Former White House chief-of-staff Mark Meadows will cease to comply with the House Select Committee on the Capitol riot, according to a letter Meadows’s attorney sent to the panel 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,” attorney George J. Terwilliger III wrote in the letter to the committee, which was obtained by CNN. “Now actions by the Select Committee have made such an appearance untenable.”
Terwilliger cited committee subpoenas for ” information from a third party communications provider,” in an apparent reference to a subpoena for phone records from AT&T, first reported by Fox News.
Terwilliger also criticized remarks by committee chairman Bennie Thompson’s (D., Miss.) regarding a potential witness, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who indicated he would exercise his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.
“If you say you haven’t done anything wrong, but on the other hand you want to assert the 5th Amendment…it says that you have something to hide,” Thompson told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week.
Thompson’s statement “calls into question for us what we had hoped would be the Select Committee’s commitment to fundamental fairness in dealing with witnesses,” Terwilliger wrote in his letter.
However, Terwilliger wrote that he and Meadows would be willing “to consider an interrogatory process of Select Committee written questions and answers from Mr. Meadows so that there might be both an orderly process and a clear record of questions and related assertions of privilege where appropriate.”
National Review has reached out to Terwilliger for comment.
The committee was formed to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, in which supporters of former President Trump breached the Capitol during the certification of the Electoral College results. However, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) refused to appoint two Republicans recommended by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), leading McCarthy to withdraw his recommendations.
The only Republicans on the nine-member committee are staunch anti-Trump representatives Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.).
The committee has subpoenaed various advisers and former Trump administration officials for records of communications in the lead-up to the riot. Former adviser Stephen Bannon defied a subpoena from the committee, after which the House voted to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress.