Inside Mark Meadows’s final push to keep Trump in power
The former congressman played a key role in Trump’s effort to overturn the election, according to his texts, congressional investigations and interviews
By Michael Kranish
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Behind closed doors in a civic center outside Atlanta, state officials were scouring thousands of mail-in ballots on Dec. 22, 2020, when an unexpected visitor showed up: Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.
Joe Biden had won the electoral college one week earlier, but Meadows’s boss was still baselessly claiming he’d been robbed — and pointing specifically at Georgia.
After Georgia’s deputy secretary of state blocked Meadows from entering the room where officials were matching voter signatures, Meadows struck up a conversation with her office’s chief investigator, Frances Watson, and got her phone number. To Watson’s shock, the next day Trump called.
“Mark asked me to do it, he thinks you’re great,” Trump said, while falsely claiming he had won Georgia “by hundreds of thousands of votes.” Trump, according to audio of the call, added, “Whatever you can do Frances, it’s a great thing, an important thing for the country.”
As he hung up, Trump said, “Mark appreciates it.”
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The text messages, which have been revealed in court filings, committee documents and media reports, provide a vivid illustration of how Meadows made it a personal mission to try to help overturn the election.
Meadows texted about his “love” for a proposal aimed at allowing state legislatures to keep Trump in office. He said in a text message that he “pushed” a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes. And he texted conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, that the effort to overturn the election was “a fight of good versus evil. … Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. … I have staked my career on it.”
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But on Dec. 1, 2020, Attorney General William P. Barr personally told him to drop the fight, according to Barr’s account in his memoir, “One Damned Thing After Another.” In an Oval Office meeting, Barr told the president, as Meadows sat across from him, “We have looked at the major claims your people are making, and they are bulls---.”
Barr wrote in his memoir he then offered his resignation, prompting Trump to say “Accepted!” Meadows asked Barr to remain through the end of the administration, but he left a month before Inauguration Day.
Meadows labored “mightily to cure or head off the President’s frequent bad ideas or his impulsive mistakes,” Barr wrote. But after Trump lost, Meadows was “like a lion tamer without a whip and chair.”
much more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/09/inside-mark-meadowss-final-push-keep-trump-power/
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