Mark Meadows is cooperating with the DOJ against Donald Trump
Mark Meadows is cooperating with the DOJ in its January 6th probe against Donald Trump, according to a strangely worded new CNN article whose source is perhaps Meadows himself. In any case, this might be the worst news for Trump yet. Meadows knows more about Trump’s crimes than anybody.
This is a weird sentence from the CNN article : “Meadows turned over the same materials he provided to the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, one source said, meeting the obligations of the Justice Department subpoena.”
So the DOJ only subpoenaed Meadows for what he had already given to the House? Meadows gave a ton of evidence to the January 6th Committee, but the committee made very clear that it did not meet the requirements of that subpoena. The DOJ seemingly would have asked Meadows for all relevant evidence, not just the specific evidence he gave the House.
Then there’s this weird passage from CNN: “It’s not yet clear whether the Justice Department will seek more materials from Meadows as part of the ongoing criminal investigation, which could lead to a legal fight over executive privilege.”
So the source for the CNN article is, what, publicly warning the DOJ that it won’t get anything more out of Meadows without a fight? Could the source possibly be anyone other than Meadows himself, trying to publicly play both sides?
Meadows has a history of partially cooperating against Trump, so he can keep himself out of prison while telling himself he’s still remaining loyal to Trump. So there’s reason to suspect he could be doing the same here.
There’s also the question of when this cooperation happened. Yesterday? Last month? This CNN article
But regardless of whether Meadows has fully complied with the DOJ subpoena, the fact that he’s given the the DOJ as much as he gave the House is still very bad news for Trump. It renders moot the question of whether the House is sharing everything with the DOJ. And perhaps more importantly, it makes 100% clear that the DOJ is in the process of criminally indicting Trump for his January 6th-related crimes, or it wouldn’t have subpoenaed Meadows.
This news has surfaced in the kind of weirdly worded manner which suggests that it’s not an entirely accurate representation of what’s going on, and is instead merely one side’s version of the story. Whenever that kind of thing happens, it often prompts the other side to seek to set the record straight. If Meadows’s cooperation has failed to satisfy the DOJ’s subpoena, we could see a rare instance of the DOJ giving the media the real story in the next day or two. But again, even if Meadows has only mostly cooperated with the DOJ’s Trump 1/6 probe, it’s the worst news for Trump yet, because it means Trump is being indicted on federal criminal charges across the board.
