Former President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sued House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Jan. 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot to block subpoenas compelling him to testify.
Meadows, a former member of Congress, asked a judge to invalidate the subpoenas, calling them “overly broad and unduly burdensome,” in a complaint filed Wednesday in Washington federal court.
The suit is the latest clash between the committee and Republicans who have vowed not to cooperate with the probe into the violent attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters that led to several deaths. Former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon is set to go on trial in July on criminal contempt charges over his refusal to cooperate with the investigation.
Meadows was scheduled to appear before the committee in a closed-door session Wednesday, but didn’t show and now faces criminal contempt of Congress proceedings.
“The Select Committee acts absent any valid legislative power and threatens to violate longstanding principles of executive privilege and immunity that are of constitutional origin and dimension,” the suit filed by Meadows’ attorney George Terwilliger contends.
The Jan. 6 select panel has signaled that it is preparing to hold Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate, a move that would send the matter to the Justice Department for potential criminal charges. The panel has rejected Meadow’s claim, noting that current President Joe Biden has not asserted privilege to block Meadows’ testimony. Trump, a former president, has no role in asserting privilege anymore, they say — a position recently supported by another federal judge in Trump’s own lawsuit against the committee.
Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman, and Vice-Chair Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, said Meadows’ “flawed lawsuit won’t succeed at slowing down the select committee’s investigation or stopping us from getting the information we’re seeking.”
The committee will meet next week and recommend to the House that Meadows be cited for contempt and the case referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution, Thompson and Cheney said in the joint statement Wednesday.
Earlier Wednesday, Thompson told reporters the investigation doesn’t rise or fall on Meadows and Bannon and there are four depositions set for Thursday.
Last week, Meadows agreed to sit for a deposition before the Jan. 6 committee, but on Tuesday his lawyers said he would no longer appear, citing efforts by the committee to go through third-party vendors, such as telephone companies, to obtain records that might be covered by executive privilege.
Over the course of negotiations, Meadows repeatedly offered to answer written questions or discuss topics he deemed “non-privileged” — including details of his contacts with the Justice Department, which Trump sought to deploy in service of overturning the election. But even within those topics, Meadows described limitations on what he would share.
And he also suggested deferring testimony to the committee about his involvement with a call from Trump to Georgia election officials that has been the subject of a grand jury investigation in Fulton County. But the panel never accepted his offer, reserving the right to ask him about topics he deemed privileged.
In his lawsuit, Meadows also levels a procedural complaint against the committee, noting that Pelosi rejected the appointment of two GOP members selected by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to serve on the panel. After Pelosi’s decision, McCarthy pulled his remaining appointees from the committee, leaving Pelosi’s picks as the only remaining members. Pelosi appointed two Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Kinzinger, to the panel.
Meadows contends that McCarthy’s decision to withdraw his remaining picks left the panel without a ranking Republican appointee. Yet the committee’s subpoena authority requires that the ranking members be consulted on subpoena decisions.
“The ordering of Mr. Meadows’ deposition runs afoul of the Select Committee’s authorizing resolution, making it invalid and unenforceable,” Meadows contends.
Meadows also mirrors one of Trump’s central arguments: that the Jan. 6 committee serves no “valid legislative purpose.”
In addition to seeking to block the subpoena to Meadows, the suit filed Wednesday seeks to quash a subpoena the House panel issued to Verizon Wireless for records about the former White House chief of staff’s cell phone use.
Meadows’ suit appears similar to one filed in 2019 by former Trump Deputy National Security Adviser Charles Kupperman over a House Intelligence Committee subpoena seeking Kupperman’s testimony for use in an impeachment investigation focused on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
In response to that suit, lawyers for the House argued that the courts cannot entertain suits from subpoenaed witnesses seeking to resolve such privilege claims.
Kupperman’s suit was framed as a request for guidance from the court, and, at times, Meadows’ suit takes a similar tack.
“Mr. Meadows, a witness, has been put in the untenable position of choosing between conflicting privilege claims that are of constitutional origin and dimension and having to either risk enforcement of the subpoena issued to him, not merely by the House of Representatives, but through actions by the Executive and Judicial Branches, or, alternatively, unilaterally abandoning the former president’s claims of privileges and immunities,” the suit says. “Thus, Mr. Meadows turns to the courts to say what the law is.”
However, the bulk of Meadows’ court complaint takes a more hostile stance towards the committee. Although just days ago he was pledging cooperation with the panel, Meadows’ attorneys are now arguing that the committee was not properly constituted under House rules.
“This information has no bearing on any contemplated constitutional legislation. It is relevant only to serve the Select Committee’s stated purpose of engaging in ad-hoc law enforcement and its unstated purpose of antagonizing its political adversary,” the complaint says.
The House Intelligence Committee dropped its subpoena to Kupperman before the judge assigned to that case, George W. Bush appointee Richard Leon, ruled on whether a witness can take such a fight to court. Leon later dismissed the case.
Sources: Thegoptimes, Politico, Bloombergquint, Nypost
