Mark Meadows To Appear Before January 6 Committee After Ignoring Subpoena

Former President Donald Trump‘s ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has agreed to turn over documents and provide a deposition to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, ignored a Committee subpoena last month, arguing, like Trump, that the records from his tenure in the Trump Administration are shielded by executive privilege.

Meadows cannot “in good conscience” testify due to his personal “appreciation for our constitutional system and the separation of powers,” George J. Terwilliger III, Meadows’s attorney, said on November 10.

A federal appeals court is currently weighing whether that assertion has any constitutional standing.

But the Committee’s decision on Monday to charge ex-Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark with contempt of Congress is widely viewed as a motivating factor in Meadows’s change of heart.

Meadows is has become the highest-ranking former Trump Administration official to appear before the Committee.

“Meadows has been engaging with the Select Committee through his attorney. He has produced records to the Committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition,” Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) said in a statement. “The Committee will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition.”

Terwilliger said that while his client intends to cooperate, the information he provides will be limited.

“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 longstanding position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress,” Terwilliger said. “We appreciate the Select Committee’s openness to receiving voluntary responses on nonprivileged topics.”

Meadows’s testimony is extremely valuable to the Committee’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election because he actively participated in them, including having pressured the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s outlandish conspiracy theories about election fraud, stolen votes and other gobbledygook. Lawmakers also believe that Meadows has first-hand knowledge of what went down in the days and weeks leading up to the January 6 insurrection.