A top Trump aide gave “real-time communications” during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol to House investigators.
The House Jan. 6 committee announced Tuesday it was informed that Mark Meadows would no longer be cooperating with its inquiry — but not before he delivered a trove of documents. Meadows, who was chief of staff to former President Donald Trump at the end of his administration, is one of a few dozen people subpoenaed as part of the congressional investigation into the events surrounding the siege of Congress.
“Even as we litigate privilege issues, the Select Committee has numerous questions for Mr. Meadows about records he has turned over to the Committee with no claim of privilege, which include real-time communications with many individuals as the events of January 6th unfolded. We also need to hear from him about voluminous official records stored in his personal phone and email accounts, which were required to be turned over to the National Archives in accordance with the Presidential Records Act,” Chairman Bennie Thompson and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney said in a joint statement.
MEADOWS WITHDRAWS COOPERATION WITH JAN. 6 COMMITTEE
Meadows is still scheduled to appear before the committee for a deposition Wednesday. If he does not change course and show up, Thompson and Cheney said the select committee “will be left no choice but to advance contempt proceedings and recommend that the body in which Mr. Meadows once served refer him for criminal prosecution.”
A letter from Meadows’s attorney accused the select committee of making cooperation impossible.
“We agreed to provide thousands of pages of responsive documents and Mr. Meadows was willing to appear voluntarily, not under compulsion of the Select Committee’s subpoena to him, for a deposition to answer questions about non-privileged matters. Now actions by the Select Committee have made such an appearance untenable,” George Terwilliger II wrote.
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A source told CNN that Meadows gave the committee 6,000 pages of documents, among which are communications from Jan. 6. This source also said that “many people had Meadows’s cellphone.”
“The committee wants to ask him about some of that, and it’s really untenable that all of a sudden at the last minute he’s saying no, that somehow there’s some reason why he can’t talk about this,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told CNN anchor Jake Tapper in an interview.
Meadows told Fox News in a Tuesday evening interview that he has “tried to work with the committee to provide them — and even offered them other options in terms of answering questions.” Meadows also said he will respect Trump’s claim of executive privilege related to Jan. 6, which is being fought over in court, and claimed he is “not aware of anybody in the West Wing that had any advance knowledge that the security was going to be breached at the Capitol.”
