Meadows makes deal to cooperate with House probe of Capitol attack
WASHINGTON — Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump, has reached an agreement with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to provide documents and sit for a deposition, the panel said Tuesday, a notable reversal for a crucial witness in the inquiry.
The change of stance for Meadows, who had previously refused to cooperate with the committee in line with a directive from Trump, came as the panel prepared to seek criminal contempt of Congress charges against a second witness who has defied one of its subpoenas. It marked a turnabout after weeks of private wrangling between the former chief of staff and the House committee over whether he would participate in the investigation and to what degree. Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, is the highest-ranking White House official to cooperate in any way with the inquiry.
“Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the select committee through his attorney,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the chair of the panel, said in a statement. “He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition.”
Thompson indicated that he was withholding judgment about whether Meadows was willing to cooperate sufficiently, adding, “The committee will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition.”
Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, suggested that there were strict limits to his client’s willingness to participate in the inquiry.
“As we have from the beginning, we continue to work with the select committee and its staff to see if we can reach an accommodation that does not require Meadows to waive executive privilege or to forfeit the long-standing position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress,” Terwilliger said in a statement. “We appreciate the select committee’s openness to receiving voluntary responses on nonprivileged topics.”
The deposition is expected to be private, as has been the panel’s practice with other witnesses.
Meadows’ testimony is seen as key to the committee’s investigation because he was deeply involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and could provide crucial insight into what the president was doing and saying as the attack unfolded Jan. 6.