Looks like Mark Meadows is finally testifying against Donald Trump to the DOJ grand jury
A federal judge has now ordered Mark Meadows to immediately testify against Donald Trump to the grand jury. It took the DOJ a very long time to build the kind of overwhelming case to convince the courts to override executive privilege and force this testimony. But now we’re here.
Trump can still try to appeal this. But we just saw that when Trump tried to appeal Evan Corcoran’s testimony, it bought him less than a week. Trump doesn’t have some magic wand for delaying or stalling things to his liking. He never did.
If the DOJ had charged Trump for 1/6 awhile back, like everyone was demanding, it would have had to go into trial without the testimony of inside witnesses like Meadows, which would have meant a likely acquittal.
What outsiders interpreted as the DOJ dragging its feet, being cowardly, or doing nothing, was actually the DOJ painstakingly piecing together the entire rest of what happened so that the courts would order Meadows to testify – and so that Meadows can’t get away with just lying.
What’s really interesting here is that the courts cannot order people to testify against themselves, only against others. As far as anyone can tell, Meadows has huge 1/6 criminal liability of his own. So how is it that the courts are ordering him to testify about 1/6?
It’s possible that the DOJ is giving Meadows some degree of immunity. It’s possible they already have a cooperation deal. It’s also possible the DOJ has found a way to have Meadows testify about Trump’s crimes in a specific narrow way that doesn’t incriminate Meadows. We don’t know which of these it is. But given the judge’s order today, the DOJ has clearly squared these details away.
Even if Meadows gets on the stand and tries to invoke the Fifth over crimes that he and Trump committed together, the DOJ can give him immunity on the spot. Then he has to testify, and if he doesn’t, the courts immediately haul him off to jail for contempt of court.
And again, Meadows can’t just lie on the stand, because by now the DOJ has pieced together enough of the story from other witnesses and evidence, such that they’d be able to nail Meadows for perjury for any lie he’d try to tell.
So now we wait to see if Trump appeals this court order to try to delay Meadows’ testimony. And if so, we’ll see how many days that buys Trump. But at this point his appeals are only buying him days. It’s how you know the whole thing is closing in on him.
And if you’re still skeptical that Meadows will indeed testify against Trump, think about how skeptical you were just a week ago about the idea that Trump’s Corcoran would ever testify against Trump – and that happened this morning.
