'Delicate dance': How Mark Meadows navigated 'legal and political peril' as Jack Smith 'closed in' on Trump
When special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis were investigating former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, both of them took a close look at former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Now, Trump is facing criminal indictments in both cases, and Meadows is among Trump's 18 co-defendants in Willis' prosecution.
In an article published by the New York Times on August 22, reporters Jonathan Swan, Alan Feuer, Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman examine Meadows' dealings with Smith's team. Meadows, they emphasize, "commenced a delicate dance with federal prosecutors" after being subpoenaed.
"He had no choice but to show up and, eventually, to testify," the Times reporters explain. "Yet Mr. Meadows — Mr. Trump's final White House chief of staff — initially declined to answer certain questions, sticking to his former boss' position that they were shielded by executive privilege. But when prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, challenged Mr. Trump's executive privilege claims before a judge, Mr. Meadows pivoted."
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The journalists continue, "Even though he risked enraging Mr. Trump, he decided to trust Mr. Smith's team, according to a person familiar with the matter…. The episode illustrated the wary steps Mr. Meadows took to navigate legal and political peril as prosecutors in Washington and Georgia closed in on Mr. Trump, seeking to avoid being charged himself while also sidestepping the career risks of being seen as cooperating with what his Republican allies had cast as partisan persecution of the former president."
Swan, Feuer, Broadwater and Haberman note, however, that while Meadows' strategy "largely kept him out of the 45-page election interference indictment" in Smith's case, it "did not help him avoid similar charges" in Willis'.
The Times reporters point out that although the former White House chief of staff tried "to position himself as a neutral witness" who "was neither pro- nor anti-Trump," the Georgia indictment "lays much blame at Mr. Meadows' feet."
"It portrays him as acting as a willing accomplice in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with state-level officials, soliciting phone numbers for Mr. Trump and ordering up memos for strategies to keep him in power," Swan, Feuer, Broadwater and Haberman explain. "Prosecutors in Georgia also accused Mr. Meadows of a felony over his role in an infamous phone call on January 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump pushed the Georgia secretary of state, (Brad Raffensperger) to 'find 11,780 votes.'"
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The New York Times' full report is available at this link (subscription required).
