth Social spree, hours after his onetime fixer Michael Cohen took the stand in his criminal hush money trial, with rapid-pace quotes attacking the legitimacy of the trial.

Trump published 11 quotes on his social media site after delivering a shouting rant outside the Manhattan courtroom where he stands accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Among the quotes he posted were from right-wing National Review editor Andrew McCarthy.

“Bragg has no authority to enforce Federal Law,” the quote reads. “The NDA payments were not Campaign expenditures under Federal Law…That’s why the FEC and DOJ — which do have exclusive authority to enforce Federal Law — took no action against Trump…Bragg is making up his own version of Federal Campaign Law.” He also quoted far-right talk radio host Mark Levin, who said, “This is a case looking for a Legal basis. THERE IS NONE!”

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Excerpt from www.washingtonexaminer.com

President Joe Biden underscored his record with labor union workers as he announced new, higher tariffs on Chinese imports, including a 100% rate on electric vehicles.

“I’m determined that the future of electric vehicles will be made in America by union workers,” Biden told a crowd on Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden.

Hurrying through his remarks, held under the threat of rain, Biden also criticized former President Donald Trump for his trade policy, contending Trump’s deal with China did not increase U.S. exports.

“Now, Trump and MAGA Republicans want across-the-board tariffs on all imports from all countries,” he said. “Well, that would drive up costs for families on an average of $1,500 per year each year. He simply doesn’t get it.”

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Excerpt from www.msnbc.com

Billionaire Trump backer and major TikTok investor Jeff Yass has been exposed as the key financier behind a right-wing group known for investigating and intimidating liberals. CNBC reports Yass is a significant investor in the group “Accuracy in Media,” an organization that’s been behind recent efforts to dox and disrupt pro-Palestinian demonstrators on college campuses. In a press release responding to the news, the watchdog group Accountable.US expounded on the work Accuracy in Media does, noting it specializes in “sting operations and propaganda campaigns” and comparing the group to the beleaguered right-wing organization Project Veritas. I’ve grown quite suspicious of Yass’ aspirations when it comes to media. His opposition to a TikTok ban (paired with an interesting uptick of pro-Trump content on the app) and his involvement in dubious organizations like Accuracy in Media suggest he’s deeply interested in tools that can be used to manipulate and misinform the public.

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Excerpt from crooksandliars.com

On Tuesday, Biden announced an increase in tariffs on a variety of Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, solar cells, semiconductors, and advanced batteries, to protect strategic American industries from a new wave of competitors that the President said were unfairly subsidized by Beijing, according to the New York Times. Of course, Trump grabbed credit for that, and he was all about tariffs, but at the same time, he criticized Biden for it from the courthouse because, of course he did.

“They’ve also got to do it on other vehicles, and they have to do it on a lot of other products,” he told reporters before entering court for his hush money/election interference trial in New York. “Because China’s eating our lunch right now. … They have to do it on much more than electric vehicles.”

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Excerpt from www.rawstory.com

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems intent on strangling the life out of the Constitution to give Donald Trump authoritarian powers, according to a state Supreme Court justice.

Hawaii Supreme Court justice Todd Eddins has been an outspoken critic of the nation’s top court, which he said had abandoned legal precedent to impose their personal preferences and political theories to decide cases, and he told Slate columnists Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern that these decisions put democracy at risk.

“You know, when precedent is for suckers and we don’t know whether settled law will become unsettled every June, it’s really hard for the judiciary to function,” Eddins said. “It’s hard for judges to operate when there’s a lack of stability. And it’s not just judges; it’s the litigants, the lawyers, the law professors who have to tear up their syllabuses. I mean, it’s fundamental to our American system of justice that law works incrementally, that cases build upon cases, and that we rely on precedent. That’s the stability of the law. And when you have a group of people who come in and disregard precedent, it really unsettles things; it causes chaos. People don’t know how to operate.”

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Excerpt from lidblog.com

 

The Washington Post is warning all you rubes out there that you need to stop using hot water because we need to save the earth… or something.

That’s right, folks, you low down, rabble need to stop valuing your comfort, your nice hot showers, and you hot-water to clean your dishes and clothing. How water is destroying the earth, dont’cha know?

Take the word of Allyson Chiu of the Washington Post. She knows better than you do, of course.

