The Daily Fuckup

On March 28, 2022, the January 6 select committee took its sharpest procedural step yet against two former Trump aides: it voted to recommend criminal contempt citations for Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino. The move did not by itself make those citations final. It sent the question to the full House, which later approved the contempt resolution on April 6, 2022. But the committee’s vote marked a clear escalation from requests and subpoenas to the formal machinery Congress uses when witnesses refuse to comply.

The distinction matters. A committee recommendation is not the same thing as a chamber-wide vote, and the March 28 action was still just that — a recommendation from the select committee after Navarro and Scavino declined to cooperate. Even so, the signal was plain. The committee was no longer treating noncompliance as a delay tactic it could absorb. It was moving to force the issue through the House floor and, if necessary, into criminal referral.

That shift came after months of work on the attack at the Capitol and the pressure campaign surrounding the 2020 election. The committee had already spent the winter collecting testimony, documents, and public evidence about the effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. By late March, it was also showing that subpoenas were not optional in practice just because the targets were close to Donald Trump. The panel’s vote said the inquiry had reached a point where refusal would be answered with formal consequences.

Navarro and Scavino were not the only people in Trump’s orbit to face legal exposure from the investigation, but their cases gave the committee a concrete test of whether it could compel cooperation from former aides who had taken the same line: no documents, no useful testimony, no voluntary help. The March 28 vote showed the committee was willing to use contempt proceedings to make its subpoenas mean something. The House later made that recommendation official, but the first hard turn happened in committee on March 28.

The larger point for the House was institutional as much as political. Investigations that matter usually require more than hearings and speeches. They require subpoenas, deadlines, document production, and a willingness to enforce the rules when witnesses ignore them. On March 28, the January 6 committee chose enforcement over drift, and it did so in a case involving two men who had worked directly for Trump. That made the moment less a symbolic flourish than a sign that the panel was prepared to press its inquiry into the next stage, one where refusal itself became part of the record.