This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg has launched his arguments in his "hush money" payments trial against President Trump. He's alleging conspiracy, election interference, and all sorts of other felonies in the case now being heard by a jury in the ultra-leftist and avowedly anti-Trump enclave of New York City.

But it's all based on "hocus-pocus," explains an analysis from respected legal commentator Gregg Jarrett.

He's a Fox News legal analyst and commentator.

"Hocus-pocus is a meaningless distraction or illusion that is intended to fool. That neatly summarizes District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump," Jarrett explained. "The D.A. hopes to snooker a Manhattan jury into convicting the former president with a bag of legal tricks."

And he warns such "chicanery" might even work in New York, a "Trump-hating venue."

He explained the "sleight of hand" appeared immediately during opening arguments, presented for the prosecution by Matthew Colangelo, who was Joe Biden's pick at the DOJ.

Colangelo claimed the case is "about a criminal conspiracy," but Jarrett pointed out it's not.

"The word 'conspiracy' can be found nowhere in Bragg’s indictment. It’s not there because there was no criminal conspiracy. But that didn’t stop the prosecutor from deceiving the jury by arguing about an uncharged crime. Like a skilled magician, he hopes his pretense will fool them. "

Then Colangelo slipped in another canard.

"More than once, he accused Trump of 'election fraud,' conveniently ignoring the fact that the Federal Election Commission examined Trump’s payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and determined there was no fraud because the money conferred did not qualify as a campaign donation. Federal prosecutors who investigated reached the same conclusion. So did Bragg’s predecessor. There was no crime."

Jarrett also noted Colangelo ignored the fact non-disclosure agreements are "perfectly legal and routine."

"None of this stopped the prosecutor from informing the jury that all of this constitutes 'an illegal conspiracy to undermine a presidential election.' Like most illusions, it seems plausible on the surface. But wait. Let’s check the indictment again. Every single one of the 34 charges against Trump took place in 2017. You’ll note that this is after the 2016 election," Jarrett pointed out.

Trump's defense informed the jury that election "influence" has been going on for centuries: "It's called democracy."

"Trump had nothing to do with the bookkeeping or the 34 invoices reflecting the same number of charged counts. He assigned his lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, to resolve the demands for money, which he did. Cohen booked the cost as legal services and expenses, which they were," the commentary said.

Bragg "accuses Trump of 'conspiring to influence the 2016 presidential election' without recognizing the obvious hypocrisy. It is Bragg, himself, who is guilty of election interference in 2024 by bringing a legally absurd case designed to take Trump off the campaign trail while his opponent, Joe Biden, freely blankets key states in advance of the November balloting."

A report at Just the News this week pointed out how justices on the U.S. Supreme Court now are concerned about "the increasing prevalence of political prosecutions in the United States."

The report noted two justices cited "the apparent contradictions in the Biden administration’s selective enforcement of certain provisions against January 6 protestors. The high court’s ruling in this case may have implications for Trump too. He is charged with the same crime, obstructing an official proceeding in one of his federal cases."

Trump has described the latest Democrat attacks as lawfare that continues the attacks that started even before he was president.

"They had the Mueller hoax, the Mueller report and that came out, no collusion after two and a half years…that was set up by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats," he has said.

"But this is what they do. This is what they do so well, if they would devote their energies to honesty and integrity, to be a lot better for our country, they could do a lot better," he added.

Just the News noted celebrity lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz., a longtime leftist, said he sees "partisan purposes" in the prosecution of Trump.

"I just don't understand what the crime is. And I've been doing this for 60 years, I have more experience than all the prosecutors combined, in this case, in terms of teaching, writing, and litigating criminal cases. And if I can't even find the crime, you know, what they say the crime is, it's a misdemeanor, that was expired under the statute of limitations a long time ago. And they turned it into a state felony by saying that the purpose of the misdemeanor was to violate a federal felony, which the federal government didn't go after," he told Just the News.

"[If] the defendant's name weren't Donald Trump, and he wasn't running for president, no sane prosecutor in a million years would ever bring this case, and none has in the nearly, you know, 200 whatever years of American history, this is a first and it's a terrible mark on the American justice system,": he added.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

The chief of Columbia University, whose campus like many others across the nation has been the scene of anti-Semitic protests and violence in recent weeks, has been schooled by a member of Congress on what the God of the Bible says about the issue.

It developed when Rep. Rick Allen, R-Ga., was allowed five minutes to question Minouche Shafik, the head of Columbia, where officials went to the extreme of banning a Jewish professor from a part of campus where anti-Israel radicals had taken over territory.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Election interference?

Facebook probably could offer a good how-to course, given that a new study has confirmed the web giant did exactly that – 39 times since 2008.

