outliers soberly and appropriately. that s why we re here this evening. the select committee s report referring mr. meadows for criminal contempt charges is clear and compelling. as white house chief of staff, mr. meadows played a role and witness to key events leading up to and including the january 6 th assault on the united states capitol. don t let lawsuits or of eds about executive privilege by mr. meadows or his representatives confuse you. it comes down to this, mr. meadows started by doing the right thing. cooperating. he handed over records he didn t try to shield behind an excuse but in an investigation like ours, that s the first step. when the records raise questions, you have to come in and answer the questions and
took place for january 6th. to accommodate mr. meadow s request is clear he has no intention of compiling with the subpoena even when his testimony could have no confection to the claim and he s refusing and turned over to the committee and assertions of executive decisions. he s refusing to testify about statements in his book published last week and the media about the events of january 6th. this is again another category of statements where any conceivable executive privilege claim that could be invoked by president biden were asserted by former president trump has already been deliberately waived
without objection that letter will be made part of the record. a small group of people got a lot of attention because of their defiance but a lot of others took a different path and provided important information about january 6th and the context in which the riot occurred. anyone who wants to cooperate with our investigation can do so. nearly everyone has. our democracy was inches from ruin. our system of government was stretched to the breaking point. members and staff were terrorized. officers fought hand to hand for hours. people lost their lives. the select committee recently toured the capitol and saw firsthand what our brave capitol police had to endure and heard them say had it not been for the metropolitan police timely
including some of our own colleagues on the day of the violent attack and we ve learned that many of those interactions took place on a personal cell phone device so we need to ask mark meadows about that. mr. meadows himself has acknowledged that he has responsive and non-privileged documents and communications. he sent some of them to us. he filed others in court. it certainly appears that mr. meadows played a key role in events that cull resulted on the attack of our democracy. he must physical low the lay and cooperate with the lawful requests of this committee or face the consequences and that s why as much as we might personally like mr. meadows, we have to take this action today because no one is above the law. thank you, mr. chairman.
i want to pick up where mr. kinzinger left off. 9,000 pages of records is which meadows turned over and meadows himself asserted no claim of privilege. none. these include thousands of text messages spanning the months before election day between election day and the end of the former president s term in office. of these documents, i m particularly struck by messages that come from lawmakers who were sending them to mr. meadows on january 6th. a time period he says he won t discuss with the committee. i want to display a few of the messages he received from people in congress. the committee is not naming these lawmakers at this time as our investigation is on going. if we could queue the first graphic. this one reads on january 6th, 2021, vice president mike pence, as president of the senate,