Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows announced he’s filing suit against the Speaker of the House and the nine other members of the partisan House January 6th Committee. Meadows informed the committee that he would not cooperate in their investigation, and then came the lawsuit.
George Terwilliger, Meadows’ attorney said,
The select Committee acts absent any valid legislative power and threatens to violate longstanding principles of executive privilege and immunity that are of constitutional origin and dimension.
Mr. Meadows, a witness, has been put in the untenable position of choosing between conflicting privilege claims that are of constitutional origin and dimension and having to either risk enforcement of the subpoena issued to him, not merely by the House of Representatives, but through actions by the Executive and Judicial Branches, or, alternatively, unilaterally abandoning the former president’s claims of privileges and immunities.
Along with Meadows, former White House national security advisor General Michael Flynn filed a restraining order from Nancy Pelosi’s House Select Committee with a select group of representatives investigating the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Flynn argues that the information and testimony were presented without the subpoena’s legal authority.
The document stated that Michael Flynn had no part in speaking at, organizing, or participating in the rallies, protests, or incursions in the nation’s capital.
Every member of the Select Committee, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was named in the complaint.
“General Flynn did not organize, speak at, or actively participate in any rallies or protests in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, and he of course did not participate in the attack on the Capitol that day.”
The complaint continued, “Ex. A Declaration of Michael Flynn (“Flynn Decl.”) 5. Nevertheless, the Select committee—assuming the role of shadow prosecutor for the January 6 attack and working in parallel with the actual prosecutors at the Department of Justice—has diverted its attention from its important wort to target General Flynn for a quasi-prosecution that is either aimless or transparently partisan.”
“Despite nor participating in any public events in Washington on January 6, Defendants have issued General Flynn a sweeping subpoena seeking twenty different categories of documents and a demand that General Flynn appears for a deposition in Washington, D.C.”
“The subpoena demands records of General Flynn’s communications about the 2020 election and seeks to identify the basis for his beliefs and the persons with whom he associated, in addition to contacts with government officials. It thus constitutes a frontal assault on his 1st Amendment rights to freedom of speech, association, and petition,” it claimed.