Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Burned ‘Dozens’ of Files After White House Meetings, Aide Said
© AP Photo / Evan Vucci
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Newly released documents from the House January 6 committee have revealed that Mark Meadows, former US President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, burned documents at least a dozen times in the weeks leading up to the Capitol insurrection.
The accusation comes from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide under Trump who has become a key witness for the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters.
According to Hutchinson, she saw Meadows “incinerate” documents in his office fireplace perhaps a dozen times after it was turned on in December 2020.
“I want to say once a week or twice - it’s - I can recall specific times that I did,” she told the committee in a May deposition. “Maybe a dozen, maybe just over a dozen, but this is over a period, December through mid-January too, which is when we started lighting the fireplace.”
“However, I don’t know if they were the first or original copies of anything,” Hutchinson said. “It’s entirely possible that he had put things in his fireplace that he also would have put into a burn bag that there were duplicates of or that there was an electronic copy of.”
7 October 2022, 00:02 GMT
She noted that the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to surrender its documents to the US National Archives and Records Administration when a sitting president leaves office, “only asks that you keep the original copy of a document.”
Several of those instances were reportedly after Meadows met with Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), a Trump supporter who was allegedly involved in efforts to replace then-Attorney General William Barr with Jeffrey Clark, an assistant attorney general who endorsed Trump’s claims of election fraud. Barr abruptly left office in December 2020 after rejecting Trump’s claims that fraud had led to Joe Biden’s electoral victory a month prior.
“I know maybe three or four times - between two and four times, he had Mr. Perry in his office right before” burning documents, Hutchinson told the committee, although she cautioned she didn’t know if there was a connection between the two.
According to information uncovered by the January 6 committee, Meadows was a key player in Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election results and stay in power. He acted as a liaison between the White House and Republican congressional leaders, right-wing politicians in state governments and courts around the country and activists and political groups who supported Trump’s power grab.
29 November 2022, 22:34 GMT
In December 2021, Meadows was held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena to testify before the January 6 committee, although the Department of Justice declined to prosecute him. He had previously supplied the committee with thousands of emails and text messages that provided key insights into White House events from November 2020 into January 2021.
The committee published its full report on its probe of the attack on the Capitol last week, having spent 18 months on the project. Despite Trump’s acquittal by the Senate in a February 2021 trial, the committee placed the blame on his shoulders for the riot, which saw thousands of Trump supporters storm and loot the US Capitol Building. During the violence, five people were killed and Congress was temporarily dispersed, although the attackers failed in their goal of seizing the Electoral College results or any senior US politicians.
The committee then voted unanimously to recommend Trump and lawyer John Eastman to the DOJ for prosecution, on charged including obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to make a false statement; and attempts to "incite," "assist" or "aid or comfort" an insurrection.