Just look at this nonsense:

You may not be giving a second thought to setting your washing machine on the hot cycle, cranking your showers to a steamy temperature or scrubbing your dirty dishes under a stream of scalding water.

If you did, you’d find that you probably don’t need to use so much hot water — and that you could be saving energy and cutting your utility bills. Water heating is responsible for more than 10 percent of both annual residential energy use and consumer utility costs, the biggest share after air conditioning and heating, according to the Energy Department. An American household uses an average of 64 gallons of hot water a day — close to the amount needed to fill an average bathtub — by doing laundry, showering, washing the dishes and running kitchen and bathroom faucets.

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Excerpt from www.sciencedaily.com

The latest edition of Florida Atlantic University’s “Florida Climate Resilience Survey,” found that 90% of Floridians believe that climate change is happening. In comparison, a recent Yale University survey showed 72% of all Americans believe climate change is happening. The FAU survey includes questions on beliefs about climate change, experience with extreme weather events and support for climate-related policies.

The Florida Climate Resilience Survey also shows belief in human-caused climate change has surged among Florida Independents while slipping among Republicans in the state since last fall.

But despite these changes, the latest edition of the survey found enduring support among Floridians for increased government action to address the consequences of a warming planet. The survey found 68% of all respondents want state government to do more and 69% want the federal government to do more to address climate change, a finding consistent with previous surveys.

“Floridians support strengthening our resilience to the effects of climate change because they are experiencing it. The urgency to act means debate over causes is largely irrelevant,” said Colin Polsky, Ph.D., founding director of FAU’s School of Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sustainability (ECOS), a professor in geosciences, and director of the FAU Center for Environmental Studies (CES) within the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.

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Excerpt from www.politicususa.com

Michael Cohen has drawn praise so far for being a calm, credible, and poised witness, but the powerful way that he closed his testimony did major damage to Trump.

Harry Litman posted about the end of Cohen’s testimony:
“Do you have any regrets about your past work and association w/ Trump”
I do. I regret doing things for him I should not have. lying. bullying people. I don’t regret working w/ them — some interesting and great times. but to keep the loyalty and do the things he asked me to do. I violated my moral compass and I suffered the penalty as did my family.”

NO FURTHER QUESTIONS

Up next for Cohen is cross examination by the defense, and then redirect by the prosecution. The Trump defense case is expected to be quick and maybe consist of two witnesses at most. There have been no plans for Trump to testify.

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Excerpt from www.breitbart.com

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said Tuesday on “The View” that the Senate Republicans who voted not to impeach former President Donald Trump were enabling his un-American “lies about the election.”

Stephanopoulos said, “I think the most important thing that people should understand go this election is how far from normal it is. We have never had a former president, presidential candidate who was impeached then indicted for trying to overturn an election. Never in all of our history, we’ve never had a former president, a presidential candidate who lies about the election that he lost. We’ve never had a former president or presidential candidate who refuses to pledge to accept the results of the next election if he lost. You know, the peaceful transfer of power is the most fundamental tenet of our democracy. Refusing to accept it is un-American. I believe it’s unconstitutional and I think it’s the job of the media to put that in context.”

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Excerpt from www.newsbusters.org

The staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host of ABC’s The View, Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) was again allowed into the New York courtroom for former President Trump’s hush money trial and reported back to the Cackling Coven her shocking findings. Last week, she was startled by Trump’s “radioactive orange” face. This time, she was rocking brand new “binoculars” with which she deduced that there were too many white people in the courtroom.

According to the race-obsessed co-host, there were too many white people and her job was to “give a little color to the courtroom.” Even moderator Whoopi Goldberg wanted her to walk it back:

HOSTIN: I was! I was in the courtroom again yesterday. Yes, thank you.

[Applause]

Thank you. What I want to do is give a little color to the courtroom, because a lot of people –

GOLDBERG: Oh, redo that.

HOSTIN: No, no, a little color. I mean that literally and figuratively.

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Excerpt from www.infowars.com

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos proclaimed Tuesday that the “Deep State is packed with patriots” who “don’t care about political parties.”

What an odd thing to say, especially considering the media and Democrats for years had dismissed the existence of the Deep State as a conspiracy theory.

Stephanopoulos made the remarks on The View while discussing his book where he interviewed many bureaucrats in the intelligence agencies and military.

“Some people like to call those people the Deep State. Well, the big thing I learned doing this book is that the Deep State is packed with patriots,” he said.

