Nice try, Mark Meadows!

| 6:18 pm EDT August 15, 2023
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Mark Meadows is filing to move his Fulton County indictment to federal court. Donald Trump and others may end up making similar filings. But this will have zero chance of being granted, and it won’t delay their trial dates by a single day. This isn’t a strategy, it’s a desperation move. It’s not a story.

This isn’t me being “optimistic.” It’s just how these things work. Trump already filed to have his Manhattan trial moved to federal court, and that request was laughed out of court as well – and it didn’t delay his Manhattan trial date by a single day.

So why even bother with these kinds of hopeless desperation filings? The lawyers have to do something to convince their client they’re trying. And the client is desperate enough to try delusional ideas for saving themselves, because there are no realistic ideas on the table.

Someone asked if this might mean that Meadows does have a deal at the federal level, and he’s hoping to move these charges to the federal level so they’ll be lumped into his deal. It’s possible. But even if so, it won’t work. You can’t get charges moved to a different jurisdiction just because you want them moved. You’d need a legal basis, and there is none.

Someone else asked if it’s possible Meadows is cooperating in Fulton County, and he was indicted as some kind of smokescreen. Maybe. But these “clever” explanations always have far less chance of being true than the obvious explanation, which is that he’s just an idiot. And if Meadows is secretly cooperating with Fani Willis, why would he now be asking to have the indictment against him taken away from Fani Willis? So it kind of rules that out.

All along Mark Meadows’ moves have been a seemingly incoherent attempt at splitting the difference between cooperating and not cooperating with prosecutors, and we’ve all wondered if he was three steps ahead of us or he was just being stupid. The fact that he ended up criminally indicted tells us that all along he was just being stupid.