The House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will meet Monday to consider recommending that the House keep former Trump aides Peter Navarro and Daniel Scavino in contempt for challenging congressional citations.
If the committee recommends a vote of no confidence and the full House approves the resolution, a likely outcome, as it is made up of Democrats and only two Republicans, both of whom support investigating the former president’s role in the attack. , the couple could be referred to the U.S. District Attorney for Columbia.
The committee issued a citation for the records and testimony of the former White House commercial adviser Pere Navarro in February, alleging that he developed plans to change the election result.
In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Navarro promoted a document he called the “Navarro Report” that claimed unfounded and discredited allegations of election fraud.
AP / Andrew Harnik, AP / Alex Brandon
In a book published last year, Navarro wrote that he and other Trump advisers had built a plan called “Green Bay Sweep” as the “last and best opportunity to snatch an election stolen from the jaws of Democratic deception.” “.
He described the scheme, which was done in coordination with Steve Bannon, in interviews with The Daily Beast late last year and MSNBC last month. In his appearance on MSNBC, he told host Ari Melber that they had lined up “more than 100” congressmen and senators to help challenge the election results in six battlefield states that Joe Biden had won.
“These are the places where we believe that if votes were sent back to those battlefield states and looked at again, there would be enough concern among the legislatures that most or all of those states would desert the election. That would launch in the House of Representatives, “Navarro said, adding that the plan was legal.
In a statement to CBS News at the time of the summons, Navarro accused the Jan. 6 committee of being “domestic terrorists” and called his efforts a “partisan witch hunt.” He said that since Trump has invoked the privilege of the executive, the committee should “negotiate any waiver of the privilege with the president and his attorneys directly, not through me.”
Scavino, the former White House communications director, was quoted for documents and testimony in September, along with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former senior adviser Steve Bannon and former Pentagon chief of staff Kashyap Patel.
The committee requested his testimony on the activities and communications of Mr. Trump in the days leading up to the Capitol attack, citing both his presence in the White House that day and his more than a decade of work for the former president.
Scavino sued Verizon late last year in an attempt to prevent the company from handing over its phone records in response to a separate subpoena from the committee.
The House has already voted in favor despise Bannon and Meadows for refusing to comply with the commission’s summons. The Justice Department has yet to take action in the Meadows case after the House vote in December. Bannon era accused of contempt in November and pleaded not guilty.
The committee has issued more than 90 summonses, including those to Trump’s allies, former White House officials, campaign aides and people involved in planning the rally in front of the White House before the Capitol building was besieged.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up the House Select Committee last year to investigate January 6 attack, when thousands of Trump supporters marched on the Capitol as Congress counted the election votes, a largely ceremonial final step that affirmed Biden’s victory. Lawmakers were sent to flee amid the riot, which killed five people and arrests of hundreds more. Trump, who encouraged his supporters to “walk” to the Capitol during the Ellipse rally before the counting of election votes, was denounced by the House a week later to incite the riot but it was later acquitted by the Senate.
Ellis Kim and Caroline Linton contributed to this report
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