Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) on Tuesday warned former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that he will be referred for criminal contempt if he fails to show up for his deposition on Wednesday.
OT, now zooming out to more global matters. Does your brain have the bandwidth for all this? Mine is struggling. Time for some puppy videos.
These depositions usually are scheduled for 10:00AM. IIRC, on Bannonâs they waited until 10:05 to start the criminal referral process.
Also, I will remind folks that once a federal indictment is issued you canât put the toothpaste back in the tube. The trial will proceed regardless of who controls congress over the next few years. Meadowmuffins will probably be making some calls tonight. If the committee is smart, theyâll answer one call, once. Then set their voicemail greeting to âItâs 10:00AM. Do you know where your liberty is?â
If you really wanna start binging on Everclear, scribbling goodbyes, and looking for overhead beams strong enough to support your weight, contemplate what happens when the PRC finally invades Taiwan.
(Or, better still, donât.)
But that all changed on Tuesday morning, when Terwilliger told the committee in a letter that Meadowsâ feathers were apparently ruffled by the committeeâs treatment of Meadows âexecutive privilegeâ defense.
Am I not correct in remembering that the only person who can claim âexecutive privilegeâ or that something is protected by âexecutive privilegeâ is the sitting POTUS? And POTUS #46 is not claiming âexecutive privilegeâ.
Meadows âwalk like a man, not a muffinâ.
that the Select Committee has no intention of respecting boundaries concerning Executive Privilege
So Meadows is too lazy to say âI assert my 5th amendment right not to incriminate myselfâ 346 times?
That should be the rule for all unexcused failures to appear going forward frankly. Everyone has been warned and everyone knows what the game is so no reason to delay or compromise: the only way out is through.
Now itâs become obvious that this was just another delay tactic.
When are the good guys going to realize this, and will that be too late?
Theyâve stated today that if meadowmuffins doesnât show up to tomorrowâs deposition they will start the criminal referral process tomorrow. Third sentence of the article.
This jerk-off keeps trying to have it both ways. Time to put a stop to this nonsense. 
âAs a result of careful and deliberate consideration of these factors, we now must decline the opportunity to appear voluntarily for a deposition,â Terwilliger wrote."
PLUS
Someone thought they heard Terwilliger menacingly murmur he hoped Meadows wouldnât have to âgo down there and confront any inquisitors by slapping them around with his hard-earned-Associates-Degree-educated-opinion of his circumstancesâ.
I donât know why he doesnât just show up and plead the 5th on every question. Maybe heâs gambling on SCOTUS holding up his privileged communication objections? Pretty big gamble though. I donât think Meadows could handle a month or two in the slammer like Bannon.
The House and DOJ need to just indict this SOB for criminal contempt.
They first have to give him a deadline for him to miss, and the the indictment will be served.
In days of yore, Markie might have been drawn and quartered and broken on the wheel.
Iâm willing to settle for just broken on the wheel.
HmmmmâŚliterally just having a change of government here in Germany (measured in hours now), so weâll see. We knew how Merkel felt about Nord Stream and Russia, not sure about Scholz and his coalition partners.
In all my years of lawyering, I have always understood that privilege cannot be used to shield criminal activity. The one exception is the spousal privilege. Even the attorney-client privilege is subject to the crime-fraud exception. So, why would the executive privilege, a creation of the common law (i.e., the court), and not statute or an explicit constitutional provision (the courts say the privilege, in part, is rooted in the constitution, specifically, the separation of powers), be any different?
Hereâs a good law review article on the subject:
Trump is a norm destroyer. Prior to Trump, many interrelations with colleagues and associates in politics were governed by serious-but-not-statute rules called mores.
Trump stopped that and there is this:
In order to start to return with mores again, trust and common respect between people are required and no single person has so alienated his fellow Americans against each other more than Trump.
In all your years of lawyering, are you aware of any successful invocations of the crime fraud exception (against the one claiming privilege)? The problem with the crime fraud exception to executive privege, is that one usually has to pierce the privilege to show that a crime has occurred.
Iâm sure Mr Meadows is operating under the longstanding principle that all rich, white, American males have the same God-given rights and privileges afforded to any corporate executive.