'Destroying his legacy': Fox News hosts urged White House to act during Jan. 6 riot, committee reveals
As a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows received text messages from multiple Fox News hosts and the president’s son, urging him to convince Trump to issue a statement condemning the violence, according to the House select committee investigating the attack.
The text messages are among thousands of documents Meadows has turned over to the committee, according to Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who revealed the messages Monday evening as the panel gathered to pass a resolution to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress.
Cheney said Meadows, who served as Trump’s chief of staff during his final months in office, turned over thousands of emails and text messages as part of a previous agreement to cooperate with the panel, but he has refused to testify, despite being ordered to do so by a subpoena. Meadows’s attorney said the former top White House aide believes his testimony is protected by executive privilege.
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Cheney said as she read out loud a text message from Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
“Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” wrote Brian Kilmeade of “Fox & Friends.”
Sean Hannity, another Fox News star, asked if Trump could “make a statement” asking “people to leave the Capitol.
Cheney also described multiple texts Meadows received from Donald Trump Jr. similarly urging the president to take action. “He’s got to condemn this s*** ASAP,” Trump’s eldest son wrote to Meadows, who replied: “I'm pushing it hard. I agree.”
Cheney, a prominent GOP critic of Trump’s actions that day, concluded: “These text messages leave no doubt the White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol.”
Some of those messages stand in contrast with how some Republican lawmakers, as well as Fox News stars like Tucker Carlson, have portrayed the violent attack on the Capitol. Two Fox News contributors recently quit over a special that downplayed the assault.
The revelations came as the House panel voted Monday to make Meadows the third Trump ally it referred for possible criminal penalties for refusing to cooperate with its investigation.
The specific text messages revealed by Cheney ahead of Monday’s vote are the latest details to emerge about Meadows’s communications leading up to and during the deadly riot by Trump supporters who sought to overturn the results of last year’s presidential election.
In a report issued on Sunday night ahead of the contempt vote, the committee described several specific messages about which it had planned to question Meadows about last week, when he failed to show up for a scheduled deposition.
Among the documents described in the contempt report is a Jan. 5 email in which Meadows indicated that the National Guard would be present at the Capitol the following day to ‘‘protect pro-Trump people.”
It’s not clear who was the recipient of this message from Meadows, or what it was based on, but it comes amid renewed scrutiny of who is to blame for the National Guard’s delayed response to requests for help from the Capitol Police during the riots. One of the main questions for congressional investigators is whether Trump played any role in that delay.
The comment matches up with congressional testimony given by former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller in May, in which he described a conversation with Trump on Jan. 3 in which the president told him to "do whatever was necessary to protect the demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights."
Other messages cited in the contempt report include text messages between Meadows and individuals including members of Congress, on Jan. 6 before, during and after pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the Capitol. The report also referenced text messages Meadows sent to and received from an organizer of the rally where Trump spoke near the White House before the attack.
In addition to correspondence pertaining specifically to Jan. 6, the select committee also described several emails and text messages produced by Meadows that could shed new light on Trump’s attempt to undermine the 2020 election, including messages regarding encouraging Republican legislators in certain key states to send alternate slates of electors to Congress. Some of the messages highlighted in the report appear to reflect direct communication between Meadows and the former president. One such example is a November 2020 text exchange with a member of Congress about contacting state legislators in which Meadows relayed that ‘‘POTUS wants to chat with them.” Another is an email from Dec. 23 regarding the Trump campaign’s effort to challenge election results, in which Meadows wrote, ‘‘Rudy was put in charge. That was the President’s decision.’’
The panel also cited text messages from December 2020 about the effort to install Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general, as well as texts regarding Trump’s infamous Jan. 2 call in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in that state.
The committee’s interest in many of the records produced by Meadows began to surface last week. One day before Meadows had been scheduled to sit for an initial deposition, his attorney notified the panel that the former Trump aide would no longer be cooperating, citing the panel’s apparent interest in information that, he argued, is covered by the former president’s claims of executive privilege.
In a letter to Meadows’s lawyer, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., disputed this argument, explaining that the committee intended to question Meadows about a number of specific records he’d already turned over without a claim of privilege. Among the records Thompson said the committee sought to ask Meadows about included a Jan. 5 email about having the National Guard on standby, and another email regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” that was to be provided “on the hill.”
More details have also since emerged about that PowerPoint briefing.
According to the New York Times, the PowerPoint cited by Thompson recommended that Trump “declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the election results,” claiming that China and Venezuela had interfered in the vote. It also included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” when Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s win on Jan. 6. It had been circulated on Capitol Hill before the Jan. 6 riot by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and proponent of misinformation about fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Waldron told the Times that he did not personally email the PowerPoint to Meadows, but that it was possible Meadows received it from someone else on Waldron’s team.
In a separate interview with the Washington Post, however, Waldron said he visited the White House multiple times after the election and spoke with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times.”
According to the Post, Waldron was a cybersecurity consultant who worked with Trump’s outside lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, to challenge the election results in several key states. He described one particular meeting he and others had with Meadows around Christmas last year in which, he said, Trump’s chief of staff asked what he needed to determine whether the 2020 election had been hacked. Waldron told the Post that his team put together a list for Meadows of IP addresses, servers and other information that he believed should be investigated “using the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus.”
Waldron’s account of his interactions with the White House in the days and weeks after the election, along with details that have emerged about the PowerPoint itself, raise new questions about Meadows’s contacts with unsubstantiated theories about voter fraud that were circulating among Trump’s advisers during that time. George Terwilliger, Meadows’s lawyer, told the Times late last week that the PowerPoint was turned over to the Jan. 6 committee because Meadows had simply received it via email and did nothing with it.
“We produced the document because it wasn’t privileged,” Terwilliger said.
Last week, Meadows filed a lawsuit against the Jan. 6 select committee, arguing that the panel’s “overly broad and unduly burdensome subpoenas” violate his right to free speech as well as his former boss’s powers of executive privilege. President Biden, as the current office holder, has so far waived executive privilege for documents relevant to the select committee’s investigation. Last week, a federal appeals court ruled against Trump’s effort to override Biden’s authority and block the Jan. 6 panel from accessing his White House records.
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