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(WASHINGTON) — The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Tuesday moved to punish Trump adviser Steve Bannon, recommending the full House hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena for records and testimony.

The nine-member panel voted unanimously Tuesday evening to send a report recommending contempt charges to the full House. If approved by the full chamber as soon as this week, the matter would then be referred to the Justice Department to decide whether to pursue criminal charges.

“Our goal is simple: we want Mr. Bannon to answer our questions,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in the meeting. “We want him to turn over whatever records he possesses that are relevant to the select committee’s investigation. The issue in front of us today is our ability to do our job.”

The Justice Department has declined to comment on how it might act on a criminal referral for Bannon or others who may be held in contempt.

After President Joe Biden said recently that the Justice Department should prosecute Bannon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki attempted to distance the White House from that action, telling reporters on Monday that Biden “believes it’s an independent decision that should be made by the Department of Justice.”

The matter could take months, if not years, to litigate, and could result in a fine of up to $100,000 and up to one year in prison.

Robert Costello, Bannon’s attorney, told committee members that his client would not cooperate with the probe given Trump’s executive privilege concerns, or without a court order to do so.

“Though the Select Committee welcomes good-faith engagement with witnesses seeking to cooperate with our investigation, 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,” Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said in a statement earlier this month.

Thompson said Bannon “stands alone in his complete defiance” of the committee.

“We have reached out to dozens of witnesses. We are taking in thousands of pages of records. We are conducting interviews on a steady basis,” he said.

The committee’s report argues that the committee’s efforts to seek information from Bannon are justified because he “had specific knowledge about the events planned for January 6th before they occurred.”

“Mr. Bannon was a private citizen during the relevant time period and the testimony and documents the Select Committee is demanding do not concern discussion of official government matters with the President and his immediate advisors,” the panel wrote in the report, in response to Trump’s claims of privilege.

Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, said that Bannon and Trump’s claims of privilege “suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th.”

She also warned Republicans that Trump’s continued lies about widespread election fraud are “a prescription for national self-destruction.”

“You know that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud sufficient to overturn the election; you know that the Dominion voting machines were not corrupted by a foreign power. You know those claims are false. Yet President Trump repeats them almost daily,” she said.

“The American people must know what happened. They must know the truth. All of us who are elected officials must do our duty to prevent the dismantling of the rule of law, and to ensure nothing like that dark day in January ever happens again,” Cheney said.

Several other former Trump aides and associates, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Kashyap Patel, who served as a senior Pentagon official, continue to negotiate with the committee over cooperation after receiving subpoenas.

It’s not clear if Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, will cooperate with the panel’s investigation.

On Monday, the former president announced he was suing the committee, as well as the National Archives, to block lawmakers from receiving Trump White House records.

The Biden administration had refuted Trump’s of claim executive privilege, saying that the invocation “is not in the best interests of the United States,” White House counsel Dana Remus wrote in a letter to the National Archives.

As a result, the National Archives notified Trump’s attorney last week that it planned to turn over dozens of records to the committee on Nov. 12, “absent any intervening court order.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Amid a fresh wave of criticism from liberal activists and lawmakers, the White House on Tuesday defended President Joe Biden’s decision to nominate Rahm Emanuel for U.S. ambassador to Japan.

The former congressman and chief of staff to President Barack Obama has faced questions over how, as mayor of Chicago, he handled the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014.

Emanuel faces his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, which is also the seventh anniversary of McDonald’s killing — prompting renewed outcry this week.

He’s one of dozens of Biden ambassadorial nominees still stuck in the confirmation process. Biden has seen a single-digit handful of his ambassadorial nominees confirmed by the Senate, leaving key vacancies in foreign capitals and at the highest ranks of the State Department that some analysts warn pose a national security threat.

Republican senators, especially Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, have put holds on dozens of nominees over Biden’s refusal to sanction the German company behind Russia’s pipeline, Nord Stream 2. But the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., secured confirmation for 33 nominees on Tuesday, sending them to the Senate floor for a final vote.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed back against new calls for Biden to withdraw Emanuel’s nomination on Tuesday.

“The president nominated Rahm Emanuel to serve as ambassador to Japan because he’s somebody who has a record of public service, both in Congress, serving as a public official in the White House, and certainly also as the mayor of Chicago, and he felt he was somebody who could best represent the United States in Japan,” she told reporters.

No Democratic senators have spoken out against Emanuel’s nomination. Instead, powerful Democratic senators like Dick Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip and a fellow Illinois Democrat, have backed him. Durbin tweeted back in August that Emanuel “has a lifetime of public service preparing him to speak for America. … I will do all I can to help Rahm become America’s voice in Japan.”

Some House Democrats, however, have urged the White House to reverse course, although they do not vote to confirm nominees.

