The lead investigator for the House Jan. 6 Committee argued that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was more cooperative with Special Counsel Jack Smith, due to him wielding the “hammer” of the Department of Justice.
Tim Heaphy, the lead investigator for the committee, commented on Meadows’s role in former President Donald Trump’s latest indictment in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. He argued that Meadows wasn’t particularly cooperative with the panel, but was much more so with Smith, because the latter had greater legal tools at his disposal.
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Heaphy said that Meadows only “halfway cooperated” with the House investigation, handing over crucial text messages but refusing to appear to give a deposition, despite a subpoena.
“Our only option was civil litigation, which takes a while,” he said. “We did not have the time because we were on a time clock. We were expiring at the end of the Congress to take that claim to a judge. We thought it was meritless. But we did not have the enforcement ability.”
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“Jack Smith goes right upstairs to the chief judge who supervises the grand jury, and that Judge immediately makes a ruling,” Heaphy continued. “He hears from Meadows’s lawyer, he hears from the Special Counsel, and he makes a call and then immediately goes to the Court of Appeals on a motion to stay. So he has that hammer to sort of quickly push through privilege assertions and he has used that effectively to get access to information that we did not have.”
Meadows played a key role in the indictment, according to the charging documents, telling Trump personally that the verification process of election ballots was “exemplary.”
