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Don't Compare 'Her Emails' With Trump's Brazen Misconduct

Don't Compare 'Her Emails' With Trump's Brazen Misconduct

Ever since the FBI searched Donald Trump’s premises at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 to retrieve the boxes of files he kept there unlawfully, he has tried to distract attention by reviving his bawling about "her emails."

For years, Trump has insisted that Hillary Clinton somehow escaped the punishment she merited — amid shrieks of "Lock her up!" from the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Flynn— and now complains that he is somehow the victim of a "double standard" because the FBI is investigating his apparent theft of national security materials. "Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable," he whined earlier this month.

In fact, the former secretary of state endured many months of an intrusive investigation that cost her heavily in legal fees and personal demonization —although she was finally and fully exonerated of any criminal wrongdoing or intent by the Justice Department.

Rather than benefiting from favorable treatment by the FBI, Clinton was the target of a concerted smear campaign by Trump allies within the bureau instigated by Giuliani. Their internal operation pushed then FBI director James Comey to brazenly violate strict Justice Department political guidelines by discussing her case publicly twice, the last time only weeks before the November 2016 election — while at the same time concealing the counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign's collusion with the Kremlin. The sanctimonious Comey, who claimed to be above politics, cowered under threat from right-wingers lodged within the Bureau.

So, while the differences between the Clinton and Trump cases are vast indeed, they leave little space for the feigned indignation of the former president and his flunkeys.

What we know about Hillary Clinton's emails is that of the many thousands examined by the FBI, only a tiny proportion — a number in the low single digits — were deemed to have been "classified." Of those, none disclosed sensitive information that could have jeopardized national security, such as nuclear weapons secrets, but instead involved drone strikes that had already been prominently reported in national news outlets. Most of the emails deemed secret had either been classified after the fact or were improperly marked in the first place.

As Comey explained at the time, the FBI found no evidence that Clinton, her aides, or her attorneys had intentionally withheld any information from the State Department, the National Archives or the Justice Department, or obstructed the investigation in any way.

We know far less about the documents that Trump allegedly removed from the White House, but what has been reported so far draws a sharp contrast with the Clinton emails episode. According to the search warrant and receipt released by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump evidently absconded with hundreds of hard copies of highly classified documents — all properly marked — that implicated serious national security and defense matters.

The Justice Department plainly suspects him of violating the Espionage Act, of hiding or destroying those sensitive documents, and of obstructing the government's efforts to locate and retrieve them.

In other words, Trump acted with purpose and in direct violation of the law, including the Presidential Records Act. He continued to defy the law even after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for documents he had withheld — which was why the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago to recover them.

Despite the excessive and obsessive media coverage that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss, the more we learned more about the substance of Clinton's emails, the more their importance diminished, ultimately to the vanishing point. The opposite is true of Trump's purloined documents, whose significance only seems to be increasing. And we are still at the very beginning of this scandal.

In panic, Trump and his henchmen now insist that he had "declassified" all those papers, and many others too, supposedly for the sake of transparency. But top officials of his administration have openly ridiculed that assertion, which is absurd on its face, as a brazen lie. Much like his election lies, it is a hollow claim, devoid of any supporting facts or evidence. Donald Trump lie? What a surprise!

Protecting the nation requires a careful declassification process, even when the president wishes to alter the status of specific documents. For Trump to void secrecy with a wave of his hand would create a state of chaos, gravely damaging national security. And since he believes in exercising presidential power so recklessly, he must never be allowed anywhere near the nation's secrets again.

Trump and his minions only bring up Hillary Clinton as a ruse. Keep in mind that "her emails" only became an issue because House Republicans were trying to damage her politically, bring down her poll numbers, as the perpetually stupid Kevin McCarthy blurted out, by concocting a pseudo-scandal from the Benghazi attack. She put that to rest when she testified before the House Benghazi committee for 11 hours, answering every question posed by her inquisitors.

Three days after the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, on August 11, Trump invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 440 times in response to questions from the New York Attorney General investigating his crooked business practices. In 2016, Trump said, “If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?" We should expect that if he is ever compelled to testify about the potential crimes involved in swiping and concealing White House documents, we will hear him repeat the Fifth Amendment many more times.

O.J. Trump And The Mar-A-Lago 'Plant'

O.J. Trump And The Mar-A-Lago 'Plant'

“This is sad, O.J.” That’s what Ron Shipp, a police officer and friend of O.J. Simpson, said on the stand at Simpson’s murder trial when he learned the defense was trying to suggest that the former football player was framed.

