Category: Congress

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Congress Donald Trump

The Donald’s Former Accounting Firm Just Handed His Financial Records To Congress

Despite his countless legal maneuvers to keep it from happening, failed, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump now has to watch as his financial records are handed over to congressional Democrats, a development which must have him seething.

According to The New York Times, Mazars USA has given the records to a key House committee:

“After a yearslong legal fight, the House Oversight Committee has received a first trove of documents from the firm, which recently entered into a legal settlement agreeing to produce a range of financial documents from several years before Mr. Trump took office and during his early presidency. Mazars said in February it could no longer stand behind a decade of annual financial statements it had prepared for the Trump Organization.”

The chair of the committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) confirmed that Mazars was indeed cooperating and providing documents:

“We’re reviewing them. Mazars is being very cooperative.”

Maloney also noted that her committee was the only one in Congress to obtain any of the Mazars documents.

The Times also notes that news of the document handover has been a long time coming:

“The Oversight Committee has been in a lengthy struggle to obtain financial documents from Mr. Trump as part of its investigation into allegations of conflicts of interest, inadequate financial disclosures and violations of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution, which bar the president from receiving profits from a domestic or foreign government other than his official compensation. In 2019, Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney, testified before the committee that Mr. Trump’s financial statements had falsely represented the former president’s assets and liabilities and that Mr. Trump had ‘inflated his total assets when it served his purposes’ and, at other times, ‘deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.'”

The agreement between Mazars and the Oversight Committee specifies “that Mazars must turn over any documents between 2014 and 2018 that indicate any false or undisclosed information about Mr. Trump’s assets, income or liabilities; communications related to any potential concerns that financial information provided by Mr. Trump’s companies was inaccurate; documents from November 2016 to 2018 related to the Old Post Office Building, a federal property in Washington that Mr. Trump’s company converted into a hotel through a lease deal; and documents from 2017 and 2018 related to relationships between Mr. Trump’s businesses and foreign states.”


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Capitol Insurrection Congress January 6

January 6 Committee ‘Won’t Be Quiet’ In The Weeks Leading Up To Midterm Elections: Report

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol is making it clear they will not let the November midterm elections keep them from holding hearings and releasing new findings in the weeks leading up to the November 8 balloting.

Damaging new revelations could be a big problem for Republicans, who have seen their polling lead vanish in recent weeks at the same time President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are polling strongly and could wind up keeping control of both houses of Congress.

According to Axios, Jan. 6 committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) is signaling that there will be no pullback by the panel:

Thompson told Axios the panel does not want to be “perceived as a partisan committee … we’ve been fairly free of those kind of complaints, and we would not want to interfere with the election.”

But he said the time between an expected Sept. 28 hearing and the election “won’t be a quiet period.” He also said that “the goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election.” The panel may release its interim report in that window.

Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Republicans will complain no matter what happens in the hearings:

“There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”

The biggest fear for Republicans: Damaging new information coming out of the hearings that would put the issue forefront in the minds of voters right as they’re headed to the polls.

The panel’s highly publicized public hearings over the summer dredged up events Republicans would sooner forget, searing them into the public consciousness in a way they hadn’t been since early 2021. New revelations could return concerns to the forefront of voters’ minds.

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Congress GOP Gun Crime Viral Video WTF?!

Viral Video: Marjorie Taylor Greene Appears To Kick A Gun Control Activist Who Disagrees With Her

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) appears to have committed a crime that was caught on video today in Washington, D.C.

Greene was walking and talking to activists who support sensible gun control. The congresswoman is vehemently opposed to any laws that would regulated guns in any manner whatsoever.

One of the activists, Santiago Mayer, the executive director of Voters of Tomorrow asked Greene about her staunch opposition to laws that would help reduce mass shootings, to which Greene replied:

“Shame on you. You know what? Go move to another country where they take away your guns.”

Mayer:

“I want to live in a country where kids don’t get shot.”

A sneering Greene told Mayer:

“You’re not even a grateful American.”

Another woman who was wearing a blue dress, then inquired of Greene:

“How does the second Amendment prevent gun violence?”

If you watch closely at the 1:15 mark of the video, it appears that Greene kicks the woman to make her move out of her walking path. The startled woman is clearly surprised, and a few seconds later an aide to Greene mentions that it’s against the law to block a member of Congress.

As she walks past the woman in the blue dress, Greene seems to say that she should just consider being kicked an “accident.”

