Remember the old real estate adage, the three most important factors are location, location and location? With respect to the investigation by the January 6 Committee, the three key Republican responses are delay, delay, and delay. The obvious takeaway from that is that if nothing went wrong January 6, and nobody did anything untoward, let alone illegal, why not testify and get it over with? Won’t happen. This is like pulling teeth. The latest GOPer to blow off the Committee is Mark Meadows, who failed to show up for his deposition Friday. The Hill:
Meadows’s attorney George Terwilliger stressed that his client is loath to talk to the committee without a court settling the matter.
“Our correspondence over the last few weeks shows a sharp legal dispute with the committee. The issues concern whether Mr. Meadows can be compelled to testify and whether, even if he could, that he could be forced to answer questions that involve privileged communications. Legal disputes are appropriately resolved by courts. It would be irresponsible for Mr. Meadows to prematurely resolve that dispute by voluntarily waiving privileges that are at the heart of those legal issues,” Terwilliger said in a Friday morning statement.
“No matter how important the subject matter of the committee’s work, decades of litigation over Executive Privilege shows how critically important it is for a president to have access to advice and counsel without fear that political opponents in Congress will later be able to pull away the shield of confidentiality that protects candor in those communications.” […]
Courts could take months to resolve the matter. The committee scored an initial victory earlier this week when a federal judge ruled Trump could not seek to block release of his records, noting that “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”
But an appeals court granted a Trump motion to block their scheduled release today while the matter proceeds in court.
Meadows’s defiance brings to three the number of those subpoenaed who have defied the committee.
They’re all going to defy the Committee. That’s pretty much a no-brainer. We are looking at more than just the investigation of the insurrection here, we’re looking at a break down of the rule of law itself. And the Republicans involved are just fine with that. They don’t have a problem with it, whatsoever, with the exception of a few outliers like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
He ain’t the executive with privilege. He’s one of the former guy’s minions/enablers.