Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff, said that he will no longer cooperate with the House Select Committee, which is tasked with probing the January 6 riots in Washington DC.
Meadows said in an interview with Real America’s Voice that the investigative committee plans to ask about items that he considers are protected by executive privilege.
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Meadows said in the interview, “we found that in spite of our cooperation and sharing documents with them they had issued unbeknownst to us, and not without even a courtesy call, issued a subpoena to a third party carrier trying to get information”, according to reports from NBC News.
The former top White House official said that no one in the west wing of the executive building possessed any advanced knowledge of the January 6 storming of the United States Capitol complex.
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Last month, the January 6 committee announced that Meadows had agreed to cooperate with the investigations after refusing to turn up for an under-oath interrogation. Prior to this, the January 6 committee was considering pursuing criminal contempt charges against the former official.
Bennie Thompson, the United States Representative leading the investigation, said in a statement last month that the committee will “continue to assess his degree of compliance”, according to reports from Associated Press.
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Back when Meadows said he would cooperate with the House committee, his lawyer George Terwilliger said he was continuing to work with the committee and its staff on a “potential accommodation” that would not require Meadows to waive executive privilege nor “forfeit the long-standing position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress,” as Trump has argued.
It is unclear if the January 6 committee would go back to pursuing criminal contempt charges against the 62-year-old, a move that put Trump’s aide Steve Bannon at the centre of the investigation.