Former White House Chief of Staff Meadows cooperating with House Jan. 6 committee

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff who previously refused to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, has produced documents and will appear before the panel for a deposition, the chair of the investigative body said Tuesday.

"Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the Select Committee through his attorney. He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition," announced Bennie Thompson, Democrat from Mississippi who chairs the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

"The Select Committee expects all witnesses, including Mr. Meadows, to provide all information requested and that the Select Committee is lawfully entitled to receive," Thompson said in a statement. "The committee will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition."

Meadows was subpoenaed by the panel on Sept. 23 for his communication with former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, as well as his interaction with the organizers of a rally which the former president addressed shortly before a mob of Trump's supporters besieged the Capitol Building in an attempt to stop Congress from formalizing the ex-president's loss in the 2020 presidential election.

Meadows missed the Nov. 12 deadline set by the Jan. 6 panel to answer questions, with his attorney, George Terwilliger, maintaining that his client's cooperation with the investigation was contingent upon how the dispute over his executive privilege was resolved in court.

In response to his defying the subpoena, Thompson and Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chairwoman of the panel, warned in a joint statement that Meadows could face contempt of Congress referral to the Justice Department, the same way the panel treated another uncooperative investigatee, Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist.

Terwilliger on Tuesday told CNN, which first reported the agreement between Meadows and the Jan. 6 committee, that his client have reached an understanding with the panel on how to exchange information, suggesting, however, that the agreement could fall apart if the two sides couldn't find common ground on what is privileged information.

"As we have from the beginning, we continue to work with the Select Committee and its staff to see if we can reach an accommodation that does not require Mr. Meadows to waive Executive Privilege or to forfeit the long-standing position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress," Terwilliger said. "We appreciate the Select Committee's openness to receiving voluntary responses on non-privileged topics."

News of Meadows' willingness to cooperate with the House investigators came on the same day as Trump's lawyers argued in front of a federal appeals court in Washington that the former president should be able to assert executive privilege to block certain records from being accessed by the committee.