essentially flipped from stiff-arming the committee to engaging and to trying to be helpful, and presumably the reason for that is that he doesn t want to get the bannon treatment, he doesn t want to get charged, he s trying to somehow meet the committee in the middle and be helpful, and there s no question that that has the potential to be a substantial breakthrough for investigators. all right. betsy woodruff swan. thank you very much. that was illuminating. i want to bring in now barbara mcquade, professor at the university of michigan law school. also served as u.s. attorney for the eastern district of michigan. and on this question of privilege, barbara, i want to read to you the headline that politico wrote. now, we should say, questions during oral arguments don t always correlate to the opinions. but the write-up today, appeals court judges poised to reject trump s efforts to withhold jan 6 documents. if you listen to the audio it sure sounded like it. how do you sound to y
that mr. clark had conversations with others in the federal government including members of congress regarding efforts to delegitimize, disrupt or overturn the election results in the weeks leading up to january 6th. now, clark stonewalled that subpoena request. he showed up. he didn t just blow them off like bannon. he showed up but he refused to answer substantive questions. and that s why the select committee is now moving forward to recommend finding him in contempt of congress. it is worth noting that unlike former trump adviser steve bannon, who was indicted on counts of contempt of congress earlier this month, clark actually has a more plausible claim to legitimate executive privilege. i mean, he at least was on the payroll, actually worked for then president donald trump at the time in question and was advising him in some official capacity. although as the committee point out in its report today, the law is clear executive privilege does not extend to discussions relating to
tapes, and they made the call. so that s wilkins sort of laying out that argument. what did you make of that proposal by trump s lawyers, which seemed to me a bizarre one? yeah, it really struck me as just a flat out effort to stall. because they know that if the court has to methodically go through each and every one of these documents it s going to take a very long time. you know, sometimes that happens when we have attorney-client privilege where there is some question as to whether documents are privileged. we saw that when we had the search warrant executed at michael cohen s law office, where a retired judge was appointed to be a special master and to review those documents. but this is a very different matter. this is about separation of powers. we have got, as you said, the legislative branch and executive branch agreeing. we have a former president trying to intervene and tell the executive branch what to do. so that i think is why this document by document review is a non
the way up to sitting for a sworn deposition. our understanding right now is that meadows is at least cooperating with the committee on the smaller end of that cooperation spectrum. we know he s turned over tons and tons of e-mails and other written communications. we don t know the content of those e-mails and communications. we also are hearing different things from meadows than what we re hearing from the committee itself about the actual verbal interview, question and answer session that meadows is going to do with the committee. be members of the select committee have said he s going to come in next week. they ve used the term deposition. that means it would be under oath. it means if meadows lied he would be liable for prosecution by the justice department. but meadows and his lawyer have signaled that they don t actually want to do a sworn deposition. so there s a gap there between the verbiage that they re using. but what we do know for sure is that in recent days meadows has
pushing his big lie of election fraud, just hours before the insurrection itself where he reportedly stressed to his allies how he wanted to delay the certification of biden s victory in congress. we should note that reporting is based on anonymous sources and it has not been confirmed by nbc news. i don t know whether that s going to bear out or not. but the question of whether it is true or what extent trump was talking with those folks is exactly the purpose of this undertaking. it s why congressional oversight into the attempted coup is so important. and it s why the information has to be brought to light so it can be confirmed and brought to the public s attention. because the threat s not going away. trump is likely to run for president again in 2024. and the american public deserves to know exactly how close he came to pulling it off. to dismantling american democracy in his last days in power. betsy woodruff swann is the national correspondent at politico where she s been cover