WASHINGTON — Two more top White House aides for former President Donald Trump are on their way to criminal contempt of Congress referrals for refusing to honor subpoenas from the House Jan. 6 committee.
The panel on Thursday announced that the committee would meet Monday night to vote on contempt charge recommendations against Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, and social media aide, Dan Scavino. Those would go to the full House and, if approved, could result in Justice Department prosecutions.
Navarro was a key player in spreading Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election and was a proponent of the scheme to use the scheduled pro forma certification of the election on Jan. 6 to instead overturn his loss and reinstall Trump to a second term. Scavino was reportedly with Trump for much of that day, including in the Oval Office, from where Trump watched the violent attack on the Capitol play out on television in his adjacent dining room.
The committee has already referred three Trump associates for contempt charges to the full House, which has approved referrals for two of them: Steve Bannon, a former top White House aide who with Navarro was trying to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff who was involved in various elements of his boss’s attempt to remain in office despite losing the election.
Bannon was subsequently indicted by the Justice Department and is awaiting trial, while the Meadows referral is still pending.
The committee also voted to recommend a contempt referral for Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who was helping Trump try to overturn his loss by falsely claiming that the department had found evidence of voter fraud. But Clark subsequently honored his subpoena by showing up for a deposition, although he reportedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than a hundred times.
A criminal contempt charge cannot force someone to testify, but does make that decision more costly with added legal fees and time lost to court appearances. If it results in a conviction, it could lead to as much as a year behind bars.
The committee — which includes Republicans, but none who helped spread Trump’s election lies — has interviewed hundreds of witnesses, mostly without the need for a subpoena, and collected tens of thousands of pages of documents. It plans public hearings, which are now scheduled to start in May, and could lead to criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
Trump, despite losing the election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College, became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. His incitement of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol led to five deaths, including that of one police officer. The event also injured another 140 officers and led to four police suicides.
Despite this, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.
