The "hyper-partisan" Jan. 6 Select Committee is not concerned with facts, the law, or executive privilege and only seeks a narrative to distract from the "failing" Biden administration, according to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Newsmax.
"We worked real hard to try to reach an accommodation with the committee, and yet it's been basically their way or the highway," Meadows told "Rob Schmitt Tonight" after he declined to appear on subpoena from the committee early Friday.
"Congress has gotten so hyper-partisan and, candidly, this committee is more interested in politics than they are really solving real problems," he added.
The committee indicted former White House strategist Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, the first time an indictment has been sought on that charge when executive privilege had been asserted by a U.S. president.
"They took a very aggressive move today and sadly, you know, I think what most Americans are seeing this is an attempt to really keep the focus on Jan. 6 and not on their failing Biden administration policy," Meadows told host Rob Schmitt.
Meadows said he was not unwilling to share information with the committee, including information that counters the Democrats' Jan. 6 narrative, but he said courts must first weigh in on Trump's executive privilege.
"It would be irresponsible for Mr. Meadows to prematurely resolve that dispute by voluntarily waiving privileges that are at the heart of those legal issues," his attorney George Terwilliger III wrote in a statement as former President Donald Trump is seeking legal protection on his executive privileged communications.
"These are complex legal matters," Meadows added to Schmitt. "Quite frankly, you've got a number of difference of opinions – kind of got me in the in the middle of it – where we've got a president in President Trump that is saying that he wants to claim executive privilege. There's case law that would suggest that that's appropriate.
"You've got Congress that's saying, 'No, we're not going to do that; we're going to hold you in contempt if you don't show up.'
"Hopefully the courts will weigh in."
Democrats are using a playbook they have been following during the Trump era: Concoct a narrative and keep selling it until it becomes adopted by the media, which gobbles up selectively spun leaks, Meadows said.
"They have a they have a track record of doing that: You know what they'll do is they'll selectively leak," Meadows said. "We saw that during the impeachment. We've seen that with the Steele dossier. They leak out little parts of it when they know they know better and, sadly, it hurts their reputation."
Meadows noted the long overdue corrections from The Washington Post on taking the Democrats' bait on the Russia collusion narrative the Clinton campaign spun and paid to disseminate to try to damage Trump in the public and subvert his administration.
"This was always a narrative where we had the Hillary Clinton campaign actually feeding information to someone to try to authenticate that," Meadows concluded. "And, then ultimately, these sources that they're now having to retract were actually made up sources.
"So they spun their whole narrative, but here's what you'll start to find out is that a number of people closely tied to the Clinton campaign where not only shopping this information, but they were giving the information and then trying to authenticate it.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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