Donald Trump has often been compared to Benito Mussolini, George Wallace and Richard Nixon, with the last two, at least, looking a little better than he does on close inspection. Now add O.J., who — like Trump — tried to cover his guilt with the time-honored approach of so many defendants: by blaming the police.

OK, Trump hasn’t killed anyone (unless you count the roughly 200,000 coronavirus deaths that could have been avoided had he urged masks and vaccination.) But if he did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, his cult followers would rally around him at approximately the same decibel level as they have in the days since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago on Monday.

The torrent of attacks on the FBI and Democrats is not likely to subside much, even after the release of the warrant Friday (a preemptive move by Trump World), which included clear probable cause. We learned that the former president had refused to comply with a subpoena for highly-classified documents that he was hoarding at home. At a minimum, Trump failed to secure nuclear secrets from the prying eyes of the many spies posing as lounge lizards and visiting suck-ups at his club. House Republicans cancelled a press conference after the attack on the FBI office in Cincinnati by a January 6 insurrectionist (later killed by authorities), but they’ll be back on the warpath soon enough, however dangerous their incitement might be. On Friday night, their despicable leader released the names of the FBI agents who searched his mansion, painting a MAGA target on their backs.

Trump’s “Free O.J.!” mob is following a preposterous script. The liars and enablers who make up today’s GOP are trying to cast Attorney General Merrick Garland — the straightest of straight arrows— in the improbable role of Mark Fuhrman, a cop who became more despised during the 1994 O.J. trial than the murder suspect himself. See, Garland is worse than Trump! Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Jesse Watters and other Trump lackeys now claiming evidence was “planted” at Mar-a-Lago are doing their best imitations of Simpson’s facile attorney, the late Johnnie Cochran, though that is terribly unfair to Cochran.

Let’s just uproot the “planted evidence” argument for a moment. It’s being spread now by Trump himself, a sign that he’s worried about the evidence the FBI has gathered. It goes without saying that his conspiracy-addled cult followers will keep peddling this lie for years. In the O.J. case, Cochran implied that Fuhrman or some other racist and crooked cop planted a bloody sock and a bloody glove and a bloody footprint from a Bruno Magli shoe at the murder scene and in Simpson’s house. This was far-fetched during the Simpson trial but it’s downright plausible compared to what would be required to plant evidence in the Mar-a-Lago case—evidence, of course, that had already been, uh, “declassified”.

Imagine what the FBI would have to do to frame Trump. It’s a helluva lot harder than, say, planting drugs on an 18-year-old Black kid in a bad neighborhood, a crime that is more common than most people assume. Corrupt FBI technicians would somehow have to forge highly-classified documents about nuclear weapons that would then have to stand up in court as authentic. Easy-peasy!

That’s about as much juice as I can squeeze out of O.J. Fortunately there are many other takeaways from last week’s stunning developments:

On the basic question of what motivated the search, I’m of two minds. Since 2015, I’ve operated on the assumption that whenever you think Trump has touched bottom, he crashes through the floor. Given that everything else about him ends up even worse than it first appeared, this would suggest that the documents will turn out to contain Trump’s hand-written notes on the coup plot, his betrayal of the United States at the 2018 Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, or (and!) his apparent determination as far back as 2019 to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Now that he’s out of office and his family is making multi-billion dollar business deals with the royal family in Riyadh, the last of these might be the most likely scenario.

At the same time, there’s a lot to suggest this really is just about mishandling classified material—an offense the government has always taken very seriously, and which DOJ argues in the warrant violates not only the Presidential Records Act but possibly the Espionage Act and statutes on obstruction of justice. Trump and his flunkies are already insisting that as president he had the power to issue a “standing order” declassifying even nuclear secrets without going through any “bureaucratic” process. Nuclear secrets—no biggie. Who cares if some deep state types say this release of this information would pose an “exceptionally grave” threat to national security? Expect to hear that fatuous claim about 5,000 times on Fox in the next couple of years, then again in court.

Could Garland, famous for playing it by the book, have merely been enforcing a subpoena from last spring for the boxes of documents belonging to the government that Trump was refusing to hand over? Now that the secrets are safe, might he call it a day on Trump’s failure to protect them? Possibly so, though it’s more likely the still-sealed government affidavit that accompanied the warrant includes something less “stale,” as prosecutors put it.

