In a Reversal, Meadows Refuses to Cooperate With Jan. 6 Inquiry

Politics|In a Reversal, Meadows Refuses to Cooperate With Jan. 6 Inquiry

WASHINGTON — Mark Meadows, the erstwhile White House main of unit nether President Donald J. Trump, connected Tuesday informed the committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 onslaught astatine the Capitol that helium was nary longer consenting to cooperate with its investigation, reversing a woody helium reached with the sheet conscionable past week to beryllium for an interrogation and supply documents.

“We present indispensable diminution the accidental to look voluntarily for a deposition,” Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, wrote to the committee.

Instead, helium projected that Mr. Meadows reply questions successful penning done what helium called an “orderly process” that would make a “clear grounds of questions and related assertions of privilege.”

The turnabout was the 2nd successful 2 weeks by Mr. Meadows, who had initially refused to comply with a subpoena from House sheet successful enactment with a directive from Mr. Trump, but told the sheet past week that helium would beryllium consenting to supply documents and beryllium for a voluntary interview.

In his Tuesday letter, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Meadows’s lawyer made a litany of complaints against the prime committee, saying that it did not look to respect Mr. Trump’s assertion of enforcement privilege and had issued a wide-ranging subpoena for Mr. Meadows’s communications that would see idiosyncratic conversations.

“We agreed to supply thousands of pages of responsive documents and Mr. Meadows was consenting to look voluntarily, not nether compulsion of the prime committee’s subpoena to him, for a deposition to reply questions astir non-privileged matters,” Mr. Terwilliger wrote. “Now actions by the prime committee person made specified an quality untenable.”

Mr. Terwilliger said the worldly sought by the committee see “intensely idiosyncratic communications” with nary relevance to immoderate morganatic investigation.

“With the breadth of its subpoenas and its pugnacious approach, the prime committee has made wide that it does not mean to respect these important law limits,” Mr. Terwilliger wrote.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a subordinate of the committee, called Mr. Meadows’s demands “imperious and highhanded.”

“I can’t ideate we volition judge it,” said Mr. Raskin, adding that helium was speaking lone for himself and not the afloat committee, which has yet to sermon Mr. Meadows’s latest move. “We’ve got to determine what to do. Our witnesses bash not dictate the presumption of our investigation.”

The committee has present interviewed much than 275 witnesses and is receiving practice from immoderate members of erstwhile Vice President Mike Pence’s interior circle, including his erstwhile main of unit Marc Short, according to a idiosyncratic acquainted with the investigation.