WASHINGTON -- Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff for President Donald Trump, filed suit Wednesday against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in an attempt to persuade a federal judge to block the committee's subpoenas.
His lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, accuses the committee of issuing "two overly broad and unduly burdensome subpoenas" against him, including one sent to Verizon for his phone and text data.
"Mr. Meadows faces the harm of both being illegally coerced into violating the Constitution," his lawsuit contends.
"Allowing an entirely partisan select committee of Congress to subpoena the personal cell phone data of executive officials would work a massive chilling of current and future Executive Branch officials' associational and free speech rights," the lawsuit states.
The complaint was filed hours after Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the committee chairman, declared that he had "no choice" but to proceed with contempt charges against Meadows. Meadows did not show up Wednesday for a scheduled deposition after his lawyer, George Terwilliger, told the committee that his client was ending his cooperation.
Yet Thompson noted that Meadows has already provided documents to the committee, including personal emails and texts about President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and has also published a book, released this week, that discusses the Jan. 6 attack.
"That he would sell his telling of the facts of that day while denying a congressional committee the opportunity to ask him about the attack on our Capitol marks an historic and aggressive defiance of Congress," Thompson said in a letter to Terwilliger.
In a statement late Wednesday, Thompson and the committee's Republican vice chairwoman, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming , said the panel will meet next week to vote on advancing criminal contempt charges against Meadows.
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"Mr. Meadows's flawed lawsuit won't succeed at slowing down the Select Committee's investigation or stopping us from getting the information we're seeking," the two lawmakers said.
The committee has now interviewed more than 275 witnesses and obtained tens of thousands of documents. Those cooperating include some members of former Vice President Mike Pence's inner circle, including Marc Short, his former chief of staff. But several high-profile witnesses are stonewalling the panel, in line with a directive from Trump.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED
Meadows joins Trump in suing the committee to try to block its investigation. The former president is battling in court to prevent the release of documents requested by the committee that he says are subject to executive privilege, although the Biden administration has refused to assert that claim.
Meadows, who has turned over thousands of pages of documents to the committee, informed the panel Tuesday that he was no longer willing to sit for a deposition that had been scheduled for Wednesday, reversing a deal he had reached with the panel just last week to be interviewed by its investigators. The leaders of the committee immediately threatened to charge Meadows, a former congressman from North Carolina, with contempt of Congress if he did not appear.
The documents Meadows has provided, Thompson wrote, include communications from around the time of the presidential election in November 2020 and before the insurrection and involve White House efforts to overturn Joe Biden's election victory. Meadows provided the committee last month with personal emails and backed-up data from his personal cellphone, including text messages, Thompson said.
The documents Meadows turned over included an email dated Nov. 7, 2020 -- the day Biden was declared the White House winner -- that Thompson described as "discussing the appointment of alternate slates of electors as part of a 'direct and collateral attack' after the election." Thompson did not say who sent the email or give further details.
Thompson also described an email that referenced a 38-page PowerPoint presentation titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN." that Thompson said was intended to be shared on Capitol Hill. Thompson did not further elaborate on the email but said it was dated Jan. 5, 2021, the day before hundreds of Trump's supporters violently breached the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Biden's victory.
A separate Nov. 6, 2020, text exchange between Meadows and an unidentified member of Congress, Thompson wrote, was "apparently about appointing alternate electors in certain states as part of a plan that the member acknowledged would be 'highly controversial,' and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, 'I love it.'"
Also included in the documents, according to Thompson: a Jan. 5 email about having the National Guard on standby the next day; an "early 2021 text message exchange" between Meadows and an organizer of the rally held the morning of Jan. 6, when Trump told his supporters to "fight like hell"; and "text messages about the need for the former president to issue a public statement that could have stopped the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol."
Terwilliger did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter or confirm the contents of the documents.
Meadows also informed the committee that he had turned in the cellphone he used on Jan. 6 to his service provider and that he was withholding some 1,000 text messages connected with the device, Thompson said, prompting additional questions and the need for more cooperation and a deposition.
The committee recently sent a flurry of subpoenas to telecommunications companies seeking the data of dozens of individuals, including Meadows, prompting his lawyer to object to a request he said sought "intensely personal communications" with no relevance to any legitimate investigation.
"The Verizon subpoena seeks Mr. Meadows' cellphone metadata, despite the fact that he has already provided the select committee with his responsive text messages, emails, and the metadata," his lawsuit states.
