0 defense. the court yesterday appointed a guardian to represent their son. they have seemingly abandoned him. have had no contact with him. have not seen him or spoken to him. obviously what lies ahead for their case, it s going to be a difficult one for prosecutors after they charge them with four counts of involuntary manslaughter arguing that they gave him the gun as a gift, but also saying that they did nothing to prevent him from unleashing this shooting, this attack. prosecutors saying they knew things were going on and they should have done stuff, that s why they charged them and we ll see them later in court this afternoon. four children are dead. sh shimon, thank you very much. very good tuesday morning to you. i m jim sciutto. i m erica hill. the fate of mark meadows will likely soon be in the hands of the justice department, this following the january 6th committee voting unanimously to recommend that meadows be charged with criminal content of congress for defying it
Hold former president trump s chief of staff mark meadows in contempt. after first turning over some documents, appearing to cooperate in part, but then changing his mind, now refusing to cooperate. here s our chief washington correspondent jonathan karl tonight. reporter: the january 6th committee voting tonight to hold former president trump s chief of staff, mark meadows, in contempt of congress. a vote of the full house could come as soon as tomorrow, and meadows, a former congress member himself, is fighting and insisting he s done nothing wrong. nothing i ve done would rise to criminal contempt. reporter: meadows initially cooperated with the committee before abruptly refusing to show up for his deposition last week. but by that point, he had already turned over thousands of documents. according to the committee, one of the documents was a 38-page powerpoint presentation written by an outside adviser that urged the president to declare a state of emergency after the electio
The committee also says emails show that shortly before january 6th, meadows told an unnamed associate, quote, the national guard would be present to protect pro-trump people. the committee also has many of meadows text messages from the day of the riot itself, including a desperate plea from a former white house employee urging him to do something to stop the violence, writing, you should go to the cameras and say, we condemn this. please stand down, if you don t, people are going to die. david? all right, jon karl live in washington tonight. jon, thank you. and when we come back here, the major news tonight involving usa gymnastics, involving larry nassar, as well. and later here, how can you help in the storm zone. we give you more. ure s bo,
Now the justice department is prosecuting a number of people. but i assure you, at the end of the day, the public will be shocked to know how close we came to losing our democracy if those insurrectionists had succeeded. congressman bennie thompson of the great state of mississippi, chairman of the january 6th select committee. chairman, thank you for taking time to be here tonight. i know these next couple of days will be busy and intense. thanks for helping us understand. thank you for having me. the january 6th committee voting unanimously tonight to refer former trump advisor steve bannon for criminal contempt of congress prosecution. house will vote on that we just found out, the house will vote on that, full house, on thursday. at that point, if they vote, if a majority of the house votes to refer bannon, that will be handed over to the u.s. attorney s office in d.c. for potential prosecution there. that hasn t in 40 years in terms
reporter: and look, they won t take no for an answer now, but when you talk about this being about the larger landscape of what congress can and can t enforce, we went through four years of the trump administration, and you and i have talked about this a lot where effectively congressional subpoenas were trampled and ignored by trump allies. this is setting the precedent that that s no longer going to be the case, especially now that trump is out of office and especially when you consider the fact that bannon was not a member of the white house during the time the congressional committee is looking to talk to him about in the waning days of 2020. all of this leads to a legal battle we knew was coming. the president here certainly far outweighs just talking about january 6th. it s definitely about the larger landscape. he was just a private citizen. we always say if it was you and me, he was just you and me. yet we are still waiting. i want to dig deeper and bring in illinois repu