The DOJ’s bigger plans for Mark Meadows

| 9:09 am EDT April 26, 2022
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When the DOJ promptly indicted Steve Bannon for contempt but then didn’t promptly indict Mark Meadows for contempt, we took it as a sign that there had to be more going on behind the scenes. Given the evidence that’s been gradually surfacing against Meadows for months, it’s seemed obvious that the DOJ has been building a much broader criminal case against him. Now it turns out we’re not the only ones who see it that way.

On Friday night the January 6th Committee made a court filing against Meadows which included numerous incriminating text messages that he exchanged with various House Republicans ahead of the Capitol attack. Then over the weekend CNN published even more Meadows text messages, establishing him as the central figure in the Trump-GOP plot to overthrow the election.

On the Nicolle Wallace show on MSNBC yesterday, legal expert Harry Litman pointed out that Mark Meadows is “up to his eyebrows in two potential serious federal crimes that give a lot of [prison] time.” In response to this, legal expert Laurence Tribe tweeted that “There’s a decent chance that DOJ’s seeming hesitation to indict Meadows on a misdemeanor charge of contempt of Congress means that it has much bigger plans for him.”

We continue to believe that there are two plausible explanations for why the DOJ has been holding off on indicting Mark Meadows for contempt. The first would be that it doesn’t want Meadows to be able to do what Bannon is currently doing, which is using the court hearings in his contempt case to try to uncover what all else the DOJ is in the process of doing to him. The second would be that Meadows has already cut a deal with the DOJ against Trump and others.

We’ll see what ends up happening. The Garland DOJ has managed to operate with extreme secrecy. It managed to build complete criminal cases against the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders, without anyone knowing it was even happening, right up until the minute they were arrested. The DOJ also managed to put a career prosecutor in charge of a January 6th criminal probe into Trump world, and no one knew about it until months after he’d empaneled a grand jury.

So it’s totally reasonable to suspect that the DOJ has either been building a massive criminal case against Mark Meadows that no one knows about, or that the DOJ has been working with Meadows in a way that no one knows about. Take your pick. But now even skeptical legal experts are beginning to conclude that the DOJ has something going on with Meadows that’s far bigger than the contempt charge, and that’s why the contempt charge hasn’t been brought yet.