“This nomination is deeply shameful. … That the Biden administration seeks to reward Emanuel with an ambassadorship is an embarrassment and betrayal of the values we seek to uphold both within our nation and around the world. I urge the Senate to vote NO on his confirmation,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said in a statement last month.

This week, Kina Collins, a Democrat running for Congress in Emanuel’s home state of Illinois, has been leading advocacy against him.

“We can’t say Black Lives Matter and plan to build back better by appointing the man who covered up a police murder to a cushy job as an ambassador — a job the man is completely unqualified to hold,” tweeted the community organizer and activist, running again against Democratic lawmaker Danny Davis, who has held the Chicago district’s seat for over two decades.

At issue is the accusation that Emanuel, a longtime Democratic power player, helped cover up the 2014 killing of McDonald, a black teenager shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyke, a white policer officer.

Chicago police had said McDonald ignored warnings and approached the officers, but video, released 13 months later by a judge’s order, showed McDonald veering away from Van Dyke before the officer shot him.

The city reached a settlement with McDonald’s family, and in October 2018, Van Dyke was found guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm.

Emanuel had said the city could not release the video because of a Justice Department investigation, said he did not see the video until shortly before its release, and has denied any wrongdoing. The video was released in Nov. 2015, seven months after Emanuel won reelection as mayor.

Asked whether Biden and Emanuel have spoken, including about the McDonald case, Psaki told reporters, “I don’t have any record of him speaking with him necessarily through the process. … Obviously, he’s somebody who he was familiar with. He knew his record of long standing prior to the nomination. And the president has made his own comments about that case, which I would point everyone to.”

Emanuel, a former ABC News contributor, was reportedly under consideration for a Cabinet secretary position during the transition last winter, but ultimately, he was not nominated for a role. The White House announced his nomination for ambassador to Japan on Aug. 20 after months of speculation.

To date, only nine Biden ambassador picks have been confirmed by the Senate, with dozens of others held up by Cruz, Hawley, and others over foreign policy disagreements with the White House, especially on Nord Stream 2.

“There have been unprecedented delays, obstruction, holds on qualified individuals from Republicans in the Senate,” Psaki said Monday. “The blame is clear. It is frustrating. It is something that we wish would move forward more quickly.”

After months of battle, however, there was a breakthrough Tuesday, with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voting to send 33 nominations to the Senate floor for a vote.

“As the United States faces an unprecedented confluence of challenges on the world stage, our security, interests, and ability to advance our values and assert global leadership should not be imperiled by the obstructionism of those infatuated with playing politics with our entire national security infrastructure,” Menendez said Tuesday.

Among those approved by the committee are Cindy McCain, John McCain’s widow, for U.S. envoy to the United Nations agencies in Rome; former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, an outspoken Trump critic, as ambassador to Turkey; famed pilot Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger as U.S. envoy to the International Civil Aviation Organization; and former Delaware Democratic Gov. Jack Markell as U.S. envoy to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.

ABC News’s Sarah Donaldson contributed to this report from the White House.

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(WASHINGTON) —  The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is expected to recommend holding longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the panel’s investigation.

Committee members will vote Tuesday evening on whether to send a report recommending contempt charges to the full House. If approved by the full chamber on Thursday, the matter would then be referred to the Justice Department to decide whether to pursue criminal charges.

After President Joe Biden said recently that the Justice Department should prosecute Bannon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki attempted to distance the White House from that action, telling reporters on Monday that Biden “believes it’s an independent decision that should be made by the Department of Justice.”

The matter could take months, if not years, to litigate, and could result in a fine of up to $100,000 and up to one year in prison.

“Though the Select Committee welcomes good-faith engagement with witnesses seeking to cooperate with our investigation, 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,” Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said in a statement earlier this month.

The statement came after Robert Costello, Bannon’s attorney, told committee members that his client would not cooperate with the probe given Trump’s executive privilege concerns, or without a court order to do so.

The committee’s report argues that the committee’s efforts to seek information from Bannon are justified because he “had specific knowledge about the events planned for January 6th before they occurred.”

“Mr. Bannon was a private citizen during the relevant time period and the testimony and documents the Select Committee is demanding do not concern discussion of official government matters with the President and his immediate advisors,” the panel wrote in the report, in response to Trump’s claims of privilege.

Several other former Trump aides and associates, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Kashyap Patel, who served as a senior Pentagon official, continue to negotiate with the committee over cooperation after receiving subpoenas.

It’s not clear if Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, will cooperate with the panel’s investigation.

Earlier Tuesday, the former president announced he was suing the committee, as well as the National Archives, to block lawmakers from receiving Trump White House records.

The Biden administration had refuted Trump’s of claim executive privilege, saying that the invocation “is not in the best interests of the United States,” White House counsel Dana Remus wrote in a letter to the National Archives.