Mayer later confirmed that Greene had indeed kicked a member of his team:

 

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Climate Change Congress GOP

WATCH AOC Eviscerate A Republican For His Bigoted, Sexist Attack On A Climate Expert

On Thursday, a House committee on climate turned ugly when Republican Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana used bigoted and sexist terms directed at an expert on the issue and was then verbally eviscerated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

According to HuffPost:

Raya Salter, an energy justice lawyer who serves on the New York State Climate Action Council, was invited to testify before House lawmakers during a hearing about the oil and gas industry’s lack of accountability and major role in the climate crisis. She said that the climate crisis is an “unprecedented global crime and the smoking gun lies in the hands of big oil and gas.”

Salter, a Black woman, talked about the disproportionate impact that the fossil fuel industry has had on Black and brown communities, as well as low-income families. She said that corporations are trying to shift the blame for the climate crisis to individual consumers and environmental activists instead of focusing on the real solution: transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Higgins began his questioning with this:

“Everything you have – your clothes, your glasses, your car you got here on, your phone, the table you’re sitting at, the chair, the carpet under your feet – everything you’ve got is petrochemical products. What would you do with that? Tell the world.”

Salters responded, as Higgins tried to talk over her:

“If I had that power in the world – actually, I don’t need that power because what I would do is ask you, sir, from Louisiana, to search your heart and understand why the EPA knows that toxic petrochemical facilities are some of the most toxic polluting facilities in the world and are killing Black people throughout Louisiana.”

That’s when Higgins turned into a condescending piece of excrement:

“My good lady. I’m trying to give you the floor, boo,” Higgins said as he continued speaking over her. “Boo” is a common term of endearment in the Black community, however, when used sarcastically – as the white congressman apparently did – it can be considered disrespectful, racist and misogynistic.

Higgins also invoked religion, suggesting that God gave man the power to care for the Earth, to which Salter replied:

“Sir, if we’re going to talk about the Lord, I ask that you search your heart again and think about repenting because the fossil fuel industry that owns your state is destroying the earth and the natural world. And that is a fact, sir.”

That led Higgins to start yelling:

“You know what you got, young lady? You got a lot of noise, but you got no answers!”

Ocasio-Cortez then took a verbal scalpel to Higgins and exposed him as the disgusting asshole he is:

“In the four years that I’ve sat on this committee, I have never seen members of Congress – Republican or Democrat – disrespect a witness in the way that I have seen them disrespect you today. I do not care what party they are in, I’ve never seen anything like that.

“And for the gentleman of Louisiana, and the comfort that he felt in yelling at you like that – there’s more than one way to get a point across. Frankly, men who treat women like that in public, I fear how they treat them in private. We can be better than this.”

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Congress GOP

WATCH: Jamie Raskin Burns Republicans Down With Impassioned Speech About Democracy

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is truly an American treasure and one of the most important Democrats in the country. Why? Because he doesn’t take any bull and isn’t afraid to speak truth to power.

Raskin is especially eloquent when he discusses the perversion of American democracy that the Republican Party in the Age of Trump has engaged in for one purpose: Power.

The Maryland Democrat took to the House floor Wednesday and gave a speech that will go down in history as one of the best ever given by any member of Congress.

The topic of Congressman Raskin’s speech was today’s GOP, whom he excoriated for being anti-democratic, snuggled up with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, and enemies of democracy.

“America is a country of individual freedom and the rights of the people to make their own decisions, not having busy body theocrat politicians in state capitols how to make their own decisions about their careers, their lives, their families, and their healthcare, and certainly not allowing Lindsey Graham to tell the women of America what their destiny will be, and they won’t say a word about it.

“They’ll blame Joe Biden for global inflation. They’ll blame Joe Biden for Vladimir Putin’s filthy imperialist invasion of Russia (Ukraine). I hear them denounce Joe Biden.  They won’t denounce Vladimir Putin for one second.”

But it was what Raskin said next that all Americans need to hear before they cast a ballot in the midterm elections:

“We’re on the side of small ‘d’ democrats all over the world against the autocrats like Putin, against the theocrats like the people who would dictate to the women of America their own health decisions. We’re against the tyrants and bullies and the despots. We’re against presidents who get into office and try to dictate the political decision-making of individual members of the workforce and push their ideological program into the government, and we’re for defending whistleblowers. We’re for defending the Census. We’re for defending democratic institutions in America.”