meadows2 bak

8 22

no lnx

trump coup, but turned over docs at 1st?

meadows520

freedom caucus --> mick mulvaney?

like ginni TP roots ~ BO racism // wht supr?

6? house reps subpoena jan 6 5 22

cass 12 22 said he burned docs more doz times after mtg w perry

j6 ch 2

...2.2 The Plan Emerges

More than a month before the Presidential election, the media reported that the Trump Campaign was already developing a fallback plan that would focus on overturning certain election results at the State level. An article published on September 23, 2020, in The Atlantic explained, “[a]ccording to sources in the Republican Party at the State and national levels, the Trump Campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground States where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” 15 Ominously, the same reporting predicted, almost exactly, what would later come to pass: “With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask State legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly.” 16

Numerous senior Trump Campaign advisors—including Campaign Manager William Stepien, Deputy Campaign Manager and Senior Counsel Justin Clark, and President Trump’s lead attorney Rudolph Giuliani—all told the Select Committee that there was, indeed, a State-focused “strategy” or “track” to challenge the outcome of the election, which included pressing State legislators to challenge results in key States and to appoint new electoral college electors.17

“You know, in the days after election day, later in that first week, bleeding into the second, as our numbers and data looked bleaker, internally we knew that,” Stepien told the Select Committee.18 “As the AP [Associated Press] called the race, I think some surrounding the President were looking for different avenues to pursue.” That’s when Stepien remembered the concept first coming up.19

Those around President Trump were pushing this idea, and pushing it hard.

Just two days after the election, President Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., forwarded to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows a suggestion that “State Assemblies can step in and vote to put forward the electoral slate[,] Republicans control Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, etc. we get Trump electors” and so “we either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress 6 January . . .” 20 Chief of Staff Meadows responded: “Working on this for pa, ga and nc already.” 21

Within one week after the election, Meadows had also sent or received several other similar messages:

“The state legislature can take over the electoral process”—Mark Meadows’s text to Georgia State Senator Marty Harbin.22

“Agreed”—Mark Meadows’s text to a different sender, who suggested that the Trump Administration “should get that out there” if they were “seriously considering the state legislature strategy.” 23

“I will tell him”—Mark Meadows’s text to a sender who suggested President Trump “[s]tart building momentum for the state legislatures.” 24

“I love it”—Mark Meadows’s text to Representative Andy Biggs, who relayed what he acknowledged as a “highly controversial” idea to have “Republican legislature’s (sic)” “appoint a look doors (sic) [electors].” 25

“. . . Why can’t the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors… I wonder if POTUS knows this . . .”—former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to Mark Meadows.26

Another White House official exploring such a plan less than a week after the election was Vince Haley, Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy, Strategy and Speechwriting. He suggested:

“. . . Imagine if every red state legislature slated zero electors. It would reveal that we are a red country. To do this we would have to jack this to the nth degree as a battle of tribes . . . .” 27

Haley pushed this strategy in several texts and emails, including to Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Personnel Johnny McEntee,28 an individual Haley characterized as “a very trusted lieutenant” for President Trump, “a direct conveyor to Boss with ideas,” and “[a]t his side almost all the time.” 29

For Haley, however, purported election fraud was a way to justify President Trump-friendly legislatures changing the outcome of the election, but there were other reasons for doing so, too. Election fraud was “only one rationale for slating Trump electors,” Haley told McEntee, and “[w]e should baldly assert” that State legislators “have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents” if that prevents socialism.30

Haley added, “[i]ndependent of the fraud—or really along with that argument—Harrisburg [Pennsylvania], Madison [Wisconsin], and Lansing [Michigan] do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris,” proposing that radio hosts “rally the grassroots to apply pressure to the weak kneed legislators in those states . . .” 31

McEntee replied “Yes!” and then: “Let’s find the contact info for all these people now.” 32 Hours later, Haley sent him names and—in most cases—cell phone numbers for top GOP legislators in six States, suggesting “. . . for POTUS to invite them down for a WH meeting . . .” 33 The President would later call several named in that message, including Rusty Bowers and Karen Fann in Arizona; Lee Chatfield and Mike Shirkey in Michigan; and Jake Corman in Pennsylvania.34

Others weighed in with the President about a State-focused plan, too. Some were already looking ahead to January 6th.

On November 8th, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich met President Trumpat the White House.35 Two days later, he sent a follow-up note to the President’s executive assistant titled “please give to POTUS[,] newt.” 36 It suggested that “[t]he only way Trump loses is rigged system” and added that President Trump could encourage “GOP legislatures elect not to send in electors,” forcing a House vote by State delegations on January 6th that Gingrich expected President Trump would win.37 Meadows replied: “Thanks Speaker.” 38

Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy had President Trump’s ear and reportedly spoke with him by phone at least four times before December.39 He forwarded a memo to other close advisors of the President recommending that the Trump team persuade one or more Republican-led chambers in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Minnesota to “pick a separate competitive State slate of Electors,” which the memo predicted might turn January 6th into “a cat-fight in Congress wherein VP Pence is Presiding.” 40

Attorney and conservative activist Cleta Mitchell was recruited by Mark Meadows immediately after the election to assist the Trump Campaign’s legal work.41 By November 5th, she emailed Dr. John Eastman of Chapman University,42 who would later play an outsized role pushing a theory about what Vice President Pence could or couldn’t do during the January 6th joint session of Congress that is detailed in Chapter 5 of this Report. In her email, Mitchell asked Eastman to write a memo justifying an idea that State legislators “reclaim” the power to pick electors and asked, rhetorically, “Am I crazy?” 43 Dr. Eastman wrote the memo, entitled “The Constitutional Authority of State Legislatures to Choose Electors,” and sent it along for sharing “widely.” 44

j6 ch 3

3.2 President Trump and the Campaign Adopt the Fake Elector Scheme

In early December, the highest levels of the Trump Campaign took note of Chesebro’s fake elector plan and began to operationalize it. On December 6th, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows forwarded a copy of Chesebro’s November 18, 2020, memo to Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Jason Miller writing, “Let’s have a discussion about this tomorrow.” 25 Miller replied that he just engaged with reporters on the subject, to which Meadows wrote: “If you are on it then never mind the meeting. We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.” 26 Miller clarified that he had only been “working the PR angle” and they should still meet, to which Meadows answered: “Got it.” 27 Later that week, Miller sent Meadows a spreadsheet that the Trump Campaign had compiled.28 It listed contact information for nearly all of the 79 GOP nominees to the electoral college on the November ballot for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.29 And on December 8th, Meadows received a text message from a former State legislator in Louisiana recommending that the proposed “Trump electors from AR [sic] MI GA PA WI NV all meet next Monday at their state capitols[,] [c]all themselves to order, elect officers, and cast their votes for the President. . . . Then they certify their votes and transmit that certificate to Washington.” 30 Meadows replied: “We are.” 31

https://www.alternet.org/unequal-justice-crime-and-punishment/

j6 comm good at narr]

...

Trump’s prosecution, at least at the federal level (he’s also under serious investigation in the states of Georgia and New York), now rests in the hands of the Justice Department and special counsel Jack Smith. The DOJ has received criminal referrals from the committee for four overlapping federal felonies committed by the former President:

Obstruction of an official proceeding, referring to the joint session of Congress convened on January 6, 2021, to confirm the election of Joe Biden, and the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify Biden’s victory;
Conspiracy to defraud the United States, referring to the former president’s multi-phase scheme to overturn the election;
Conspiracy to make a false statement, referring to the plan to submit false slates of electors to Congress and the National Archives; and
Inciting, assisting, or giving aid and comfort to an insurrection, referring to Trump’s incendiary speech immediately prior to the riot at the Capitol and his behavior during the riot.

The committee has also referred five of Trump’s former aides and associates to the Justice Department: John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Cheseboro and Jeffrey Clark. Trump, however, is the only member of the crew who has been referred for insurrection. The report singles out the ex-commander-in-chief on the insurrection charge, stating “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.”

Although the referrals are non-binding, Smith is already in the thick of investigating the insurrection and the plot to overturn the 2020 election, presenting evidence to at least two grand juries. The special counsel is also leading the investigation into Trump’s removal of top-secret government documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Convicting Trump will not be easy, especially on charges related to January 6. Each of the felonies referred to the Department of Justice requires proof of criminal intent. The government will have to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump knew he had lost the election and was acting with a “corrupt purpose” to obstruct the work of the joint session of Congress or, on the conspiracy referral, that he had an intent to defraud the nation with the submission of fake slates of electors.

It will be particularly challenging to prove that Trump incited or assisted the insurrection as Trump would likely mount a First Amendment defense. In its landmark 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court articulated a two-part test for punishing incendiary speech, holding that the First Amendment protects advocating the use of force or lawbreaking “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” (emphasis added).

Still, it’s easy to understand why the committee chose to cite Trump for insurrection. Trump knew that members of the crowd who had gathered to hear him talk were armed when he urged them to march to the Capitol to “fight like hell.” And amid the ensuing melee, he accused Pence of cowardice for not using his authority as Vice President to change the outcome of the election, seething in a Tweet, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…USA demands the truth!” Almost immediately after the Tweet was posted, the report notes, “the crowd around the Capitol surged, and more individuals joined the effort to confront police and break further into the building.”

Should Trump be tried and convicted of insurrection, he would face a prison sentence of up to ten years. He would also be barred from holding federal office for life.

So, what are the odds that Trump is finally held to account? Will Jack Smith prove to be Trump’s Porfiry Petrovich, the police investigator who brought Raskolnikov to justice, or will he turn out to be another Robert Mueller? We may have the answer in a matter of months.

he is being set up as fall guy?

https://www.alternet.org/voter-fraud-allegations-mark-meadows/

an 12 22

no lnx docs

'They will ruin my life': January 6th panel publishes additional testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson

Brandi Buchman and Daily KosStaff December 22, 2022

On Thursday, the Jan. 6 committee published two transcripts from its extensive interviews with Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who offered some of the most damning and explosive testimony to emerge from the 18-month probe of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

When she appeared publicly before the committee this summer, Hutchinson recounted how former President Donald Trump waved off warnings from his security detail about armed people in the crowd and urged that they be allowed to pass through metal detectors unmolested. She revealed learning about how Trump had lunged at the neck of his own Secret Service agent when his request to be ferried to the Capitol after the speech at the Ellipse was denied. She recalled the secrecy of her boss, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who allegedly burned paperwork after a meeting with Rep. Scott Perry, an outspoken advocate of Trump’s Big Lie.

Hutchinson’s testimony was an embarrassment of riches for the committee, filling in blank spots left open by less-than-cooperative Trump White House officials. But the transcripts released Thursday also illuminate the huge pressure she came under by testifying.

Hutchinson told the committee that she recalled telling her mother plainly: “I’m f*cked.”

Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 14 by Daily Kos

She was “f*cked,” she said, because she was effectively trapped.

She didn’t have the ability to shell out huge sums of cash to attorneys who could represent her when she went before the committee so was stuck with Stefan Passantino, a Trump White House lawyer whose fees were being paid by the former president’s Save America political action committee.

“I am completely indebted to these people,” she told her mother, the transcript shows. “And they will ruin my life Mom, if I do anything they don’t want me to do.”

[Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 15 by Daily Kos

She went to her estranged father, a Trump supporter, and asked him for help.

“I drove up to New Jersey, and I went to his house one night and begged him. It’s probably the one thing I regret in all of this, I wish I didn’t stoop to that level because it was a no— but I begged him to help me. I said I would pay him back, like, ‘name your interest rate,’” she said. “Like I just need help. And I remember saying to him, ‘you have no idea what they’re going to do to me if I have to get an attorney with Trump world,’ because he’s a very big Trump supporter, as is his own right, and I don’t—it’s not being critical, it’s just a fact. And he just didn’t get it. And I didn’t expect him to. But I just left there feeling defeated.”

Passantino, she told the committee, urged her to skimp on details when answering the investigator’s questions. He advised her to mislead the committee, she said, though she stressed that he did not instruct her to lie explicitly.

“I want to make this clear to you,” Hutchinson said. “Stefan never told me to lie. He specifically told me, ‘I don’t want you to perjure yourself but ‘I don’t recall’ isn’t perjury.”

She remembered him adding: “They don’t know what you can and can’t recall.”

He also suggested that she avoid meeting with the committee altogether when she had an appointment in June. She should consider drawing a contempt of Congress charge instead of testifying, he allegedly advised. It would be an unpleasant risk but a smaller one.

Hutchinson said Passantino told her, “running to the right is better for you.”

Passantino represented Hutchinson during three of her depositions before she hired a different attorney. The transcripts published on Thursday are dated Sept. 14 and Sept. 15, both dates when Passantino was not representing her. For these meetings, Hutchinson was represented by attorney Jody Hunt.

The committee has not yet published its final report in full or the complete record of its witness transcripts. Her earlier interviews under Passantino’s representation are expected to be included in that group.

