So that was fast
When the January 6th Committee revealed incriminating text messages between Mark Meadows and an unnamed Republican member of Congress during the Meadows contempt hearing, we pointed out why the person’s name was being omitted. Better to let that person squirm, even as other Republicans in Congress rushed to announce that it wasn’t them. As the person’s identity became more clear through process of elimination, that person would likely end up confessing, in an effort to spin the whole thing.
Sure enough, that’s now happened. Right wing outlet The Federalist is now claiming that Adam Schiff and the January 6th Committee “doctored” the text message in question, due to an inadvertent period placed at the end of the graphic that displayed the text message. Oh come on, that doesn’t count as being “doctored.”
The real story here is that The Federalist is outing Jim Jordan as the author of the text message in question. Let’s be clear here: a right wing rag like The Federalist would not be outing a right wing politician like Jim Jordan unless it was doing so with Jordan’s blessing and cooperation. In other words, Jordan gave his own text message to The Federalist so it could run the misleading story about it having been “doctored.”
So just as we were expecting, the person behind the text message has indeed outed himself in an attempt at putting his own spin on it. Jim Jordan may think this works in his favor. But no one outside his own extremist base is going to believe the nonsense about his text message being “doctored.”
In reality, this is all about how average Americans in the middle are going to see things. And in that sense, the January 6th Committee doesn’t have to worry about looking partisan by outing Jim Jordan as being the author of the text message, because he just outed himself. Now the committee gets to frame things in terms of “Jim Jordan admits he was the author of this text message to Mark Meadows.”
It’s more important than ever to understand how these kinds of probes work. The January 6th Committee laid a trap for Jim Jordan, and because he’s an idiot, he eagerly jumped right into the trap. Now the committee has the upper hand in terms of Jordan having confessed, and it’ll have an easier time convincing average Americans that its upcoming subpoena of Jordan is justified. And given how much of an idiot Jordan is, it’ll be fascinating to see how quickly he manages to put himself on the losing end of the cooperation / contempt balancing act he’s about to face.