Newsbusters has explored the research of the MRC Free Speech America effort to review what's happened in American elections.

Those researchers "compiled 39 times Facebook was caught interfering in U.S. elections since 2008."

These actions surged in 2012, then reached a "crescendo" in 2020 and happened all the while Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg was claiming free speech ideologies.

It also was Zuckerberg who, during the 2020 election, handed out some $400 million plus to various election officials to help them deal with COVID. They mostly used it to recruit Joe Biden voters.

Zuckerberg has claimed, "We can either continue to stand for free expression understanding its messiness but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great. I'm here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression."

Further, he claimed he believes politically centered censorship is dangerous.

"Yet, from 2012 through 2024, Facebook has vacillated between a hands-off approach to free speech online and repeated election interference through policy changes and outright censorship of political candidates and ideas," Newsbusters noted.

Highlights of the MRC evidence include that Facebook suspended a Veteran PAC in 2012 for a meme about the disastrous loss of American lives in Benghazi.

According to the MRC report, "Facebook suspended the account of Special Operations Speaks, a veteran-led PAC. The group had posted a meme reminding its followers that Navy SEALs were denied backup during the tragic terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The meme showed pictures of then-President Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden along with the words 'Obama called on the SEALs and THEY got bin Laden. When the SEALs called on Obama THEY GOT DENIED.'"

Facebook claimed its removal was not, in fact, censorship.

Then came 2016.

MRC said, "In 2016, Facebook censored then-Democratic Party candidate for president Bernie Sanders and 'conservative topics' and news. Facebook used to have a trending section on its website that included trending news manually curated by contractors. Several of the curators who worked for Facebook in 2014 and 2015 told Gizmodo the articles that appeared in Facebook’s Trending News section often depended on the biases of the curator and what Facebook wanted to be trending at the time. 'Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,' a former curator who asked to remain anonymous said. 'I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.' Stories about then-presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) were also reportedly excluded."

During the 2018 midterms, the report said, "Facebook removed ads for Sen. (then-Rep.) Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), and Michigan State Senate Republican candidate Aric Nesbitt. The platform additionally censored an ad promoting border security paid for by then-President Donald Trump. Similarly, the platform reportedly removed a video promoting an AR-15 giveaway that Senate candidate Austin Petersen (R-MO) was conducting on his website."

At its peak political activism in 2020, Facebook's work "exploded."

"The platform censored posts and ads from then-sitting President Donald Trump at least four times and took down seven political ads paid for by the political right. One of these ad campaigns Facebook killed just over a month before the election. The ad reportedly pointed out the incongruence between Democrats’ open borders and COVID-19 lockdown policies."

The MRC said, "[The] 2020 election interference came to a head, however, when the platform censored the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden report documenting the Biden family’s financial scandals and then ultimately placed an indefinite suspension on then-sitting President Trump’s accounts shortly into 2021."

The Facebook censorship continued into 2022, when it targeted mostly Republicans including Rep. (then candidate) Rich McCormick of Georgia, Virginia GOP congressional candidate Jarome Bell, Tennessee GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck, and Missouri GOP U.S. Senate candidate Eric Greitens.

What's up in 2024?

"Facebook and Instagram are limiting users’ access to political content. Meta already began limiting its distribution of political content in 2022 but has continued to lean into that in the lead-up to the 2024 election. In February, Meta announced that Instagram and Threads (a new social media platform owned by Meta) will no longer recommend political content by default, but users can opt into having such content promoted to them. … Although the move sounds harmless, it makes it more difficult for those who produce political content to grow their page and for more viewers to decide for themselves whether or not they want to follow that content."

WND reported only weeks earlier that Pamela San Martin, a member of Meta’s Oversight Board, in an interview with Wired, demanded more censorship.

"Even though we're addressing the problems that arose in prior elections as a starting point," she said, "It is not enough."

She claimed, "Between the U.S. election [in 2020] to the Brazilian election [in 2022], Meta had not done enough to address the potential misuse of its platforms through coordinated campaigns, people organizing, or using bots on the platforms to convey a message to destabilize a country, to create a lack of trust or confidence on electoral processes."

Wired blasted Facebook in its report, for not doing enough, with, "Meta, in particular, with some 3 billion users across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, is a uniquely powerful force in shaping the global information ecosystem. In 2016, the platform took center stage for its seemingly central role in propelling Donald Trump into the White House. Sensitive to criticism that it had not done enough to protect American democracy, Meta invested in new tools and processes to try and keep election-related misinformation and disinformation off its platforms during the 2020 presidential election. But once the race was over, reporting from OneZero at the time found that Stop the Steal groups continued to balloon in the weeks after the 2020 election. The company rolled back many of these new mitigating strategies, allowing narratives that questioned the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win to circulate in the lead-up to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. And despite the violence on January 6, Meta has continued to allow ads that question the results of the 2020 US election."