When news first broke Wednesday about Passantino’s alleged advice to Hutchinson, he denied any wrongdoing in statements to reporters. Hutchinson, he said, was truthful and cooperative and he never instructed her to mislead the committee. His biography, meanwhile, has been pulled off the webpage of the law firm where he serves as partner.

During her initial interviews with the committee prior to September, Hutchinson said Trump aides would reach out to her. Jason Miller and Justin Clark extended potential job offers to her after she met with the select committee for the first time. The next time she was scheduled to testify, she said Ben Williamson, an aide to her former boss Mark Meadows called her on the eve of her appearance.

‘Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal,” Williamson said in a voicemail, Hutchinson recalled. “He knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.”

The “boss” was watching, Passantino would later hint to her.

why wd he comply? now?

https://www.alternet.org/meadows-2658957827/

an raw 12 22

The massive trove of text messages turned over by Mark Meadows to the House select committee show Republican elected officials were willing to violate the U.S. Constitution on "bizarre" and obviously phony evidence.

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker obtained the messages, which show the former White House chief of staff communicating with GOP officials at all levels of government about far-fetched conspiracy theories to justify overturning Donald Trump's election loss, and he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that their lack of sophistication was genuinely shocking.

"We're touching on something that is really a central thing here," Walker said. "I covered the Trump White House, and a big question is how many people are in on the joke and how many people are true believers. I first, you know, became familiar with the text log when i was working on my book, The Breach, which is about the Jan. 6 investigation. I co-wrote it with [former GOP lawmaker] Denver Riggleman. He knows a lot of these people, and he was shocked when he opened the text log. He led the [select committee's] phone team, it was like looking into the mouth of madness, and even with that introduction, I had a similar reaction."

"Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question," Walker continued. "You're talking about the wild Italian theory, people were taking it seriously. We see another instance where someone has a bizarre theory from a Romanian YouTube video that any of us would know not to tweet, based on stuff from 2005 that they somehow thought carried over to 2022.The information literacy of our members of Congress is called into question here, and that's part of why we thought it was more important to present more of the totality of the these texts you have seen anywhere before, and our text team made sure you can see them in a phone as they were received, because the typos, the wild links, all of this is really important."

"One last point, and this is something that shouldn't be lost in this discussion," he added. "We see the pressure, we see it in real time in these texts on people like Doug Ducey, that was on people like Brad Raffensperger, that was on people like the Arizona attorney general. Scott Perry, the same guy sending this Italian theory, is talking about lobbying to have Trump pressure the Italian government and Pennsylvania legislatures, and you know, I think one of the things we see is if these people had given into the pressure, all of this plotting just might have worked."

Watch belowor at the link

Former President Donald Trump and allies’ attempted coup and the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building was egged on by a number of Republicans. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, in December 2021, even recommended that Trump declare martial law in order to remain in the White House. And Flynn isn’t the only Trump supporter who had martial law in mind. According to the January 6 select committee, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina had the same idea.

In an article published by Rolling Stone on December 13, journalist Charisma Madarang reports that in late 2020 and early 2021, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was in touch with “34 members of Congress” via text messaging about Trump’s efforts to remain in power. Meadows, according to Madarang, was forced to “hand over 2319 text messages to the House select committee.” And in one of them, dated January 17, 2021, Norman recommended martial law.

January 17, 2021 was 11 days after the January 6 insurrection and only three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. In that text message to Meadows, Norman wrote, “Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”

Norman referred to martial law as “Marshall law” in his texts, and so did Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

“By January 17,” Madarang writes, “Greene told Meadows that several Republicans in Congress wanted Trump to declare martial law. She, too, appeared to think giving power to the military was named after a person named Marshall.”

Greene, in a text, told Meadows, “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law. I don’t know on those things. I just wanted you to tell him. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next. Please tell him to declassify as much as possible so we can go after Biden and anyone else!”

https://www.axios.com/2022/11/04/trump-georgia-lawsuit-cleta-mitchell

Late on the night of Jan. 6, 2021, as the world reeled from the shocking images of a pro-Trump mob ransacking the U.S. Capitol, conservative activist and Trump legal adviser Cleta Mitchell focused her attention elsewhere — on a crumbling voter fraud lawsuit in Georgia that could open the door to criminal exposure.

The big picture: Axios has obtained dozens of previously undisclosed emails from the time period covering Dec. 30, 2020, to Jan. 8, 2021. They shed new light on the internal machinations, pressures and disagreements at the heart of the unprecedented legal battle to keep a defeated president in power.

Why it matters: The central question of what then-President Trump and his lawyers knew when he signed sworn court documents attesting to false evidence of voter fraud in Georgia is now under scrutiny by the Justice Department, Atlanta prosecutors and the House Jan. 6 committee.

Two lawyers advising Trump were revealed over the past several weeks to have raised concerns about the president signing the verification, which carried the penalty of perjury. The new emails show a third, Bruce Marks, also expressed concern but was overruled.
The emails also reveal new granularity about the role of Mitchell, who since then has collaborated with the Republican Party to build an activist base of national "election monitors" — many of whom will be out in force in Tuesday's midterms.

Details: The legal discussions on the night of Jan. 6 about Georgia involved Trump himself and consideration of how to minimize exposure from the botched lawsuit and attestation.

"I spoke with POTUS and he said do the best we can," Mitchell wrote in an email timestamped 9:36 p.m. ET, to Trump campaign lawyers Justin Clark and Matthew Morgan.
The nation's capital was under citywide curfew. The House and Senate had just resumed debating objections to Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.
"We are trying to protect all concerned … just wanted to be sure you were in the loop … we will send the letter now," Mitchell wrote.

Context: A federal judge last month ordered John Eastman, a conservative attorney at the center of the scheme to overturn the election, to hand over a batch of emails to the Jan. 6 committee — finding they were "sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States."

Eastman himself presciently predicted in one email, first reported by Politico: "I have no doubt that an aggressive DA or US Atty someplace will go after both the President and his lawyers once all the dust settles on this."

Screenshot of email from Cleta Mitchell [foley addy] to Boris Epshteyn, obtained and redacted by Axios

Frustrations among the warring factions of outside lawyers clinging to Trump and the dream of a second term bubbled to the surface in the dying hours of 2020.

"I must tell you that Bruce & Co are utterly outrageous," Mitchell sounded off in one furious email to Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn on Dec. 31.
"They've done squat on this new case after saying it was all ready to go," she wrote, tearing into outside lawyer and decades-long voter fraud campaigner Bruce Marks. "This 'team' of Bruce's is worthless. BRUCE IS WORTHLESS. So sick of them."
Fifty-four days had passed since the election was called for Joe Biden. In six days, Congress was set to meet to certify Biden's Electoral College victory.
The army of fringe attorneys and conspiracy theorists that now had the president's ear was growing desperate.

Mitchell’s email to Epshteyn was provoked by a message from Marks the day before, Dec. 30, raising concerns about inconsistencies in the draft motion being prepared for the Georgia challenge — a federal lawsuit against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Marks had questioned the absence of a supporting memorandum of law in the draft. Mitchell fired back, blaming Marks instead: "This lawsuit is one you guys talked us into doing. So why don't you have a memorandum of law for us already?"
"Cleta, I am not going to get into emails with you like this. Please stop this," Marks responded.

Behind the scenes: Sources say Mitchell leveraged her connection to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to exert authority over the patchwork legal team.

Her bulldozing of Marks, who has made a career out of alleging massive absentee ballot fraud since 1993, may come to bear serious legal consequences for the president and his lawyers.
On Dec. 31, Marks wrote in an email to Eastman, Epshteyn and Kurt Hilbert — the Mitchell-aligned attorney leading the Georgia lawsuit — that he could find no legal requirement for Trump to personally sign a verification of the claims of voter fraud that would be incorporated as evidence.
"I don't know why we would place this burden on the President in a suit which will receive substantial attention and scrutiny," Marks argued.
After a heated back-and-forth with Hilbert, who explained that a verification was needed to seek "equitable relief," Marks eventually relented and said he would "leave this to others to resolve."
Hilbert and Marks did not respond to requests for comment.

Screenshot of email sent by Bruce Marks, obtained and redacted by Axios

Between the lines: Marks is the third lawyer revealed to have raised concerns about Trump signing the verification for evidence now known to be false.

Forty-five minutes after Marks' objection, Eastman warned that Trump had been made aware that some of the allegations and evidence of voter fraud used in a previous state-level Georgia election lawsuit were inaccurate, according to emails turned over to the Jan. 6 committee.
"For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate,"Eastman told Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro and outside lawyer Alex Kaufman, adding he was intentionally leaving out Marks and his team.

To protect Trump from responsibility, Hilbert suggested inserting a footnote in the lawsuit that stated the president was only relying on voter data provided to him.

A satisfied Mitchell pressed ahead and asked Eastman to get the verification approved bysenior White House lawyer Eric Herschmannwhile she searched for a notary to certify Trump's signature via Zoom.
But a separate batch of emails previously reported by Axios reveals that later that evening, Herschmann told Mitchell andMeadowshe was concerned about Trump signing a verification in support of facts that may fall apart under scrutiny.

The bottom line: None of those warnings stopped the verification from being signed and notarized just hours before midnight on New Year's Eve.

A federal judge later cited Eastman's email warning as evidence Trump "knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public."
Both Marks and Herschmann have been subpoenaed in the Justice Department's criminal investigation of the Trump-backed efforts to overturn the election. Federal agents seized Eastman's cellphone in June.

Flash forward: On the night of Jan. 6, as many Americans were still struggling to comprehend the frightening scenes at the nation's Capitol, Mitchell penned a frantic email to the Trump campaign lawyers, Justin Clark and Matthew Morgan.

"I've tried [to] reach both of you and have left voicemail messages for each of you," Mitchell wrote, as she claimed that Georgia officials were threatening to move for sanctions against the Trump legal team unless they withdrew their lawsuits.
"The potential exposure to the president and the other plaintiffs could be in the millions of dollars," she warned.

Email from Cleta Mitchell to Trump campaign lawyers, obtained and redacted by Axios

Mitchell had attached a draft letter to Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr, dated Jan. 6, agreeing to withdraw all of the Trump-backed legal team's Georgia state and federal lawsuits as part of a "settlement" allegedly proposed by Kemp and Raffensperger.

The letter, drafted by Hilbert, claimed the Georgia officials had agreed to share election data in exchange for the dismissal of the lawsuits. Mitchell painted the alleged settlement as "something of a win" because the Georgia officials "would provide certain records that we have been requesting."

"We think that we should immediately send this letter accepting the settlement offer because we are afraid the defendants will withdraw the settlement offer. Then we will be forced to dismiss the case without getting any records whatsoever," Mitchell wrote to Morgan and Clark.
She warned that it was "now 9:30pm" ET on Jan. 6, and that she and Hilbert would be forced to send the letter within 15 minutes if they didn't hear from the campaign. The historic, bloody events of that day had not deterred Mitchell and her team from their focus on false allegations of voter fraud in Georgia.

"Kurt and Cleta, [in] no way do I have authority to sign off on this decision or this letter," Morgan replied.

Citing a previous email in which Mitchell specifically asserted that she was "in charge of Georgia," Morgan urged her to get sign-off from Trump or Meadows and said the campaign would accept the decision.
That's when Mitchell dropped her kicker: She had already spoken to Trump — whose mindset and actions on Jan. 6 are at the heart of several criminal investigations — and, according to Mitchell, he had encouraged her to follow her judgment.
Morgan declined to comment. Spokespeople for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
White House call logs obtained by the Washington Post confirm Trump and Mitchell spoke for approximately two minutes at 7:53 p.m. ET. At 9:36 p.m. ET — the very minute that Mitchell replied to the Trump campaign lawyers — Hilbert sent the letter to the Georgia AG's office.

The intrigue: Kemp and Raffensperger ultimately accepted the withdrawal of the lawsuits but disputed that there was ever a formal settlement. "Donald J. Trump voluntarily dismissed this litigation contending the dismissal is a result of settlement between the parties. It is not. There is no 'settlement,'" they stated in court.

Axios obtained the earlier Jan. 3 letter from Georgia's attorney general that Hilbert and Mitchell were referencing. An outside counsel working with the AG's office had told Hilbert that the allegations in the lawsuit "(1) are factually wrong; (2) are based on improper speculation and faulty data and data analysis; (3) lack substantive legal merit; (4) are moot; and (5) are procedurally deficient."
The lawyer said the AG's office was "willing to share as much information as we can" regarding election data, but only if the lawsuits were withdrawn. Remarkably, the letter made no reference to a "settlement" or "sanctions," as Mitchell and Hilbert had claimed.
Instead, it specifically stated that once the litigation was dropped, Hilbert could make an appointment the following day to bring exhibits from the Trump lawsuit and receive a demonstration on why the "proffered evidenced [sic] does not support the conclusions"of their court filings.
Forwarding the email to Mitchell, Hilbert wrote: "Please give to the President as this is technically an offer to settle."

