Adam Schiff Rips Mark Meadows’ ‘Absurd Position’ After Text Message Reveal: If He Can Keep Doing Fox News Interviews, Why Not Testify?

Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) criticized Mark Meadows for refusing to cooperate with the House select committee on January 6th, even with all of his recent, public comments and disclosures.

Schiff spoke to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday after the committee moved to charge the former Donald Trump chief of staff with contempt of Congress over his non-compliance. The interview gravitated around the communications and documents that Meadows did provide to the committee, including the text messages he got from the former president’s allies begging for his intervention in the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

As Schiff argued that the texts “exposed the hypocrisy” of Trumpworld’s attempts to downplay the riot, he said it also “helps make the case so clear that Meadows should be held in criminal contempt for refusing to testify.”

If he is going to provide these messages — which he and his counsel acknowledged, there is nothing privileged about — how can he now claim he can’t come in and testify about those messages? How can he go on Fox News and do interviews and say ‘I can be doing these public interviews, but I can’t talk to Congress about it?’ It’s an absurd position to take and assume he is doing it because he is instructed to so by the former president; but that is, I think, a clear case of federal contempt of Congress.

Schiff was likely referring to the fact that Meadows gave an interview to Sean Hannity on Monday night, just after it was revealed that the Fox News host implored to Meadows that the president tell his supporters to leave the Capitol on January 6th. Neither of them acknowledged the revelation as Meadows railed against the contempt charge.

Before Meadows was in the news over his January 6th text messages, he was drawing a great deal of media focus for revealing in his new memoir that Trump tested positive for Covid earlier than was publicly known. Trump publicly railed at the “fake news” media coverage surrounding the story, but was reportedly angered by Meadows’ book.

Watch above, via MSNBC.