However, Facebook was not even the chief among offenders.

WND reported when the Media Research Center reported researchers found 41 times when Google interfered in American elections.

Dan Schneider, MRC's Free Speech America vice president, and Gabriela Pariseau, editor, said in a summary, "MRC researchers have found 41 times where Google interfered in elections over the last 16 years, and its impact has surged dramatically, making it evermore harmful to democracy. In every case, Google harmed the candidates – regardless of party – who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice."

Their report continued, "From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its 'great strength and resources and reach' to advance its leftist values. Google’s outsized influence on information technology, the body politic, and American elections became evident in 2008. After failing to prevent then-candidate for president Donald Trump from being inaugurated following the 2016 election, Google has since made clear to any discerning observer that it has been — and will continue — interfering in America’s elections."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

University campuses across America have been plagued in recent weeks with totally intolerant and often violent protests that condemn Israel.

The anti-Semitic events are carried out by anti-Israel radicals who blame the Middle East democracy for defending itself against the terrorists in Hamas, who invaded from Gaza Oct. 7 and killed some 1,200 civilians, often in horrific ways.

Israel, after the terror attack, dispatched its army to eliminate that threat of terrorism.

Now President Trump has blamed Joe Biden for the events that have all but destroyed free speech on many campuses and left Jewish students and faculty alike at risk.

Fox News said Trump made the comments ahead of entering a Manhattan court, slamming the on-campus radicalism and pinning the blame.

"What's going on at the college level… Columbia, NYU and others is a disgrace. And it's really on Biden," Trump explained. "He's got the wrong words. He doesn't know who he's backing. And it's a mess. And if this were me, they'd be after me, they'd be after me so much, but they're trying to get him a pass. And what's going on is a disgrace to our country. And it's all Biden's fault, and everybody knows it. He's got no message, he's got no compassion and doesn't know what he's doing."

He described Biden as the "worst" president ever.

Fox's report noted that antisemitism has surged on campuses of the nation's most "elite" universities.

There, protests against Israel have threatened that Jewish students are the "next" target of Hamas' terrorists.

Dozens of students were arrested on Columbia's grounds just days ago and others were arrested at Yale and NYU.

Trump explained, "It all starts with Joe Biden. The signals he puts out are so bad. And I can tell you he's no friend of Israel, that's for sure. And he's no friend of the Arab world either."

In fact, when a far-left member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, commented recently, "It is especially important that we remember the power of young people shaping this country today... as we once again witness the leadership of those peaceful, student-led protests on campuses like Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and many others," Biden instructed listeners to "Listen to that lady."

A report in the Free Beacon described other damage from the movement, including widespread cancellation of classes and the decision by Robert Kraft, New England Patriots owner, to stop donating to Columbia due to "virulent hate" on campus.

On some campuses, radicals have erected tent cities to take over the properties and push their ideologies.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

"Science" as it once was claimed the earth was flat.

Now "science" says it's "misinformation" to claim that there are two sexes.

The article includes comments from Florence Ashley, law professor, and "Simon(e) Sun," a "scientist."

So why is there no "binary" reality in sex, they are asked.

Sun said, "The error is simply that the gametes are a determining factor of sex—that once you know what gametes a person produces, that’s their sex and nothing about it can change. But biology is a dynamic system where an organism starts in a particular state and grows through life and through development with multiple systems interacting. That is, more precisely, how sex works. Sex essentialism boils all that down to one, immutable characteristic to preclude transness as a biological phenomenon. If you start with a model of sex that is binary, you'll always produce a binary result. And if you insist that it is true, then it is the only answer that you get."

Ashley added, "There's something to be said about the rhetorical tricks here. The people who use ideas about biological sex against trans people are first appealing to the idea of biology as a description of difference, but then they do a jump and use that conception of biology as a form of meaning. The thing is, we organize society around meaning, not difference. Biology at its core can't tell you what matters to human organizations. So there is a fallacy here of looking at the human difference at the biological level, oversimplifying it, and then saying, 'That's what we should organize people around.' We should really be asking what we care about, and then look to see if biology has anything to say about it. If you go through that exercise, then you realize that biology really has very little, if not virtually nothing, to say about things like trans rights."

A report at Modernity News, however, that it is just as simple and being male or female.

The report noted SA's piece and its notion that "there are three types of 'misinformation," and they are "oversimplifying scientific knowledge, fabricating and misinterpreting research, and promoting false equivalences."

