By MARY CLARE JALONICK, JILL COLVIN and COLLEEN LONG

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is moving swiftly Tuesday to hold at least one of Donald Trump’s allies in contempt as the former president is pushing back on the probe in a new lawsuit.

Trump is aggressively trying to block the committee’s work by directing former White House aide Steve Bannon not to answer questions in the probe while also suing the panel to try to prevent Congress from obtaining former White House documents. But lawmakers on the House committee say they will not back down as they gather facts and testimony about the attack involving Trump’s supporters that left dozens of police officers injured, sent lawmakers running for their lives and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

“The former president’s clear objective is to stop the Select Committee from getting to the facts about January 6th and his lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe,” said Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the panel’s vice chairwoman, in a joint statement late Monday.

They added: “It’s hard to imagine a more compelling public interest than trying to get answers about an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overturn the results of an election.”

Trump’s lawsuit, filed after Biden decided to waive his right to block the document release over executive privilege concerns, claims that the panel’s August request was overly broad and a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition,” according to papers filed in federal court in the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit was expected, as Trump has repeatedly made clear that he will challenge the investigation of the violent attack by a mob of his supporters. But Trump’s challenge went beyond the initial 125 pages of records that Biden recently cleared for release to the committee. The suit, which names the committee as well as the National Archives, seeks to invalidate the entirety of the congressional request, calling it overly broad, unduly burdensome and a challenge to separation of powers. It requests a court injunction to bar the archivist from producing the documents.

The Biden administration, in clearing the documents for release, said the violent siege of the Capitol more than nine months ago was such an extraordinary circumstance that it merited waiving the privilege that usually protects White House communications.

The legal challenge came a day before the panel is scheduled to vote to recommend that Bannon be held in criminal contempt of Congress for his defiance of the committee’s demands for documents and testimony. In a resolution released Monday, and scheduled to be voted out of the panel on Tuesday, the committee asserts that the former Trump aide and podcast host has no legal standing to rebuff the committee — even as Trump’s lawyer has argued that Bannon should not disclose information because it is protected by the privilege of the former president’s office.

Bannon was a private citizen when he spoke to Trump ahead of the attack, the committee said, and Trump has not asserted any such executive privilege claims to the panel itself.

“Mr. Bannon appears to have played a multi-faceted role in the events of January 6th, and the American people are entitled to hear his first-hand testimony regarding his actions,” the committee wrote in the resolution.

The resolution lists many ways in which Bannon was involved in the leadup to the insurrection, including reports that he encouraged Trump to focus on Jan. 6, the day Congress certified the presidential vote, and his comments on Jan. 5 that “all hell is going to break loose” the next day.

Once the committee votes on the Bannon contempt measure, it will go to the full House for a vote and then on to the Justice Department, which would decide whether to prosecute.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, the White House also worked to undercut Bannon’s argument. Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su wrote that the president’s decision on the documents applied to Bannon, too, and “at this point we are not aware of any basis for your client’s refusal to appear for a deposition.”

“President Biden’s determination that an assertion of privilege is not justified with respect to these subjects applies to your client’s deposition testimony and to any documents your client may possess concerning either subject,” Su wrote to Bannon’s lawyer.

Bannon’s attorney said he had not yet seen the letter and could not comment on it. While Bannon has said he needs a court order before complying with his subpoena, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former White House and Pentagon aide Kashyap Patel have been negotiating with the committee. It is unclear whether a fourth former White House aide, Dan Scavino, will comply.

The committee has also subpoenaed more than a dozen people who helped plan Trump rallies ahead of the siege, and some of them have already said they would turn over documents and give testimony.

The committee has demanded a broad range of executive branch papers related to intelligence gathered before the attack, security preparations during and before the siege, the pro-Trump rallies held that day and Trump’s false claims that he won the election, among other matters.

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Associated Press Writers Zeke Miller, Nomaan Merchant and Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

WASHIINGTON (AP) — Colin Powell, former Joint Chiefs chairman and secretary of state, has died from COVID-19 complications, his family said Monday. He was 84.

In an announcement on social media, the family said Powell had been fully vaccinated.

By JONATHAN LEMIRE and ZEKE MILLER

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is entering a crucial two weeks for his ambitious agenda, racing to conclude contentious congressional negotiations ahead of both domestic deadlines and a chance to showcase his administration’s accomplishments on a global stage.

Biden and his fellow Democrats are struggling to bridge intraparty divides by month’s end to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a larger social services package. The president hopes to nail down both before Air Force One lifts off for Europe on Oct. 28 for a pair of world leader summits, including the most ambitious climate change meeting in years.

