Last Updated on August 30, 2023
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has the power to have the Contempt of Congress charges filed by Nancy Pelosi and her J6 Committee against Trump advisors Peter Navarros and Steve Bannon thrown out, and could do it so swiftly, that the charges would be gone within hours of McCarthy’s decision to act.
Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, two of 45th President Trump’s most well-known and highest-ranking advisors, were charged in 2021 and 2022 respectively by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi with two counts each of Contempt of Congress. The charges came after Bannon and Navarro refused to turn over privileged communications to Peosi’s J6 Committee.
Bannon has already been convicted on the charges and sentenced to 4 months in prison by a federal kangaroo court but is appealing the decision, while Navarro is slated to go on trial on September 5th.
But under federal law and the United States Constitution, because the charges originated under former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, they could be tossed at the behest of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’er who took Pelosi’s place after the House’s balance of power changed with the 2022 mid-terms.
As Speaker of the House, McCarthy has the power to, at any moment, rescind Pelosi’s criminal referrals against Bannon and Navarro.
Recently, National File legal contributor Ivan Raiklin joined John Himes on the One America News Network to break the situation down and explain how Kevin McCarthy could act today to have the politically motivated charges against Bannon and Navarro tossed.
If McCarthy moves to rescind the phony charges against Bannon and Navarro, Raiklin explained, the charges could be dropped “immediately.”
“It can happen before dinner, today, as we’re speaking here,” Raiklin said, before explaining the legal and constitutional footing for the maneuver.
“The bottom line here is that the Congress is the body that did the criminal referral for contempt of Congress because they did not respond in the manner in which the Congress wanted as it applies to the J6 cover-up committee,” said Raiklin.
“And so this current Congress can easily just go ahead and rescind that criminal referral so that then it becomes moot in the district court and the person that could easily do that is Speaker Kevin McCarthy.”
“The same authority that initiated it is the same authority that can go ahead and pull it back. Based on new evidence or even, for that matter, Kevin McCarthy, Speaker McCarthy can call in those two individuals (Bannon and Navarro) to actually testify for a minute or two, maybe for 4 seconds, and then that would meet the threshold of complying with the subpoena so that the case in the federal district court would be moot,” Raiklin told OANN.
“It could show that [Kevin McCarthy] is actually willing to stand up to the overreach of the previous Congress as well as the overreach that we’re seeing with the Department of Justice weaponizing their entire resources to go after their political opponents.”
And if McCarthy were to take action, Raiklin added, “the next step would be for him to take an even bolder action where he would reconsider the criminal referrals for all of the J6 defendants in the collective depending on if they were just politically motivated.”
“It’’s going to be abundantly clear, in my opinion, that what happened on January 6th was a manipulated, curated, political hit job,” said Raiklin.
Watch National File legal contributor Ivan Raiklin’s full interview with OAN below:
National File Legal Contributor & Constitutional Atty Ivan @Raiklin explains how @SpeakerMcCarthy can handle contempt charges levied against Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon by Nancy Pelosi.
McCarthy can make them go away TODAY!
So, WHY WON'T HE? pic.twitter.com/JwYMPHE566
— National File (@NationalFile) August 29, 2023
