Last week the media was reporting, Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows cooperating with Jan. 6 committee:
Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff at the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, is cooperating with the House committee investigating the pro-Trump insurrection, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), said Tuesday.
“Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the Select Committee through his attorney,” Thompson said in a statement. “He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition.”
Head fake. That was then, this is now. CNN is reporting today, Mark Meadows to halt cooperation with January 6 committee:
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows will no longer cooperate with the House select committee investigating January 6 insurrection, according to a letter from his attorney to the panel, which was obtained by CNN on Tuesday.
“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,” the letter from George J. Terwilliger II stated.
“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,” Terwilliger added.
Once again, there is no executive privilege for the high crimes of sedition, insurrection and treason. The crime-fraud exception to executive privilege eviscerates the privilege.
Moreover, Meadows’ book possible ‘waiver’ of executive privilege, Jan. 6 investigators say:
In interviews, members of the committee say Meadows may have damaged his case for maintaining the secrecy of his contacts with former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6 by divulging selected details in his book, due to publish Tuesday.
“It’s … very possible that by discussing the events of Jan. 6 in his book, if he does that, he’s waiving any claim of privilege. So, it’d be very difficult for him to maintain ‘I can’t speak about events to you, but I can speak about them in my book,’” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the panel’s nine members.
The committee said later Tuesday it will move forward with a scheduled deposition with Meadows on Wednesday even though he said he no longer plans to cooperate.
By going forward with the scheduled deposition, the committee is setting up a path to hold Meadows in criminal contempt.
“Tomorrow’s deposition, which was scheduled at Mr. Meadows’s request, will go forward as planned. If indeed Mr. Meadows refuses to appear, the Select Committee will be left no choice but to advance contempt proceedings and recommend that the body in which Mr. Meadows once served refer him for criminal prosecution,” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who lead the committee, said in a joint statement.
* * *
Meadows’ about-face is due in part to learning over the weekend that the committee had “issued wide ranging subpoenas for information from a third party communications provider,” the letter notes.
“As a result of careful and deliberate consideration of these factors, we now must decline the opportunity to appear voluntarily for a deposition,” Terwilliger writes.
Terwilliger writes that Meadows would answer written questions “so that there might be both an orderly process and a clear record of questions and related assertions of privilege where appropriate.”
Responding to Meadows’ claim that the committee was ignoring his claims of executive privilege, Thompson and Cheney state that Meadows was willing to discuss details about Trump in his new book.
“Mark Meadows has informed the Select Committee that he does not intend to cooperate further with our investigation despite his apparent willingness to provide details about the facts and circumstances surrounding the January 6th attack, including conversations with President Trump, in the book he is now promoting and selling,” they write.
The pair add that they have “numerous questions” for Meadows that have nothing to do with executive privilege.
NBC News adds, Jan. 6 committee threatens contempt proceedings after Meadows stops cooperating:
Chair of the select committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said Tuesday that if Meadows refuses to appear at a deposition scheduled for Wednesday, the committee “will be left 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 Cheney added in their statement that even as privilege issues are litigated, the committee has “numerous questions” for Meadows about records he has turned over to the committee “with no claim of privilege, which include real-time communications with many individuals as the events of January 6th unfolded.”
[T]hompson said last month that there is a “wide range of matters the select committee wished to discuss with Mr. Meadows.”
In letters released in September, the committee said Meadows had significant information about former President Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 and reportedly communicated with officials at the state level and in the Justice Department “as part of an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election or prevent the election’s certification.”
The House committee has issued batches of subpoenas in recent weeks to dozens of Trump administration officials and allies of the former president.
Some subpoena recipients are engaging with the committee. Marc Short, who was chief of staff to then-Vice President Mike Pence, is now cooperating, according to two people familiar with the panel’s activities.
The committee said last week that Meadows had begun cooperating with the investigation after he previously failed to show up to answer questions under oath. The committee had been considering whether to pursue criminal contempt of Congress charges against him.
