WASHINGTON – Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff under former President Donald Trump, has complied with a Justice Department subpoena and turned over records as part of a federal investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a person familiar the matter said Thursday.
The records produced by Meadows are the same ones he earlier provided to a House committee conducting a similar investigation, according to the person, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing Justice Department probe.
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The subpoena to Meadows, first reported by CNN, makes clear that Justice Department officials are seeking information from the most senior of Trump's White House advisers as they examine wide-ranging efforts to overturn the results of the election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
The department, whose work at times has mirrored or overlapped with that of the committee, this month served a broad wave of grand jury subpoenas and search warrants to Trump allies.
Meadows has been a pivotal figure in the House investigation, his name invoked repeatedly in testimony by other Trump advisers, including by his own top aide. He had provided the committee with thousands of text messages, including communications with outside Trump allies and advisers.
In a filing in April in a federal lawsuit over his House subpoena, a lawyer for Meadows accused the committee of trying to vilify him publicly, noting that all of the texts it had been provided had been disclosed to the news media. The committee declined at the time to respond to the accusation.
Meadows did not provide to the committee records he believed were subject to claims of executive privilege and those documents were also not produced to the Justice Department.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of Jan. 6 at https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege