Former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said on Wednesday that the West Wing “fell apart” under Mark Meadows’s watch, describing the final days of the Trump administration as “anarchy” and a “clown show.”
In an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt, Mulvaney said Meadows, his successor as former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, would not be the “most credible” witness for House Jan. 6 committee and that he would be more inclined to believe former White House counsel Pat Cipollone over Meadows. Cipollone is slated to testify before the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Friday.
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“As a former chief of staff, I picked up on things in [former Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s] testimony that really frightened me, and it was the way the West Wing was running. It wasn’t running. It was anarchy. It was chaos. It was a clown show, with folks like Rudy Giuliani and Lin Wood and Peter Navarro in the Oval Office, with all the reasonable people, the smart people, seeming to be disengaged,” Mulvaney said on Wednesday.
The former Republican congressman for South Carolina and former special envoy to Northern Ireland added that Meadows, a former congressional colleague of Mulvaney’s, “seems to have gone through a very dark period” in the last days of the Trump White House, appearing “detached from the job,” based on testimony from Hutchinson.
Mulvaney added that Meadows failed in his duty as White House chief of staff to enforce protocols that may have prevented the riot on Jan. 6.
“It’s up to the chief of staff, me, Mark Meadows, John Kelly, to make sure that the West Wing functions properly because there are protections in place to make sure things like Jan. 6 don’t happen, and that system fell apart under Mark’s watch,” Mulvaney said.
Mulvaney speculated that if Meadows were to appear before the Jan. 6 committee, the former chief of staff would most likely exercise his Fifth Amendment rights and not answer questions “more often than not.”
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When asked by Hunt if Meadows “betrayed the country,” Mulvaney said that “that case is being made” but it is too early in the process to draw that conclusion, noting that future witnesses may counter Hutchinson’s testimony and paint Meadow’s role in the events of Jan. 6 in a better light.
Meadows stopped cooperating with the committee last year, but he has turned over documents, such as private communications, to the committee that it has used during the hearings. Meadows declined to appear for testimony and was held in contempt of Congress. The Justice Department has so far declined to pursue charges against him.