In court, the Georgia officials also sharply rebuked Hilbert for his involvement in a now-infamous Jan. 2 call in which Trump sought to pressure Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to overturn Biden's election victory.

Mitchell, Meadowsand Kaufman were also on that call. In an email to Trump campaign lawyers on Jan. 8 attempting to secure payment for members of the legal team, Mitchell said Kaufman was forced out of his law firm because of his involvement on the call. "Quite outrageous," she wrote.
Mitchell abruptly resigned her partnership from the law firm Foley & Lardner after the firm publicly aired concerns about her own involvement in the Jan. 2 phone call.

What's next: Despite these troubles, Mitchell has over the past 18 months redoubled her efforts and established herself as a central player in the nationwide network of Trump-allied lawyers and activists who are laying the groundwork to monitor and contest future elections.

Mitchell's project, called the "Election Integrity Network," is run out of the Conservative Partnership Institute, an influential Washington, D.C.-based think tank stocked with former senior Trump administration officials.
In a sign of how important Mitchell's efforts are to Trump, the former president, who is loath to share his PAC's money, authorized a $1 million donation to CPI. This was by far the Trump committee's largest donation to political allies in the second half of 2021.
Mitchell told Axios in a statement: "Any assertion that we are seeking to overturn future elections is a complete fabrication. There's not a word in any of our materials saying this is about 'overturning elections.' We aren't saying that. We aren't doing that."

Axios' Emma Hurt contributed reporting

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/marjorie-taylor-greene-texts-insurrection/

an 10/17/22

When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia debated Marcus Flowers, her Democratic challenger in the 2022 midterms, on October 16, he lambasted her for encouraging the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. Greene angrily responded that it was unfair to blame her for that attack in any way. But an article written by journalist/author Hunter Walker and published on SubStack following that debate demonstrates that Greene promoted the Big Lie after the 2020 election and encouraged MAGA efforts to overturn the election results.

Greene, during the debate, told Flowers, “You cannot accuse me of insurrection. I was a victim of the January 6 riot just as much as any other member of Congress. That was the third day I had on the job. I had nothing to do with what happened there that day, and I will not have you accuse me of that. That is wrong of you to do. You’re lying about me, and you will not defame my character in that manner.”

But text messages that Greene sent to former White House Chief of Starr Mark Meadows before January 6, 2021, according to Walker, “indicate” that she “was involved in organizing the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election at the U.S.”

Walker has had a lot to say about the January 6, 2021 insurrection. He wrote the new book, “The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th,” with former Rep. Denver Riggleman — a conservative/libertarian who served in the U.S. House of Representatives via Virginia before losing a GOP primary and has been vehemently critical of the MAGA movement.

In one of her pre-January 6, 2021 messages to Meadows, according to Walker, Greene wrote, “Good morning Mark, I’m here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th. I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn’t get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help…. We are getting a lot of members on board. And we need to lay out the best case for each state.”

In another text, Greene told Meadows, “Last night Sen (Lindsey) Graham told me that if I found 100 names of dead voters in GA that he would object. I have 100 dead voters names!!.... Tell President Trump!”

After the insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, Walker reports, Greene promoted the bogus conspiracy theory that they were members of Antifa.

“Mark we don’t think these attackers are our people,” Greene told Meadows. “We think they are Antifa. Dressed like Trump supporters.”

On January 7, 2021, Greene told Meadows, “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked. I don’t think that President Trump caused the attack on the Capitol. It’s not his fault. Antifa was mixed in the crowed and instigated it, and sadly people followed. But when people try everything and no one listens and nothing works, I guess they think they have no other choice.”

Greene continued, “Absolutely no excuse and I fully denounce all of it, but after shut downs all year and a stolen election, people are saying that they have no other choice. I defended Trump last night on Newsmax. He has been the greatest President. I will continue to defend him.”

an 9 22

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was among the many MAGA Republicans who aggressively promoted the Big Lie — claiming that the election had been stolen from Trump and aggressively looking for possible ways to keep Trump in the White House. One of the fellow Trump supporters Meadows worked with during that period, according to CNN reporter Zachary Cohen, was Republican operative Phil Waldron.

“As allies of then-President Donald Trump made a final push to overturn the election in late-December 2020, one of the key operatives behind the effort briefed then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about his attempts to gain access to voting systems in key battleground states, starting with Arizona and Georgia, according to text messages obtained by CNN,” Cohen reports in an article published by CNN’s website on September 26. “Phil Waldron, an early proponent of various election-related conspiracy theories, texted Meadows on December 23 that an Arizona judge had dismissed a lawsuit filed by friendly GOP lawmakers there. The suit demanded state election officials hand over voting machines and other election equipment, as part of the hunt for evidence to support Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.”

Cohen continues, “In relaying the news to Meadows, Waldron said the decision would allow opponents to engage in ‘delay tactics’ preventing Waldron and his associates from immediately accessing machines.Waldron also characterized Arizona as ‘our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,’ referring to similar efforts in other states like Georgia. ‘Pathetic,’ Meadows responded.”

According to Cohen, those previously unreported text messages “shed new light on how Waldron’s reach extended into the highest levels of the White House and the extent to which Meadows was kept abreast of plans for accessing voting machines — a topic sources tell CNN, and court documents suggest, is of particular interest to state and federal prosecutors probing efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”

Cohen describes Waldron as a “retired” U.S. Army colonel with ties to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

According to Cohen, Waldron has “emerged as a key figure in the broader scheme to overturn the election and was the architect of several extreme proposals for doing so” — including “a PowerPoint presentation.”

“Waldron also helped draft language for an executive order directing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines on behalf of the White House,” Cohen reports. “Trump never signed the order, siding with White House lawyers who insisted the idea was legally perilous. But there is evidence that his closest allies, including Meadows, continued to entertain similar pitches from Waldron in the lead-up to January 6, (2021) as they sought to validate conspiracy theories about foreign election interference.”

an 8 22

Former President Donald Trump and his inner circle of allies continue to circulate claims that declassified documents were removed from Mar-a-Lago during the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search of his estate.

In fact, according to HuffPost, former Trump official Kash Patel recently echoed that same argument during an interview with Fox News' Mark Levin.

“In October of 2020, President Trump put out for the world to see, a sweeping declassification order, and he did it via social media — every single Russia-gate doc, every single Hillary-gate doc, everyone,” Patel said on Sunday.

On Oct. 6, 2020, Trump actually did tweet, “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

However, previous remarks debunking that claim are now circulating again on social media. Per HuffPost, later that month Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff under Trump, "conceded in a sworn declaration to a federal court that Trump’s tweet was not an order to declassify or release those records."

In a sworn statement, the former Trump White House chief of staff wrote, “The president indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were no self-executing declassification orders, and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents."

Meadows added that "the tweets 'related to authority' the president had delegated" to U.S. Attorney General William Barr pertaining to records.

The sworn statement was written after a judge demanded that an explanation be provided on why the former president's tweets appeared to contradict the White House stance on declassifying Russia-related documents.

In addition to recalling Trump's tweets, Patel – who stepped in as acting chief of staff after Meadows' departure — also claimed that he "had witnessed Trump declassify 'whole sets of documents' in December 2020 and January 2021 while Trump was 'on his way out.'”

However, HuffPost notes that he previously said "the administration 'failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings.'” Declassification is not a process that can be completed in secret.

Watch Patel's Fox News appearance below or at this link:...

Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show

By Jonathan Karl

https://books.google.com/books?id=vogzEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA268

meadows asked Mark Martin NC regent law school to help; pat c not in mtg; eastman offered 2-----

an 8 22 tom b raw

According to a deep dive by the New York Times, Donald Trump and his former White House Chief of staff rushed to get private FBI files redacted so the former president could declassify them and turn them over to journalistssympathetic to his administration.

The report states that work was completed just three days before Trump left office but was abandoned by Meadows after he was advised he could and government officials could be in conflict with privacy laws.

According to the report, "In Mr. Trump’s last weeks in office, Mr. Meadows, with the president’s blessing, prodded federal law enforcement agencies to declassify a binder of Crossfire Hurricane materials that included unreleased information about the F.B.I.’s investigative steps and text messages between two former top F.B.I. officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had sharply criticized Mr. Trump in their private communications during the 2016 election."

The Times reports that FBI officials were concerned about releasing anything from the files, but that Meadows, "dismissed those arguments, saying that Mr. Trump himself wanted the information declassified and disseminated."

According to the report, "Just three days before Mr. Trump’s last day in office, the White House and the F.B.I. settled on a set of redactions, and Mr. Trump declassified the rest of the binder. Mr. Meadows intended to give the binder to at least one conservative journalist, according to multiple people familiar with his plan."

That plan was set aside after Meadows was warned off, with the Times reporting, "Justice Department officials pointed out that disseminating the messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page could run afoul of privacy law, opening officials up to suit."

The report adds that those files were not ones that were recently seized at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort just over two weeks ago.

You can read more here.

full timeline here]

https://www.justsecurity.org/77681/mark-meadows-timeline-the-chief-of-staff-and-schemes-to-overturn-2020-election/

Former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was directly involved at major intersections of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. What follows is a detailed timeline of all the publicly available information.

The timeline shows why Meadows may face :{significant criminal exposure:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: for directly participating in a scheme to pressure the Justice Department to investigate baseless election fraud claims. The timeline also describes a :{“parallel track”:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: reportedly created by Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, and Meadows’ repeated involvement in Donald Trump and the Trump campaign’s political efforts.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent Meadows a :{request:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: to appear for a transcribed interview several weeks ago. The evidence below raises, among other questions, whether Congress should coordinate with the Justice Department so as not to tread on any potential criminal investigation, whether the House and Senate committees investigating these matters should make a criminal referral to the Justice Department in the course of their oversight work, and why there is no indication that the Justice Department has started such a criminal investigation on its own initiative. Notably, Meadows would have more difficulty resisting a subpoena to appear before a grand jury than he would a request or subpoena to appear before Congress. Also significant, Meadows may have greater legal exposure than others involved because he presumably understood well when Attorney General William Barr and others informed him that the allegations of widespread election fraud were without any foundation.

Nine highlights from the Timeline below:

1. :{:{Meadows and Giuliani created a “parallel track” to raise election fraud claims}:

}:2. Trump campaign staff followed up on :{:{“Meadows’ theory” that tens of thousands of “illegal aliens” voted in Arizona}:

}::{3. Meadows helped introduce President Trump to DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who was plotting to oust the acting attorney general and use the Justice Department to overturn election results in Georgia

}:4. Meadows expressed upset, along with Trump, in response to Attorney General Barr’s having told the Associated Press there was no election fraud:{ that could have affected the outcome in the election

}::{5. Meadows made a surprise visit to Georgia where he met with the Secretary of State’s lead elections investigator. Trump called her the next day on Meadow’s suggestion and in the call urged her to find fraud in Fulton County

}:6. Meadows arranged and participated in the call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”:{; and during the call Meadows asked the Georgia officials to share voting data even after they told him they could not because it was protected by law

}::{7. In several communications with the Justice Department—in violation of White House and DOJ contacts policies—Meadows pressured the Department to investigate baseless allegations of election fraud

}::{:{8. Then-Acting Secretary of Defense’s chief of staff Kash Patel says he spoke to Meadows “nonstop” on Jan. 6}:

}:9. In his final days in office, Trump hoped to issue a preemptive pardon for Meadows, Giuliani and possibly himself

Timeline

Election night: As results are coming in, Giuliani proposes, “just say we won” in several swing states. Meadows :{reportedly :(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}:thinks the plan is incoherent and irresponsible.

Meadows thought Giuliani’s argument was both “incoherent and irresponsible,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker :{report:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:. “We can’t do that,” Meadows said, raising his voice. “We can’t.”

On Nov. 4, 2020: The morning after the election, “Cleta Mitchell [is] dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia,” Jane Mayer :{reports:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

In a :{radio show:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Mitchell says Meadows, who she has “known for many years,” called her on the morning of Nov. 4 asking her to go to Atlanta “because he was worried about Georgia … because [Trump’s lead] kept shrinking.” “Probably if anybody else had called me, I would have said you’re two months late, but because it was Mark Meadows and I love the president, I said yes I’d go help.”

Mitchell does not explain how the chief of staff would have a role in such a political assignment. She appears to alternate between saying she was working on behalf of the president/administration and on behalf of the campaign. She states that she worked in Georgia from Nov. 4 to Jan. 8 and did so on a volunteer, unpaid basis.

Note-1: Mitchell later participates, along with Meadows, in the Jan. 2 phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger (see entry for Jan. 2 below).

Note-2: For background on Mitchell: Michael S. Schmidt and Kenneth P. Vogel, :{“Trump Lawyer on Call Is a Conservative Firebrand Aiding His Push to Overturn Election,”:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:400"):}: New York Times; Jane Mayer, :{“The Big Money Behind the Big Lie,”:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:400"):}: New Yorker.

