January 6th Committee confirms Mark Meadows gave up valuable January 6th evidence before flip flopping
Mark Meadows is a deer in the headlights who has no idea what he’s even trying to do, so he keeps meekly flip flopping in real time. When he decided to cooperate with the January 6th Committee at the last second before they were going to ring him up for contempt, he reportedly began giving them documents. At the time we hypothesized that these documents must have been valuable, or else the committee wouldn’t have taken his offer of cooperation seriously and would have instead immediately rung him up.
Yesterday Meadows flip flopped again, deciding that he’s now done cooperating with the committee. Accordingly, the committee is now going through the formalities of ringing him up. It’s ordered him to appear and testify today, so when he doesn’t do it, it can make a criminal referral to the DOJ for failure to appear. Meadows will end up indicted, arrested, and imprisoned. In the meantime, it turns out he did indeed give up valuable documents just to buy himself a bit of time while he was flip flopping.
The January 6th Committee has announced that Mark Meadows turned over “real-time communications with many individuals as the events of January 6th unfolded.” In other words, Meadows really did give up valuable evidence that’s going to help the committee piece together what really happened and take people down. And Meadows was dumb enough to give up this evidence while getting nothing in return, and he’s still getting indicted for contempt.
If Mark Meadows’ strategy was to not cooperate at this time, he could have sat on this evidence in case he needed to trade it later as part of a plea deal. But because he couldn’t make up his mind what path he wanted to take, and kept flip flopping in real time, he’s made the committee’s life easier while making his own life harder. There’s no strategy here from Trump’s increasingly desperate underlings, just desperation and a lack of viable options.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report