Former White Home chief of staff Mark Meadows took legal action against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and every member of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on Wednesday, declaring that it is unconstitutionally usurping executive branch authority.
The lawsuit, submitted in the federal district court for the District of Columbia, came after the chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-GA), composed to Meadows’s attorney earlier Wednesday to state that the committee would pursue criminal contempt charges against Meadows.
Letter from Bennie Thompson to Mark Meadows’ attorney concludes:
“The Select Committee is left with no option but to advance contempt procedures and recommend that the body in which Mr. Meadows when served refer him for prosecution” pic.twitter.com/ahiwtgTaub
— Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) December 8, 2021
That came after Meadows’s attorney wrote to the committee on Tuesday to say that Meadows could not work together with the committee due to the fact that it was trying to subpoena his private telephone records from his mobile phone supplier, Verizon.
The lawsuit specifies that the committee is demanding that Meadows violate executive advantage and the Constitution, and asking his mobile phone company to break the law:
The Select Committee acts missing any valid legal power and threatens to violate longstanding principles of executive benefit and immunity that are of constitutional origin and measurement. Without intervention by this Court, Mr. Meadows deals with the harm of both being illegally persuaded into violating the Constitution and having a 3rd party involuntarily violate Mr. Meadows rights and the requirements of appropriate laws governing records of electronic interactions.
Meadows’s suit also describes that he wished to adhere to the committee, however that it wanted materials he thought he did not can provide under the Constitution:
For months, Mr. Meadows has actually regularly sought in great faith to pursue an accommodation with the Select Committee whereby it could acquire pertinent, non-privileged info. While the Committee and Mr. Meadows engaged over an amount of time in an effort to attain such affordable accommodation, the Select Committee adamantly refused to acknowledge the immunity of present and previous senior White House assistants from being forced to appear prior to Congress and similarly declined to acknowledge a former president’s claims of Executive Privilege and guidelines to Mr. Meadows to keep such opportunity claims in resolving the Select Committee’s inquiries.
The present President of the United States, through counsel, supposed to waive the former president’s claims of advantage and resistance.
As a result, Mr. Meadows, a witness, has been put in the illogical position of choosing in between contrasting benefit claims that are of constitutional origin and measurement and needing to either risk enforcement of the subpoena issued to him, not merely by the House of Representatives, however through actions by the Executive and Judicial Branches, or, alternatively, unilaterally abandoning the previous president’s claims of opportunities and resistances. Therefore, Mr. Meadows turns to the courts to state what the law is.
The claim argues further that the committee is illegitimate by its own terms: the House resolution establishing the committee offers that “The Speaker will designate 13 Members to the Select Committee, 5 of whom will be designated after assessment with the minority leader” (emphasis included). Furthermore, the resolution says that subpoenas “will” just be released in assessment with the committee’s ranking minority member, and there is no ranking minority member.
Meadows’s filing states: “Licensed congressional committees have subpoena authority implied by Post I of the Constitution. … The Select Committee, however, is not an authorized congressional committee because it stops working to comport with its own licensing resolution, House Resolution 503.”
Speaker Pelosi rejected the candidates offered by Home Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and chose two members of the minority. As it stands, the committee only has 9 members– seven Democrats and two Republican politicians, both of whom are avowedly anti-Trump.
Democrats preserve that Meadows, who was chief of personnel for President Donald Trump, has product information about the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Meadows has actually not been connected to the riot by any among hundreds of Department of Justice cases versus the participants.
The Department of Justice is prosecuting former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon for resisting a subpoena on similar constitutional grounds to Meadows’s objection. Bannon wants a court to decide the executive opportunity problem before handing over materials to the committee. Ironically, the Department of Justice is attempting to avoid Bannon from revealing other materials about the riot, which it provided to him as part of the legal procedure.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday nights from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the current e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative point of view. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.