The Washington establishment never gave up on trying to bring down Donald Trump.
And all hell broke loose when Donald Trump found out about this criminal charge.
Donald Trump invoked executive privilege when ordering former aides Steve Bannon, Kash Patel, Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino to not cooperate with Nancy Pelosi’s partisan January 6 committee.
Republicans view the panel as a partisan fishing expedition to serve as a third impeachment of Donald Trump.
Bannon – who was Trump’s former chief strategist and spoke to Trump on January 5 – skipped his deposition with the committee and honored Trump’s executive privilege claim.
Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson – who chairs the committee – fired off a statement announcing the intention to move forward and refer Bannon to the Justice Department to face criminal charges.
Congressman Thompson wrote:
Mr. Bannon has declined to cooperate with the Select Committee and is instead hiding behind the former President’s insufficient, blanket, and vague statements regarding privileges he has purported to invoke. We reject his position entirely. The Select Committee will not tolerate defiance of our subpoenas, so we must move forward with proceedings to refer Mr. Bannon for criminal contempt. I’ve notified the Select Committee that we will convene for a business meeting Tuesday evening to vote on adopting a contempt report.
The Select Committee will use every tool at its disposal to get the information it seeks, and witnesses who try to stonewall the Select Committee will not succeed. All witnesses are required to provide the information they possess so the Committee can get to the facts. We’re grateful to the many individuals who are voluntarily participating and to witnesses who are complying with subpoenas, including several who met the deadline to begin producing materials to the Select Committee. We’re moving ahead quickly to get answers for the American people about what happened on January 6th and help secure the future of American democracy.
The committee will first vote on a criminal referral.
Once the committee votes in the affirmative the referral will then proceed to the floor vote for the full House of Representatives to weigh in on.
Donald Trump responded by firing back at the committee itself as a criminal entity.
Trump claimed the committee was “looking to hold people in criminal contempt for things relative to the Protest,” when Trump believed “they should hold themselves in criminal contempt.”
President Trump’s statement also served to point out that the committee served as a political vehicle to discredit Donald Trump and his supporters ahead of a potential 2024 comeback.
“They are using prosecutors and prosecutions to destroy more than half of this Country and the people are not going to stand for it!” Trump declared.
There is no legal precedent for a former president invoking executive privilege.
Trump will tie this effort up in court.
But Joe Biden and his allies may regret this fight to weaken executive privilege.
If Republicans win back the House and Senate,a newly empowered GOP committee chairman will certainly haul every Biden aide they can before Congress to testify about Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden’s cognitive decline, and Hunter Biden’s alleged corrupt business dealings.
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