On Nov. 9, 2020: Meadows calls to inform Defense Secretary Mark Esper he is being dismissed for not being “sufficiently loyal.”

Around 1:00 PM, Esper’s chief of staff Jen Stewart receives an email that the president is firing Esper. At the same time, Meadows calls Esper to say “the president’s not happy… And we don’t think you’re sufficiently loyal. You’re going to be replaced. He’s going to announce it this afternoon” (Leonnig and Rucker book).

Four minutes later, :{Trump tweets:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:: “I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately.”

On or around Nov. 12, 2020: Meadows :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}: tells President Trump that Giuliani has asked him to look into allegations that tens of thousands of “illegal aliens” may have voted in Arizona. Trump campaign staff investigate “Meadows’ theory.”

Meadows tells Trump that Giuliani’s team has asked him to look into the issue. “Professionals on the campaign staff investigated Meadows’s theory,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker :{report:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, but it proves invalid (emphasis added). The vast majority of the cases were U.S. citizens living abroad who voted legally.

In mid-November 2020: Meadows and Giuliani create a “:{parallel track:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}:” in a joint effort to raise election fraud claims.

The Trump campaign sets up a team in Georgia. However, “a parallel track was underway from the Oval Office where Giuliani and Meadows, who was just returning to work after being sidelined by Covid, started bringing in their own people,” the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender reports in his :{book:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

(Meadows :{returned:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: to the White House on Nov. 16.)

In mid-November-December 2020: Meadows introduces President Trump to Jeffrey Clark who plots to oust the acting Attorney General and overturn results in Georgia. Meadows also introduces the president to Mark Martin, who has radical theories of how Pence can stop certification.

Bender reports that, :{according to DOJ officials:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, “Meadows had helped introduce Trump to DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark, who was putting together a secret plan to oust Rosen, the acting attorney general, and force Georgia to overturn its results” (emphasis added). Meadows denies any involvement.

Note: The New York Times :{reported:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: that Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), a member of the Freedom Caucus that Meadows helped found, “first made Mr. Trump aware that a relatively obscure Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen, according to former administration officials who spoke with Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump.” Perry later :{confirms:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: the New York Times report. Neither the report, nor Perry mention Meadows.

Following their introduction, Trump communicates and meets with Clark without alerting Justice Department officials in apparent violation of the :{White House:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: and :{Department of Justice:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: contacts policies. The New York Times reports:

Department officials were startled to learn that the president had called Mr. Clark directly on multiple occasions and that the two had met in person without alerting Mr. Rosen, those officials said. Justice Department policy stipulates that the president initially communicates with the attorney general or the deputy attorney general on all matters, and then a lower-level official if authorized.

Meadows also :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:connects President Trump with former North Carolina Supreme Court justice Mark Martin,who told him that Vice President Pence could stop the certification of Electoral College results.

According to Leonnig and Rucker’s :{book:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, senior administration officials blamed Meadows for neglecting his gatekeeper role. One senior official said Meadows facilitated the president’s being “exposed to crazy people spouting lunatic theories about the election and his ability to overturn it. That is all Meadows.” Meadows “reinforced [Trump’s] instincts,” they said. Politico also :{reports:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, “many blamed [Meadows] for feeding Trump’s belief that he won the election.”

Around Thanksgiving: Meadows acknowledges to the White House communications director that he knows Trump lost the election.

Alyssa Farah :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: tells Meadows she wants to step down as communications director. “We need to give a graceful exit and acknowledge that Biden won,” she tells Meadows. “I know, I know,” Meadows says. “We’re going to get the president there.” Earlier in the month, Meadows had multiple conversations with Sen. Mitch McConnell in which Meadows assured that “they would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short” and that “Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat,” the New York Times reported.

Despite what he told McConnell and Farah. “Meadows couldn’t get the president to acknowledge the reality that he had lost. There wasn’t any indication that he had even tried,” Leonnig and Rucker report.

Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020: In White House meetings, Meadows and President Trump express displeasure with Barr for telling news media the Justice Department had found no election fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.

In the early afternoon, the Associated Press publishes an :{interview:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: with Barr, in which the Attorney General said, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Barr attends a previously scheduled meeting with Meadows at 3:00 PM. Pat Cipollone joins the meeting. “Surprisingly to Barr, Meadows hated” the news story, but the chief of staff also seemed to acknowledge the election outcome, Leonnig and Rucker report.

President Trump hears Barr is in the White House and asks to see him. According to Leonnig and Rucker, President Trump yells at Barr about the AP report while Meadows is present. Present in the meeting as well are Will Levi, Barr’s chief of staff; Eric Herschmann, senior White House adviser (who earlier served as a personal attorney on Trump’s first impeachment team); and Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel. :{Bender described:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: President Trump’s reaction in the meeting as a “volcanic eruption.”

Barr responds in the meeting by stating that Trump’s allegations of election fraud are completely false. Barr calls the allegations, “bullshit,” and that Trump’s legal team is a “clown show” (reporting by Leonnig and Rucker; Bender, :{Jonathan Karl:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:). “No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are,” Barr :{says:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: in the meeting.

Leonnig and Rucker also report the following part of the exchange:

“Bill, did you say this?” Trump said, his voice sharp and quick. “Yeah,” Barr said. “I said it.”

“How could you say that?” Trump asked.

Barr replied that his statement was true, and that he was merely answering the reporter’s question.

“Why didn’t you just not answer the question?” Trump said.

Then the president, his voice getting higher, switched oddly to speak of himself in the third person.

“There’s no reason for you to have said this!” he said. “You must hate Trump!”

“We’ve looked into these things, and they’re nonsense,” Barr says in the meeting.

On the specifics, “It’s complete nonsense,” Barr says about an allegation that Pennsylvania ballots had been backdated, and that there was no evidence of ballot stuffing in Georgia. Barr also explains in detail why Trump’s allegations of fraud in Wayne County, Michigan were false. “There’s no evidence of substantial fraud that would change the election,” Barr reiterates.

“Meadows sat silently on the opposite side of the dining room, with his arms crossed, a posture that seemed to say, This is DOJ’s problem,” Leonnig and Rucker report (see also Karl). Cipollone, in contrast, “at one point interjected to tell the president that Barr’s department had been dutifully investigating the fraud claims.”

After Barr leaves the room, the president tells Meadows he had every reason to and should fire Barr (Leonnig and Rucker).

As indicated, the meeting is reported in three different books. “The details of this meeting were described to me by several people present,” Karl :{writes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020: Meadows asks Attorney General Barr to stay until the end of the term.

Meadows calls Barr early in the morning to ask him to stay until the end of the term. :{According to Bender, :(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:“Barr agreed, and immediately regretted it.” Barr resigned on Dec. 14 and was replaced by Jeffrey Rosen.

Karl reports the following exchange:

“I think there’s a way through this,” Meadows told him. He could prevent Trump from firing him, but he wanted an assurance from Barr that he wouldn’t resign. “Are you willing to stay?” Meadows asked.

“I’m not going to sandbag you,” Barr said. “I will give you a warning if I’m going to leave, and No. 2, I’ll stay as long as I’m needed.”

Friday, Dec. 11, 2020: Trump decides not to fire Gina Haspel, despite Meadows’ attempts to have her removed.

As rumors circulate that Haspel is going to be fired, she attends a routine intelligence briefing and reminds Trump “of how effective the CIA had been on her watch.” After the meeting, Trump asks Pence, Cipollone, and Kellogg whether he should fire her. Pence speaks strongly in her favor: “Gina’s done a lot for this nation… She’s done a lot of heavy lifting.” Kellogg agrees, “She killed a lot of bad guys.” Trump decides she can keep her position (Leonnig and Rucker book).

Meadows reportedly “had a burr under his saddle about Haspel” and “questioned her loyalty to Trump and indicated he wanted a more politically supportive leader at the CIA,” according to Leonnig and Rucker. He tells Haspel that he has offered Kash Patel the deputy CIA director position, unaware that the president has changed his mind. Haspel threatens to resign. Meadows has to “swallow his pride and reverse the order,” :{according to Axios:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Saturday, Dec. 12, 2020: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley warns Meadows about making personnel moves.

Gen. Milley :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: confronts Meadows, asks if Trump and he are planning to replace FBI Director Wray or CIA Director Haspel, and warns Meadows. “Just be careful,” says the Chairman, who is concerned at the time that Trump will try to hold onto power. “Milley wanted Meadows to know that he was watching. Did anyone think the leaders of the U.S. military were idiots? He wanted the White House to understand that he was drawing hard boundaries,” Leonnig and Rucker write.

Friday, Dec. 18, 2020: Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone push back on radical ideas being proposed to address alleged election fraud in a meeting with President Trump, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn.

Meadows participates in a :{meeting:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: at the White House with the president, attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and former Trump administration official, Emily Newman, who works on Powell’s legal team. Others who join the meeting in person or by phone include Cipollone, Herschmann, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, White House staff secretary Derek Lyons, Giuliani, and Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan.

Trump reportedly discusses appointing Powell as special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, but “:{[m]ost of his advisors:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:” are opposed to the idea. “Meadows indicated that he was trying to wrap his mind around what exactly Powell’s role would entail. He told Powell she would have to fill out the SF-86 questionnaire before starting as special counsel,” Axios :{reported:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Trump also asks about Flynn’s idea to impose martial law and deploy the military to “:{rerun:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:” the election. Another one of the ideas includes :{commandeering voting machines:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:. Cipollone and Meadows “:{repeatedly and aggressively:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:” push back on the ideas being proposed, according to the New York Times report.

Flynn accused Meadows and other senior advisers of being quitters. “Don’t you dare challenge me about whether I’m being supportive of the president and working hard,” Meadows shouted back, according to :{Axios:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2020: Meadows visits Georgia to observe the audit of absentee ballot envelope signatures and meets with the Georgia Secretary of State’s lead elections investigator, Frances Watson.

:{The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Meadows’ visit to the Cobb County Civic Center where absentee ballot signatures are being reviewed. Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs :{greets him and prevents him:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: from entering the room where the signature audits are being conducted.

Meadows meets with Frances Watson, the lead elections investigator in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office (Leonnig and Rucker book; transcript of phone call with Trump).

Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020: :{At Meadows’ suggestion:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}:, President Trump calls Frances Watson, the lead elections investigator in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

The following day, President Trump urges :{Watson to :(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}::{find “dishonesty”:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: to help overturn the state’s election results, and says she will be “praised” for doing so. The president urges her to match ballot signatures with older signatures and to look at votes in Fulton County. :{Watson sounds flattered:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: to receive the call but is cautious and does not reveal any details about the investigation.

During the call, President Trump :{says:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Meadows had suggested that he call Watson. The president also says, “Well you have a big fan in our great chief, right? Chief of staff, Mark,” and “I just wanted to thank you for everything. He told me you’ve been great.”

A :{transcript:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: and :{audio recording:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: are available.

Sunday, Dec. 27, 2020: President Trump :{tells:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}: Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”

The Committee on Oversight and Reform obtained :{handwritten notes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: taken by Donoghue during a meeting with Trump and Rosen.

According to Donoghue’s contemporaneous :{notes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Rosen said “the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way.” According to the notes, Trump responds, “Don’t expect you to do that, just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” The DOJ officials push back and say “Sir, we have done layers of investigation… We are doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false.”

At the end of the call, Trump appears to threaten to fire DOJ senior leaders. The notes read: “People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership.”

It has not been reported whether Meadows took part in this call.

Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2020: President Trump’s White House personal assistant, Molly Michael, circulates a :{draft complaint:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}: alleging six states violated the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, and Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall. In the email, she notes that the draft complaint was shared with Meadows.

Molly Michael, Trump’s White House personal assistant, uses her official White House email account to send Rosen, Donoghue, and Wall :{a draft complaint:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: to file before the Supreme Court to overturn election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. The complaint alleges the six states violated the Electors Clause or the Fourteenth Amendment by allowing non-legislative acts to change election rules.

She states the president has asked her to send the draft and that she has “:{also shared with Mark Meadows and Pat Cipollone:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.”

Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2020: Meadows meets with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel to discuss (wild, baseless) allegations of election fraud.

:{Documents obtained:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform indicate Meadows met with Donoghue, Cipollone, Philbin, Rosen, and Engel on Dec. 29 to discuss allegations of election fraud.

In particular, :{Donoghue notes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:: “advised that we are looking at the claim that certification > # of votes cast” in Pennsylvania.

The group also discusses Arturo D’Elio, an employee at :{Leonardo S.p.A:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, an Italian company specializing in aerospace, defense, and security. :{Donoghue writes in his notes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: that D’Elio “claims involvement in vote changing in US 2020” and that it was “in coordination w/CIA offices in Embassy.”

Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2020: Cassidy Hutchinson, legislative advisor to Meadows, emails Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs to set up a call.

