The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is set to recommend contempt charges against former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
on Monday as lawmakers are releasing new details about thousands of emails and texts he has handed over to the committee.
The panel says it also wants to know more about whether Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the response of the National Guard, which was delayed for hours as the violence escalated and the rioters brutally beat police guarding the Capitol building. The contempt vote comes after more than two months of negotiations with Meadows and his lawyer and as the panel has also struggled to obtain information from some of Trump’s other top aides, such as his longtime ally Steve Bannon. The House voted to recommend charges against Bannon in October, and the Justice Department indicted him on two counts of contempt last month.
Committee staff said they would have interviewed Meadows about emails “to leadership at the Department of Justice on December 29th and 30th, 2020, and January 1st, 2021, encouraging investigations of suspected voter fraud,” even though election officials and courts across the country had refuted the claims.
In other texts, sent the day of the attack, Meadows' former colleagues encouraged him to get Trump to discourage the violence, the committee said. Similarly, in an exchange with an organizer of the rally that morning — where Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell” — the organizer told Meadows that they “desperately” needed direction from him because things “have gotten crazy.”
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