WASHINGTON — Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has declared he will “honor” ex-president Donald Trump’s claim to executive privilege in response to a House select committee subpoena calling on him to discuss his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

His response confirms the Trump political organization’s strategy to stall and eventually kill the committee’s effort to discover who was behind the mob riot against the houses of Congress.

President Joe Biden has quickly declined to claim any such privilege. He has adhered to two court rulings, one of which held “former president Trump has given the court no legal reason to cast aside President Biden’s assessment,” or to “create a separation of powers conflict that the political branches have avoided.”

The Jan. 6 attack resulted in several deaths and obliged many legislators to cower under desks and behind locked doors as rioters roamed the halls hunting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and yelling “Hang Mike Pence” — a reference to the former vice president’s unwillingness to go along with Trump’s big lie about the election having been stolen. Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, dismissed Meadows’s claim on grounds that such privilege goes only to a sitting president and thereby neither Trump nor any of his former staff could invoke the protection.

Thompson wrote: “There is no legitimate legal basis for Mr. Meadows to refuse to cooperate with the Select Committee and answer questions about the documents he produced, the personal devices and accounts he used of the events he wrote about in his newly released book” on Trump.

According to The Washington Post, the new materials included Meadows’s involvement in plans to appoint state electors to replace those poised to certify the election of Biden with others favoring Trump, when Pence presided over the Electoral College count. But Pence flatly rejected such a plea from the defeated president, acknowledging he lacked the power to thwart the will of duly chosen election officials or to halt the process to permit a further drawn-out process.

Thompson also cited messages from Meadows citing “the need for the former president to issue a public statement that could have stopped the January 6th attack on the Capitol.” The chairman continued: “All of these documents raise issues about which the select committee would like to question Mr. Meadows.”

At the same time, Meadows also filed another suit against Speaker Pelosi and all members of the insurrection committee, asking the D.C. District Court to “invalidate and prohibit the enforcement of two overly broad and unduly burdensome subpoenas,” thus confirming the defense strategy of stalling the process to a slow walk.

All this clearly justifies the call of Meadows’s critics from the Democratic side of the aisle for no further delay, and for renegade Republican committee member Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming to demand that the subpoenas be enforced with dispatch.

The action should also induce the Justice Department to follow through now on its charges of contempt of Congress against former Trump political strategist Steve Bannon, in support of another House resolution of criminal contempt. Thumbing his nose at the Biden administration in such an obvious treasonable act cries out for no further delay.

The long-running saga of Trump’s defiance of the Constitution and our small-d democratic process must be ended by a bipartisan Congress, as long as the Grand Old Party on its own fails to cleanse itself of its betrayal of its own stated high purposes.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.

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