In the email, :{obtained by American Oversight:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Hutchinson writes “I just spoke to Chief Meadows regarding his visit with you in Cobb County last week. When you have a moment, could you please give me a call”

On the phone call, Hutchinson reportedly asks Fuchs if there was anything the White House could do to show appreciation to the people conducting the audit, according to a :{Reuters report:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:. An anonymous source told Reutters the call was just an attempt by Meadows to “smooth things over” since investigators had been working through the holidays and were reportedly discouraged by Trump’s tweet that they were being “:{very slow.:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:”

Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2020: Meadows twice emails Acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen about (baseless) allegations of fraudulent activity during the 2020 election.

According to records obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Meadows emails Rosen twice from his White House email account.

At 9:31 AM, :{Meadows forwards an email:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: from one of President Trump’s personal lawyers, Cleta Mitchell, referring to allegations of “video issues in Fulton County” and “the equipment / software.” Meadows asks Rosen: “Can you have your team look into these allegations of wrongdoing. Only the alleged fraudulent activity” (no question mark in original).

As CNN’s Jeremy Herb :{explains:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, “Meadows appeared to be the go-between between Giuliani’s team and Rosen. He forwarded an email from Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who worked with Giuliani, laying out their claims about fraud in Georgia.”

Note: Mitchell appears to have sent the email to a different email address for Meadows who then forwards it to his own White House email account before sending it to the Justice Department.

At 9:43 AM, Meadows emails Rosen an image of a translated letter from Carlo Goria, an individual in Italy, who claims to have “direct knowledge” of activities undertaken in Italy to manipulate the electoral vote. The letter claims :{Leonardo S.p.A:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, an Italian company specializing in aerospace, defense, and security, coordinated with the CIA to use “:{advanced military encryption capabilities:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:” to change the election result. It involves the wild conspiracy theory discussed in the phone call with Meadows and senior White House and Justice Department officials the day before.

In early January 2021: Meadows is likely contacted by Amy Kremer, an organizer of the Jan. 6 rally out of concern about plans for that day.

Women for America First, a conservative group supporting Trump, :{obtains a permit:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: to gather on the White House Ellipse, but not for an organized march, while Stop the Steal, another more radical conservative group supporting Trump, obtains a permit to rally on Capitol grounds. Amy Kremer, leader of Women for America First and an organizer of the Jan. 6 rally, :{likely contacts:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Meadows with safety concerns that Ali Alexander, the leader of Stop the Steal, and his allies are planning an organized march, which would violate the Women for America First permit and potentially create legal liability for the organizers. It is unclear how far Kremer or other Women for America First organizers went to notify Meadows or other officials about their fears, according to a deep investigative report by ProPublica. “Senior White House officials, including Meadows, were involved in the broader effort to limit Alexander’s role on Jan. 6,” reported the news outlet. Alexander spoke instead at the rally the day before where he :{led:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: a crowd of Trump supporters in a “victory, or death” chant.

Friday, Jan. 1, 2021: Meadows sends Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen (baseless) claims of election fraud and pressures him to investigate the allegations.

Meadows sends Rosen multiple emails from his White House email account with allegations of election fraud in Georgia and New Mexico.

At 3:08 PM, :{Meadows sends:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Rosen an email containing a link to a Youtube video, which is now unavailable, with the subject line: “Brad Johnson: Rome, Satellites, Servers: an Update- Youtube.” Rosen forwards the email to Acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue, who responds at 3:39 PM saying, “Pure Insanity.” In the video, former CIA station chief, Brad Johnson, :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: discusses “Italygate,” a conspiracy theory that individuals working for an Italian defense contractor collaborated with the CIA to change the election result.

At 4:13 PM, :{Meadows emails:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Rosen again saying, “There have been allegations of signature match anomalies in Fulton county, Ga. Can you get Jeff Clark to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation” (no question mark in the original) (emphasis added). Rosen forwards the email to Donoghue noting that he is not going to respond to Meadows. “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to the message below,” the acting attorney general writes.

At 6:56 PM, :{Meadows sends:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Rosen another email with “New Mexico List of Complaints” in the subject line, and asks the acting attorney general to forward it to his team to review the allegations. The list includes complaints that “Poll Challengers were unable to adequately do their job,” “Many Anomalies” with Dominion Machines, and “Other Irregularities,” such as “Multiple documented cases of dead people voting.”

Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021: Meadows arranges a call with President Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to discuss allegations of election fraud in Georgia.

Note: Following Meadows’ email the day before asking Rosen to get Jeff Clark to engage immediately on purported anomalies in Fulton County, Clark emails Rosen at 9:50 AM :{writing:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, “I spoke to the source and am on with the guy who took the video right now. Working on it. More due diligence to do.”

Meadows reportedly arranges (:{Reuters:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:; Leonig and Rucker book) the call in which President Trump asks Raffensperger to “:{find 11,780 votes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.” Trump had tried to reach the Georgia Secretary of State eighteen times before finally doing so that Saturday at about 3:00 PM. Meadows set up the call through Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs. When Fuchs asked what Trump wanted to speak about, Meadows :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: did not give clear direction.

Others on the call include Trump campaign lawyer Kurt Hilbert, Alex Kaufman, and Cleta Mitchell. Other Georgia officials include Fuchs and General Counsel to Georgia’s Secretary of State Ryan Germany.

:{During the call:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Meadows says he is hopeful they “can find some kind of agreement” and “find a path forward that’s less litigious.”

Meadows also asks for access to the Georgia Secretary of State’s election data (time stamp: 56:45), but Germany refuses, explaining that such access would violate the law (time stamp: 57:45). Despite the explanation, Meadows continues to suggest they share the data and even tells Germany and Hilbert to get together after the call “and work out a plan” to provide access to the data (time stamp: 58:50). Finally, Meadows promises there were more than “two dead people” who voted in the election (time stamp: 59:11).

Commentators :{raise:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: concerns that Meadows’ particular involvement in the call as White House chief of staff may violate the Hatch Act in addition to :{potential criminal liability:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: for interfering with election officials counting votes.

Note: In a subsequent conservative radio show :{interview:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Mitchell calls Raffensperger “a pathological liar.”

The transcript and audio recording of the call is available :{here:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021: Meadows faces criticism after audio from the previous day’s call is released to the Washington Post.

Trump :{tweets, :(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:“I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters,’ dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

Raffensperger :{responds to the tweet:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.” He then :{shares the recording:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: of the Jan. 2 call with the Washington Post. After the call leaks, other Trump advisers “blasted Meadows” for having arranged the call. Larry Kudlow :{asks:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:,“Mark, did you think for one minute that the call would not be leaked in its entirety?… Are we children here or are we adults?… What were you thinking?” In response, Meadows :{claims:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: “I couldn’t stop the president. I tried, but I couldn’t stop him” (Leonnig and Rucker book).

Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021: Eric Hovakimian, Associate Deputy Attorney General and advisor to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, drafts an email announcing his and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue’s resignation in anticipation that Rosen would be fired by President Trump.

A :{document obtained:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: by POLITICO reveals that Hovakimian is concerned that Trump will fire Rosen. After Rosen and Donoghue depart for a meeting at the White House with the president, Hovakimian drafts the resignation email on his and Donoghue’s behalf. The first line includes the following statement:

“Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen over the course of the last week repeatedly refused the President’s direct instructions to utilize the Department of Justice’s law enforcement powers for improper ends.”

A copy of the draft email is available :{here:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Sunday, Jan. 3: White House meeting with Defense Department officials in advance of Jan. 6.

At 5:30 PM, Meadows :{attends:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: a meeting about Iranian threats at the White House that includes Miller and Milley. At the end of the meeting, President Trump turns to Jan. 6 and tells the Defense Department, “Do whatever is necessary to protect demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights,” according to Miller’s :{testimony:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Note: In their book, Leonnig and Rucker report that Trump said, “Just make sure it’s all safe,” and Milley thought that sounded pretty benign.

Others at the meeting include Patel, O’Brien, Cipollone, and Pompeo.

Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021: Meadows is with President Trump throughout the day.

:{In the morning:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Meadows joins Trump in the Oval Office, along with Stephen Miller, Pence’s National Security Advisor Keith Kellogg, attorney Eric Herschmann, Ivanka Trump, and other members of the Trump family. Trump tries to gauge the size of the crowd on the Ellipse and calls Pence about overturning the election.

Shortly after, Meadows :{attends:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: the “Save America” rally alongside President Trump and his supporters. Trump Jr. records a video of Meadows, Trump’s advisor Kimberly Guilfoyle, and others playing music backstage. Trump gives a speech to his supporters and :{concludes with a call to action:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, asking his supporters to march to the Capitol.

Trump returns to the White House, where Meadows joins him to watch the events unfold on television. After Ivanka Trump sees rioters are inside the Capitol, she goes back and forth to the Oval office and :{attempts to persuade:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: President Trump to order his supporters to disperse. Meadows reportedly asks Ivanka Trump to come back multiple times to help him persuade Trump to take action (see also New York Times report).

Former White House communication director, Alyssa Farah, reaches out to Meadows several times and :{tells:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: him, “You guys have to say something.” “Even if the president’s not willing to put out a statement, you should go to the [cameras] and say, ‘We condemn this. Please stand down.’ If you don’t, people are going to die.” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser :{personally asks:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Meadows for help twice. Sarah Matthews, a deputy press secretary, reached out to Ben Williamson, an adviser to Meadows to get the president to issue a statement against the violence, but to no avail.

Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short calls Meadows to inform him the vice president was protected and that they intended to stay and finish their work once it was safe. Meadows :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: replies that he thought it was appropriate for Pence to continue his work.

Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller’s chief of staff Kash Patel has :{said:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, “I was talking to Meadows, nonstop that day.”

:{At 4:39 PM:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, after the President issues remarks via Twitter, Miller reportedly updates Meadows on the status of removing protestors from the Capitol complex. McConnell joins the call at different points. McConnell is furious and insists the Pentagon act to clear the Capitol.

Jan. 7-20: Meadows, Miller and Pompeo :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}: have a daily phone call to ensure the peaceful transfer of power.

Jan. 7-20: Trump reportedly wants to issue preemptive pardons for Meadows, Guiliani, and possibly himself, but the White House Counsel threatens to hold a news conference and resign.

Bloomberg :{reports:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}::

President Donald Trump has prepared a sweeping list of individuals he’s hoping to pardon in the final days of his administration that includes senior White House officials …:{

}:…:{

}:Preemptive pardons are under discussion for top White House officials who have not been charged with crimes, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

White House Counsel Cipollone :{reportedly:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: tells Meadows that such pardons would smack of—and quite possibly constitute—obstruction of justice, says many of his senior lawyers would resign en masse, and threatens to hold a news conference to resign and publicly announce their strong objections. Trump backs down.

Friday, Feb. 11, 2021: Meadows claims on The Ingraham Angle that President Trump “took immediate action” on January 6th.

Meadows claims “we took immediate action” and tells viewers that Trump “wanted our National Guard to be on the ready for any civil unrest that might be there.”

The full :{exchange:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: follows:

INGRAHAM: One of the big things that they pushed today and yesterday was that the president didn’t immediately come out on camera and immediately tweet go home, stop this, this is horrible what’s happening, this is not what we’re about. Why didn’t he?

MEADOWS: Well, I can tell you we took immediate action. One of the things that has not has not been told yet is the fact that not only the president wanted to make sure everybody was safe but he literally at the very first said we need to make sure that they have the resources.

You know that that’s not being told, the fact that he wanted our National Guard to be on the ready for any civil unrest that might be there and so he tweeted out a number of things as we were looking at some of this unfold. What we now know happened actually was not as graphic is was laid out over the last couple of days because we were seeing little bits and snippets but he condemned it and wanted to make sure that we respected law and order and was very forceful in that.

Friday, Feb. 12, 2021: Meadows claims on Hannity that President Trump :{moved quickly to deploy the National Guard:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}: on January 6th.

Meadows claims President Trump moved quickly to deploy the National Guard and that former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller could confirm his account.

The full :{exchange:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: follows:

HANNITY: “It was related to the fact about whether or not the president delayed in sending — or requesting National Guard troops. Did he ask for troops before the 6th, that day, and what time?

MEADOWS: Yeah, two days before that. So, you know, everybody can do that. I think Secretary of Defense Miller will be glad to back me up on this.

But more importantly, Democrat governors and Democrat mayors, throughout the summer, they can back me up on it because I made personal phone calls to them. Every time that there was not only violence there, the president was swift to call and say we want to offer help. But he offered help on this particular day, more than 48 hours before.

I can tell you, when I got the phone call — I didn’t ever get a phone call from Speaker Pelosi, but from Mayor Bowser, the answer was immediate and yes, and that’s what we focused on.

And so, again, another false narrative by some of the Democrat House managers to suggest anything other than a very deliberate and quick action on the part of President Trump.

