Meadows sues as Jan. 6 panel proceeds with contempt case

Thompson also described an email that referenced a 38-page PowerPoint presentation titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN" that Thompson said was intended to be shared on Capitol Hill. Thompson did not further elaborate on the email but said it was dated Jan. 5, 2021, the day before hundreds of Trump’s supporters violently breached the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Biden's victory.

A separate Nov. 6, 2020, text exchange between Meadows and an unidentified member of Congress, Thompson wrote, was “apparently about appointing alternate electors in certain states as part of a plan that the member acknowledged would be ‘highly controversial,' and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, ‘I love it.’"

Also included in the documents, according to Thompson: a Jan. 5, 2021, email about having the National Guard on standby the next day; an “early 2021 text message exchange” between Meadows and an organizer of the rally held the morning of Jan. 6, when Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell"; and “text messages about the need for the former president to issue a public statement that could have stopped the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol."

Terwilliger did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter or confirm the contents of the documents.

Meadows' decision to stop complying with the committee was a reversal after he had initially agreed to the deposition and after Terwilliger said the committee was open to allowing him to decline some questions based on Trump's executive privilege claims.

Terwilliger told the committee in a letter this week that a deposition had become “untenable” because the committee “has no intention of respecting boundaries” around questions that Trump claims are off-limits.

Trump has attempted to hinder much of the committee’s work, including in an ongoing court case, by arguing that Congress cannot obtain information about his private White House conversations.

Terwilliger also said he learned over the weekend that the committee had issued a subpoena to a third-party communications provider that he said would include “intensely personal” information about Meadows.

“As a result of careful and deliberate consideration of these factors, we now must decline the opportunity to appear voluntarily for a deposition,” Terwilliger wrote in the letter.

In his response, Thompson confirmed the subpoenas to a third party but said it “does not impact Mr. Meadows’s production of documents and text messages, which are the areas we seek to develop during his deposition.”

The committee in August issued a sweeping demand that telecommunications and social media companies preserve the personal communications of hundreds of people who may have been connected to the attack. But the panel did not ask the companies to turn over the records at that time.

As the investigation has progressed, the committee has “sought data that will help answer important questions” but does not include the content of the communications, according to a committee aide who was not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity. The metadata requested includes dates and times of the communications, which could include both emails and texts.