Mark Meadows has provided records to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol after weeks of resisting cooperation with the panel, shielding him from the committee holding him in contempt of Congress for the time being.
The former White House chief of staff to Donald Trump will also sit for a deposition, committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson said in a statement Tuesday.
“Mr. 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,” Thompson said. “The Select Committee expects all witnesses, including Mr. Meadows, to provide all information requested and that the Select Committee is lawfully entitled to receive. The committee will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition.”
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Disputes over Meadows’s cooperation are not over, though. In a statement, Meadows’s attorney George Terwilliger confirmed the development but said that Meadows will not be providing material deemed to be information subject to executive privilege.
“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 long-standing 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 non-privileged topics.”
Meadows skipped a mid-November deadline to appear before the Jan. 6 committee, with his lawyer arguing that he could not be compelled to answer questions that involve privileged communications.
In response, the committee threatened to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply.
Congress in October held former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress over his refusal to cooperate with the committee, and it will vote on doing the same for former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark this week.
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Meadows and other former Trump officials have echoed the former president’s claim that materials and information the committee seeks is subject to executive privilege.
A federal judge earlier this month ruled that Trump cannot block the Jan. 6 committee from accessing his records based on executive privilege. Trump appealed the ruling.
Ryan King contributed to this story.