:{Journalists:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: :{understood:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: Meadows to be claiming the president reacted immediately in dispatching the Guard. Meadows appeared to be reiterating President Trump’s earlier claim. In :{prepared remarks:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: on Jan. 7, President Trump said, “I immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders.”

[See entry on May 12 for Miller’s testimony contradicting President Trump and Meadows’s statements.]

Wednesday, May 12, 2021: Miller :{testifies:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}: that President Trump played no role in the Defense Department’s actions on Jan. 6 and contradicts Meadows’s prior statement.

:{In his written testimony:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Miller states, “I also want to address questions that have been raised in regard to the President’s involvement in the response. He had none with respect to the Department of Defense efforts on January 6.” This statement contradicts President Trump’s Jan. 7 statement and Meadows’ Feb. 12 assertion that Trump took immediate action and activated the National Guard.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/meadows-cassidy-hutchinson/

witness intim?! attempts to discredit her fail

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-family-research-councils-insurrection-connections/

theFamily Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.

FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”

Blackwelland Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.

Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.

At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”

“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski, a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.

Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute, which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.**”**It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair,whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Completing the circle,Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PACshortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.

Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.

As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”

In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.

Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the firstBlackwell-Klukowski collaboration.They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.

At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.

The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.

Tags: Connie Hair Ed Corrigan Jeffrey Clark Jerry Boykin Ken Blackwell Ken Klukowski Kenneth Blackwell Mark Meadows Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Conservative Partnership Institute Council for National Policy Family Research Council

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/22/gop-lawmakers-deeply-involved-in-trump-plans-to-overturn-election-new-evidence-suggests-00027340

ref but no mention of lesko?

no lnx

insurrection fallout

GOP lawmakers were deeply involved in Trump plans to overturn election, new evidence suggests

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee underscore the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had enlisted themselves in Trump’s effort to cling to power.

Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Matt Gaetz speak to reporters.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speak to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in 2021. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

By Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu

04/22/2022 11:36 PM EDT

Updated:04/23/2022

Republican members of Congress were heavily involved in calls and meetings with former President Donald Trump and his top aides as they devised a strategy to overturn the election in December 2020, according to new evidence filed in federal court late Friday.

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee — part of an effort to force former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to appear for an interview — suggest that some of Trump’s top allies in Congress were frequently present in meetings where a handful of strategies to prevent then-President-elect Joe Biden from taking office were discussed, including efforts to replace the leadership of the Justice Department with figures who would sow doubts about the legitimacy of the election.

Lawmakers who attended meetings, in person or by phone, included Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and numerous members of the House Freedom Caucus, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows who provided key testimony about the conversations and meetings Meadows had in December 2020.

The new evidence underscores the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had ultimately enlisted themselves in Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power. Members traded theories about ways to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Biden’s election, they parried with the White House Counsel’s Office on the boundaries of the law regarding presidential electors and they met directly with Pence’s staff to encourage him to take direct action on Jan. 6, when Congress convened to count electoral votes.

“They felt that he had the authority to — pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the States,” Hutchinson recalled.

The disclosure came as part of a Friday evening court filing by the select panel asking a federal court to throw out Meadows’ lawsuit against the committee. In the filing, the select committee revealed that Meadows turned over 2,319 text messages during a brief period of cooperation but withheld more than 1,000, citing various privileges.

“[H]e was not acting as anything like a typical White House Chief of Staff advising the President on official matters of government policy,” House General Counsel Doug Letter wrote. “Mr. Meadows was playing a campaign role, attempting to facilitate a strategy that would have reversed the certified results of the 2020 election.”

The committee indicated that Meadows told Jordan in a text message that he supported efforts to convince Pence to send the election back to the states.

“I have pushed for this. Not sure it is going to happen,” Meadows texted Jordan early in the morning on Jan. 6.

Some of the GOP lawmakers were present in December meetings, Hutchinson recalled, when members of the White House Counsel’s Office raised significant legal doubts about a plan for pro-Trump activists to submit “alternate” electors in states won by Joe Biden.

Others attended a Dec. 21 meeting where Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, and some associates advocated a plan for Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electors and instead send the election back to various GOP-controlled state legislatures to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

The panel also released text messages between Perry and Meadows about replacing Justice Department leadership before Jan. 6 with officials thought to be more sympathetic to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down. 11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration,”Perry texted the then-White House chief of staff on Dec. 26, 2020, asking him to get in touch with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. “We gotta get going!”

“I got it. I think I understand. Let me work on the deputy position,” Meadows responded.

Perry rejected a request from the select panel to testify.

The panel also revealed that it interviewed Steven Engel, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Engel indicated that Clark proposed on Jan. 3, 2021, having DOJ issue a legal advisory opinion regarding “the Vice President with respect to his authority when it comes to opening the votes as the President of the Senate on January 6th.”

“And I shot down that idea,” Engel recalled. “But I said — I said: ‘That’s an absurd idea. The — you know, the Vice President is acting as the President of the Senate. It is not the role of the Department of Justice to provide legislative officials with legal advice on the scope of their duties.” And — you know, and — not to mention it was 3 days from the date. OLC doesn’t tend to provide the legal opinions, you know, in those cases, you know, in that short timeframe.”

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The committee also homed in on Meadows’ role as an unofficial campaign adviser, noting that he routinely straddled the line between his official White House work and his effort to keep Trump in office. Hundreds of documents Meadows claimed were privileged included contacts he had with Trump campaign lawyers, the committee said, citing a privilege log from Meadows himself.

The committee chronicled Meadows’ frenetic activity in the final weeks before Jan. 6, with his actions including:

— Helping the campaign craft and distribute talking points about election fraud, in concert with allies like attorney Cleta Mitchell and campaign adviser Jason Miller. “This is what I prepared and sent to Sen Braun last night to help prepare him for ABC appearance this am,” Mitchell wrote on Jan. 6 to Meadows, who forwarded the email to Miller. “Can the WH press office get and start using??”

— Communicating with Raffensperger and his deputy Jason Fuchs around efforts to get Georgia officials to overturn the results in the state.

— Texting often with Perry about plans to install Clark at the Justice Department in order to use DOJ’s power to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. In one exchange,Perry indicated he had sent separate messages to Meadows via Signal, and the two discussed a potential deputy for Clark.

— Meeting in his office with retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, who was pushing for Trump to invoke national security procedures as part of a plan to seize control of voting machines. Waldron referenced the meeting in an email sent to Meadows’ Gmail account.

— Conducting an array of calls on Jan. 6 from a secure “control car” that was part of Trump’s motorcade.

“I know that he was on several calls during the rally. And I went over to meet with him at one point, and he had just waved me away, which is out of the ordinary,” Hutchinson testified.

The committee also indicated it has come to believe Trump did not attempt to contact any federal law enforcement agency amid the riot, pointing to testimony from former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, former Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue, who indicated he never connected with Trump that day.

“I never spoke to the President that day,” Donoghue told the panel. “He was not on any calls that I was on.”

The panel concluded: “It is also now clear that Mr. Trump never telephoned his Secretary of Defense that day to order deployment of National Guard, and never contacted any federal law enforcement agency to order security assistance to the Capitol Police.”

Filed under: Joe Biden, Joe Biden 2020, Mike Pence, Donald Trump,

POLITICO

expert on White House dynamics says Mark Meadows is by far the worst chief of staff in U.S. history.

Former aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified last week that Meadows seemed unconcerned about the insurrection taking place just blocks away at the U.S. Capitol, and author Chris Whipple, who has interviewed dozens of chiefs of staff, said that testimony cemented Donald Trump's lead staffer as the worst of all time, reported Business Insider.

"It used to be a fairly stiff competition for the worst chief of staff in history, but Meadows absolutely owns it," Whipple said.

Hutchinson told the House select committee that Meadows remained glued to his cell phone instead of asking the president to call off his supporters at the Capitol, and Whipple said that would be his lasting legacy.

"I used to think the defining lasting image of Mark Meadows would be mugging for Don Trump's Jr.'s video camera in the tent at the Ellipse right before Trump went out to incite a mob to attack the Capitol,"Whipple said. "I now think the defining image of Meadows is the guy sitting on the couch in the White House chief's office scrolling through his phone while a violent mob attacks Capitol police that day."

Whipple had previously ranked H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's chief of staff during the Watergate burglary and subsequent coverup, as the worst in American history, but he said Hutchinson's testimony had shaken up his ratings.

"The Watergate figures really look like choir boys compared to Trump, and Meadows, and their gang," Whipple said. "That was before now the most serious political scandal in American political history, but it pales in comparison to a president who sends an armed mob against the Capitol knowing that they are armed, knowing that there will be violence, and with a chief of staff who at best just shrugs and looks the other way and at worst was a co-conspirator."

Whipple, the author of "The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency," noted that Trump had cycled through more chief staffers in one term than any other president, but he found exactly what he wanted in Meadows.

"What he wanted is what he got ultimately in Mark Meadows, which is sycophant," Whipple said. "I think he was less a chief of staff than a kind of glad-handing maitre d' who tried to please Trump in every way, and, in fact, he told basically everybody what they wanted to hear, not just Trump. He was and is a spineless character and the polar opposite of the best chiefs."

i forgot to include jan 6 stuff: closed dr of car 3x, paralyzed on phone (b/c he wanted to give mob time or he realized coup had failed? why did he cooperate at 1st then stop?

an 7 22

Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat provided fascinating insight — and a terrifying prediction about future Republican Party violence — when she was interviewed by CNN's Jim Acosta on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that on Jan. 6, Trump was "irate" when the Secret Service would not drive him to the Capitol and lunged for the steering wheel of his presidential limousine.

Acosta began that interview by noting that weeks before Hutchinson's testimony, Ben-Ghiat had informed his audience that Trump had to go to the Capitol for the phase of a coup where the new order would be announced. Acosta described her analysis as "almost clairvoyant."

"And we have since learned that Trump did try to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, but his Secret Service stopped him," Acosta said. "Ruth, what is your reaction to everything we learned this week, including this new CNN reporting that seems to back up what Cassidy Hutchison was saying?"

"I'm really disturbed, not surprised, about the role of violence," the New York University professor replied.

"It was very telling to me that Trump said chief of staff Mark Meadows, who seems to have been like the control center of this operation, she said that when the violence broke out, he didn't seem concerned at all, and he didn't seem perturbed, and that's because violence was part of the plan. It has to be in a coup," she explained.

"That's also why Trump wanted the, you know, weapons detectors removed, and so the other thing that stands out is that not only did he want to be driven there to the Capitol and be at the head of this, you know, violent thug march into the Capitol, but Ms. Hutchinson testified that there were conversations about him entering the chamber," she continued. "And what that says to me is first, you know, you'veneutralized the presidential chain of succession. They were going to do something to Pence, they were hunting Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi, speaker, and so he was going to also have fixed the problem with the electoral counts because Pence wasn't there, and then he was going to declare himself at the head of this violent mob in the chamber as a legitimate president, and that's where that phase of the coup would have ended."

"It's extraordinary what we're learning from these hearings," she said.

Acosta asked Ben-Ghiat to compare Trump to other leaders she has studied.

She said Trump, "and his party are behaving in a desperate way, and when autocrats think they're going down, they will do anything -- and we've seen Jan. 6 -- to stay in power. What's really extraordinary is how Trump, who came from outside politics, put the GOP in such a state of authoritarian subjection and discipline that the whole party is completely compromised. We're learning from these hearings just how many people were involved," she said.

"And unfortunately, I think we can expect more extremist behavior, aggressive behavior from the party because they are acting out of fear. They're guilty, and their coup failed, and they've been exposed to the world by these hearings, and so they are -- they're in emergency mode," Ben-Bhiat warned.

Watch:

payoff for co-op?

//NRA expose?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jan-6-committee-zeroes-in-on-trump-e2-80-99s-big-lie-fundraising

zoe takes lead;

no lnx

the Jan. 6 committee spent most of its second hearing Monday picking apart Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 election outcome — lies he pursued despite findings from both his campaign staff and government investigators that the election results were legitimate.

But Monday’s hearing ended with an interesting change of topic: The panel zeroed in on Trump’s fundraising. Specifically, the committee found, Trump lied to his base in order to raise millions of dollars, and then used that money to pursue his own political and personal ends.

According to the committee’s senior investigative counsel Amanda Wick, it went like this: After Trump lost the 2020 election — and even after the “safe harbor date” that usually spells the end of election lawsuits —Trump and his campaign pursued a fundraising strategy based around a so-called “Election Integrity Fund”: A fund that they told donors would help “PROTECT THE INTEGRITY OF OUR ELECTION” in dozens of emails over several weeks.

But the Election Integrity Fund didn’t exist: Gary Coby, the campaign’s former digital director, agreed during a deposition that it was a “marketing tactic.” And the tactic worked: The committee found that Trump and his allies raised nearly $100 million in the first week after the election.

