Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to invalidate subpoenas issued by the House select committee examining the Jan. …
Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to invalidate subpoenas issued by the House select committee examining the Jan.6 Capitol riot after the panel’s chair informed Meadows’ attorney it would move forward with contempt proceedings. The Meadows complaint, first reported by Politico, names Pelosi and the committee’s nine members as defendants, along with the committee itself. The suit describes the subpoenas for documents and testimony issued to Meadows in September as “overly broad and unduly burdensome”. “The Select Committee acts absent any valid legislative power and threatens to violate longstanding principles of executive privilege and immunity that are of constitutional origin and dimension,” the filing says. “Without intervention by this Court, Mr. Meadows faces the harm of both being illegally coerced into violating the Constitution and having a third party involuntarily violate Mr. Meadows rights and the requirements of relevant laws governing records of electronic communications.” The key issue in the filing is the committee’s bid to obtain cell phone records from Meadows and “a third-party telecommunications company,” records which Meadows argues the panel “lacks lawful authority to seek and to obtain.” In a Tuesday letter to Meadows’ attorney George Terwilliger, committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said the committee had been “left with no choice” but to vote on whether to hold Meadows in contempt after he informed the committee he would no longer assist their investigation while former President Donald Trump’s claims of executive privilege are being heard by the courts.
