Meadows to cooperate with probe
Trump’s chief of staff will be deposed, turn over documents
WASHINGTON — Mark Meadows, who was White House chief of staff under former 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 stunning 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 stonewalled its subpoenas. It marked a turnabout after weeks of private wrangling between the former chief of staff and the select committee over whether he would participate in the investigation, and to what degree.
“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.”
His deposition is expected to be private, as has been the panel’s practice with other witnesses. Meadows’ lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, also 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 Mr. 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 non-privileged topics.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard arguments Tuesday from lawyers for Trump and the House committee seeking records as part of its investigation into the Capitol riot. Trump’s attorneys want the court to reverse a federal judge’s ruling allowing the National Archives and Records Administration to turn over the records after President Joe Biden waived executive privilege.
A panel of judges questioned whether they had the authority to grant Trump’s demands and stop the White House from allowing the release of documents related to the Jan. 6 insurrection led by Trump’s supporters.
But the judges also noted that there may be times when a former president would be justified in trying to stop the incumbent from disclosing records.
Trump supporters broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6 after a rally where he made false claims of election fraud and challenged them to “fight like hell.”
Compared with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, whose ruling Trump is contesting, the three judges on the appeals court spent relatively little time weighing the importance of the documents themselves. They instead focused most of the hearing Tuesday on what role federal courts should have when an incumbent president and former president are at odds over records from the former’s administration.
The judges sharply questioned both sides and challenged them with hypothetical scenarios.
To Trump’s lawyers, Judge Patricia Millett suggested a situation where a current president negotiating with a foreign leader needed to know what promises a former president had made to that leader. The incumbent might seek to release a transcript of a phone call or other records from the previous administration for national security reasons, the judge said.
“To be clear, your position is a former president could come in and file a lawsuit?” Millett said. Trump lawyer
Justin Clark responded, “That is our position.”
To a lawyer for the House committee, Millett raised a scenario where a newly elected president might seek retribution against a disliked predecessor. The new president and a Congress might declare that there was a national security interest in releasing all of the former president’s records, even at the risk of endangering people’s lives, she said.
“Needless to say, the former president comes to court, (says), ‘Hang on,’ ” Millett said. “What happens?”
She did not say she was referring to any president and rejected committee lawyer Douglas Letter’s response referencing a president who “fomented an insurrection.”
“We’re not going to make it that easy,” she said.
Letter argued the determination of a current president should outweigh predecessors in almost all circumstances and noted that both Biden and Congress were in agreement that the Jan. 6 records should be turned over.
“It would be astonishing for this court to override the current president and Congress,” Letter said.