But that goal has been jeopardized by fractures among Democrats, imperiling the fate of promised sweeping new efforts to grapple with climate change. There’s also rising anxiety within the party about a bellwether gubernatorial contest in Virginia and looming Senate fights over the federal debt limit and government funding that could distract from getting the president’s agenda across the finish line.

Biden is trying to stabilize his presidency after a difficult stretch marked by the tumultuous end of the Afghanistan war, a diplomatic spat with a longtime ally and a surge in COVID-19 cases that rattled the nation’s economic recovery and sent his poll numbers tumbling.

His team has continued its strategy — one that served it well during the campaign and earlier this year — of blocking out the outside noise to stay focused on a singular mission, this time to pass the two-part package that will give Democrats a platform on which to run in next year’s midterm elections.

“These bills, in my view, are literally about competitiveness versus complacency, about opportunity versus decay, and about leading the world or continuing to let the world move by us,” Biden said Friday while pushing the legislation in Connecticut.

Yet beneath the White House’s pleas for patience — reminding people that hard things take time — is a bubbling sense of urgency that a deal needs to be struck rapidly.

For the White House, there are the explicit target dates, including an end-of-month deadline on transportation funding and Biden’s upcoming foreign trip. But there are also more abstract imperatives: proving Democrats can deliver on their promises to voters and protecting Biden’s waning political capital.

With new urgency, the administration has sent signals to Capitol Hill in recent days that it is time to wrap up negotiations, that a deal needs to be reached, according to two White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations. Biden himself has expressed impatience and will be increasing his own personal outreach this week to push lawmakers to find a compromise and bring the bills to a vote, the officials said.

West Wing officials are still optimistic that an agreement will ultimately be struck, but there are also fears that the messy, drawn-out negotiation has clouded the tangible benefits of what Biden aims to deliver to voters.

Biden sought to address some of that when he traveled to Hartford, Connecticut, last week to showcase initiatives to sharply reduce the cost of early childhood care — perhaps one of the only pieces of the legislation that is a lock to make the final package.

Even Democratic leaders are divided on the best way to shrink the overall price tag of the package in order to win over more votes. Biden said Friday he prefers including all of the wish-list proposals, but trimming down the length of the programs to cut costs. His thinking is that a future Congress can vote later to extend programs that the American people will find popular.

But days earlier, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested the opposite tack — approving a narrower set of programs to last for a longer time period.

Some Democrats have pushed for passing the bipartisan infrastructure deal by Oct. 31 even if the larger social services package is not settled, a move many progressives dislike because they could lose leverage for the latter bill.

The fate of climate change provisions is particularly perilous.

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s objections to a program aimed at speeding the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels threatens the heart of Biden’s plans to combat climate change just before he tries to assert American leadership on the issue at the upcoming global conference in Scotland.

The Democrats’ razor-thin margins in both houses of Congress have empowered individual lawmakers like Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, vexing fellow lawmakers and the White House. White House aides have not abandoned the clean energy program but are exploring alternate means to string together a mix of policies to cut emissions, officials said.

Abandoning the provisions could wound Biden in Glasgow, at a summit that the administration has held out as a vital opportunity not just to combat climate change but to reassert U.S. leadership on the issue after four years of retrenchment under President Donald Trump. The United States will be bringing a major footprint to the gathering — including former President Barack Obama — but it risks falling behind European nations that have taken more concrete steps to cut emissions.

Biden’s stop in Scotland early in November will follow his participation in a summit of world leaders in Rome. But Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to skip the gatherings — delaying the first meeting between the leaders of the two superpowers — could diminish their relevance. Still, Biden is expected to meet in Italy with French President Emmanuel Macron as the men look to repair relations after a U.S. submarine deal with Australia scuttled a French contract and led the French to briefly withdraw their ambassador from Washington.

Also looming is the Nov. 2 gubernatorial election in Virginia, which is regarded as a referendum on Biden and the Democrats’ chances of retraining control over Congress next year.

Terry McAuliffe, who previously served as the state’s governor, is locked in a closer-than-expected race with Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin in a state that Biden won by 10 points last year.

McAuliffe has been surprisingly public in his criticism of the administration’s legislative strategy, urging Democrats to pass the infrastructure bill before Election Day to give him something to show voters. White House officials privately expect McAuliffe to emerge with a narrow win and believe they can ignore worries about a smaller-than-expected margin of victory.

But a tight outcome, or a Youngkin win, could rattle Democrats uncertain about Biden’s political coattails — potentially making them less likely to take risky votes for his agenda — and would buoy Republicans heading into the midterms.