The select committee of the House investigating January 6 bombing of the United States Capitol will recommend former Trump aides Peter Navarro and Dan Scavnio be considered a contempt in Congress for not cooperating with citations.
The committee released the report recommending the charges of contempt on Sunday night, ahead of the meeting scheduled for Monday, where they will vote to send it to the plenary.
The committee, made up of six Democrats and two Republicans who support investigating the role of former President Donald Trump in the attack, will likely approve of Navarro and Scavino being despised.
If authorized by the committee, the recommendation is passed to the full House, controlled by Democrats, which will then vote on whether to turn the matter over to the Justice Department.
In a statement last week, Navarro described the vote of contempt as “an unprecedented partisan attack on the privilege of the executive.” Navarro, along with other Trump allies who have been cited, have said they cannot overturn Trump by invoking executive privilege. President Biden, for his part, has rejected claims for executive privilege.
AP / Andrew Harnik, AP / Alex Brandon
The committee has issued a subpoena to Navarro, who served as a trade adviser to former President Donald Trump, alleging that he developed plans to change the outcome of the election. Scavino, a former deputy chief of staff, was also summoned in September to provide documents to the committee and attend depositions, along with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon and Pentagon Chief of Staff Kashyap Patel.
The Jan. 6 select committee has already formally recommended that the U.S. House formally refer Bannon and Meadows out of contempt of congressional prosecution. The House, by a majority of votes that included nine Republicans, voted in favor of the remission.
Weeks later, the Department of Justice charged BannonWho was handed over to the authorities and pleaded not guilty. He is scheduled to stand trial in late July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. His defense attorney told CBS News that the defense expects to file a motion to dismiss the indictment on April 8.
The Justice Department has not commented on the nature or results of its review of possible criminal charges against Meadows. The U.S. House of Representatives, with a two-vote majority that included only two Republicans, approved Meadows’ referral for possible office in mid-December. Three months later, no case has been filed yet.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the committee, told Face the Nation on Sunday morning that he “is not confident that Meadows has delivered everything.”
“He was cooperating with us a little bit and then, in an attempt to make Donald Trump happy, he stopped cooperating,” Kinzinger said. “We gave him a lot of space to come back and resume. He didn’t.”
Last week, CBS News election chief and campaign correspondent Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post obtained texts between Meadows and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, who also holds the January 6 committee of the House. In the texts, Ginni Thomas pushed Meadows to cancel the 2020 election.
Rebecca Kaplan, Ellis Kim and Zak Hudak contributed to this report.
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