WASHINGTON — The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will vote Monday night to recommend holding former President Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to testify and produce requested documents.
The committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans appears prepared to make Meadows the third Trump confidante they’ve targeted with contempt after he refused to appear for questioning Wednesday. The entire House then plans to vote Tuesday on whether to send the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution.
Meadows, meanwhile, has filed a federal lawsuit against Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the panel.
Former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon is set to go on trial in July on criminal contempt charges over his refusal to cooperate with the investigation. In addition, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official and Trump adviser, faces potential House contempt action.
Meadows’ lawsuit seeks to invalidate the panel’s two subpoenas instructing the former congressman to turn over documents and testify as violating the protections of executive privilege and testimonial immunity for senior advisers to the president.
Meadows also asserts the committee’s requests are “overly broad and unduly burdensome” in seeking such information as personal cellphone data.
The Jan. 6 panel has been working to counter efforts by the former president and his allies to thwart its inquiry into the Capitol attack that injured dozens of law enforcement officers and interrupted Congress’s certification of the 2020 Electoral College results.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, explained in a Tuesday letter to Meadows’ lawyer, George Terwilliger, that the committee “is left with no choice but to advance contempt proceedings and recommend that the body in which Mr. Meadows once served refer him for criminal prosecution.” Thompson and Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the committee’s vice chair, have argued that Meadows’ lawsuit is flawed and won’t slow down the investigation.
Both lawmakers have noted the committee has previously received some documents from Meadows, including text messages and emails from his private cellphone and private email accounts.
“They include documents that are directly related to what President Trump should have been doing on January 6, during the attack, and now he is refusing to appear to answer questions about those non-privileged documents,” Cheney said Thursday. “He appears now to be saying he’s going to challenge and bring suit about documents over which he’s claimed privilege. We look forward to litigating that.”
Thompson directly referred to some of those already-provided documents in his letter Tuesday night to Meadows’ lawyer, Terwilliger.
Those documents include a Jan. 5 email regarding a 38-page Power Point briefing for lawmakers titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN”; a Jan. 5 email about having National Guard on standby; and a Nov. 6, 2020 text message “with a Member of Congress apparently about appointing alternate electors in certain states as part of a plan that the Member acknowledged would be ‘highly controversial’ and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, ‘I love it’.”
Meadows also provided an early January text message exchange with an organizer of the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and “and text messages about the need for the former President to issue a public statement that could have stopped the January 6th attack on the Capitol,” Thompson wrote.
“All of those documents raise issues about which the Select Committee would like to question Mr. Meadows and about which you appear to agree are not subject to a claim of privilege,” Thompson wrote. But he also asserts in the letter that Meadows has withheld more than 1,000 personal text messages from his personal cellphone.
As the Meadows matter is set to command committee attention at the start of next week, the panel’s decision on whether to hold Clark in contempt hinges on how cooperative he is just days later when his closed-door questioning has been rescheduled for Dec. 16.
