Dan Scavino, a former aide to Donald Trump, was finally served a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol after a long struggle to locate him. The subpoena was taken to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on Friday. Scavino, a former deputy White House chief of staff for communications, was actually in New York at the time but asked a staff member to accept the subpoena on his behalf.
The serving of the subpoena ends a long saga after the Jan. 6 committee had been unable to locate Scavino for more than a week. The committee believes Scavino can have useful information because of his history of working closely with Trump. Specifically, the committee wants information regarding talks Trump had on Jan. 5 trying to convince lawmakers not to certify the election as well as what the president did on Jan. 6. Scavino will review the subpoena with his lawyers and decide what his next steps should be, a source tells CNN.
Scavino is one of several of Trump’s former aides who received a letter from Trump’s lawyer advising them to not provide any documents or testimony to the committee. He is one of four former Trump aides who had a Thursday deadline to hand over materials to the panel investigating the events of Jan. 6. Former Trump aides Mark Meadows and Kashyap Patel are “so far engaging” with the panel, Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, a Republican, said in a statement. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, on the other hand, has refused to cooperate with the subpoenas. “Mr. Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former president,” Thompson and Cheney said. They warned that “we will not allow any witness to defy a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral.”
President Joe Biden has decided not to invoke executive privilege to prevent White House records from being shared with the congressional investigation. “The president has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not warranted for the first set of documents from the Trump White House that have been provided to us by the National Archives,” press secretary Jen Psaki said. Trump now has 30 days to challenge that decision in court before the records are released to the panel.
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