Government

Mark Meadows Is Very Concerned About Executive Privilege. Except When He's Got A Book To Sell.

Every rule has an exception!

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(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has been in the news a lot lately. Media outlets are dutifully ginning up interest for his book about serving in the Trump administration, The Chief’s Chief, which will be released next week. Just this morning The Guardian reported on a passage from Meadows’s memoir revealing that Trump had already tested positive for COVID before he debated President Biden in September 2020.

If it’s rolled out like every other Trumpland tell all, we’ll spend the next week reading juicy anecdotes in various papers as the publisher works to boost interest in the lead-up to publication day. Which is an odd juxtaposition with the other reason that Meadows is in the news this week.

Because at the same time the former North Carolina congressman is spilling all the tea on Trump, he’s simultaneously insisting that he can’t possibly tell the January 6 Select Committee about his time in the White House because of executive privilege.

“Mr. Meadows remains under the instructions of former President Trump to respect longstanding principles of executive privilege. It now appears the courts will have to resolve this conflict,” his attorney George Terwilliger III said when his client defied a subpoena and refused to show up to testify last month

Before the Trump administration, executive privilege was only understood to cover communications between the president and his senior staff. But beginning with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Team Trump embraced an expansive theory of privilege that covered the entire executive branch and did not require the White House to make any specific assertion by the executive himself.

“I’m not claiming executive privilege because that’s the president’s power and I have no power there,” Sessions told the Senate, as he dodged questions about his communications with the Trump in June of 2017.

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Meadows has continued to insist on this metastatic interpretation of privilege, refusing to answer any questions from the January 6 Select Committee. Not about his efforts 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 not about his communications with Stop the Steal rally organizers who weren’t even part of the executive branch.

Terwilliger, a former deputy attorney general, even took to the pages of the Washington Post to wail that Biden was blowing up “200 years of history” by refusing to invoke privilege over testimony by Meadows and other Trump White House officials. And yet his client seems perfectly willing to monetize those communications in his own memoir.

Perhaps cognizant of the apparent disconnect, Meadows finally agreed yesterday to testify to the Select Committee and produce the subpoenaed documents. But he hasn’t tapped out on his claims of privilege, at least not publicly.

“As we have from the beginning, we continue to work with the Select Committee and its staff to see if we can reach an accommodation that does not require Mr. Meadows to waive Executive Privilege or to forfeit the long-standing position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress,” Terwilliger told CNN. “We appreciate the Select Committee’s openness to receiving voluntary responses on non-privileged topics.”

That may be bluster meant to preserve Meadows’s standing in the MAGAsphere. The Committee has made clear that a contempt referral is very much on the table if he doesn’t cooperate, with Chair Bennie Thompson putting out a statement yesterday welcoming Meadows’s change of heart while promising that Committee members “will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition.”

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Luckily there’s one exception to executive privilege acknowledged by everyone in Trumpland, where the Gotta Sell Books privilege trumps all. (Right, John Bolton?) So if Meadows does continue to flip off Congress, the Committee can always shell out $25.20 for a hardcover copy of his book and find out everything they want to know.

First on CNN: Meadows cooperating with January 6 investigators [CNN]

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

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