SA claims, "Many of the arguments against trans rights center on the idea that transness itself is not legitimate—that there are just two sexes, period."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A common-sense parental rights protection that is being adopted by states in the wake of the fall of the unconstitutional Roe abortion "rights" precedent now is under attack by the leftist ideology of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

He's released an ad portraying two girls being stopped by a police officer and ordered to take a pregnancy test.

The concept in the laws, already in place in Idaho and being considered in others, is that it should be criminal to take someone else's child out of state for an abortion. Such bans target directly situations where abusers attack and rape young girls, then force them into abortions to continue abusing and raping.

Leftist legacy media outlets have portrayed opposing that as a bad thing.

One report noted, "Newsom's Campaign for Democracy ad is set to air in Alabama starting Monday."

The ad claims "Republicans are trying to criminalize young women's travel to receive abortion care. We cannot let them get away with this."

It shows two "young women" heading for a state line until they hear a siren.

"Trump Republicans want to criminalize young Alabama women who travel for reproductive care," a voice on the ad states. A trooper then walks up to the car and demands, "Miss, I'm going to need you to step out of the vehicle and take a pregnancy test."

That report claims such travel restrictions for minors are part of an effort to criminalize travel by "women" to another state for abortions.

Newsom previously has participated in other pro-abortion campaigns, using ads and billboards.

Jack Posobioec a commentator, activist, and senior editor at Human Events, caught the new ad, and noted, "Newsom just released a new ad saying Trump is going to order police to stop women crossing state lines and force them to take pregnancy tests."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A professor at Columbia University has been denied access to portions of the campus where he works – because he's Jewish.

Equally alarming is the reasoning of the school: It says it couldn't be confident he would be safe if allowed to enter.

The report is from the Washington Examiner, which said the stunning developments are because of the widespread anti-Israel protests being orchestrated by leftists on campuses across the country.

They are part of the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians that left some 1,200 innocent people dead, often killed in horrific butchery.

Israel's response was to dispatch its military to wipe out that terror threat and the result has been the portrayal of Israel as the attacker, and the protests are in defense of Palestinian "victims."

The Columbia University situation developed when Shai Davidai, an Israel native and assistant business professor, was barred by the school from entry into the campus's "liberated zone."

"Davidai claimed his identification card had been deactivated as school officials said they could not ensure his safety. An estimated 200 pro-Palestinian protesters were on the campus at the time, with the students likely needing to have their IDs to get in," the report said.

The school sent its chief operating officer, Cas Holloway, to tell Davidai he needed to go to a different part of campus, the report said.

"I am a professor here; I have every right to be everywhere on campus; you cannot let people that support Hamas on campus, and me, a professor, not go on campus. Let me in now," Davidai responded.

He previously was interviewed on an Israeli news show to explain what the protesting students were doing was "terrorism."

Earlier, a Jewish student had filed a hate crime report charging he was hit in the head with rocks thrown by pro-Palestinian protesters.

Constitutional expert and popular legal issue commentator Jonathan Turley explained what was so alarming about the school's decision.

"What was equally concerning is that the university did so for his own protection out of concern that, as an outspoken Jewish faculty member, he could not walk around the campus safely. It was reminiscent of the recent controversy of a man in London threatened with arrest because being 'quite openly Jewish' would trigger pro-Palestinian protesters," he explained.

He said, "The most basic obligation of a university is to ensure the safety of its faculty and students from physical assaults. If there is a problem on campus, it is found in those students or faculty who would threaten a Jewish professor if he were to walk on campus.

"This is not part of the debate over what language is considered a threat or hateful rhetoric. This is barring a professor because his status alone makes his presence inflammatory or dangerous. I cannot imagine how the solution was barring the potential victim of religious-based bigotry and violence," he said.

He pointed out that "major donors like Robert Kraft" have begun pulling their financial support over the anti-Israel hate.

The school needs, he said, to supply "whatever security is needed to allow him and others to walk around campus without fear of assault."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

An expert may have concluded that the U.S. government, under Joe Biden, has become a de facto middleman in child trafficking, but now a man who advised both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has been accused of child sex offenses.

A new report from Daily Fetched explains Rahamim Shy, 46, formerly a senior policy adviser to Clinton and Obama during his administration, "was arrested by British police in Bedfordshire."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Now it appears that artificial intelligence can make anyone say anyone. Literally anyone and literally anything. And the proof is in the Mona Lisa … RAPPING?

All that's required is a still image of a face, a recording of words, singing, anything, and the new software.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A new report reveals that the California disciplinary judge who punished Donald Trump lawyer John Eastman with disbarment, from a position requiring political neutrality, actually donated money to the Democrat election agenda.

It is the Georgia Star News that uncovered the revelations about Yvette Roland, who delivered the punishment to Eastman for his work on multiple cases challenging the results of the 2020 presidential race.