At 100 Centre St awaiting the start of Trump criminal trial at 11 ET. First order of business at 9:30 tho: Judge Merchan is holding a hearing on whether Trump violated the court’s gag order with repeated statements and social media posts attacking likely witnesses and the court. Trump will shrug off any relatively modest fines levied against him. He doesn’t care about several thousand dollars. He is likely to care about the prospect of jail time, however. Merchan runs a tight, sober-minded courtroom. We’ll see how he decides to rein in Trump.

RIP Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win supporting actor Oscar. apnews.com/article/1e86e1…

Trump’s financial trap — he can’t come up with the cash to appeal his $454 million civil fraud judgment — may ravage his business. More directly: It intensifies his threat to national security by making him an easy mark for overseas interests. My column: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in Michigan not to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News. detroitnews.com/story/news/pol… “It’s just shocking that the president of the United States was at the most minute level trying to stop the election process from happening," said one Wayne County commissioner.

1/5. Five cities around the globe and how each of them have been affected by the Covid pandemic. Opener, via ⁦@foxjust⁩ : “New York City, I Love You, But Since Covid, You’re Bringing Me Down” bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-… 2/5: New Delhi, via @rpollard: bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-…

New intelligence has prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic, though American spy agencies remain divided over the origins of the virus, American officials said. nytimes.com/2023/02/26/us/… “In addition to the Energy Department, the F.B.I. has also concluded, with low confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses.”

After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: The Year That Redrew the Oil and Gas Map bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-…

“Carlson was one of several Fox News hosts who repeatedly took a different tone when speaking to viewers on air [about election fraud] than when they were talking privately. The private conversations pose a serious legal threat” to Fox. nytimes.com/interactive/20… Court filings showed that Sidney Powell forwarded an email about voter fraud to Maria Bartiromo “from the source, a woman who claimed, among other things, that ‘the Wind tells me I’m a ghost.’”

Trump is suing journalist Bob Woodward for releasing recordings of interviews that he gave to the journalist in 2019 and 2020, claiming he never agreed to those tapes being shared with the public. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The bonkers piece of this: Trump claims that although he had given Woodward consent to record their conversations “for the sole purpose of a book,” that consent didn’t extend to packaging those recordings as an audiobook.

Durham's probe had "some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation" nytimes.com/2023/01/26/us/… And yes: Bill Barr was just as unethical, partisan and thuggish throughout all of this as you might have suspected him to be.

Russian oligarchs have been playing everyone for decades now: intelligence operatives and law enforcement; politicos and diplomats in Washington, London and Moscow; investors, the public -- everybody. The latest: justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/f… “Charles McGonigal, a former high-level FBI official, and Sergey Shestakov, a Court interpreter, violated U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch. They both previously worked with Deripaska."

“I think [Tesla’s] stock is only going to go down from here,” said Catherine Faddis, senior portfolio manager at Fernwood Investment Management. “Elon Musk has damaged his reputation with this Twitter business and all the negative news flow.” $TSLA bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

A Trump employee has told federal agents about moving boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago at the specific direction of the former president. washingtonpost.com/national-secur… “People familiar with the investigation said agents have gathered witness accounts indicating that, after Trump advisers received a subpoena in May for any classified documents that remained at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told people to move boxes to his residence.”

Searching Mar-a-Lago for stolen federal records and breaking into Trump’s safe should just be Garland’s opening acts. He still needs to indict Trump and his advisers for trying to stage a coup. The American experiment is on the line. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… 2/ Trump’s pied pipers at Fox News devoured his talking points about the FBI probe. “This is some Third World bullshit,” one of the network’s propagandists, Dan Bongino, said of the Mar-a-Lago search.

Elon Musk says he’s walking away from his $44 billion Twitter bid. Expect lawsuits. Musk's letter to Twitter: sec.gov/Archives/edgar…

1/ Trump and I watched “Sunset Boulevard” on his jet together nearly 20 years ago. Silent film star Norma Desmond, bemoaning the arrival of the talkies and her loss of stature, rages: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… 2/ “Those idiot producers. Those imbeciles! Haven’t they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them. I’ll be up there again, so help me!”

Cassidy Hutchinson just shredded part of the script around Trump’s big lie — and he never likes anyone questioning his myths or his star power. Merrick Garland will need to make sure this horror show doesn’t have a sequel: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… Sitting in his limo after his speech, Trump directed the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol. The agents refused - intruding on the theatrics Trump had so carefully engineered. “I’m the f-ing president, take me up to the Capitol now,” he insisted.

“Cass are you excited for the 6th? It’s going to be a great day,” Giuliani said to Hutchinson the evening of 1/2/21, per her testimony. She says that when she then asked Meadows about what was going to happen on Jan. 6, he replied that it could get “really, really bad.” She also testifies that when she discussed this with Trump's DNI, John Ratcliffe, he told her he was deeply worried about Trump's plans to overturn the election results.

1/ Hutchinson has already testified that Perry, Jordan, Greene and Boebert raised the idea of Pence ignoring the electoral vote count on Jan. 6 — and that Perry supported the idea of urging Trump’s supporters on a march toward the Capitol. slate.com/news-and-polit… 2/ She also testified about a meeting ahead of the Jan. 6 certification in which Republicans discussed delaying the Congressional count or otherwise blocking the counting of electoral votes. That meeting, she said, included Jordan, Greene and at least 9 other GOP lawmakers.

"When juxtaposed with the court’s expected abortion decision, the Bruen case reveals a court that is contracting women’s right to control their bodies and choose not to bear children even as it expands the right to bear arms." - @NoahRFeldman bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… "This court appears to be the Thomas court, with the most conservative justice convincing the other conservatives to follow his lifelong practice of ignoring precedent and rejecting the idea that the real-world consequences of judicial decisions should matter to the courts."

Asked to commit crimes to demonstrate loyalty to Trump, Bowers and others testified at the Jan. 6 hearing that they chose to obey the law instead. Democracy hung on the integrity of a group of individuals — a slender thread.

So what happens next time? bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… “I do not want to be a winner by cheating,” Bowers noted. “Hmm,” I can imagine Trump thinking. “I’ve always been OK with cheating.”