Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows will no longer cooperate with the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, according to a letter sent to the panel by his attorney.
Meadows and attorney George Terwilliger notified the committee Tuesday morning, after the senior Trump administration official could not come to terms with lawmakers on an arrangement to work with them.
“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 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.”
Just last week it was reported that Meadows would begin cooperating with the committee. His decision to reverse course seems to be in part from 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 added.
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. … The chairman of the committee … publicly said that another witness’s claiming of the Fifth Amendment would be tantamount to an admission of guilt.”
He added that this statement called into question “exactly what is going on with this committee.”
Meadows is not the first to refuse cooperation with the House Select Committee. Former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, failed to appear and was then indicted for contempt of Congress following a referral from the House.
