Government

What Excuse Will Mark Meadows Use To Avoid Telling Congress About Italian Space Lasers?

That guy will NEVER show up.

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Odds that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to talk about the events leading up to the January 6 Insurrection: ZERO.

Meadows famously tried to get the Justice Department to investigate a rumor that Barack Obama conspired with the Italian president to steal the election via military lasers, and CNN reports that Chairman Dick Durbin is interested in sitting down for a little chat about it. Ditto for Meadows’s recollections of White House efforts to enlist the Justice Department in an effort to overturn the election results.

“I’d like to have the opportunity,” Durbin said, although he acknowledged that he’d have to get Republican cooperation to issue a subpoena in the event Meadows refuses to come in voluntarily.

Let’s take a wildass guess that Meadows will not cheerfully accede to requests to come in and reminisce about his time in Trumpland. The January 6 House Select Committee has subpoena power, and will doubtless want a piece of Meadows’s time, too. But short of an engraved invitation from Jesus himself, Meadows will never spill the beans on his former boss.

Despite DOJ assurances that it will not be invoking executive privilege for presidential communications about the events leading up to the Capitol riot, Team Trump has steadfastly maintained that the former president retains the right to invoke executive privilege as a private citizen.

“Please be advised that the Department’s purported waiver and authorization are unlawful, and that President Trump continues to assert that the non-public information the Committees seek is and should be protected from disclosure by the executive privilege,” huffed former Georgia congressman Doug Collins, now Trump’s private lawyer, in a letter to former DOJ officials summoned by congress.

Note that he’s not actually invoking privilege with regard to any particular statement. Collins is just continuing the four-year run of gesturing vaguely in the direction of an inchoate executive privilege covering all executive branch communications without actually invoking it.

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Which was always bullshit, of course. Congress has wielded broad oversight power of the executive branch for decades, and both Democratic and Republican administrations have generally cooperated. But the Trump administration flatly refused, because they knew that they controlled the Justice Department, and Bill Barr wasn’t going to prosecute anyone for blowing off Democratic congressional demands. They did it because they could.

“We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump admitted in 2019, insisting on his right to refuse to cooperate with any Democratic congressional oversight if they didn’t back off the Ukraine impeachment inquiry. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.”

Remember when Hillary Clinton refused to sit down with Congress for eleven hours to talk about Benghazi because it was illegal to conduct oversight if you had evil, partisan designs in your heart? No, you don’t.

IRL lawyers like former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue aren’t stupid enough to keep playing this game when “their” ref has left the field. Once the DOJ told them to cough it up, they ran not walked to Congress to spill the beans before Trump could get into court and bollix it up with some inane attempt to exert post-presidential privilege.

But no one has ever accused Mark Meadows of insufficient stupidity. From his new position heading the pro-Trump Conservative Partnership Institute (where he and Cleta Mitchell both got a soft landing), he has zero incentive to cross the Big Man. So it’s a safe bet that he’ll go along with any harebrained scheme to claim privilege over any and all conversations he had with coup plotters, conspiracy theorists, and Justice Department officials — much less Donald Trump himself.

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Maybe he’ll say he’s washing his hair. Maybe he’ll shout “EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE!” and run away laughing at the three Clinton chiefs of staff who didn’t know the one weird trick to get out of giving congressional testimony. Maybe he’ll make like Eminem and put one of those fingers on each hand up. But he will never appear before Congress.

Senate Judiciary chairman wants to interview former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows [CNN]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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