Committee Investigating Jan 6 Attack Plans Contempt Vote As Trump Sues Over Probe

House committee that is investigating the Jan. 6 riot is planning contempt vote as former US President Donald Trump is suing the panel over the probe.

The former President is making attempts to block the committee’s investigation by directing ex-White House aide Steve Bannon not to reply to questions in the probe while also taking legal action against the panel to try to prevent Congress from getting hands on White House documents.

But lawmakers on the House committee, which continues to collect facts and testimony about the riot involving Trump’s supporters that left several cops injured and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s win, said that they will not back down, reported Associated Press.

Chairman of the special committee, Bennie Thompson, and Republican Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the panel’s vice chairwoman, issued a joint statement Monday where they said that Trump's clear objective is to stop the committee from getting to the facts about Jan. 6 and "his lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe."

“It’s hard to imagine a more compelling public interest than trying to get answers about an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overturn the results of an election," they added in the statement.

According to papers filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, Trump’s lawsuit claims that the committee’s request in August was a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition," and overly broad.

The legal action was taken just before the committee planned to vote to recommend that Bannon be held in criminal contempt of Congress for defying the panel's demands for testimony and documents.

According to The Guardian, the legal jeopardy for the former White House aide is expected after it popped up in a letter to his lawyer that he had claimed executive privilege protections on materials that were not related to the executive branch. Thompson said in the letter that even if the committee entertained the claims of executive privilege, Bannon had no basis to ignore the order since not even a leader of America could grant him immunity from subpoena issued by the House select committee.

The committee wrote in a resolution that Bannon seems to have played a multi-faceted role in the events of Jan. 6, and people of America are "entitled to hear his first-hand testimony regarding his actions."

Meanwhile, former White House and Pentagon aide Kashyap Patel and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows have been in talks with the committee. As for former White House aide, Dan Scavino, it is not clear if he will comply.

A Republican on the committee did not rule out issuing a subpoena for Trump. When asked if the committee could do a thorough investigation without subpoenaing Trump, Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger told CNN that he doesn't know. He added that if they subpoena him, they know that's going to become "kind of a circus" so that's not necessarily something they want to do up front, but if he has pieces of information that they need, they will subpoena him.