Here’s the thing about Mark Meadows’ testimony against Donald Trump
This past Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals cleared the way for a number of Trump White House aides to testify to the DOJ grand jury against Donald Trump. To give you an idea of how crucial this ruling is, and how eager the DOJ was to jump on it, one major news outlet reported that the DOJ put one of those witnesses – Ken Cuccinelli – on the stand that same day.
But one of these people is Mark Meadows. And here’s the thing about that. The Fifth Amendment protects you from incriminating yourself, but not others. So you have to testify about crimes that you witnessed, but not about crimes that you participated in. If your roommate came home with a bag of cash and told you he robbed a bank, you have to testify about it. If you and your roommate robbed a bank together, you don’t have to testify about it, because to incriminate your roommate would be to incriminate yourself.
This is all well established under the law. No court would order you to testify to a regular grand jury about your own alleged crimes. Yet the courts have indeed ordered Mark Meadows, who by all accounts was a key criminal co-conspirator in Donald Trump’s 2020 election plot, to testify against Trump.
There is, obviously, a missing piece here that we don’t know about. If Meadows is a DOJ criminal target, and he’s planning to just plead the Fifth in response to essentially every question anyway, why would the DOJ have fought so hard to get the courts to order him to testify? The DOJ clearly has an expectation that Meadows will give Trump up on the stand. But why?
We still don’t know if Mark Meadows has a cooperation deal in place with the DOJ, or if he’s still a criminal target but the DOJ is giving him limited immunity with regard to specific things that he and Trump plotted together, or something else along these lines. But something has transpired that’s allowing Meadows to give meaningful grand jury testimony against Trump.
It’s a good reminder of just how much we still don’t know about what all has been going on behind the scenes in the DOJ’s sprawling multilayered criminal case against Donald Trump. Even as we’re nearing the finish line, we’re still mostly limited to what we can glean from court filings and court rulings and such. Mark Meadows is days away from giving some of the most important grand jury testimony in American history, and those of us on the outside still don’t even know if he’s a cooperator or a target. To paraphrase The West Wing, the total tonnage of what the DOJ knows about this case, that we don’t know, could stun a team of oxen in its tracks. But it’ll all come out when Trump’s indictment finally drops.