William M. Arkin, an intelligence expert and great reporter I know and trust, writes that two sources tell him that there was a “mole” at Mar-a-Lago. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that “someone familiar with the stored papers told investigators there may be still more classified documents at the private club after the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes earlier in the year.” That—not a “weaponized” DOJ—is what precipitated the search warrant.

Trump claims to be buoyed by supporters rallying behind him but he’s got to be worried about exactly what’s in those 27 additional boxes removed on Monday. One of them contained material on Roger Stone and his pardon. Might there be something else in Stone’s files that implicates Trump? Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime fixer, told CNN that his old boss no doubt “feels trapped” and is worried that the source Trump calls a “rat” (spoken like true mobster) has more dirt on him.

Many commentators across the spectrum this week thought that mishandling and withholding classified material was too small a crime to justify prosecuting Trump — as if anything short of the former president committing treason did not justify enforcing the law; as if the Feds in the 1930s should not have prosecuted Al Capone for something as minor as income tax evasion. Really? Law enforcement should retreat in the face of partisan noise and threats of violence?

In my cable news gorging this week, it felt as if many of the same analysts saying that Garland was too aggressive if he didn’t have something earth-shaking were claiming a month ago that he wouldn’t be aggressive enough. The only thing that changed was the simultaneously terrifying and tiresome cannonade from the GOP. It intimidated a surprising number of people into accepting Trump’s frame on the story—until Garland, late in the week, turned the tables.

But of course the carnival of hypocrisy will never close. Trumpsters don’t oppose all law enforcement, only the investigations aimed at them. They’re against defunding the police until they’re for defunding the FBI.

It was only six years ago that Trump got elected in part by harping on Hillary Clinton’s emails, which might have contained classified information unsecured on her private server. He said the issue was disqualifying and delegates to the Republican National Convention — the same people making excuses for him today — chanted ominously: “Lock Her Up!”

Sometimes the hypocrisy is so bald even Trump can’t ignore it. “I once asked [not “once,” about 50 times], ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’” he said after pleading the Fifth more than 400 times on Wednesday in a deposition in a civil suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. “Now I know the answer to that question.”

As it happens, Trump was correct the first time, though no president should trample on any constitutional right. In civil cases, it’s permissible for a jury to infer guilt from a defendant taking the Fifth. Which is why Trump is likely to owe millions in civil judgments stemming from his financial shenanigans.

In the meantime, the braying of the asses continues unabated. “This is the worst attack on the republic in modern history—period,” the powerful radio host Mark Levin thundered on Fox News. How so, Mark? Because it is “unprecedented”? (A word that newscasters this week turned into a pejorative.)

Kevin Williamson, an anti-Trumpist, had a good response to that in the National Review:

“The FBI’s serving a search warrant on Donald Trump’s residence is not — in spite of everything being said about it — unprecedented. The FBI serves search warrants on homes all the time. Donald Trump is a former president, not a mystical sacrosanct being.”
If we really believe, as we say we believe, that this is a republic, that nobody is above the law, that the presidency is just a temporary executive-branch office rather than a quasi-royal entitlement, then there is nothing all that remarkable about the FBI serving a warrant on a house in Florida.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and the others demagoguing the issue all know better. They know the FBI search did not break or even bend the law. It was the temerity of it that they thought, rightly, would be red meat for the base — the very idea that anyone would dare hold their Dear Leader to account. We’re all so inured to rightwing nonsense that Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) comparing the FBI to the Gestapoflies right past us—as if executing a search warrant is the same as executing six million Jews.

Fortunately, Garland is genuinely non-political, which means he won’t let the political assessment of how his prosecution is “playing” impede his efforts. In fact, the most important — and gratifying — conclusion we can draw from the Mar-a-Lago search is that the long debate over the intentions of the attorney general — does he have the intestinal fortitude to prosecute Trump? — is over. He may not be a flashy hard-charger, but his steady, implacable will to push back against outrageous intimidation and uphold the rule of law — wherever that might lead — is now on the display for the whole world.

On Thursday, Garland skillfully called Trump’s bluff that the attorney general would stay silent while the former president controlled the media narrative. All week, it bothered me that even some good reporters and interviewers fell for Trump’s ferocious spin, and imposed a double-standard that conjured 2016 and boded ill for 2024. I wasn’t alone. Ben Rhodes, a former Obama speechwriter, tweeted:

If Garland’s seriousness about holding Trump to account was the best news of the week, the worst news was how Republicans closed ranks around the former guy. I’m not worried about it in terms of the midterms. The Republicans enraged by the Mar-a-Lago “raid” were already certain to turn out for Republican candidates. It’s hard to imagine swing or sporadic voters (those who usually avoid midterms) coming out in droves because Trump is playing the victim card again.

