President Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows will no longer cooperate with the House committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Meadows claimed that the committee was acting in bad faith after he had previously said he would sit for a deposition for the committee.
Meadows’ lawyer, George J. Terwilliger II, sent a letter to the committee that said, “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.”
Terwillger added, “In short, we now have every indication from the information supplied to us last Friday — upon which Mr. Meadows could expect to be questioned — that the select committee has no intention of respecting boundaries concerning executive privilege.”
Meadows has backed out on cooperating with the committee due in large part to news that the committee has issued “wide-ranging subpoenas for information from a third party communications provider.”
Meadows’ former boss, President Trump, has previously contested the idea that what happened on Jan. 6 was an “insurrection.” He countered that the real “insurrection” occurred during the 2020 election.
“The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!” said the 45th president.
Trump has derided Democrats and RINOs for wasting time investigating the events of Jan. 6 on Capitol Hill when they could be investigating allegations of voter fraud that may have taken place during the 2020 election.
Trump took aim at the congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 in October, when he said, “The Unselect Committee of partisan Democrats, and two very weak and pathetic RINOs, should come to the conclusion after spending many millions of dollars, that the real insurrection happened on November 3rd, the Presidential Election, not on January 6th — which was a day of protesting the Fake Election results.”
Trump filed a lawsuit in October to stop the House committee from obtaining documents, claiming “executive privilege.” The lawsuit struck back hard at the committee, blasting it as an “illegal fishing expedition.”
“The Committee’s request amounts to nothing less than a vexatious, illegal fishing expedition openly endorsed by Biden and designed to unconstitutionally investigate President Trump and his administration. Our laws do not permit such an impulsive, egregious action against a former President and his close advisors,” the lawsuit states.
It appears that regardless of what Mark Meadows does, the January 6 committee’s fishing operating against the Trump administration will continue.