The House Oversight Committee has issued a new subpoena to accounting firm Mazars USA for a wide swath of records related to former President Donald Trump, which would likely include the ex-President's tax returns.

Though Trump recently lost his case to hold off a prosecutor in New York from obtaining the Mazars records for a criminal probe, the US House is still fighting for access.

The renewed subpoena went out last Thursday, according to a new court filing on Tuesday, but the return date is on hold as a federal court in Washington continues to review the separation of powers standoff.
Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney obtained tax records last week that Trump had tried to keep secret for years, just hours after the US Supreme Court denied Trump's last-ditch effort to keep them private, a spokesperson for the district attorney said.

The millions of pages of documents, sources say, contain Trump's tax returns spanning from January 2011 to August 2019, as well as financial statements, engagement agreements, documents relating to the preparation and review of tax returns, and work papers and communications related to the tax returns. The documents handed off from Trump's longtime accounting firm Mazars won't be released to the public because they're subject to grand jury secrecy rules, unless prosecutors were to make details public through criminal proceedings. Trump and others in his organization have not faced charges from the New York district attorney.
But the secrecy rules around the House, if it were to obtain the same records, could be less stringent.

Tuesday’s oral arguments in two cases—Brnovich v. DNC and Arizona Republican Party v. DNC—concerned the legality of “ballot harvesting,” a practice in which community activists collect ballots to boost voter turnout. The arguments also discussed an Arizona law that disqualified ballots cast in the wrong precinct. There’s no evidence of the voting fraud that these laws purport to limit, and voting rights activists say that the laws disproportionately limit Black, Latino, and Native American voters’ access to the polls.

So Justice Amy Coney Barrett had a simple question for the lawyer defending the GOP-backed laws: “What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC here in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?”

“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” the lawyer, Michael Carvin, responded. “Politics is a zero-sum game.”
https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1366781318990876674

The New York City Bar Association added its name to the list of groups urging the state court committee that recommends whether to disbar attorneys to investigate complaints against Rudy Giuliani.

In a letter obtained by CNN, the NYC Bar Association said allegations call for a "serious investigation" into Giuliani's actions, saying he used his position as an attorney who served in senior government positions including Manhattan US Attorney's office and Associate Attorney General of the United States to "lend credence" to former President Donald Trump's baseless assertions that the 2020 Presidential Election results were the product of widespread election fraud. Giuliani is not a member of the NYC Bar Association, which is a voluntary organization.

"The complaints against Mr. Giuliani allege serious misconduct. They do so in great detail, and appear to be substantiated by extensive evidence -- consisting in large part of Mr. Giuliani's own statements," the letter said. "They describe a pattern of misconduct that Mr. Giuliani engaged in both inside and outside the courtroom with the purpose of subverting a Presidential election, culminating in his speech on a podium at the Ellipse in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 when he urged a crowd of angry Trump supporters to engage in 'trial by combat.'"

In New York, attorney discipline is handled by the court system, and any investigation of Giuliani would be handled by the Attorney Grievance Committee for the First Department in New York, said attorney Ronald Minkoff, who represents attorneys with cases before grievance committees in New York. It can take years for complaints against attorneys to be investigated and lead to action including being disbarred, Minkoff said.

Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, two men were seen hauling a gold statue of Donald Trump through the Hyatt Regency Orlando lobby. Clergy, coreligionists and people with eyes for easy metaphors all asked: Where’s the beef?

It doesn’t take a doctorate of divinity to see the parallel to this ludicrous idol worship and the episode of the golden calf, in which a faction of the Israelites, left alone by Moses for roughly the period Trump’s been out of office, melted down their rings into a “molten calf” and made offerings to it.
https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1365142286854742016
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1365141354960084994
This made God (a Jealous God) angry, and Moses, too. I mean, our guy shattered the Ten Commandments when he saw what was going down. It’s pretty clear to see why.

On those tablets, notarized by divine fire, one finds the line item, “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

“Capitol Police requested National Guard help prior to January 6th. That request was denied by Speaker Pelosi and her Sergeant at Arms.”

— Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in a tweet, Feb. 15, 2021.....

The Pinocchio Test
Without evidence, Jordan asserted that House Speaker Pelosi had denied a request for National Guard troops two days before the insurrection. Instead, public testimony shows she did not even hear about the request until two days later. Jordan also tried to pin the blame on the House sergeant-at-arms, but testimony shows the Senate sergeant-at-arms also was not keen about the idea.

We will keep an eye on this issue in case new information emerges that would result in a new rating. But for the moment, Jordan earns Four Pinocchios for his tweet. Speculation is not the same as evidence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=916

It sounds like Hyatt Hotels wished it had never agreed to host this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference. In an unusually honest corporate statement issued late Sunday, after Donald Trump took to the stage at the conference’s finale, the hotel group said it was “extremely disappointed by the disrespect many individuals involved in the event showed to our colleagues” following reports that attendees became abusive when asked to wear masks and socially distance. The hotel group also called symbols of hate “abhorrent” after the design of the CPAC stage was compared to a Norse rune used by Nazis during World War Two. Hyatt clarified that it had no involvement in the stage design, adding: “We take the concern raised about the prospect of symbols of hate being included in the stage design at CPAC 2021 very seriously as all such symbols are abhorrent and unequivocally counter to our values as a company.” Matt Schlapp, American Conservative Union chair, dismissed the comparisons to the Nazi rune as “outrageous and slanderous.”
https://twitter.com/BJacksonWrites/status/1365696825680949251