Rudy Giuliani

Texas attorney Paul Davis, who was fired earlier this month after posting several Instagram videos of himself on the front lines at the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, filed an impressively grandiose lawsuit in federal court on Monday, requesting that Congress disappear entirely and that nearly everyone who holds high office in the United States, along with Mark Zuckerberg, be barred from ever seeking election or voting again. He also asked the court to tell the Justice Department and FBI not to arrest him.

The complaint, filed in the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas by Davis and co-counsel Kellye SoRelle, a failed Republican candidate for state office, claims that every vote cast in the 2020 general election was illegal, and therefore that "entire 117th Congress is illegitimate." Consequently, Davis argues, every action this Congress has taken, including impeaching former President Trump and certifying President Joe Biden's victory, is "null and void."

President Donald Trump has hired South Carolina lawyer Butch Bowers as his impeachment lawyer, Jake Sherman reported in the Punchbowl.

"Butch Bowers, who has represented two S.C. governors at ethics hearings, is not a stranger to impeachment proceedings," the Post and Courier said. "He worked for then-Gov. Mark Sanford when lawmakers considered impeaching him after he left the state to see his mistress in Argentina in 2009."

President Donald Trump left Washington Wednesday morning while most of his former aides were still asleep. But he's going to need some help moving forward.

CNBC reported Thursday that as the Senate readies to take up the impeachment trial, the ex-president doesn't have a legal team or a strategy for dealing with it.

Donald Trump is the only American president to be impeached twice. This time, he stands accused in a single article of impeachment of "incitement of insurrection" for delivering an incendiary speech on January 6 to an angry mob of supporters, sparking them to storm the U.S. Capitol building to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.

Trump will now be tried in the Senate. There, he will be given the opportunity to defend his shameless rhetoric and behavior. Among other claims, he will likely mount a defense under the First Amendment and argue that his speech was constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court's landmark 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

One America News, the Trump-loving cable news network that has peddled nonstop conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, has quietly scrubbed its website of stories about Dominion Voting Systems.

Business Insider reports that OAN has removed several election conspiracy articles it published earlier in the month, including stories about companies that have been filing defamation lawsuits against Trump supporters such as attorney Sidney Powell and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

President Donald Trump announced 143 pardons and commutations on his way out the door. Of those, 73 individuals got pardons and 70 were given commutations.

Of those were former California Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, who pleaded guilty for accepting receiving over $2.3 million bribes. Another Republican was Rep. Robin Hayes who was party to one of North Carolina's largest corruption scandals. He never served time.

President Donald Trump's staff, like many Americans, is counting down the days until President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.

The outgoing president spent his last weekend in office complaining that he'd been cheated out of re-election -- insisting, "Everybody knows I won" -- and senior administration officials are ready to get off the carousel, reported The Daily Beast.

The Constitution endows the President with the "power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States." Pardons have generally been granted after conviction and sentencing, but since Ford pardoned Nixon, there is precedent for pardoning someone who has not even been charged with a crime. Lawyers call this a "pre-emptive pardon." But is any kind of pardon valid when riddled with corruption? The question would appear to answer itself.

A close analogy would be a contract with the government infected with a conflict of interest because the procurement officer's daughter's father-in-law owns a stake in the counter-party. Lawyers would say that such a contract is void ab initio, lawyerspeak for void and of no legal effect.

In December, then-Attorney General William Barr infuriated many diehard supporters of President Donald Trump when he acknowledged Joe Biden as president-elect and told the Associated Press that he saw no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. And following the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Barr was sharply critical of Trump's role in inspiring his followers, saying he orchestrated "a mob to pressure Congress" and calling it a "betrayal of his office."

Commentators should be careful before giving Barr too much credit, though. Barr was long among Trump's most vigorous defenders, and journalist Marcy Wheeler — in an article published on her Empty Wheel blog this week — argues that he has a great deal of "complicity" in the violence that occurred in Washington, D.C. on January 6.

When a small group of pro-Trump lawyers announced they would be filing challenges in court to overturn the results of the 2020 election in several swing states that voted for President Joe Biden, Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis referred to the team of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell as having "RELEASED THE KRAKEN!"

This promptly became the butt of several jokes as Powell and Giuliani proceeded to lose case after case, with roughly 60 smackdowns in state and federal court — including from at least one judge appointed by Trump.

On Monday, CNN's KFILE reported that Rudy Giuliani voted with a provisional ballot — a practice he publicly opposed during the Trump team's effort to overturn the results of the presidential election.

According to Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski, Giuliani was forced to do this because his name was missing from the voter rolls when he showed up at a Manhattan precinct to cast his ballot.