The subpoenas, which follow records preservation demands sent to 35 technology and social media companies in August, do not seek the content of any communications but simply the dates and times of when the calls and messages took place, according to a committee aide.
The House voted in October to recommend that another of Trump's associates, Steve Bannon, be charged with criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. A federal grand jury subsequently indicted him on two counts that could carry a total of up to two years behind bars. A judge on Tuesday set a July 18 trial date for Bannon, meaning that the select committee will most likely have to wait the better part of a year, if not longer, for a resolution of his case and any potential cooperation from him.
The committee has also recommended a contempt charge against Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department lawyer who participated in Trump's efforts to invalidate the 2020 election results, for refusing to cooperate with its inquiry. The panel is waiting to complete that referral until it can determine how much information Clark is willing to provide during a deposition scheduled for Dec. 16. Clark has said he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Another potential witness, John Eastman, a lawyer who wrote a memo that some in both parties have likened to a blueprint for a coup to keep Trump in power, has also indicated that he plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment in response to the committee's subpoena.
A third witness, political operative Roger Stone, told the committee this week that he, too, planned to invoke his right against self-incrimination in defying a subpoena, declining to sit for an interview or produce documents.
"Given that the select committee's demand for documents is overbroad, overreaching and far too wide-ranging to be deemed anything other than a fishing expedition, Mr. Stone has a constitutional right to decline to respond," his lawyer, Grant J. Smith, wrote to the panel.
ORGANIZER TO TESTIFY
Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer of Stop the Steal rallies with ties to far-right members of Congress who sought to invalidate the 2020 election results, is cooperating with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, pledging to deliver a trove of documents that could shed light on the activities that preceded the attack.
The participation of Alexander, who is scheduled to be deposed by the panel today, could provide insight into the nature and extent of the planning by Trump and his Republican allies in Congress for their bid to overturn the election Jan. 6. It could also help clarify whether and to what degree the prospect of violence was discussed or contemplated before or during the rampage.
Members of the panel said they wanted to dig into Alexander's communications with Republican members of Congress and White House officials.
Alexander, who rose in right-wing circles in the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, was one of a handful of planners who put together marches and rallies around the country protesting the outcome. The events culminated with the one in Washington on Jan. 6 that brought together throngs of attendees who went on to storm the Capitol.
He attended Trump's incendiary speech at the Ellipse near the White House that day, then marched with the crowd toward the Capitol, along with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars. Alexander arrived, as he put it in his prepared remarks to the panel, "in the early stages of the lawbreaking."
Alexander, who has been banned from Twitter for spreading false statements about the election, denies he was to blame for the violence.
"Anyone who suggests I had anything to do with the unlawful activities on Jan. 6 is wrong," Alexander wrote in a memo to the committee. "They're either mistaken or lying."
Late last month, the House committee issued subpoenas for both Alexander and Jones, suggesting that they might have knowledge of how the Stop the Steal rallies on Jan. 6 came together.
Alexander planned to use his deposition today to proclaim his innocence, telling the select committee that he had "nothing to do with any violence or lawbreaking" that day and accusing other rally organizers of having done little or nothing as the mob stormed the Capitol, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by The New York Times.
He also accused them of removing from an event program important instructions for where the crowd was to go and partying in an upscale Washington hotel during the violence.
"While I was actively trying to de-escalate events at the Capitol and end the violence and lawlessness, it's important to note that certain people were nowhere to be found," Alexander planned to tell investigators, promising to turn over documents to respond to a congressional subpoena. "Press reports suggest they may have had their feet up drinking donor-funded Champagne in a war room in the Willard. I don't know where they were. But they weren't working with police trying to de-escalate the chaos like I was."
It is not clear where Alexander was or what he was doing during the riot. But in the weeks before the attack, Alexander repeatedly referred during Stop the Steal events to the possible use of violence to achieve his organization's goals. He claimed to have been in communication with the White House and members of Congress about events planned to undermine Congress' official count of the Electoral College results, the committee said.
Alexander has said that he -- along with Reps. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; and Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. -- set the events of Jan. 6 in motion.
"We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," Alexander said in a since-deleted video posted online, "so that who we couldn't lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside."
Information for this article was contributed by Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer of The New York Times; and by Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker and Jill Colvin of The Associated Press.