Two different Donald Trump criminal investigations are skipping over Mark Meadows and going after everyone else. Why?
For all the pundit chatter about the DOJ supposedly doing “nothing,” and there supposedly being no indication that the DOJ is investigating Donald Trump, real world story paints a very different picture. The DOJ has carried out search and seizure warrants against top Trump henchmen Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, and has also indicted top Trump operatives Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress.
But among those who keep insisting the DOJ is doing “nothing,” their loudest argument is that the DOJ announced it was declining to indict Mark Meadows for contempt of Congress. People who are unfamiliar with how these kinds of probes (and the pundits who pander to their angst) seem to be under the impression that this means Meadows is off the legal hook, and that he’s “gotten away with it all.”
These folks keep insisting that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is doing “all the work” while Merrick Garland and the DOJ sit on their hands But now there’s a twist which helps to highlight just how absurd these folks are for bashing the DOJ based solely for not having indicted Mark Meadows.
Several days ago the Fulton County DA sent material witness grand jury subpoenas to every Trump associate outside of Georgia who was involved in Trump’s Georgia election tampering plot. Now, today, the DA has sent criminal target letters to a number of Trump associates who are in Georgia.
At this point the Fulton County DA has pinged everyone involved in Donald Trump’s Georgia election plot… except Mark Meadows. So now we have two different prosecutorial entities, the DOJ and the Fulton County DA, each criminally pursuing a broad criminal plot led by Trump and partly carried out by Meadows, and yet from all outside appearances, they’re both declining to touch Meadows even while going after everyone else.
Meadows arguably has the most serious criminal exposure of anyone in either of these two scandals. So why is he still untouched? Two opposite explanations come to mind: 1) Meadows’ crimes are so severe, the DOJ and the DA both see him as a top level target to be indicted alongside Trump, so they’re saving him for later, after other they’ve flipped other witnesses against Trump and Meadows. 2) Meadows has flipped and is cooperating with both prosecutors. Take your pick. Both explanations seem to fit the available facts.
Keep in mind that as Cassidy Hutchinson’s second time (out of four) testifying behind closed doors to the January 6th Committee, Meadows was tampering with her, meaning he couldn’t have flipped by then. But did Meadows flip after Hutchinson exposed his tampering? Getting caught committing that kind of process crime, which makes for an easier conviction than something like seditious conspiracy, is often what causes people to conclude that they’re not going to avoid prison and that they should go ahead and flip.
So if Mark Meadows has flipped, how will we know? We won’t, at least for awhile. The Fulton County DA would have little or no reason to announce such a deal this soon, and this DOJ doesn’t like announcing anything it’s doing. We might not learn of a Meadows cooperation deal until it shows up in the text of an indictment against someone else.
On the other side of it, if Meadows has not flipped and is indeed a top criminal target in these two probes, how will we know? If news reporting surfaces that the DA has indeed subpoenaed Meadows or sent him a target letter, this would at the least mean he doesn’t have a deal in place with the DA.
Short of that, we’re still in the dark. But at this point it’s impossible to believe that even as these two different prosecutorial entities have plowed forward, they’ve both decided to let Mark Meadows off the hook just for the heck of, even though his fingerprints are all over the criminal plots being investigated. If Meadows hasn’t flipped, or doesn’t flip, he’s going down hard.
