January 6 Committee, Ex-Trump Chief Of Staff Battle Over Personal Communications

The House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot voted Monday to hold Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, in contempt for refusing to turn over communications he claims are protected by executive privilege.

January 6 committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Meadows’ attorney, George Terwilliger III, exchanged letters on Monday over dueling claims of the extent of executive privilege and accusations of bad faith and procedural violations. At the center of the battle are communications and other data held on Meadows’ personal cell phones and emails.

“Over the last several weeks, Mr. Meadows has consistently sought in good faith to pursue an accommodation with the Select Committee and up until yesterday we believed that could be obtained. We acted on the belief that the Select Committee would receive, also in good faith, relevant, responsive but non-privileged facts,” Terwilliger wrote in a Monday letter.

The committee recommended on Monday that Meadows be held in contempt for violating a congressional subpoena and refusing a summons for a deposition in front of the committee. The recommendation will move to a House vote and, if passed, given to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution.

Meadows has withheld a number of texts and messages stored on two personal cell phones and two personal email accounts. The former Trump official has turned over some information from those sources to the committee, but Meadows’ attorney has claimed that turning over every message asked for in the subpoena would violate executive privilege and result in a massive breach of Meadows’ privacy.

“[W]e learned over the weekend that the Select Committee had, without even the basic courtesy of notice to us, issued wide ranging subpoenas for information from a third party communications provider without regard to either the broad breadth of the information sought,” Terwilliger said, referring to a committee subpoena to Verizon for Meadows’ phone records.

A complete response to the subpoena “would include intensely personal communications of no moment to any legitimate matters of interest to the Select Committee, nor to the potentially privileged status of the information demanded,” Meadows’ attorney said.

Thompson responded to Terwilliger later Monday pushing Meadows to identify which topics the former Trump official considers protected. Thompson claimed that the purpose of a deposition Meadows was scheduled to participate in – and which Meadows pulled out of after the committee’s subpoena for his personal phone records – was in part to give the committee a better idea of what Meadows was claiming to be privileged.

The committee chairman also said that Meadows denials raise questions whether the former White House chief of staff violated the Presidential Records Act by failing to turn over materials to the National Archives for the official records of Trump’s presidency.

“There is no legitimate legal basis for Mr. Meadows to refuse to cooperate with the Select Committee and answer questions about the documents he produced, the personal devices and accounts he used, the events he wrote about in his newly released book, and, among other things, his other public statements,” Thompson said. “The Select 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.”

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