Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), Chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, attends a news conference with 10 other Republican members of Congress announcing their introduction of a U.S. House resolution alleging misconduct in the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation and requesting the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate the law enforcement probes into the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., May 22, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Special Counsel Jack Smith scored a big win as a federal judge rejected Trump’s claim of executive privilege and ordered Mark Meadows and others to testify about the plot to overturn the 2020 election.
A federal judge has rejected former President Donald Trump’s claims of executive privilege and has ordered Mark Meadows and other former top aides to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
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In a sealed order last week, Judge Beryl Howell rejected Trump’s claim of executive privilege for Meadows and a number of others, including Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, his former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, former top aide Stephen Miller, and former deputy chief of staff and social media director Dan Scavino, according to sources familiar with the matter.
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There are many reasons why Trump’s executive privilege claim was bound to be rejected. The biggest one is that criminal plots by a president and his/her aides and administrative officials are not one of the five areas of executive privilege that have been established by case law and the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel.
Courts have consistently ruled that Trump’s plot to overturn the election was not part of his presidential duties or Congress’s legislative scope. Trump acted as a candidate when he tried to overturn the election, so presidential executive privilege would not apply to a criminal plot to subvert democracy.
Trump is expected to appeal the ruling, given that he has yet to win a single executive privilege claim related to the 2020 plot, the odds are that Meadows and others in the former president’s inner circle will be forced to testify.
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