January 6th committee releases contempt report for Trump-aides Scavino and Navarro

On Sunday evening, the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol filed contempt reports for both former Trump White House aides Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro.

The committee claimed that it had given Scavino six extensions to sit for an interview and give over documents, adding that several of the issues Navarro previously said he could not discuss were included in his book.

The filing preceded the committee’s planned business meeting for Monday to vote on a criminal referral for Scavino and Navarro for failing to comply with the subpoenas they had been issued. Scavino used several delay tactics to put off cooperation with the committee’s investigation, and according to the committee, Scavino never significantly engaged and then became in violation of his subpoena. 

“Mr. Scavino reportedly attended several meetings with the President in which challenges to the election were discussed,” the committee noted in the report. “Mr. Scavino also tracked social media on behalf of President [Donald] Trump, and he did so at a time when sites reportedly frequented by Mr. Scavino suggested the possibility of violence on January 6th.”

According to a letter from Scavino’s attorney, he still holds that he does not need to testify, and Scavino pointed out that the law has not yet been settled on whether the current president has the ability to waive privilege on all testimony, including Scavino’s own conversations with Trump.

In relation to Navarro, a former White House trade adviser, the committee accuses him of not making any effort to comply with the subpoena request, adding that Navarro made it clear that he could not cooperate because Trump held executive privilege in the matter.

The committee also noted, though, that Navarro’s citation of privilege is problematic because many of the topics it wanted to discuss with him had already been written about in his book.

“There are topics that the Select Committee believes it can discuss with [him] w9ithout raising any executive privilege concerns at all, including, but not limited to, questions related to [his] public three-part report about purported fraud in the November 2020 election and the plan [he] described in [his] book,” the committee said in an early March email to Navarro.