But this episode may make it more likely that Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024. It gives him something to talk about other than the “stolen” 2020 election, which was boring even some of his ardent supporters. As his cult of personality further solidifies, you’ll see Ron DeSantis’ stock heading south.

It’s scary to watch the Kool-Aid going down the hatch. Here’s Matt Schlapp [Chairman of CPAC]:

“It’s an unshakable bond. People ask the question—Is he the leader? .. Yes, and I think he will be until he takes his last breath.”

His last breath — in the bunker? So even if slam dunk evidence emerges that Trump is a traitor, you wouldn’t criticize him, Matt? There are literally NO circumstances where he is not your leader? This isn’t a smitten insurrectionist saying this. Schlapp was George W. Bush’s White House political director. As head of the American Conservative Union and now CPAC, he’s arguably the leading “conservative” (whatever the hell that means nowadays) in the U.S. today. And all he can say is, “Heil Trump!”

The 2020s are not the 1990s, when peace and prosperity allowed us to distract ourselves with low-stakes melodramas like the O.J. Simpson trial. This is not a drill. I don’t think Trump will be reelected; even before January 6, he never cracked 50 percent approval ratings and had alienated broad swaths of independent voters. But history shows anything is possible when you receive the nomination of a major political party. If Trump is the 2024 GOP nominee and we have a severe recession, he can argue how great his economy was from 2017 to 2020, a misleading but plausible claim, and—with the help of election deniers in key states—slip back into the Oval Office. What would happen next is not a liberal fever dream but, according to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a mortal threat to American democracy. This time, Trump would know what he’s doing. Within weeks, the FBI would be transformed from a “deep state” enemy into the new dictator’s secret police. Bet on it.

Jonathan Alter, a political analyst for MSNBC, writes the Old Goats newsletter on Substack. Alter's most recent book is His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

Reprinted with permission from Old Goats

Why That 'Miranda' Warning Matters So Much Less Than You Think

Why That 'Miranda' Warning Matters So Much Less Than You Think

The United States Supreme Court decision in Vega v. Tekoh, released on June 23, worries many constitutional rights experts. Once the Clerk of the Court released the opinion, the digital town square grew rife with nervous energy that the Miranda warning -- the legally mandated reading of rights by police to suspects to inform them of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections while in custody -- is all but gone.

Graydon Gordion, a member of the executive board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia tweeted: “Roe. Miranda. Gun control. Church and State. All dismantled in a single week. The single worst week for civil rights and liberties in decades.”

Elie Mystal, attorney and justice correspondent for The Nation chimed in on the bird app, too, in partial accuracy. “Folks,” Mystal wrote, “this basically overturns ‘the right to remain silent.’”

Colin Kalmbacher, editor of Law and Crime News, described the decision this way: “U.S. Supreme Court conservatives overturn time-honored Miranda rights in landmark decision."

But I’m not that worried. All the new decision says is that law enforcement’s failure to Mirandize — meaning read the warning and a list of their Fifths and Sixths as outlined by the Supreme Court in a 1966 case called Miranda v. Arizona — doesn't afford a suspect any remedy under the federal civil rights code. Miranda lives on.

And that’s the problem because Miranda is a mirage; the warning ritual creates the appearance of protecting a suspect’s constitutional rights but doesn’t really do the job.

Miranda’s job, of course, is to protect people from coercive police tactics and misinterpretation of their protestations of innocence; the warning isn’t designed to provide refuge for the guilty, which is the main criticism of the constitutional right. False confessions happen only when a suspect is communicating with law enforcement. Those words that can and will be used against you in a court of law only exist if you utter them.

Or so the public thinks.

Let me tell you a story called State of Connecticut v. Chandra Bozelko. Picture it: Milford, Connecticut, 2007. It was a sunny October afternoon outside 14 West River Street, but inside, my future looked forbidding as the Assistant Chief of Police of the Town of Orange, Connecticut sat on the witness stand describing my arrest on February 2, 2005 for various crimes related to credit card fraud. In a nutshell, packages with purchases made on others’ credit card accounts had been directed to my parents’ home in Orange. They arrested me for various offenses and then went about trying to connect me to the crimes.

