It’s all coming out now
Some political analysis is obvious. For instance when the news surfaced that Special Counsel Jack Smith had subpoenaed Brad Raffensperger for his communications with Donald Trump, Palmer Report interpreted it as confirmation that Smith isn’t running just two DOJ probes into Trump, he’s running at least three. MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell then opened his show by making the exact same observation. Like I said, that one was obvious. As simple as counting to three. Then there’s the political analysis that’s trickier.
For instance, we’ve all watched Smith spend the past week subpoenaing the communications that Raffensperger and the communications that election officials in at least five other states had with Donald Trump regarding the 2020 election results. Smith is pretty obviously looking to use these communications to indict Trump on charges along the lines of election fraud. No big surprise there. But even as Smith has been subpoenaing these kinds of communications, a trove of similarly themed communications are suddenly leaking to the media.
To be clear, these communications surfacing in the media are generally text messages between Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and various Republican figures, who were discussing potential ways to overthrow the 2020 election results. These communications have the same theme, but have entirely different participants than the communications being subpoenaed by Jack Smith. So what’s this even about?
Kudos to Talking Points Memo for obtaining and publishing the text messages in question. But inside information doesn’t get picked up by the wind and randomly land on a reporter’s desk. There usually has to be someone on the inside who makes the decision to leak this kind of thing to the media, and it typically happens for a specific reason.
Given that TPM is identifying these Meadows texts as having already been turned over to the January 6th Committee, it suggests that this leak is the committee’s way of starting to lay the groundwork for the final bombshells it’s about to produce. The committee is reportedly announcing decisions next week about criminal referrals, and is looking at releasing every last bit of the evidence it’s obtained, to make sure none of it can ever get buried. Perhaps the committee is already getting the jump on that process, to help steer the media toward the topic before it releases its full trove.
In any case, it’s all coming out now, isn’t it? We’re going to see more and more of this kind of thing – not just in the coming months, but in the coming weeks and days. There are a whole lot of Trump investigations reaching their climaxes at right around the same time – so much so that the DOJ put a Special Counsel in charge of all of its Trump investigations – and the 1/6 committee now appears to be making its endgame moves. In that sense, let the games begin.
