“Please check your signal”

| 9:00 pm EST December 15, 2021
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The select committee investigating the January 6th insurrection is really picking up momentum with this week’s referral of Mark Meadows to the DOJ for criminal contempt charges. Meadows’ nonsensical claim of blanket executive privilege does not excuse him from appearing to answer questions about the documents he voluntarily handed over to the committee, or about conversations he had with the planners of the January 6th riot. And it certainly does not protect him from answering questions about the events he freely describes in his book.

In advance of the contempt vote, committee members revealed a swath of damning text messages sent to and from Trump’s former chief of staff. These messages strip bare the lies pouring forth from certain Fox entertainers, desperate to whitewash the events of that horrible day. And in a brilliant act of psychological warfare, the committee released messages from several as-yet-unidentified lawmakers whose names they promise to reveal in the near future. (I fully expect these lawmakers to reveal themselves through their own acts of desperation.)

But one text stands out from the rest. “Please check your signal” was the message to Meadows on January 5th, sent by an as-yet unspecified member of congress. Signal is an encrypted messaging app, and the existence of undisclosed encrypted messages is problematic for Mr. Meadows on several fronts. First, it may verify that Meadows and others were circumventing federal laws by shielding their on-the-job communications from the government record.

More directly, it undermines Meadows’ claims that he has been attempting to cooperate with the committee “in good faith.” If these Signal messages were not properly preserved, and if they were not handed over to the committee, then Meadows has been caught red-handed obstructing congress and violating federal law.

The metaphorical goose is cooked even before investigators see what is in those missing Signal messages.