A legislative committee on Thursday advanced a bill to allow state inmates, for the first time, to speak by phone or video conference at their parole hearings.

The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill after adding an amendment to give victims and law enforcement officials the option to also participate by electronic means instead of driving to Montgomery for the parole hearing.

The bill, which was approved in the Senate without a dissenting vote, now moves to the Alabama House of Representatives to be considered in the final three days of the legislative session.

ALABAMA LAWMAKERS EYE GAMBLING COMPROMISE AS LEGISLATIVE SESSION NEARS ITS END

Alabama is one of two states that do not allow inmates to speak at parole hearings.

“SB 312 gives the incarcerated inmate the ability to participate in the hearing and more importantly, it gives the Parole Board another opportunity or an opportunity to question that inmate,” Republican Sen. Will Barfoot, the bill sponsor, said.

The approval came after earlier disagreements over a proposal that would have weakened the bill by letting the Parole Board decide whether inmates could participate.

Wanda Miller, executive director of VOCAL, a victims advocacy group, said her organization opposes the bill because it believes the current system is adequate. Miller said victim advocacy groups had suggested the amendment to allow victims and law enforcement officials to also speak by phone or video conference.

Barfoot said that will make it easier for victims and law enforcement officials to participate in hearings instead of “driving sometimes three hours to sit through a 10- or 15-minute hearing.”

If approved, the measure would become effective on Oct. 1.

Since the opening of the Donald Trump’s New York trial — when the former president’s counsel told the jury that the prosecution’s star witness “cannot be trusted” — the defense has telegraphed its principal strategy: Eviscerate Michael Cohen.

As Trump’s fixer and attack dog at the time of the alleged crimes, Cohen was more central to the events spelled out in the indictment than anyone in the defendant’s orbit. He even fronted his personal funds to quiet Stormy Daniels, who was shopping a story of a 2006 sexual liaison with Trump.

And having pleaded guilty to tax evasion, false statements and campaign finance violations related to the Daniels affair, along with a separate plea to making false statements to Congress, he seems tailor-made to be accused of lying to settle scores with his former boss. For the loyalty-obsessed Trump, moreover, the prospect of savaging a traitor promises additional psychological rewards.

But before the jury has even heard from Trump’s bête noire, the prosecution has made great strides to neutralize any plan to undermine Cohen’s testimony.

They have done so first and foremost by presenting a wealth of evidence that prospectively corroborates what Cohen will say. (And after his grand jury testimony and numerous reported sitdowns with the district attorney’s office, the prosecution knows what Cohen is going to say down to the last comma.)

The prosecutors’ decision to introduce their story through David Pecker, the former chief executive of the company that owned the National Enquirer, worked beautifully. A sort of Runyonesque rascal in his business affairs, Pecker came across as completely forthcoming on the stand. And he came forth with many details that involved Cohen and will be echoed by him. Those particulars included a key August 2015 meeting in which Pecker said he first promised Trump that he would smother the stories of his purported former sexual partners who might come forward now that he was a presidential candidate.

Every major witness since Pecker has also covered ground that Cohen will retread. By the time the jury hears the account of Trump’s onetime fixer, it will ring familiar in almost all its particulars.

Almost but not quite all. Only Cohen and Trump could have been privy to certain details of the alleged falsification of documents, the basis of the 34 criminal counts in the indictment.

Still, the district attorney will be able to respond to the defense’s ferocious attacks on Cohen by noting, in time-honored prosecutorial form, that the jury needn’t rely on his word alone because of all the corroboration.

In fact, the prosecution’s case has been sprinkled with disparaging characterizations of Cohen by its own witnesses, who have called him a “jerk” and worse. It’s another signal that the district attorney will argue that the case does not stand or fall on Cohen’s testimony.

And much of what follows Cohen will reinforce his testimony. Longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks figures to provide devastating corroboration of Cohen’s testimony about “the Boss,” including her firsthand account of the 2015 meeting.

The extensive corroborating evidence is just one way the prosecution is cutting off the defense’s main line of attack. As important, prosecutors have constructed and reinforced a narrative that bolsters Cohen’s story. It moves from the initial meeting, through the efforts to “catch and kill” the stories of a Trump Tower doorman and a Playboy model, and then to the critically important “Access Hollywood” tape that left the Trump campaign in an existential crisis.

The recording, which surfaced shortly before the election and caught Trump boasting of sexually assaulting women, prompted Republican Party leaders such as John McCain to withdraw their support for Trump. The jury heard evidence on Friday that key players in the catch-and-kill scheme were confident that Trump could not recover from the revelation.