Steve Bannon, who was an aide to former President Donald Trump, was charged with two counts of contempt of Congress last month for refusing to respond to a subpoena from the committee seeking documents and testimony related to the attack. The fact that the Justice Department was willing to charge Bannon, despite an assertion of executive privilege, has increased pressure on other reluctant witnesses to agree to cooperate with the committee’s investigation.
Update: Two lawyers who should be prosecuted and disbarred, Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman join some rare company in pleading the Fifth to Jan. 6 committee:
Two figures who were instrumental in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election by seeking to exploit baseless claims of voter fraud and malfeasance have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in Congress’s Jan. 6 investigation.
Both former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and Trump attorney John Eastman have said recently that they will plead the Fifth. (Clark was set to do so this weekend before a health condition delayed his appearance.)
[B]oth Clark and Eastman join some rather select and, in some cases, infamous company in invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying to congressional investigators. Each has been the subject of intrigue — Clark for pushing Trump’s bogus fraud claims internally at the Justice Department and Eastman for laying out a failed plot to get Vice President Mike Pence to help overturn the election.
And going by the logic of a certain former president who stood to benefit from their efforts, this would seem to reinforce that something unholy and even criminal might lie beneath the surface.
“The mob takes the Fifth,” Trump said in September 2016. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
The January 6 Committee will vote to find both of these traitors in criminal contempt of Congress, and the full House will vote on a resolution to send a referral to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
Update: Long-time GQP ratfucker and Trump confidant Roger Stone is taking the Fifth Amendment as well.Roger Stone invokes Fifth Amendment in House Jan. 6 probe:
Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to former President Donald Trump, is refusing to be deposed or to hand over documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, his attorney said in a letter dated Monday.
The letter, which Stone provided to NBC News on Tuesday, invokes his Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
Pro Tip: This is not how asserting your Fifth Amendment privilege works. It is not immunity from testimony. You must appear and answer non-substantive questions, and then assert your Fifth Amendment privilege as to each material question which may self-incriminate in a criminal proceeding. There is no doubt that this convicted felon has criminal culpability (Roger Stone Keeps Lying About the Willard Hotel—and Now We Know Why, and he had a personal detail from the domestic terrorist organizations that planned storming the capitol. Video shows Roger Stone flanked by Oath Keepers on morning of Jan. 6, and EXCLUSIVE: New Video of Roger Stone with Proud Boys Leaders Who May Have Planned for Capitol Attack.)
Last week, an appeals court appeared skeptical of Trump’s claim that executive privilege should prevent the committee from getting scores of documents created when he was in the White House. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan first rejected Trump’s argument, but the appeals court granted a brief stay.
The appeals panel is likely to issue its ruling quickly. Whichever side loses can go to the full D.C. appeals court or directly to the Supreme Court.
A ruling should come before the end of the year.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
What Meadows and his attorney are complaining about is that the committee will not simply take his word (from a noted liar) as to who he spoke with and what was said. But any investigator worth his or her salt will tell you that SOP is to get information from the caller and the person called, and get the phone records from the telecommunications company to triangulate to see who is lying. So the safe bet is that Meadows lied, and he knows that he is caught in a lie.
CNN reports “Exclusive: January 6 committee casts a wide net with over 100 subpoenas for phone records”, https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/07/politics/january-6-committee-phone-records/index.html
“The House select committee investigating the January 6 riot has formally subpoenaed the phone records of more than 100 people, a substantial number that includes former Trump officials and associates of the ex-President such as his one-time chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The committee has already begun receiving some data from phone providers, the sources said. The records do not include the content of the calls but rather details about who called or texted whom, when and for how long, giving them the ability to draw a web of communications before, during and after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Congressional investigators also believe this data will help them piece together communications between those in former President Donald Trump’s official orbit and the people who organized the rally that preceded the Capitol attack and rioters who participated in the violence.
While the records do not include information about the substance of those communications, the panel believes it may be able to learn those details from individuals who are cooperating with the investigation.”
Co-conspirator members of Congress, like Rep. Jim Jordan who has been lying about his phone calls on January 6, should be the next round of subpoenas by the committee. “Chairman Bennie Thompson confirmed to CNN last week that the committee had not yet subpoenaed the phone records belonging to members of Congress but said that that step is ‘absolutely” still on the table.”