What did Donald Trump Jr. know and when did he know it?
Just how incriminating are Donald Trump Jr.’s November 2020 text messages to Mark Meadows? Trump Jr.’s lawyers are already saying it’s “likely” that Trump Jr. may have received the texts from someone else and merely forwarded them to Meadows, which is the kind of reasonable doubt defense you try when you fear your client will end up needing one at trial. Even as Junior tries that defense on for size, what stands out is when he sent these texts.
According to CNN, which first broke the story, Donald Trump Jr. sent the text messages to Mark Meadows on November 5th, two days after the 2020 election. This was a day after major news outlets called Wisconsin and Michigan for Biden, but it was two days before major news outlets called Pennsylvania for Biden. At that point the Trump campaign was still publicly insisting it was going to win the election, and no major news outlet had yet declared Biden the winner of the election.
Yet even though the election was still two days from being called, Donald Trump Jr.’s text messages (which you can read here) give off the distinct impression that he expected to lose. Junior was already talking about using alternate slates of “Trump electors” in swing states, which would only be necessary if Junior was expecting Pennsylvania to declare Biden the winner. So the big question is this: was Junior basing this expectation on his own intuition, or was he basing this on discussions he had with Donald Trump and/or the Trump campaign?
If Donald Trump and/or his campaign told Donald Trump Jr. that they were going to lose based on internal data, then it would mean that Trump Jr. sent these texts in an overt attempt at overturning an election that he knew his father had lost. It would also mean that Trump and his campaign took the actions that they took in an overt attempt at overturning an election they knew they’d lost. This speaks to intent. They’re far more likely to get indicted and convicted if they took these actions knowing they had lost, than if they took these actions under the mistaken belief that they were actually winning.
There is also the separate question of who forwarded these text messages to Donald Trump Jr (if indeed anyone did), and whether that person knew that Trump was going to lose. It’s a bit surprising that Trump Jr.’s lawyers are claiming it “likely” came from someone else, given that investigators can obtain (and probably already have obtained) Trump Jr.’s text message history in order to determine who if anyone forwarded these messages to him before he sent them to Meadows. We wonder if that story will change once they realize this.
In any case, given that the DOJ has spent months having a January 6th grand jury subpoenaing Trump world figures for all communications with any members of the Trump administration who may have plotted to obstruct the election certification, and these texts reveal that Donald Trump Jr. sent such a plot to the Trump White House Chief of Staff, it’s impossible to imagine that this grand jury isn’t investigating these Trump Jr. text messages. The key questions are who gave this fake elector plot to Trump Jr. and what Trump Jr. had been told by the Trump campaign at that point. In other words, what did Trump Jr. know and when did he know it?