As a result, the National Archives notified Trump’s attorney last week that it planned to turn over dozens of records to the committee on Nov. 12, “absent any intervening court order.”

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration on Tuesday backed down on a controversial proposal to direct the IRS to collect additional data on every bank account that sees more than $600 in annual transactions, after widespread criticism from Republican lawmakers and banking industry representatives, who said the tax enforcement strategy represented a breach of privacy by the federal government.

Instead, the administration and Senate Democrats are proposing to raise the threshold to accounts with more than $10,000 in annual transactions, and any income received through a paycheck from which federal taxes are automatically deducted will not be subject to the reporting. Recipients of federal benefits like unemployment and Social Security would also be exempt.

The IRS would collect the total sum of deposits and withdrawals from bank accounts with more than $10,000 in non-payroll income. Information on individual transactions would not be collected.

The changes were announced Tuesday by the Treasury Department.

“In response to considerations about scope, it [Congress] has crafted a new approach to include an exemption for wage and salary earners and federal program beneficiaries. Under this revised approach, such earners can be completely carved out of the reporting structure. This is a well-reasoned modification: for American workers and retirees, the IRS already has information on wage and salary income and the federal benefits they receive,” a Treasury Department fact sheet on the changes said.

The changes would exempt millions of Americans from the reporting requirement, and help the IRS target wealthier Americans, especially those who earn money from investments, real estate, and other transactions that are more difficult for the IRS to track.

“Under the current system, American workers pay virtually all their tax bills while many top earners avoid paying billions in the taxes they owe by exploiting the system. At the core of the problem is a discrepancy in the ways types of income are reported to the IRS: opaque income sources frequently avoid scrutiny while wages and federal benefits are typically subject to nearly full compliance. This two-tiered tax system is unfair and deprives the country of resources to fund core priorities,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

“Today’s new proposal reflects the Administration’s strong belief that we should zero in on those at the top of the income scale who don’t pay the taxes they owe, while protecting American workers by setting the bank account threshold at $10,000 and providing an exemption for wage earners like teachers and firefighters,” Yellen said.

The fact sheet says, “Imagine a taxpayer who reports $10,000 of income; but has $10 million of flows in and out of their bank account. Having this summary information will help flag for the IRS when high-income people under-report their income (and under-pay their tax obligations). This will help the IRS target its enforcement activities on those who are actually evading their tax obligations—decreasing costly and burdensome audits for the vast majority of taxpayers who pay what they owe.”

The proposal is a long way from being enacted. It’s currently included in a multi-trillion dollar social spending package lawmakers and the White House have been negotiating for months. If that package is passed into law, this requirement wouldn’t begin until December 2022.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden D-Ore., who spearheaded the effort to revise the proposal, dispute Republican claims that the goal is to snoop on Americans’ financial transactions.

“The bottom line is, wealthy tax cheats are ripping off the American people to the tune of billions and billions of dollars per year. Tax cheats thrive when the reporting rules that apply to them are loose and murky. Democrats want to fix this broken approach and crack down on the cheating at the top,” Wyden said in a press conference on the announcement Tuesday.

Wyden made clear that even Americans who might make a large purchase over $10,000 wouldn’t be subject to the additional reporting.

“If you don’t have $10,000 above your paycheck, Social Security income, or the like coming in or going out, there’s no additional reporting. We’ve also addressed the scenario where an individual spends a significant amount of savings for a major purchase. There will be no additional reporting in this scenario, as long as the amount of money coming into the account does not exceed wages +$10,000,” Wyden said.

The administration did not specify if the changes will impact the additional tax revenue they might be able to collect through enforcement. The administration has estimated improved tax enforcement could net up to $600 billion in additional tax revenue over the next decade.

The initial proposal, which would have affected nearly every non-dormant bank account in the U.S., raised the ire of Republican lawmakers, who called it a breach of privacy and an example of government overreach. Even with the revisions to the proposal, Republicans in the Senate remained critical.

“So how long is it gonna take for them to say, ‘Well you know we need a little bit more information because we really can’t make much of this.’ Then they’re going to want individual transactions and who knows what,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters.

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, cited President Biden’s commitment not to raise taxes on any American making less than $400,000, suggesting that threshold ought to be applied to IRS reporting.

“Why don’t they just put a ban in there that bans the IRS from snooping in the accounts of people who make less than $400,000? That’s the question I think that should be asked with the sponsors of this approach,” Crapo said.

Crapo was hard-pressed to give an example of an alternative way to close the tax gap other than to say mention “closing loopholes.”

Banking industry representatives remain skeptical of any additional reporting requirement, saying it will create a burden, especially for smaller community banks.

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