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Excerpt from www.washingtonexaminer.com

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is cashing in on Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York just hours after appearing alongside the former president as he entered the Manhattan courthouse for the fifth week of his first criminal trial.

Shortly after making remarks outside the courthouse, during which Johnson decried the charges as being politically motivated and corrupt, the House speaker’s political action committee sent out a fundraising email touting his defense of the former president. The email accuses Democrats of using Trump’s trial to interfere with the 2024 election, urging supporters to chip in to end the “political hit job.”

“President Donald Trump is on trial for one reason and one reason only: to interfere with our election. Democrats are weaponizing the justice system to defeat him,” the missive states. “Democrats are putting their fingers on the scales to interfere with an election they know they’d otherwise lose. They know they can’t beat him at the ballot box … The stakes could not be any higher. The future of our country is on the line.”

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Excerpt from www.politico.com

Republicans aren’t working hard to claim the seats of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), even after their high-profile corruption-related indictments. But the GOP is laying plans to hang their legal problems around the necks of their Democratic colleagues.

In a year when the party faces a notably favorable Senate map replete with opportunities in more purple states, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is not making a play in New Jersey (good news for Rep. Andy Kim!). But the GOP’s Senate campaign arm is homing in on Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in a bid to build Menendez’ indictments into a larger narrative that Democratic incumbents are ethically challenged.

“Bob Menendez’ comical level of corruption has brought political self-dealing to the forefront of voters’ minds. That is bad news for Bob Casey and Jon Tester, because they both have serious vulnerabilities on corruption and ethics issues,” NRSC spokesperson Mike Berg said in a statement to POLITICO.

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Excerpt from www.thewrap.com

Audiences for The Walt Disney Company’s annual upfronts presentation were warned that Jimmy Kimmel wouldn’t be holding back in his roast of the company, and he made good on that promise. Kimmel ended the Tuesday afternoon session by going after everyone from current CEO Bob Iger to former CEO Bob Chapek.

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Excerpt from redstate.com

It happens frequently – weather reports promise bad activity in your area and then you awaken to clear skies and no activity. Meteorologists have little in the way of accountability, as they get to wave off their off-target predictions with explanations of an unforeseen atmospheric influence leading to their faulty forecast; somehow their inability to predict what threw off their prediction is excusable, and they go back to promising what will happen next.

The mainstream press loves to behave in this same fashion, and we saw this play out last week with another prediction of inclement legalities when Stormy Daniels testified in the Donald Trump business accounting trial. The former porn star took the stand, and her gripping, weepy accounts of her time spent with the then-mogul and future politician had the press all atitter. That this case has itself become a laughingstock was already evident, but the very fact that she took the stand was just another risible layer to the proceedings.

This is a case that normally would warrant, at most, a misdemeanor charge. But Alvin Bragg is following through on his campaign brag to punish Donald Trump, elevating his charges to a felonious case. The Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission had previously looked over the accusations and waved them off, which was the first sign that this is all a sham.

The press wants you to think otherwise. The preamble to the Stormy appearance was full of promise that she would bring down Trump. This was laughable. She was already a compromised witness, had previously lost in court to the man, and what she could possibly reveal concerning the charges was negligible at best. That level of objectivity however was scant to be found in the media.

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Excerpt from insidethemagic.net

Governor Ron DeSantis has applauded and cheerfully joked about the swift police action that recently took place at the gates of The Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, the site of many of his legal battles.

Image Credit: Inside The Magic

DeSantis and Disney: The Many Battles

As a politician, Ron DeSantis has long defined himself by his opposition to his foes. Broadly speaking, that has meant he promotes himself as fighting against vague “woke” forces, the “liberal agenda,” and things like worker protections and child labor laws.

But for much of the last year, Governor DeSantis was locked in a multi-layered war with The Walt Disney Company, one of the world’s most beloved media corporations and the largest single-site employer in the state of Florida (thanks to Walt Disney World). The feud was kicked off when former Disney CEO Bob Chapek publicly opposed the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law, formally known as the Parental Rights in Education Act, which led to swift retaliation from the governor.

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Excerpt from www.nytimes.com

The bargain with Ms. Daniels, hashed out in the campaign’s final month, was less smooth. Mr. Pecker refused to pay her, putting the onus on Mr. Trump, and therefore Mr. Cohen. When Mr. Trump was slow to decide, hoping the threat would subside after Election Day, Mr. Cohen said that he used every imaginable excuse to stall Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, even the holiest of Jewish holidays — Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.