“At that point,” Koether said, “I read her her rights from a little rights card and asked her if she would talk to me.”

After officers transferred me to the station and I signed the paper acknowledging my advisement of rights, I asked to speak to my lawyer. When asked whom to call, I gave an officer my sister’s and my father’s numbers. They were both lawyers. I spoke to both of them and, as they arranged to post bond for me, I sat in one of the Town of Orange’s holding cells, alone, talking to no one.

The police said I confessed anyway.

The very next day in the trial, then-Officer Robert Cole (he went to another department in 2016 where AAA recognized him for his superior traffic enforcement) — falsely testified that I confessed to procuring other people’s credit card information and using it.

Cole swore under oath that I unburdened myself to him and divulged that someone called me on the phone and provided me with the stolen credit card numbers. That’s how I pulled off this massive attempted heist, according to Cole: I just answered the phone and a third party -- a person whom the police never even attempted to identify and have no idea who this person was -- provided me with stolen credit card information, an act that would have positioned as him my accomplice, as well as made him even more of a risk to the community than I since he was grabbing personal financial information from unsuspecting marks.

It should go without saying that this alleged confession doesn’t make sense - unless law enforcement traced calls to my phone and identified this caller, which they never tried to do. And, of course, the prosecution introduced no written, audio, or video memorialization of this alleged confession — because they were never required to do so.

The Innocence Project lists Connecticut as one of 30 states that require recording of certain custodial interviews but that inclusion isn’t entirely accurate. The Supreme Court of the State of Connecticut held that the state constitution doesn’t require recording of interviews. Memorialization is required only if certain circumstances apply.

No confession that isn’t memorialized in writing, audio, or video should even merit consideration as evidence in a criminal trial, much less get introduced into the record. But they do. These bogus unbosomings underwrite many convictions.

So Miranda warnings may be talismanic to civil rights advocates but they’re often useless in my opinion. I was read my rights, exercised them, and said nothing -- and yet the cops still boned me with a false confession I didn’t even make.

Miranda’s better half -- my right to counsel and her effective assistance to me -- was supposed to provide some adversarial testing to this Fifth Amendment fracas. But that didn’t work out either.

When Officer Cole described this alleged confession, one he had mentioned in a police report, my attorney, Angelica Papastavros, asked for the proof. It’s not clear that she understood that police don’t have to record or memorialize anything but she said she’d never heard of this alleged confession, that no one had provided it to her in discovery. It would have been a valiant defense if she hadn’t been holding the document in her hand when she made the argument.

“You do recognize the fact that you do have that document?” the judge asked her.

“So far, nothing rings a bell,” she replied.

The false confession didn’t ring a bell because my attorney hadn’t actually read the case file, the papers in her hand, before trial. She could have filed a motion to suppress the nonsensical confession or to hold a hearing on why, if the police accepted the cockamamie explanation that a random, unknown person plied me with stolen credit card numbers over the phone, none of them ever traced the calls to that line to identify that person. No one tracked down the mystery caller, most likely because he never existed, along with the confession, not that the record indicates any of that. It’s hardly a surprise marshals carted me to the state’s only women’s prison two months later.

Even leaving my story out, scant evidence supports Miranda’s effectiveness. People who know their rights still think that talking to police is wise if they’re innocent; most of them are juveniles or adults with mental health problems. If Miranda did her job, the number of false confessions would have dropped after 1966, when the warning became required by law. But they didn’t.

All the false confessions identified by the National Registry of Exonerations between 1989 and 2016 were squeezed out after a Miranda warning. Studies show that recitation of rights doesn’t effectively inform suspects with language barriers. Miranda’s a mess.

The moral of this story is that Miranda isn’t what people think it is; silence doesn’t even guarantee that police won’t say a suspect confessed. Not only should anyone in custody remain silent and ask for counsel, but that person shouldn’t even agree that they’ve been read their rights. Acknowledging a Miranda warning makes it easy for police to construct a narrative, as I learned entirely too well.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

Stone Takes The Fifth As Select Committee Moves Contempt Charge Against Meadows

Stone Takes The Fifth As Select Committee Moves Contempt Charge Against Meadows

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

With his deposition scheduled for next week, a longtime ally to former President Donald Trump and self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone has informed the January 6 select committee that he will invoke the Fifth Amendment as he seeks to evade testifying.

