Former President Donald Trump is not having a good day. First, his lawyers that are trying to claim executive privilege for the ex-president were grilled in court by a panel of judges. And now, former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has reportedly reached an initial agreement to cooperate with the House committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack insurrection, providing documents and agreeing to testify before the panel, The Hill reports. And Meadows is doing this despite Trump’s attorney previously sending out a letter directing aides to defy the subpoenas issued by the committee.
“Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the Select Committee through his attorney,” Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said Tuesday. “He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition.”
“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,” he added.
The agreement comes as the committee announced on Monday that it would hold a vote later this week to vote on a criminal contempt of Congress referral for former top Department of Justice official, Jeffrey Clark.
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Meadows’ attorney George Terwilliger hinted in a statement that Trump’s former chief of staff could excerpt executive privilege at some point.
“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,” he said.
“We appreciate the Select Committee’s openness to receiving voluntary responses on non-privileged topics,” he added.
As for Jeffrey Clark, if the committee moves to hold him in contempt, he would become the second person to potentially face criminal charges for refusing to provide critical information to investigators under subpoena, according to CNN.
I’m sure Trump will take this news calmly and maturely and reflect on Jan. 6 to see how he should have handled things differently and throw a temper tantrum.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