“I was following directions,” Mr. Cohen explained.

But Ms. Daniels became impatient and threatened to walk away, prompting Mr. Cohen to pay out of his own pocket. Mr. Cohen said he told Mr. Trump “immediately” once he closed the deal, an assertion backed up by phone records.

“I was doing everything that I could and more in order to protect my boss,” Mr. Cohen told the jury, “which was something I had done for a long time.”

It paid off. Mr. Trump won the election a few days later.

But Mr. Cohen lost his patience when Mr. Trump did not award him a job in Washington, and gave him what he felt was an insultingly small bonus. He conveyed his anger to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, who promised that Mr. Trump would boost the bonus and reimburse him for the hush money.

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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com

Changes in how the UN calculates Gaza’s casualties have been cited as evidence of bias. They aren’t.

Has the UN really said fewer people were killed by Israel in Gaza?

No, is the short answer.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published on May 8 an infographic that referred to a figure of 34,844 total Palestinian deaths.

Below that, it said of the deaths: “24,686 identified as of 30 April as: 10,006 men, 4,959 women, 7,797 children, 1,924 elderly”.

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Excerpt from trendingpoliticsnews.com

ABC’s “The View” co-hosts expressed their growing concern on Monday that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s high-profile trial against former President Donald Trump might actually be boosting his 2024 presidential campaign. The trial, centered on Trump’s plea of not guilty to 34 counts related to falsifying business records, has dominated headlines, overshadowing other significant news items.

Ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness, testified on Monday in the case alleging hush money payments made to actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. As the prosecution wraps up its list of witnesses, anticipation builds around the defense’s forthcoming arguments.

Drama also unfolded on the set of “The View,” where the co-hosts debated the trial’s unintended media repercussions. Sara Haines highlighted the media’s obsessive coverage, noting, “I would say when you say the Biden campaign has to get more active, I actually blame the media slightly. We talked last week a lot about how I don’t think people are able to watch this Trump trial 24-7. Now we’re talking about we’re in a campaign.”

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Excerpt from www.politicususa.com

President Biden will hold a real infrastructure week to highlight the historic progress America has made on infrastructure during his administration.

Here are some of Biden’s infrastructure accomplishments, according to a White House fact sheet:

  • Launched improvements on over 257,000 miles of roads and launched nearly 13,000 bridge repair projects making our roadways safer and reconnecting communities across the country;
  • Provided funding to deploy nearly 3,000 low-and zero-emission American-made transit buses and funded over 5,000 clean school buses in 600 communities across the country, prioritizing disadvantaged areas;

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Excerpt from www.washingtonexaminer.com

Michael Cohen offered the strongest evidence to date linking former President Donald Trump to the charges he is facing in New York, serving as either a blessing or a curse to prosecutors, depending on whether the jury finds their troubled star witness credible.

Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, testified Monday during Trump’s trial that the former president knew every step of the way how Cohen was working to prevent porn star Stormy Daniels from going public right before the 2016 election with a claim that she had a sexual encounter with Trump.

Prosecutors presented evidence that Cohen had two phone calls with Trump right before Cohen went to the bank to use a shell company to wire Daniels’s attorney $130,000 as part of a settlement agreement.

“I wanted to ensure that, once again, he approved what I was doing because I require approval from him on all of this,” Cohen said of the two calls.

Michael Cohen testifies on the witness stand in Manhattan criminal court about the calculations that Alan Weisselberg made to determine how to pay back Cohen for the money he paid to Stormy Daniels, Monday, May 13, 2024, in New York. (Elizabeth Williams via AP)

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Excerpt from www.thenation.com

Trump’s former lawyer described in court how the former president demands total sycophancy from his underlings.

Michael Cohen, former president Donald Trump’s former attorney, arrives at his home after leaving Manhattan Criminal Court on May 13, 2024, in New York City.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

The third week of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan kicked off with the testimony of a familiar Trumpworld figure: former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen’s turn on the stand has been hotly anticipated since the trial got underway last month, since he’s able to directly confirm key details in the prosecution’s case, chiefly concerning the logistics of the payoff to former porn star Stormy Daniels in order to suppress her story of an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.