NBCwas first to report the decision, which was sent in a letter from Stone’s attorney Grant Smith to the committee on Wednesday. In addition to invoking the amendment as it relates to his testimony, this also applies to any physical records that the committee has sought.

Stone is now the third witness central to the committee’s probe that has said he will take the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination. Before Stone, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark also invoked the amendment. Eastman was responsible for drafting a six-point strategy for former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results. Clark was allegedly at the center of a plot to oust his superiors at the Justice Department and install himself, with Trump’s blessing, so that the men could promote Trump’s debunked theories of election fraud to state officials.

Stone was slated to appear for a closed-door deposition on December 17. He was first subpoenaed on November 22. Though invoking the Fifth Amendment, Stone’s attorney said in the letter to committee chairman Bennie Thompson, the decision does not reflect confirmation of the existence of records sought by legislators.

Reportedly calling the committee’s requests “overbroad, overreaching and too wide-ranging to be deemed anything other than a fishing expedition,” in the letter, Stone’s attorney Grant Smith underlined that it was his client’s right to decline comment.

A day ago, Thompson, while speaking to reporters at CNN, said of those targets who have deployed their Fifth Amendment right: “Every American can do it. That’s one of the rights the Constitution guarantees.”

Stone fervently supported the former president’s lies about the outcome of the 2020 election. A series of documents already in the committee’s possession, credible media reports, and Stone’s own statements in the run-up to the attack drew the select committee’s attention to the longtime Republican operative.

The committee alleges Stone was in Washington, D.C. on January 5 and January 6 on the promise that he would lead a march to the U.S. Capitol. A month before the siege, he participated in a pro-Trump rally in Washington where he urged people to “fight until the bitter end.” His calls for battle were delivered as he reportedly had a goon squad made up of Oath Keepers members insulating him. The group is a white supremacist-leaning extremist militia organization.

Lawmakers have suggested Stone paid for his private security detail by directing people to make donations at a ‘Stop the Steal’ website. According to Mother Jones, the link was quickly removed after the insurrection exploded at the Capitol.

NBC reported that the letter from Stone’s attorney was dated December 6 and, in addition to the now-routine gripes from Trump’s inner circle about congressional overreach, the missive also criticized Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the select committee. Schiff and Stone tangled when Trump was impeached the first time and through his attorney on December 6, Stone slammed Schiff as “relentlessly misrepresenting evidence” regarding him.

Rep. Schiff did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the water grows deeper for other probe targets like Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows was informed on Wednesday that the committee will now advance criminal contempt proceedings against him since he has failed to cooperate with the panel.

Meadows has waffled on cooperation since his first subpoena on September 23. He initially agreed to sit for deposition and turned over some 6,000 pages of documents to the committee. But once excerpts of his memoir started circulating, revealed by Meadows that Trump lied about his Covid-19 status ahead of a presidential debate with Joe Biden, he backtracked.

On Tuesday, through his attorney, Meadows informed the panel he would no longer cooperate, citing the investigatory body’s pursuit of phone records from over 100 people. Chairman Thompson rebuffed Meadows’ assertion.

“Despite your very broad claims of privilege, Mr. Meadows has also produced documents that you apparently agree are relevant and not protected by any privilege at all,” Thompson wrote on December 7 [emphasis in original].

The record Meadows has produced so far include a November 7 email discussing alternate slates of electors as a part of the “direct and collateral attack” after the election, an email from January 5 containing a 38-page PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” that was to be distributed on Capitol Hill, and a January 5 email where Meadows discussed having the National Guard on standby.

Meadows also provided the committee with access to a text message where he responded to a member of congress, “I love it,” when talking about potentially picking alternate electors in key states. Another text held by the committee depicts Meadows and a January 6 rally organizer texting about the need for Trump to issue a statement condemning the attack.

The select committee revealed in its letter that Meadows also provided the body with a privilege log where he restricted access to hundreds upon hundreds of emails and over 1,000 texts. Meadow maintains those items are protected by executive privilege.

Meadows’ decision to forgo compliance has proven to the committee that he “does not intend to participate in a deposition” despite lacking a “legitimate legal basis” for his refusal.

“There is no legitimate legal basis for Mr. Meadows to refuse to cooperate with the select committee and answer questions about the documents he produced, the personal devices and accounts he used, the events he wrote about in his newly released book and, among other things, his other public statements,” Thompson wrote. “The committee is left with no choice but to advance contempt proceedings and recommend that the body in which Mr. Meadows once served refer him for criminal prosecution.”