Now that the House has voted to hold former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt for refusing to appear before the Jan. 6 Select Committee, Washington insiders are gripped in a typical, inside-the-Beltway dilemma: Whether the Justice Department should file criminal charges against him. After all, unlike Steve Bannon, Meadows was a member of the executive branch and can therefore claim “executive privilege.”
Are you kidding? Of course, the DOJ should file criminal charges against Meadows, just like they did against Bannon. It doesn’t matter where Meadows worked. White House aides aren’t above the law. Refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena is a crime. Interfering with an election is a crime. Attempting to overthrow the government is a crime. And there’s substantial evidence that Meadows is guilty of all three.
The more we learn about his involvement in the events between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021, the clearer it is that Meadows was more than Trump’s chief of staff. He was Trump’s enabler-in-chief. After Donald Trump himself, Mark Meadows was most responsible for the greatest assault on our democracy since the Civil War.
Any doubts that Meadows played a central role in the Jan. 6 insurrection vanished when Rep. Liz Cheney, co-chair of the Select Committee, read aloud frantic texts sent to Meadows while the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was underway: texts from members of the president’s family, members of Congress, and anchors on Fox News – pleading for Meadows to persuade Trump to call off the armed mob. And what did Meadows do? Nothing.
Actually, Meadows’s role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election started long before that. It was Meadows who initiated and joined in the Jan. 2 phone call to Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger in which Trump demanded that the secretary of state “find 11,780 votes.” And, as has been duly reported, rather than serve as a watchdog, dismissing a pile of nutty conspiracy theories flooding the White House, Meadows took every one of them seriously, convinced Trump to take them seriously, and pressured administration officials to investigate them and take action.