Mark Meadows’ post-election texts showed a 'basic disregard for democracy': journalist

16 December 2022

As a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-author of the book “The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6th,” Hunter Walker has done a great deal of reporting on former President Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the election results. One of those Trump allies was then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

During that late 2020/early 2021 lame duck period, Meadows, according to the January 6 select committee, sent or received thousands of text messages to other MAGA Republicans who were also hoping to keep Trump in the White House for a second term even though he had lost the election. Meadows shared at least 2319 of those texts with the committee, Walker reported. And Walker discussed those texts with reporter Katie Phang during a mid-December appearance on MSNBC.

Phang asked Walker for his “biggest takeaways” after looking through those 2319 or more text messages, and the Talking Points Memo reporter responded, “First off, these texts are the tip of the iceberg. As we delve into it in the book ‘The Breach,’ these are the texts that were obtained by the January 6 select committee. And they were provided — they were actually provided — by Mark Meadows and his legal team. So, these are, to some extent, selected and curated by him…. The first takeaway is that as extraordinary as this all is, it’s just a partial glimpse into whatever was going on. So that’s Number 1.”

Walker continued, “Number 2, just on a basic level…. The presentation of these messages is really shocking to me. We see typos…. We see basic misspellings…. We see just these wild links to…. fringe websites…. One of the takeaways for me is being just a little bit alarmed at, frankly, the intelligence level of some of our elected representatives.”

Walker went on to say that the “last takeaway,” for him, is that 34 members of Congress were texting Meadows about “efforts to overturn the election.”

The journalist told Phang, “There’s a basic disregard for democracy, an openness to authoritarianism, that goes all the way up to — as (Rep.) Ralph Norman did — suggesting we move the troops into the streets and invoke martial law…. The bottom line is that we have this information, and it’s shocking.”

Walker co-wrote “The Breach” with former Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Never Trump conservative/libertarian who formerly served in the U.S. House of Representatives via Virginia. Although right-wing in his views, Riggleman has been vehemently critical of the MAGA movement and its role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Riggleman was voted out of office in 2020 when he lost a GOP congressional primary to far-right social conservative Bob Good.

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