Down goes Mark Meadows
When Mark Meadows gave up a safe seat and decent career trajectory in the House, just to become Donald Trump’s final White House Chief of Staff, it was clear that Meadows wasn’t the brightest and was on a path to self destruction. Trump’s failing presidency was going to end badly for him, and those around him were going to take the brunt of it.
Sure enough, Meadows is now proving that he is indeed a special kind of stupid. The January 6th Committee is confirming that during his very brief period of cooperation, he gave the committee electronic evidence of real time communications from January 6th. Yet because he then abruptly broke off his cooperation, the committee has announced that it’s decided to ring him up for contempt anyway.
Meadows will be indicted by the DOJ for contempt, arrested, put on trial, and very likely convicted and sent to prison. This is before getting to the open question of whether the DOJ will also charge him for underlying 2020 election-related crimes. It’s also in addition to the fact that the Fulton County Georgia District Attorney is reportedly targeting Meadows for election tampering and has taken things to the grand jury stage.
Mark Meadows is going to prison. The only question is whether it’s for a short time or a long time, depending on what if any charges he ends up facing beyond contempt. It’s a stunning fall for a guy who could have simply kept his House seat forever, continued climbing the seniority ladder, and would never have ended up anywhere near prison.
No one should have been surprised that when the January 6th Committee came calling, the habitually self destructive Steve Bannon was the first to manage to get himself arrested as a result. Bannon has never met a situation he couldn’t spin into a loss for himself. But Mark Meadows was supposed to be more measured than that, and yet he’s going down almost as quickly as Bannon. Then again, the new rule is that everyone Trump touches gets indicted. No one has a good way out of this mess. They’re each just choosing their own path to failure.
