Like a weed, this little story grew fast.
We'll start at the NYTimes. In the piece that's ostensibly about how Trump was said to have reacted, on January 6, "approvingly" about the chants to "Hang Mike Pence" - even going so far, reportedly, that perhaps Pence should be hanged, there's this add-on paragraph:
The committee has also gathered testimony that Mr. Meadows used the fireplace in his office to burn documents, according to two people briefed on the panel’s questions. The committee has asked witnesses about how Mr. Meadows handled documents and records after the election. Mr. Meadows’s lawyer did not respond to a question about the testimony regarding the fireplace.
Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows burned documents? Is that even legal? Or safe?
Digging a little deeper into that, we find this piece at Politico:
Then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned papers in his office after meeting with a House Republican who was working to challenge the 2020 election, according to testimony the Jan. 6 select committee has heard from one of his former aides.
Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked under Meadows when he was former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, told the panel investigating the Capitol attack that she saw Meadows incinerate documents after a meeting in his office with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). A person familiar with the testimony described it on condition of anonymity. [Emphasis added.]
There's always a Pennsylvania connection, isn't there? Sometimes it's interesting but this time it's seditiously serious, apparently.
Politico continues:
The Meadows-Perry meeting came in the weeks after Election Day 2020, as Trump and his allies searched for ways to reverse the election results.
It’s unclear whether Hutchinson told the committee which specific papers were burnt, and if federal records laws required the materials’ preservation. Meadows’ destruction of papers is a key focus for the select committee, and the person familiar with the testimony said investigators pressed Hutchinson for details about the issue for more than 90 minutes during a recent deposition.
What do we already know about Rep Scott Perry?
We'll let's start from that DOJ call in which Perry is mentioned specifically by Trump to the DOJ.
Later in the phone call, Trump touts the virtues of Jeffrey Clark as new head of the DOJ. Trump says, according to the notes:
People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in.
I quoted The NYTimes as context for who Clark is:
The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.
The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.
And:
As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.And that Pennsylvania politician would be: Rep. Scott Perry.
Again, from The NYTimes:
It was Mr. Perry, a member of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, who first made Mr. Trump aware that a relatively obscure Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen, according to former administration officials who spoke with Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Perry introduced the president to Mr. Clark, whose openness to conspiracy theories about election fraud presented Mr. Trump with a welcome change from the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who stood by the results of the election and had repeatedly resisted the president’s efforts to undo them.
That same Scott Perry who met with Mark Meadows and after which meadows burned some documents in his private fireplace.
This is also the same Scott Perry who just this week did this:
York County Congressman Scott Perry continued to stonewall the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol Thursday.
Perry had been requested to give a deposition with committee staff, but his only answers this week came in the form of a five-page letter from a Washington D.C. attorney reiterating Perry’s belief that the committee’s activities are out of compliance with House rules, and that on that basis he is refusing the subpoena as null and void.
Too bad this already happened:
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., rejected an effort by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to block a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6 assault on the Capitol, ruling late Sunday that the panel can demand records from the party's email fundraising vendor.
The decision from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by former President Donald Trump, is a major victory for the House panel, as he roundly rebuffed the RNC's claims that the committee lacks the proper authorization to exercise investigative power and that its subpoena to Salesforce, the third-party vendor, failed to advance a valid legislative purpose.
Nothing to see here, citizens. Move on.
An administration that burns documents after a meeting with an important part of their attempted coup has absolutely positively as-God-is-my-witness nothing to hide.
