Fraud and Taxes: Events are turning against Donald Trump.

   The Justice Department ordered the Internal Revenue Service to hand over the former president’s tax returns to a House of Representatives committee, saying the panel has offered “sufficient reasons” for requesting the material.

  Also involving the Justice Department, The Washington Post  reports that Trump pressed top Justice officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt despite having no evidence and that, according to contemporaneous notes on the conversation, “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me.” 

  The notes were taken by Richard Donoghue, who was then the deputy to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. The Justice Department gave Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse the election results, possibly unlawfully.

  “We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt, election,” Trump said, according to the notes.

  “Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Donoghue said, also according to his notes, and that DOJ had conducted “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews” and had not found evidence to support his claims of fraud. “We look at allegations but they don’t pan out,” the officials told Trump. 

  The former president said the people “saying that the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt.” 

  Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, of New York said in a statement, “These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency.” 

  On the matter of Trump’s taxes, he always said he would not release them because he was being audited, but the Justice Department has ruled that the Treasury Department must turn over six years of Trump’s tax returns to House investigators, opening the door for their eventual release to Congress and the public.

  “The American people deserve to know the facts of his troubling conflicts of interest and undermining of our security and democracy as president,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.

Pandemic Politics: Led by a squad of  their party’s dumbest representatives, Republican members of the House marched to the Senate floor to protest Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new mask mandates for all visitors, staff, and lawmakers on the floor. In the front were Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert. 

  Pelosi has ordered  the Capitol Police to arrest visitors or staff who refuse to mask-up, and any lawmakers would be fined $500.

  In response, Taylor-Greene introduced the We Will Not Comply Act (H.R. 2317) and tweeted, “No American should be discriminated against based on their vaccine status!”

  Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said, “It is not science. It’s left-wing authoritarian politics.”

  Speaking of science, the Centers for Disease Control announced that they have found that fully immunized people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant can spread the virus just as easily as unvaccinated people. The agency cited an outbreak of  469 cases in Provincetown, Massachusetts, three-quarters of them in people who  were fully vaccinated. 

Viral News: Broadway theaters that they will require theatergoers to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and wear masks in order to attend performances. Children under 12 would have to show proof of a negative test. 

  New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said yesterday that her city doesn’t have the capacity to handle all 911 emergency calls for Covid-19. “Thanks to the Delta variant, the Covid pandemic is once again raging out of control.” The city’s daily case average is up to 272.

Five Ring Roundup: Simone Biles, America’s gymnastics star, will not compete in Sunday’s finals for vault and uneven bars at the Tokyo Games. She has pulled out of every event so far for reasons of mental focus, she has said. She is still eligible for finals in the floor exercise on Monday and the balance beam on Tuesday.

  Swimmer Katie Ledecky finished her Olympics with a gold medal in the women’s 800-meter freestyle, becoming the first swimmer to win the event in three consecutive Olympics. She said she plans to keep going through the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

  Caeleb Dressel won his third gold medal, setting a world record in the 100-meter butterfly. He has a shot at one more gold Sunday in the 50-meter butterfly.

The Spin Rack: The first wave of about 200 Afghan translators and their families have arrived in the US in an evacuation of people who helped the Americans and are likely to be killed by the Taliban. About 20,000 Afghans have applied to come to this country. — Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy who says Donald Trump will be restored to the presidency next month, has pulled his advertising from the right-wing Fox network because they refused to air an ad for his “cyber symposium” about his claims of vote fraud that he intends to live stream. — Donald Trump raised $56 million online through the first half of this year. — NASA rejected the offer by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to effectively pay them $2 billion to develop the next moon lander. — Aviation authorities in Los Angeles are looking for someone they and pilots refer to as “the jetpack man” who has been flying with a jetpack as high as 3,000 feet, sometimes in the flight path of passenger jets and other aircraft.

Warming by the Numbers: The two largest wildfires in the US have burned land nearly the size of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago combined. The amount of Greenland ice that melted on Tuesday could cover Florida in 2 inches of water.

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