LegiStorm

Not one to shy away from controversy, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is holding three indoor town halls with little apparent regard for COVID-19 safety precautions.

This morning, Greene tweeted a photo from her first town hall, held last evening, showing her huddled in conversation with a small group of women holding but not wearing masks. She will hold another town hall later today and one tomorrow. Registration for the events is now "closed due to COVID-19 capacity limitations," according to her website, which does not mention mask use or other now-common precautions.

Georgia's Department of Public Health data shows that Floyd, Whitfield and Paulding counties, where Greene is holding the events, all have among the state's worst rates of COVID-19 deaths relative to their total population sizes.

The vast majority of members have shied away from in-person town halls since the start of the pandemic, holding just as many events as usual but opting for virtual formats instead. So far, two other members have held in-person town halls in the new session of Congress: Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa) will host an event later today that requires masks and a temperature check, while freshman Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) met with masked constituents at two outdoor events earlier this month.

A public-relations executive who set up meetings between associates of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin has been lobbying on behalf of a fugitive Russian billionaire.

Josh Nass, a young public relations executive in New York who is fluent in Russian, recently disclosed his work to exclude Boris Mints from U.S. sanctions. The Treasury Department included Mints on its "Putin list" in 2018 and does not appear to have removed him in any subsequent Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act updates.

A year ago, Russia issued an arrest warrant against Mints and his two sons for allegedly embezzling 34 billion rubles, then worth $533 million USD. Mints now lives in the U.K.

Nass reportedly helped to arrange a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Jason Greenblatt, then a Trump Organization attorney, and Berel Lazar, Russia's chief rabbi and a close friend and confidant of Putin.

Nass, who had never before registered as a lobbyist, has so far reported making $50,000 for his work for Mints. He also disclosed that he spent the end of Trump's presidency trying to secure pardons for four clients, none of whom made the 11th-hour pardon list.

Ex-Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) has left Mercury Public Affairs to work for one of his existing lobbying clients.

Miller helped to open the Department of Veterans Affairs to lobbying interests during his time as Veterans' Affairs Committee chair and has since made a career of lobbying the department, as Politico Magazine detailed in 2019.

Miller is now senior vice president of government affairs for CareSource, an Ohio-based health-care nonprofit and one of the country's largest Medicaid plan providers. He'd spent the last year at Mercury Public Affairs. CareSource has been Miller's lobbying client on VA issues since 2019, when he worked for McDermott Will & Emery.

Freshman Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) has harvested his legislative director from a government agricultural-research agency.

Laney Copeland was most recently a policy adviser at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that promotes agriculture-science research.

Before moving to NIFA a year ago, she worked for ex-Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.).

A lobbying stint later, an old aide to Rep. Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.) is back with the congressman, this time as chief of staff.

Ernie Jolly comes from the Mortgage Bankers Association, where he was associate vice president and a registered federal lobbyist. Before leaving for the real-estate finance group in 2019, he was Meeks' deputy chief.

During Jolly's tenure, the association kept strong ties to Meeks, bringing him on as a conference speaker and donating $10,000 to each his campaign committee and PAC. Meeks chaired the Financial Services Committee's Consumer Protection and Financial Institutions Subcommittee last term.