Meadows, 62, had taken the job as chief of staff on the principle that his most important task would be “to tell the most powerful man in the world when you believed he was wrong,” he wrote in his memoir, “The Chief’s Chief.”
But instead of echoing the administration’s own Justice Department to tell Trump that his claims of a stolen election were wrong, Meadows went to extraordinary lengths to push Trump’s false assertions — particularly during a crucial three-week period starting with his trip to Atlanta and culminating in the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
A review of Meadows’s actions in that period by The Washington Post — based on interviews, depositions, text messages, emails, congressional documents, recently published memoirs by key players and other material — show Meadows played a pivotal role in advancing Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. In doing so, Meadows “repeatedly violated” legal guidance against trying to influence the Justice Department, according to a majority staff report of theSenate Judiciary Committee.
Meadows granted those peddling theories about a stolen election direct access to the Oval Office and personally connected some with the president, according to congressional reports and interviews with former White House officials. He pressedthe Justice Department to investigate spurious and debunked claims, including a bizarre theory that an Italian operation changed votes in the United States — an allegation a top Justice official called “pure insanity,” according to email correspondence released by congressional investigators. He also pushed the Justice Department, unsuccessfully, to try to invalidate the election results in six states through federal court action.
The article goes on to document many of Meadows’s misdeeds and how they are at the center of the ongoing congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection. As the article explains, perhaps most notable, was how, as former Trump Attorney General William Barr wrote in his memoirs, Meadows neglected his duty to speak the truth to Trump and instead, acted “like a lion tamer without a whip and chair.”
Whether he was conspiring with conspiracy kooks, or wrongfully pressing officials in Georgia, the Justice Department or Vice President Mike Pence, Meadows repeatedly and dangerously abetted Trump’s delusions and unconstitutional actions about the election.
Perhaps most damning might be the article’s account of January 6 itself. While we have evidence that multiple right-wing politicians and pundits texted him asking him to get Trump to call off the rioters, Meadows has thus far refused to disclose what he did that afternoon. As the article notes:
An organizer of the Save America rally texted Meadows that things “have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction. Please,” according to the Jan. 6 committee report, which does not say how Meadows replied.
Meadows was with Trump much of that afternoon, according to depositions given to the Jan. 6 committee, but Meadows’s response during much of this crucial time has not been publicly revealed. At 4:17 p.m. Trump put out a video in which he told rioters to go home and continued to claim the election was stolen.
…Meadows did not write in his memoir about what he did during the storming of the Capitol, what he told Trump during the insurrection, or any other actions during one of the most tumultuous afternoons experienced by any White House chief of staff in recent history.
Earlier this year, Meadows returned to Georgia at an event with Republicans.
He told the audience that he had just talked to Trump, who told him to convey a message: “We cannot give up on election integrity.”
Click here to read the entire Post article.
