Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows burned documents in his office fireplace more than once leading up to the transition of presidential power, according to recently released transcripts from the House Select Committee.
The transcripts, released Tuesday, reveal new testimony from then-White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who incriminates several key members of former President Donald Trump‘s administration and sheds light on the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Hutchinson, who became a star witness in the panel’s public hearings, told the committee on May 17 that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace in December 2020.
“The Presidential Records Act only asks that you keep the original copy of a document. So, yes,” Hutchinson said when asked if she saw Meadows use the fireplace to burn documents.
“However, I don’t know if they were the first or original copies of anything,” she continued. “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.”
Politico and The New York Times previously reported on Hutchinson’s testimony. She also testified that there “were certain things that had potentially been left off” the Oval Office diary.
A former top Meadows aide, Hutchinson said she recalled her superior having a meeting at the end of November or early December 2020 in which he told outer Oval Office staffers: “Let’s keep some meetings close hold. We will talk about what that means, but for now we will keep things real tight and private so things don’t start to leak out.”
Additionally, Hutchinson told the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace around a dozen times – about once or twice a week – between December 2020 and mid-January 2021.
Hutchinson suggested that at least two of the occasions took place after Meadows met with GOP Rep. Scott Perry about election issues.
“I know maybe three or four times — between two and four times, he had Mr. Perry in his office right before,” Hutchinson told the committee, although she cautioned that she did not know what documents were burned.
The House committee previously implicated Perry as being “directly involved” in efforts to install a Trump sympathizer into the attorney general position to use the power of the Justice Department to legitimize Trump’s unfounded claims of mass electoral fraud.
Burning documents in and of itself is not illegal but do raise concerns when it occurs at regular intervals leading up to an attack on the U.S. government. The House committee has yet to refer criminal charges for Meadows, but reports indicate the group is considering the move.
