Jan. 6 panel set to vote on holding Meadows in contempt
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MARY CLARE JALONICK
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is set to recommend contempt charges against former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Monday as lawmakers seek his testimony about President Donald Trump’s discussions and actions before the attack by his supporters.
In laying out the case for the contempt vote, the nine-member panel released a 51-page report Sunday evening that details its questions about the thousands of emails and texts he has already provided — including 6,600 pages of records taken from personal email accounts and about 2,000 text messages. The committee is recommending the contempt charges after Meadows ceased cooperating and did not show up for a deposition last week.
The panel has not released the documents, but the report says they include exchanges about Meadows efforts’ to help Trump overturn his defeat in the presidential election, communications with members of Congress and organizers of a rally held the morning of the insurrection and frantic messages among aides and others as the violent attack unfolded that day.
As part of its list of questions for Meadows, the panel says it wants to know more about whether Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the response of the National Guard, which was delayed for hours as the violence escalated and the rioters beat police guarding the Capitol building.
The documents provided by Meadows include an email he sent to an unidentified person saying that the Guard would be present to “protect pro Trump people,” the panel said, and that more would be available on standby. The committee did not release any additional details about the email.
The contempt vote is coming after more than two months of negotiations with Meadows and his lawyer and as the panel has also struggled to obtain information from some of Trump’s other top aides, such as his longtime ally Steve Bannon. The House voted to recommend charges against Bannon in October, and the Justice Department indicted him on two counts of contempt last month.
The panel is aiming to develop the most comprehensive record yet of the attack, in which hundreds of Trump’s supporters forced their way past law enforcement officers, broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory. Meadows’ testimony could be key, as he was Trump’s top aide at the time and was with him in the White House as the rioters breached the Capitol building.
The committee says in its report that Trump’s former top White House aide “is uniquely situated to provide key information, having straddled an official role in the White House and unofficial role related to Mr. Trump’s reelection campaign.”
In a Monday letter to the committee’s Democratic chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, Meadows’ attorney George Terwilliger said the contempt vote would be “unjust” because Meadows was one of Trump’s top aides and all presidents should be afforded executive privilege to shield their private conversations. Meadows himself sued the panel, asking a court to invalidate two subpoenas that he says are “overly broad and unduly burdensome.”
Terwilliger noted that the contempt statute has been used infrequently over time and argued that a contempt referral of a senior presidential aide “would do great damage to the institution of the Presidency.”
In a transcript of the deposition that Meadows skipped, released as part of Sunday’s report, an unnamed member of the panel’s investigative staff detailed several of the questions he would have been asked had he shown up.
Many of the questions center on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in the weeks before the insurrection, including Meadows’ outreach to states and his communications with members of Congress.
Committee staff said they would have interviewed Meadows about emails “to leadership at the Department of Justice on December 29th and 30th, 2020, and January 1st, 2021, encouraging investigations of suspected voter fraud,” even though election officials and courts across the country had rejected those claims.
The panel said Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, also provided text messages sent to and from members of Congress “before, during, and after the attack on the United States Capitol.” One exchange with a lawmaker concerned efforts to contact legislators in states, too, about the election because Trump “wants to chat with them.”
In a text exchange with an unidentified senator, the committee said, Meadows said that Trump believed that Vice President Mike Pence had power to reject electors in his role presiding over the Jan. 6 certification. Pence did not have that power under the law, as the vice president’s function is largely ceremonial.
A Nov. 6, 2020, text exchange between Meadows and an unidentified member of Congress, the committee said, was about appointing alternate electors in certain states, a plan the member said would be “highly controversial.” The committee said that Meadows replied, “I love it.’”
In other texts, sent the day of the attack, Meadows’ former colleagues encouraged him to urge Trump to discourage the violence, the committee said. Similarly, in an exchange with an organizer of the rally that morning — a gathering in which Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell” — the organizer told Meadows that they “desperately” needed direction from him because things “have gotten crazy.”
The panel’s expected vote to recommend charges of contempt of Congress would send the referral to the full House, which could vote as soon as this week to send it to the Justice Department. The department would then decide whether to prosecute.
Thompson and the committee’s Republican vice chairwoman, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, said last week that Meadows’ lawsuit “won’t succeed at slowing down the Select Committee’s investigation or stopping us from getting the information we’re seeking.”
The panel has already interviewed almost 300 witnesses, and lawmakers say they plan a series of hearings early next year to make many of their findings public.
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
