The House of Representatives voted 222-208 on Tuesday night to recommend contempt of Congress charges against Mark Meadows. Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger joined the entire Democratic caucus in supporting the measure. The Department of Justice will now consider indicting Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff. Similar charges were filed against Trump advisor Steve Bannon last month.
Meadows received the rebuke after he stopped complying with a subpoena from the House select committee probing the events that culminated in the January 6th Capitol riot. Meadows argues that Trump’s invocation of executive privilege prohibits his testimony, but Trump’s executive privilege argument was rejected by a federal appeals court last week. The former president will likely pursue the matter with the Supreme Court.
Before withdrawing his cooperation, Meadows handed over thousands of documents, including text messages he received from Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits.
On Monday night, a batch of those texts was read into the Congressional record by members of the select committee, including pleas from several Fox News personalities for Trump to condemn the Capitol siege as it was taking place.
More texts were revealed ahead of Tuesday night’s vote on the contempt charges. For instance, on November 4th, 2020 – just a day after the presidential election – an unidentified member of Congress texted Meadows about “an aggressive strategy” to get GOP-run state legislatures to throw out the vote in several battleground states that Joe Biden won. The lawmaker suggested the Republican-controlled states can “just send their own electors to vote and have it go to SCOTUS.”
The text indicates that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were being discussed before it was officially decided and before evidence of voter fraud could be vetted. (Eventually, all of Trump’s voter fraud claims were debunked).
Another text from another unidentified lawmaker indicates that Meadows was using encrypted messaging to communicate with Congressional allies in the days before the January 6th riot.
“Please check your signal,” a January 5 message said, a reference to an app that allows users to engage in untraceable communication.
CNN reports on another revelation from the cache of documents Meadows gave to investigators:
Rep. Adam Schiff [D-CA] read a text from an unknown number that applauded the potential appointment of Jeffery Clark to be acting attorney general while Trump tried to get the Justice Department to support his false claims of election fraud. Clark was one of the big proponents at the DOJ who was pushing to use the power of the department to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud, but he was rebuffed by the department’s leaders.
“I heard Jeff Clark is getting put in on Monday. That’s amazing. It will make a lot of patriots happy, and I’m personally so proud that you are at the tip of the spear, and I could call you a friend,” the text to Meadows read.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House select committee, said the they will decide “within a week or so” when to release the names of the lawmakers texting Meadows.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters “it will be interesting to reveal all the participants who were involved.”