UPDATE: This post was updated at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday with a statement from Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro about Mastriano’s termination of Tuesday’s deposition.
Pennsylvania’s Republican candidate for governor Doug Mastriano abruptly ended a scheduled deposition today with the House Select Committee investigating the circumstances surrounding the Jan. 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.
Next up? He plans to go to court with a direct challenge to the committee’s deposition authority.
“We want a federal judge to weigh in on whether this committee is required to follow the rules or not,” Mastriano’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, told PennLive. “It (the challenge) will be laser-focused on the conduct of depositions.”
Parlatore said that Mastriano’s scheduled on-line deposition ended in less than 15 minutes Tuesday morning after Parlatore declared that committee staffers conducting the session were not in compliance with U.S. House of Representatives rules governing depositions. Committee staffers, Parlatore said, started to ask Mastriano a question anyway.
Parlatore said he noted that they’d never sworn the witness in, and then they left the session.
The move was no surprise.
Parlatore had suggested Monday this may happen if the committee’s attorneys continued to refuse Mastriano’s request to make his own recording of the closed-door testimony, something Parlatore said Mastriano felt is necessary to avoid releases of edited excerpts that could be used to damage his candidacy against Democrat and sitting Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
That made this, Parlatore argues, a compelled deposition, but he said there are various tests established in House rules that give committees the authority to conduct compelled depositions which the House Select Committee doesn’t meet.
The primary problem, he said, is that key witness protection elements - from who conducts the questioning to the release of deposition testimony - rest with the minority party members. Those protections are missing in this committee, Parlatore contends, since House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s choices to serve on the panel were never accepted by Speaker Nancy J. Pelosi, which means the select committee has no “ranking minority member” designated by the House Republican Conference.
Connecting different sets of rules together, Parlatore said in an Aug. 5 letter to the committee, that means the committee has forfeited its specific powers to compel testimony.
Aside from the promised court challenge, Mastriano’s move also sets up the select committee for possible consideration of a contempt of Congress resolution. If the committee chooses to go that route - which it has at least three prior times - any contempt report it passes would then be considered by the full House. If it passes there, a criminal referral is sent to the U.S, Attorney for the District of Columbia.
A committee spokesman declined comment Tuesday, noting that the committee doesn’t comment on witness interviews or depositions.
Ultimately, the U.S. Justice Department decides whether to bring criminal charges, which carry penalties upon conviction of one month to one year in jail.
Parlatore said he’s not particularly worried about a contempt referral for Mastriano, first because of his past attempts to cooperate with the committee, and secondly, because of the pending legal argument.
Mastriano, a state senator from Franklin County, was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 select committee in February based on his post-election meetings with Trump at the White House, and his personal participation in the events of Jan. 6, 2021 that culminated in the attack on the Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump supporters as the final certification of Electoral College votes was in progress.
The committee cited a Nov. 28, 2020, tweet by Mastriano that said he was pushing to have the Pennsylvania Legislature undo the Wolf Administration’s certification of the presidential vote, and directly assume the appointment of electors. The resolution did not gather any cosponsors and died in committee without action on Nov. 30.
Mastriano has acknowledged participating in the march to the Capitol after Trump’s speech on Jan. 6th 2021 - his Senate campaign account was tapped to charter buses to help ferry local supporters to the rally, as well - but he has said he never entered the building, and never participated in any criminal acts.
Parlatore has represented at least two other witnesses interviewed by the Jan. 6th Committee, including Bernard Kerik, the former New York City Police Commissioner and longtime associate of Trump’s attorney, Rudolph Giuliani. His representation of Mastriano, according to state campaign finance reports, is being covered at least in part by Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign.
Shapiro’s campaign, of course, has already referenced the fact Mastriano’s ties to Trump’s efforts early and often in the general election campaign, as Exhibit A in its case that Mastriano is unfit for office.
In a statement released by his campaign today, Shapiro said:
“Doug Mastriano was called to interview with the committee in the first place because he led the effort to throw out Pennsylvanians’ votes and overturn the 2020 election, and was at the Capitol on January 6th, defying police orders and crossing barricades with the violent mob.
”Mastriano continues to show his complete disdain for our democracy, refusing to answer any questions about his efforts to overturn the last election – while he threatens “to decertify voting machines in the state” if he doesn’t like who wins in 2024. This is further proof that he is unfit to be Governor of Pennsylvania.”