On Nov. 9, Trump created the “Save America PAC.” Wick said most of the money for the “Election Defense Fund” went to that account. And that PAC, in turn, made millions in donations to Trump-aligned groups: $1 million to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ charitable foundation, $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, which employed several former Trump administration officials, $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection, and over $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., the company that ran Trump’s White House Ellipse rally — the event that preceded the Capitol attack.

The campaign sent fundraising emails regularly, including one about 30 minutes before the Capitol was breached, Wick said.

...

2x? $

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/26/us/politics/ginni-thomas-donald-trump.html

texts Show Ginni Thomas's Embrace of Conspiracy Theories

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics

Mar 26, 2022 — In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep President ...

nyt no lnx

Texts Show Ginni Thomas’s Embrace of Conspiracy Theories

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

A hard-line conservative activist, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had long been viewed with suspicion by the Republican establishment. Yet her influence rose during the Trump administration.

By Danny Hakim, Jo Becker and Alan Feuer

March 26, 2022

Two days after the 2020 election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, texted an old friend, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump.

She sent messages that had been making the rounds on pro-Trump sites, where anger over the election echoed her own raw feelings, including this passage: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

...?

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

Two days after the 2020 election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, texted an old friend, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump.

She sent messages that had been making the rounds on pro-Trump sites, where anger over the election echoed her own raw feelings, including this passage: Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

Then she added of this fanciful, if chilling, set of conspiracy theories: I hope this is true.

She texted Mr. Meadows again the next day. Do not concede, she wrote. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.

The messages were among a flurry of text traffic between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows that was revealed this past week, part of a trove of documents previously turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. (Ms. Thomas has openly opposed the committee and called for Republicans who serve on it to be expelled from the House Republican conference.)

A hard-line conservative activist, Ms. Thomas had long been viewed with suspicion by the Republican establishment. Yet her influence had risen during the Trump administration, especially after Mr. Meadows, who like Ms. Thomas has roots in the Tea Party movement,became chief of staff. Now, an examination of her texts, woven together with recent revelations of the depth of her efforts to overturn the election, shows how firmly she was embedded in the conspiratorial fringe of right-wing politics, even as that fringe was drawing ever closer to the center of Republican power....

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/

i forgot ziegler:

an 6 22 raw story

Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.

Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.

Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.

Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.

Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in aninterview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.

In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”

“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”

Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.

For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”

Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.

Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongside Flynn and Byrne.

In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.

“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”

Waldron declined to comment for this story.

Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020,also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.

“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”

While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”

In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.

“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”

Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.

“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go toTomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.

One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.

Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.

In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”

“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”

Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest heviewed Meadows as an obstacleto efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”

Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.

Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.

“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”

Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.

“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”

Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”

Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.

“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”

Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”

no lnx few

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/national-conservative-manifesto-a-plan-for-fascism-but-it-s-not-hypothetical/

'National Conservative' manifesto: A plan for fascism — but it's not hypothetical

[Viktor Orbán in 2014, Wikimedia Commons

Trump endorses strongman Viktor Orbán in Hungarian election: ‘He has my complete support’]

Kathryn Joyce andSalon June 24, 2022

Last November in Orlando, dozens of the right's leading intellectuals, writers and think tank staffers gathered for the first meeting of the National Conservatism conference since the COVID pandemic hit, drawing journalists from across the political spectrum seeking to untangle what this high-brow gathering of avowed nationalists was all about. The emergence of the "NatCon" movement several years earlier had alarmed many liberal, centrist and even mainline conservative observers with its efforts to rehabilitate the concept of nationalism.But it energized many on the right who were starting to describe themselves as "post-liberal," meaning they were no longer satisfied with the conservative marriage of convenience that had existed since at least the Reagan era and had drawn together the religious right, anti-communists and free-marketeers in a potent but sometimes uneasy coalition. That consensus, they declared loudly, was dead, and a new conservative fusion must arise to take its place.

After the disruption of the pandemic, the loss of the presidency and the rage of Jan. 6, last fall's NatCon II conference was focused on the goal of building that new coalition along nationalist and post-liberal lines: blending extreme social conservatism with a skeptical approach to some forms of laissez-faire capitalism and a sharp hostility to both global or international authority and what they see as corporate-driven liberal cultural hegemony.

Now, the movement has formalized its ideas in a new manifesto, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles," released last week by the Edmund Burke Foundation. This ambitious document calls for the creation of a "world of independent nations" as the sole bulwark against "universalist ideologies" that would impose a "homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe." The credited authors include some leading lights of the NatCon world: Israeli political theorist and Burke Foundation chair Yoram Hazony, former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, First Things editor R.R. Reno and American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher.

But the list of signatories is much longer, and also far broader, ranging from right-wing mega-donor Peter Thiel to former Trump administration staffers Mark Meadows and Ken Cuccinelli, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, multiple officials from Hillsdale College — a nerve center of contemporary right-wing politics — and numerous other think tank staffers and writers from across the spectrum of conservative media.

The manifesto hasn't gotten much attention so far — which isn't surprising, considering how much else is happening in the political realm. A column by David von Drehle in the Washington Post declared its contents akin to fascism, and a more substantial fisking in The Bulwark by Cathy Young found it "a document steeped in thinly veiled and sometimes distressingly overt authoritarian ideology." That's not wrong. But it's also worth observing that, in the battle to build a new conservative coalition, much of the NatCon platform has already won.

As Young notes, many of the NatCon's 10 priorities read, at first, like banal restatements of conservative ideology in general: national independence, the rule of law, God and public religion, free enterprise, family and children. But in ways both subtle and unsubtle, those familiar terms don't all mean what you'd think.

The NatCons hope to divorce nationalism from its association with the Nazis, who they claim were not "nationalist" at all.

The first two items, national independence and rejecting globalism and imperialism, follow one of the core, if questionable, goals of the NatCon movement, which is to divorce the concept of nationalism from its most powerful associations, such as the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, which National Conservatives see as imperialist. Instead, NatCons want to attach the term to smaller, scrappier scrappy countries that resisted the Nazis or Soviet Communism.

While the manifesto holds that "Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course," in alignment with its own legal, cultural and religious traditions, it warns against their "transferring" authority to any "transnational or supranational bodies" and advocates opposing "imperialism in its various forms." Those forms include modern-day China and Russia, of course, but also "the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image."

The "liberalism" described here, as in most NatCon contexts, isn't the center-left politics of the Democratic Party, but rather "classical" liberalism, focused on individual rights, free trade and pluralistic cultures, which until recently was embraced by most mainstream conservatives as well. But within the post-liberal and NatCon world, that small-l liberalism contained the seeds of conservatism's undoing, leading inevitably to the big-L liberalism of progressive ideology by creating a culture in which it's too hard to raise children along traditionalist lines. In this view, societies that uphold pluralistic tolerance and diversity are inherently unfair by denying the majority the right to live in a culture that supports their values — in essence, allowing the minority to oppress the majority.

While both Young and von Drehle read the jabs at boomer "imperialism" as allusions to the Iraq War — which is at least partly true — "empire" for NatCons also has a larger meaning. First, they believe that international compacts, accords and governing bodies like the European Union or the UN infringe on national sovereignty, particularly when it comes to social issues. In the movement's conference this March in Brussels, Hazony sought to align the NatCon vision with Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. Vladimir Putin's disdain for borders and national independence, he suggested, mirrored the attitudes of bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington. The obvious subtext was that Hungary and Poland — two post-liberal, overtly nationalist countries greatly admired within the movement — were facing EU sanctions over a variety of human rights issues, which Hungarian and Polish leaders rejected as an attempt to squash the rights of the nation-state, and sympathetic fellow speakers cast as the workings of a new "evil empire."

"Empire," in the NatCon world, refers to the right's long, losing battle in the cultural sphere, these days largely waged against what American conservatives call "woke corporations."

https://www.alternet.org/**2022/05**/trump-administration-meat-industry-covid/

former President Donald Trump's administration colluded with top-level meatpacking industry executives to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in order to drive up prices and downplay the severity of the emergency, according to an exhaustive investigation released on Thursday by the United States House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Representative Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), the House Majority Whip and chairman of the Subcommittee, said in a statement that "the shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated."

The probe began last year and uncovered a spider web of corruption and flagrant disregard for human life involving American corporate titans and individuals in the highest ranks of the federal government.

Officials at the Department of Agriculture – including Secretary Sonny Purdue and Under Secretary for Food Safety Mindy Brashears – "collaborated" with corporate bigwigs to prioritize profits and production over the safety of employees and the public despite being fully aware of the hazards.

"Infections and deaths among workers for five of the largest meatpacking companies—Tyson Foods, Inc. (Tyson), JBS USA Holdings, Inc. (JBS), Smithfield Foods (Smithfield), Cargill, Inc. (Cargill), and National Beef Packing Company LLC (National Beef)—were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers for these companies being infected with the coronavirus andat least 269 dying," the report states.

The powerful cadre also "engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight," it explains.

In one instance, the chief executive officers of the conglomerates told Purdue on a phone call that their workers “should not be entitled to unemployment benefitsif they are otherwise able to work through the pandemic” and cautioned against “creat[ing] an incentive, much less a path, for food industry workers to choose unemployment overproducing food.”

In that same conversation, they "implicitly acknowledged how dangerous plants were, asking for liability protection against lawsuits if workers were infected on the job."

There was also an aggressive campaign to skirt "pesky" local, state, and federal regulations that would have kept workers and their products safe and healthy.

"Companies lobbied the White House to make clear that—despite concerns by state and local health departments—meatpacking companies should not have to address coronavirus risks if it would impact productivity," the investigation revealed.

Alarmingly, the CEOs managed to successfully lobby Trump to draft and sign an executive order in April of 2020 that "would insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments and provide legal protection against lawsuits for worker illnesses and deaths."

The edict led to Trump "invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants 'continue operations.'"

Shortly thereafter, records handed over to the Subcommittee show that "meatpacking industry representatives and companies—Smithfield and Tyson in particular—engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House, including calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White;a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump."

Trump subsequently "held a call with officers of the meatpacking companies who had lobbied for it on the morning the order was issued."

After Trump granted their wish, an effort was undertaken between the administration and the industry to "coordinate closely on messaging concerning the order and its effects, apparently hoping to generate positive press coverage" for the ex-commander in chief.

Worker fatalities, meanwhile, were swept under the rug.

In a particularly egregious example, an outbreak at Foster Farms in Livingston,California that infected "at least" 392 workers and killed eight in August of 2020 prompted the company to "intimidate" the Merced County Department of Public Health from shutting down the plant.

"Foster Farms attempts to obfuscate the death count by labeling fatalities as 'resolutions,'" investigators learned. "MCPH officials told the Select Subcommittee that an unidentified person on the call from either Foster Farms or USDA said these cases could be considered 'toe tag resolutions,' referring to the toe tag that is often put on a corpse at the morgue. MCPH said that Brashears asked this individual to 'stop' and said they would 'talk about this separately.'"

Operations at Foster Farms in Livingston were eventually temporarily suspended on August 31st.

Read the full report here.

reg to vote

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/mark-meadows-three-different-states/

jane m slime machine

A.A.F. describes itself as a champion of transparency, but it declines to reveal the sources of its funding. Its official mailing address is a handsome historic building a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. But when I stopped by there recently, to ask for the group’s basic financial records—which all tax-exempt nonprofits are legally required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the building is occupied by a different nonprofit group: the Conservative Partnership Institute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loyalists in exile. It has become the employer of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and of Trump’s former ad-hoc legal adviser Cleta Mitchell, both of whom are fighting subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Cameron Seward, the general counsel of the Conservative Partnership Institute,appeared in the lobby and assured me that there was no relationship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet documents that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt status, describe the group as existing “in care of” C.P.I. Moreover, C.P.I.’s 2021 annual report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “conservatives didn’t have a group performing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plenty of liberal groups were digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on our side.” The groups have several overlapping directors, including Jones, who sits on both boards.

The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mission is to conduct nonpartisan research, but it is curious that the largest contribution by far to its parent group, C.P.I., is a million-dollar “charitable contribution” from Save America—Trump’s political-action committee. Trump reportedly raised much of the pac’s money from supporters after his 2020 defeat, and his campaign has called the group an “election defense fund.”

Save America made its contribution to C.P.I. a few months after Meadows joined the group. Meadows’s son, Blake, an associate attorney at the Georgia law firm Foster, Foster, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name appears in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Matthew Buckham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also has a Trump connection: he worked at the White House during his Administration, in the personnel office. (His father, Ed Buckham, is chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene.)

It’s a great advantage to be able to treat opposition research as a tax-exempt charitable expense rather than as, say, a campaign cost. On March 21st, Paul Teller, the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as former Vice-President Mike Pence’s political operation, gave a lecture to Christian pastors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just taking it to every Biden-Harris nominee that comes across to Congress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fighting with the Supreme Court nominee Jackson came from our friends at the American Accountability Foundation.” He went on, “We’re partnering, we’re collaborating.” Teller’s group is widely seen as promoting a potential Pence campaign for President in 2024.