Enter Daniels, who had recently resumed her efforts to parlay her alleged affair with Trump into a payday. If the campaign was on life support, her account threatened to pull the plug.

The story that prosecutors have presented from multiple sides thereby leads to the conclusion that the dealings with Daniels could have had only one motivation: to salvage the campaign. And that meant that Daniels not only had to be paid off but also that the purpose of the payoff had to be hidden.

The force of this account has Team Trump staring up at a nearly insurmountable incline. It’s not just that Cohen’s explanation of Trump’s alleged scheme and purposes will be roundly corroborated by other witnesses; it’s that no other explanation would make any sense of the whole patchwork of evidence.

The prosecution’s marshaling of that evidence leaves the defense with no viable counternarrative. Assume Trump’s team beats Cohen up for days on cross-examination and reiterates in closing that he can’t be trusted. What alternative story can they offer to supply a reasonable doubt about the district attorney’s account?

As Pecker testified and we will probably hear repeated at closing, Cohen couldn’t buy lunch without Trump’s approval. Is it remotely possible that he would nevertheless take out a home equity loan and pay Daniels $130,000 without Trump’s knowledge and direction? The Manhattan jury might be expected to conclude, in a word, “Fuhgeddaboudit.”

That’s not to say that the prosecution is coasting toward a guilty verdict or that the jury’s response to Cohen won’t matter. The charges of falsifying business records are still vulnerable to technical challenges involving intent and other questions. Especially with two lawyers in the jury’s ranks, stitching up that part of the case could be difficult. But with a broader rejection of Cohen’s testimony looking unlikely, the defense’s options for preventing a conviction are dwindling.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and the Talking San Diego speaker series. @harrylitman

Former President Trump slammed the anti-Israel “radical left lunatics” creating chaos at colleges nationwide, highlighting that the antisemitism on campuses is promoted by the left, not conservatives. 

“This is a movement from the left. These are radical left lunatics, and they’ve got to be stopped now because it’s going to go on and on. And it’s going to get worse, and worse,” Trump said Thursday morning outside of a Manhattan courtroom where he is standing trial. 

“And, you know, they take over countries, and we’re not letting them take over the USA. We’re not letting the radical left morons take over this country.” 

Student agitators have infiltrated college campuses nationwide in recent weeks, including radicals on Columbia University’s campus taking over the campus’ Hamilton Hall building, while schools such as UCLA, Harvard and Yale are working to clear student encampments where protesters demand their elite schools completely divest from Israel. 

LIVE UPDATES: NY V. TRUMP TRIAL TO RESUME WITH GAG ORDER PROCEEDINGS AFTER JUDGE FINES TRUMP $9K

The protests are associated with groups tied to far-left organizations backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros, Fox News Digital previously reported. Namely, the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) has had a large presence amid the protests on Columbia University’s campus, as well as on the campuses of UCLA, Tufts and the University of Texas at Austin. 

In his remarks Thursday, Trump praised law enforcement officers in New York City and Los Angeles for working to clear encampments and Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, and make arrests amid the chaos. 

An anti-Israel demonstrator holds a Palestinian flag on the rooftop of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in New York, on Tuesday, April 30, 2024. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

NY V TRUMP TO RESUME WITH GAG ORDER HEARING AFTER TRUMP FINED $9K, THREATENED WITH JAIL TIME 

“I’m so proud of the New York’s finest… I know so many of them. They’re incredible. They did a good job at Columbia and likewise in Los Angeles. They did a really good job at UCLA. It was very much embedded,” Trump continued.  

“And just so you understand, this is the radical left. This is a movement from the left, not from the right. The right is not your problem. Despite what law enforcement likes to say, the FBI director said that he worries about the right.”

JUDGE FINES TRUMP THOUSANDS OVER VIOLATING GAG ORDER, WARNS ‘INCARCERATORY PUNISHMENT’ COULD BE NEXT

NYPD officers line up outside Columbia University, Monday, April 29, 2024. (Rashid Umar Abbasi for Fox News Digital)

The NY v. Trump case focuses on Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, paying former pornographic actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to allegedly quiet her claims of an alleged extramarital affair she had with the then-real estate tycoon in 2006. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.

Former President Trump leaves Trump Tower on his way to Manhattan Criminal Court, April 15, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen and fraudulently logged the payments as legal expenses. Prosecutors are working to prove that Trump falsified records with the intent to commit or conceal a second crime, which is a felony, in violation of a New York law called “conspiracy to promote or prevent election.”