Government

Mark Meadows Files LOLsuit Against Nancy Pelosi For Bad Congress Thingy

When a delay is as good as a win.

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Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Briefs Media At White House

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Mark Meadows is mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take it any more. With the January 6 Select Committee threatening to refer him to the Justice Department for his refusal to testify, the former White House chief of staff sued Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Committee members last night for tortious subpoenaing. Or something.

Captioned a “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” the suit asks the court to wade into a dozen political questions and block the Committee’s subpoena to Verizon for Meadows’s phone records, as well as its demand for his testimony. And while it may be shaky as a legal document, as a delay tactic, it’ll probably work. Whether it will get Meadows back in Trump’s good graces after revealing in his book that the former president may have interacted with hundreds of people after getting a positive COVID test remains to be seen.

The current theory in Wingnutistan is that the Committee has no subpoena power because it has no ranking member with which Chair Bennie Thompson can consult in accordance with the establishing Resolution. Meadows joins John Eastman and Steve Bannon in making this argument, which is essentially a political question. But Meadows — through his attorney George Terwilliger III, former deputy AG and currently of McGuire Woods LLP — goes one further, telling a blatant lie about the sequence of events after Speaker Pelosi refused to seat Reps. Jim Banks and Jim Jordan, two of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Committee picks.

“Speaker Pelosi did not appoint Rep. Banks to serve as Ranking Member, nor did she appoint any other of Minority Leader McCarthy’s recommended minority members,” Meadows tells the court. “In a public statement, she acknowledged that her refusal to appoint the members recommended by the Minority Leader was an ‘unprecedented decision.’”

That did not happen. McCarthy yanked all his members when Pelosi blocked Jordan and Banks. Then Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger agreed to serve, with Cheney named Vice Chair.

And it’s far from the only blatant mischaracterization in this complaint. For instance, there are multiple references to the Supreme Court’s holding in Trump v. Mazars as establishing a general principle for evaluating the validity of congressional subpoenas. “A congressional subpoena must be reasonable,” Meadows argues. “An all-encompassing subpoena for personal, nonofficial documents falls outside the scope of Congress’ legitimate legislative power.”

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But that case referred only to congressional subpoenas pertaining to a sitting president, which is why the fourth prong of the Mazars test evaluates the “burdens imposed on the President by a subpoena.” It’s not applicable to Meadows at all.

Similarly, Meadows and Terwilliger invoke Office of Legal Counsel opinions positing that former White House Counsels Don McGahn and Harriet Miers possessed “testimonial immunity as a senior executive official.” Clearly the former congressman has had a road to Damascus conversion since the Benghazi hearings. But more to the point, McGahn and Miers both wound up testifying before Congress, as did Karl Rove, who was President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff. And not for nothin’, but the US District Court in DC, where this complaint is filed, ordered Miers to comply with the congressional subpoena.

And while the limit of congressional surveillance power is a topic of ongoing debate, literally no one reads the Stored Communications Act as imposing a requirement on Congress to get a warrant like a traditional prosecutor. Nevertheless, Meadows spends a huge part of this brief trying to get the Court to block the subpoena to Verizon for his cell phone records, citing the SCA, as well as the First and Fourth Amendments. Whether this is a legal strategy or because he’s super freaked out about the Committee getting his texts and being able to locate his position from cell tower data is unclear.

What is clear is that Meadows intends to slow this investigation down until after the 2022 elections, at which point he hopes Kevin McCarthy will take back the Speaker’s gavel and burn the Committee to the ground.

The question is whether that will come in time for Meadows if the Committee makes good on its threat to send it to Merrick Garland, and if the AG agrees to charge him.

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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,” Committee Chair Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney said yesterday. “The Select Committee will meet next week to advance a report recommending that the House cite Mr. Meadows for contempt of Congress and refer him to the Department of Justice for prosecution.”

Meadows v. Pelosi [Docket via Court Listener]

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

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