When the A.A.F. applied for its tax-exempt status, it portrayed itself, under penalty of perjury, as a nonpartisan charity that would neither participate in political campaigns nor try to influence legislation. As a tax-exempt nonprofit dark-money organization, Jones’s group isn’t required to publicly disclose its donors, so it’s impossible to know all the sources of its funding. Clearly, though, it has big ambitions. In its I.R.S. filing, the A.A.F. submitted revenue projections that predict its budget as six hundred thousand dollars in 2021, a million dollars in 2022, and one and a half million dollars in 2023.

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and Trump critic at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, believes that the A.A.F. is doing “frightening, sleazy stuff” with serious implications. Not only is the group creating needless vacancies in important Administration positions; it is intimidating well-qualified people from wanting to undergo the nomination process. “It’s tough enough to get top-flight people in government,” Ornstein said. “But, if you also have to go through a well-funded, well-oiled slime machine, it’s really an attack on government.

raw story tom b an 4 16 22

According to former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller, nothing better demonstrates that even the “good Republicans” like Sen. Mike Lee (UT) engaged inhare-brained schemes to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 presidential election, than Lee’s text messages leading up to the Jan 6th insurrection.

As Miller notes in his Bulwark column, there has existed a narrative that there were “good” Republicans who were not involved in plotting to keep Trump in the Oval Office no matter what voters decided, and then there were the fanatics who saw no problem with running roughshod over the Constitution.

With CNN reporting that Lee and fellow Republican Rep. Chip Roy (TX) were frantically texting former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows asking for help in disrupting the certification of the vote, Miller suggested that the “insane” wing of the party is deeper than people think.

With Lee and Roy’s texts demonstrating a swing from full-throated support for overturning to becoming appalled by the conspiracy theories and legal reasoning being put forth by former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, Miller wrote that the whole affair was a “clown show.”

“Among the self-appointed responsible Republicans, the story of Trump’s attempted election theft goes something like this: The former president had a few CRAZYpeople around him providing bad advice. Rudy and Lin Wood and Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell and their ilk were egging on a strategy that was never going to work and that nobody was actually on board with,” Miller began. “Meanwhile, the rest of the players were maybe not profiles in courage, but they were trying to do the right thing. Just, you know, behind the scenes. Some were encouraging Trump to be more presidential—to finally do that growing into the office they had promised he would do four years ago now that he had lost.”

“The real story is that the circus was in town and even the supposed ‘good Republicans”’were happy to put on their clown make-up,” he added.

Listing off a series of the texts Lee sent to Meadows, Miller wrote that they are evidence that, “The true story is that ‘good Republican’ Mike Lee and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows were forcing the crazy into the Oval Office at the most combustible time imaginable.”

Noting that Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were openly trying to derail the certification of the 2020 vote, the former RNC official said Lee was just as bad — but doing it covertly

“In the end, Lee might not have voted to overturn the election but he was every bit a part of the coup as Cruz and Hawley and the rest. As it turns out this wasn’t the case of ‘responsible’ people trying to nudge things in the right direction in private,” he wrote before concluding, “It was a case where one posse of clowns was so insane that they were giving away the game. While the ‘responsible’ clowns like Mike Lee did everything in their power to figure out how they could keep the madman in power, without getting Rudy’s hair dye on their face.”

You can read the whole piece here.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/gop-qanon/

Over the last few years, QAnon has slowly infiltrated the Republican Party, replacing its traditional conservative values with far-right conspiratorial theories that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, NY Mag's Jacob Silverman is explaining how QAnon has practically overtaken the Republican Party. While the radicalized beliefs were previously verbalized among factions of the political party, Silverman notes how those beliefs are progressively becoming more mainstream.

"QAnon’s adherents tend to espouse some selection of bizarre beliefs from the conspiracist’s buffet that includes accusations of pedophile politicians eating children, secret political tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, a great bloodletting, and Donald Trump swooping in to free us from evil. One day. Or maybe the day after. The prophecy is flexible, which is why it has evolved and endured."

Explaining the timeline of the political party's downward spiral, Silverman noted how the actions of Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, are an example of the radical shift in Republican values and belief systems.

"The latest exemplar of the GOP’s descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a well-connected conservative activist who recently admitted to attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C.," he writes. "Ginni’s right-wing beliefs have long been known, but leaked texts between her and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed Thomas’ commitment to overturning the election, based on an apparently sincere belief that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency. She encouraged Meadows to help put a stop to Democratic perfidy. 'The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,' went one message to Meadows, encouraging him to stand strong."

Silverman is also highlighting Republican lawmakers' latest actions that signal the party's shift toward more extremist beliefs.

"The signs of the Republican slide towardfull epistemic crackup are all around us," Silverman writes. "One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the 'why do you want to hurt children?'-type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers 'grooming' children on Fox News. The ginned-up moral panic, centered around the child exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-march-11-2022/

3/11 covid profiteer bk nichols

trump was going to do mask mandate but MM stopped b/c it was off freedom brand

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/mark-meadows/

voter fraud

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/mark-meadows-wife-may-have-filed-3-false-voter-claims-in-2020-report/

me not thee voter suppr

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/washington-post-editorial-mark-meadows/

an 222

reason for 180 on 1/6 cooperation? other 5 or 10K? trms

trump PAC transferred $1 million to a Mark Meadows nonprofit as House coup probe got underway

Daily Kos Staff February 02, 2022

nBC News is reporting that, only weeks after the formation of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, Donald Trump's "Save America" PAC donated a whopping $1 million to a conservative training "institute" headed in part by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows—a man who was intimately involved with multiple parts of Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election. What makes the donation especially conspicuous is that it's orders of magnitude above the Trump PAC's usual gifts.

The Trump PAC distributed a total of $1.35 million in the last half of 2021, reports NBC News. And that single $1 million donation to Meadows' group accounted for the lion's share of it.

It should be immediately clarified that this is not Donald Trump's own money. Trump's fascist-premised "Save America" fundraisers have been sucking the money out of Trump supporters' pockets just as every other Trump grift has, providing a means for Trump to give financial rewards to party allies without having to write any of the checks himself.

And Donald Trump is not known for writing checks himself. It is said that the reason Trump's fingers are so short is that whenever anyone comes to him asking him to write a check, the man bites his own fingers off so that nobody can make him pick up the pen. After the unpleasant visitor goes away, a team of surgeons reattaches each finger—always with a bit of loss, shrinking each digit by a few millimeters or so—and the cycle repeats. Or something. It is only a rumor I heard.

Trump's sudden shove of $1 million to Meadows is notable for its large size, even as the rest of his PAC spends its days trickling out money only a few thousand dollars at a time, but also because it has been clear from the beginning thatMark Meadows knows more about the Trump White House's attempts at self-coup than perhaps any other person, Trump included.Meadows participated in the call to Georgia election officialsin which Trump asked them to "find" enough Trump votes to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the state. Meadows was involved in discussions about taking pseudo-military action to erase or "redo" the election. Meadows was involved in Trump's efforts to gather a crowd of his most rabid public supporters and set them loose to "march" to the U.S. Capitol at the precise day and hour that a joint session of Congress would oversee the final constitutional acknowledgement of his loss.

Mark Meadows is, in other words, up to his ex-House-Republican eyebrows in a multipronged plan to overthrow the United States government, and Trump throwing a million bucks his way just after it became clear that House Republicans had not been able to halt the investigation of Jan. 6 and that Congress would be making an effort to haul Meadows' aiding and abetting ass into a hearing room, a donation absurdly out of scope of what the Trump PAC was doing before and since, can certainly be taken as a distribution of hush money.

And that might be an untoward accusation to make if Donald Trump had not already been caught red-handed handing out similar "hush money" in the past. And it's difficult to find examples of Trump spending money anywhere, at any time, that hasn't been directly linked to what the recipient has personally done for or said about Trump. We can be sure that Trump's PAC did not throw $1 million at Mark Meadows because Donald Trump—sincerely and urgently—believes in the "Conservative Partnership Institute" goal of training new conservative staffers for future generations. Donald Trump doesn't give a flying damn about anything that does not provide immediate and tangible benefit to Donald Trump.

So sure, maybe it's hush money. Maybe it's witness tampering with a big ol' check attached. One way to determine what the money is for is to watch how Meadows' group spends it. If it turns out the "institute" is suddenly spending $1 million or so on unexplained legal fees, as Meadows' own battles with the Jan. 6 committee heat up, well then golly gee won't that be something.

But it ain't gonna be spent on anything that Donald Trump did not personally want it spent on.

12 21

...We have received exceptionally interesting and important documents from a number of witnesses, including Mark Meadows. He has turned over many texts from his private cell phone from January 6th.

"We have litigated and won Trump’s executive privilege case in Federal District Court. The Federal Appellate Court has expedited the appeal, and we anticipate a ruling regarding many more Trump White House documents soon. [As indeed happened moments later.]

"The investigation is firing on all cylinders.

"Do not be misled: President Trump is trying to hide what happened on January 6th and to delay and obstruct. We will not let that happen. The truth will come out."

New details about Meadows' actions during the Capitol riots have also been reported by CNN. According to an inside source, Meadows provided the House Select Committee with records of his text messages and emails that suggest he was "exchanging with a wide range of individuals while the attack was underway,"

The inside source also noted that although Meadows is now refusing to communicate with investigators, the records he provided “offer a window into what people were texting to Meadows on January 6, what he was telling them about Trump in real time, and what the former President was doing for those hours while the Capitol was under attack and rioters were chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence."

Other sources have also explained how critical Meadows' text messages may be to the investigation.

Per CNN:

"In a letter sent to Meadows' attorney on Wednesday, the committee hinted at the content of the texts it has received from Trump's former chief of staff. The letter noted Meadows provided the committee with "text messages about the need for the former President to issue a public statement that could have stopped the January 6th attack on the Capitol."

The source familiar with the communications tells CNN the texts may not reflect well on the former president.

The investigation into the U.S. Capitol insurrection will likely be ongoing.

flip flops on coop, bunch taking 5th now but...

12 21 an

two days before the January 6 insurrection several Republican U.S. Senators and Representatives were briefed on a 38-page coup PowerPoint memo. That document is being described as a roadmap for then-President Donald Trump to declare a national security emergency, invalidate all electronic votes, and move to have himself declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

It does not appear that any of the Republican lawmakers alerted the public to the in-process coup attempt. It is not known if they alerted the Dept. of Justice, FBI, or other law enforcement agency.

The Guardian GUK revealed late Friday night that the 38-page coup PowerPoint "was presented on 4 January to a number of Republican senators and members of Congress." Those GOP lawmakers have not been publicly named.

Then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows turned the coup memo over to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, claiming it had been emailed to him but not implemented.

But the document itself calls for the lawmakers to be briefed.

"Senators and members of Congress should first be briefed about foreign interference, the PowerPoint said, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency, declare all electronic voting invalid, and ask Congress to agree on a constitutionally acceptable remedy," The Guardian, which saw a version of the memo, added.

The New York Times, also on Friday, added that the coup PowerPoint "included a claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states," which is false.

Larry Sabato, the highly-respected Director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics said on Twitter the 38-page document was "COMPLETE HORSESHIT."...

no lnx

Republican Paul Gosar told Jan. 6 rioters they'd get a blanket pardon from Trump: report

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona speaking at the 2018 Arizona Manufacturing Summit, hosted by the Arizona Manufacturing Council and the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry at the Renaissance Downtown Hotel in Phoenix, Gage Skidmore.

Sarah K. Burris and Raw Story October 25, 2021

Rolling Stone is reporting that a pair of witnesses have spoken to the House Jan. 6 Select Committee revealing that Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) told them President Donald Trump would issue a blanket pardon for some who attacked the U.S. Capitol that day.

According to the report, some of the planners of the rally are communicating with the investigators and the committee.

"Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump's efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent," said the report, saying that it confirmed the account from a third person.

It's the first time that Americans have heard about a member of Congress being officially tied to the events that unfolded that day.

"While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope," said the report. Both of the sources said that there were several members of Congress who participated in planning calls, but Gosar, in particular, was named for making blanket promises that couldn't be kept.

Gosar participated in a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on May 12, 2021, that focused on the Capitol attack and unanswered questions.

"And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further," said the report. "Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a 'blanket pardon' in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests."

"Our impression was that it was a done deal," the organizer told Rolling Stone, "that he'd spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support."

They noted that Gosar made the promise "several" times.

"I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you've been doing," Gosar told those on the call.

"I would have done it either way with or without the pardon," the organizer explained. "I do truly believe in this country, but to use something like that and put that out on the table when someone is so desperate, it's really not good business."

The report said that it has "documentary evidence" to prove what the three sources claimed.

Trump campaign aide Katrina Pierson has also been called a "liaison" between the insurrectionists and the White House and Mark Meadows was also named as a key part of the organizing.

Read the full report from Rolling Stone.

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