Good morning. Welcome, Naxios, today. It's Wednesday, April 5th. I'm Nyla Boudou.

Today on the show, Finland becomes a member of NATO, dealing a blow to Russia.

Plus, some big improvements at airports across the U.S.

But first, former President Trump pleads not guilty to 34 felony counts.

Understanding the charges and what comes next, that's today's one big thing.

Yesterday, in a Manhattan criminal court, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty

to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.

No matter who you are, we cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct.

That's Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg at a news conference yesterday.

Trump made his first public remarks after the arrangement last night at Mar-a-Lago.

I never thought anything like this could happen in America. Never thought it could happen.

Axios' David Lindsay and ProPublica and NPR's Ilya Maritz are here with more.

Ilya, we heard a lot about catch and kill yesterday. What does that have to do with the former President?

This was one of the most interesting developments to me, actually, because for weeks at this point,

we've been hearing that this case is being built around stormy Daniels

and the hush money payment that she received with Michael Cohen as the middleman fixer

in the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

This indictment, or specifically the fact she'd attached the indictment,

points to two other instances of a similar catch and kill phenomenon,

one involving another woman who alleged an affair with Donald Trump, Karen McDougal,

and the other one involving a door man in New York City who said he had some information

about an out-of-wedlock child of Donald Trump's information that the National Inquirer,

...