Meadows is the first Trump associate to testify in open court about actions the former president took after the 2020 election.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows appeared in federal court on Monday to make the case he was acting in his capacity as a federal employee when he worked with Donald Trump to overthrow the 2020 election. Therefore, he argued, his case in Fulton County should be sent to federal court.
Among the most "telling" pieces of the trial came toward the end of Monday's proceedings, said Just Security editor-in-chief Ryan Goodman.
The final question from the district attorney was about the fake electors and Meadows' involvement.
"That has no nexus to presidential duties," Goodman explained. "Meadows' response is perhaps telling."
"As chief of staff, no I did not coordinate those efforts," said Meadows.
"Reflect on that," wrote Goodman. He highlighted the phrase "as chief of staff," Meadows didn't do it.
"Indeed, it was not within a chief of staff's official authority. 'I did not coordinate.' Okay, then what would you call what you did do?" Goodman asked.
He then posted an excerpt from Chapter 3 Section 2 of the House Select Committee's report on the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.
"In early December, the highest levels of the Trump Campaign took note of Chesebro's fake elector plan and began to operationalize it," it said. "On December 6th, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows forwarded a copy of Chesebro's November 18, 2020, memo to Trump Campaign Senior Adviser Jason Miller writing, 'Let's have a discussion about this tomorrow.' Miller replied that he just engaged with reports on the subject, to which Meadows wrote: 'If you are on it then never mind the meeting. We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.' Miller clarified that he had only been 'working the PR angle' and they should still meet, to which Meadows answered: 'Got it.' Later that week, Miller sent Meadows a spreadsheet that the Trump Campaign had compiled. It listed contact information for nearly all of the 79 GOP nominees to the electoral college on the November ballot for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin."
The committee report went on to say that Meadows got a text message from a state legislator in Louisiana recommending the fake electors' scheme. Meadows replied to him: 'We are' doing it."
From The Washington Post:
Over nearly four hours of testimony, Meadows defended his participation in meetings and phone calls described by prosecutors as part of a plot to subvert Joe Biden’s victory, repeatedly insisting there was a “federal nexus” to all of his actions. He said his duties managing the president’s calendar and extricating him from lengthy meetings necessitated participating in hundreds if not thousands of conversations each month.
“Having open questions [about the election] continued to be a roadblock for initiating other plans,” Meadows testified. He added: “I just needed to land the plane.”
Meadows, who along with Trump and 17 others was indicted in Atlanta this month, is seeking to move his case from state to federal court, claiming that he was acting as a federal officer. U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones said the case will probably set precedent and that he will issue a decision “as soon as possible.”
Jones said the state case will proceed — meaning that, for now, Meadows will have to appear for his scheduled arraignment in Fulton County Superior Court on Sept. 6 along with the other defendants.
Meadows’s appearance Monday made him the first Trump associate to testify in open court about actions the former president took after the 2020 election. As Trump faces four criminal indictments, including two focused on his attempts to stay in power after the election, Meadows’s testimony provided a preview of what could come in the months ahead.
Meadows has also filed a motion in federal court to have the case dismissed altogether, which will be heard only if his arguments for removal prevail.
The Monday hearing focused heavily on Meadows’s participation in a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), during which Trump said he wanted to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss to Biden, and a trip Meadows took to Georgia in December 2020 to witness a state-run audit of absentee ballot signatures in the Atlanta suburbs.
Anna Cross led the questioning for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office. She sought to show that Meadows was doing far more than managing Trump’s time, particularly on the Raffensperger call, when the former chief of staff told Georgia’s top elections official: “There are allegations where we believe that not every vote or fair vote and legal vote was counted.”
Meadows explained on the stand that he has a habit of using the word “we” expansively, and said in this instance he was referring to the campaign and not the White House. He also said his goal on the call was to resolve a dispute — the Trump campaign was suing Raffensperger at the time. One witness described the call as a “settlement negotiation,” since three lawyers working with the campaign were on the call.
Jones, the judge, appeared skeptical of that argument. When Raffensperger later took the stand, Jones interrupted questioning to ask one himself: Was there any discussion of a settlement negotiation?
No, Raffensperger replied, adding that he viewed the call as inappropriate because of the pending litigation.
“I’ve seen candidates lose and have a recount, but outreach to this extent was extraordinary,” Raffensperger said.
Meadows also said he did not know that three of the lawyers on the line — Cleta Mitchell, Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufman — had participated in a campaign lawsuit against Raffensperger.
George J. Terwilliger III, Meadows’s lead attorney, repeatedly insisted his client was operating “under the color” of his job as chief of staff in every interaction cited in the Georgia indictment.
Jones later pressed Terwilliger about whether he believed there to be any “limitation” to what his client was allowed to do in his job as Trump’s chief of staff. Terwilliger described Meadows as an “alter ego” of Trump and insisted that he was consistently acting as a “federal authority” of the executive branch.
That claim was criticized by Donald Wakeford, an assistant Fulton County district attorney, who said Meadows flouted the federal Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from using their official roles to influence an election. He said Meadows saw “no distinction” between his White House work and the Trump campaign.
Meadows said he served as a gatekeeper for Trump and kept some people with less plausible claims of fraud away from him. He said he did not believe all the allegations, but he did believe there were questions about whether signature verification of absentee ballots had occurred properly in some of the larger counties.
Meadows was not required to attend Monday’s hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in downtown Atlanta, and a murmur spread through the crowded courtroom when he walked in with his lawyers.
Under questioning from his own attorney, Meadows repeatedly described the post-election atmosphere at the White House as chaotic. He testified that because he was viewed as someone who had “the ear of the president,” he received a deluge of phone calls and emails, including from those raising questions about the outcome of the 2020 election.
“It felt like my phone number was plastered on every bathroom wall in America,” Meadows said of the calls.
The courtroom was packed with reporters and lawyers for other defendants in the case, including defense attorney Steve Sadow, a new addition to Trump’s legal team. Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) did not attend the hearing but a half-dozen prosecutors from her office did. Meadows greeted several of them with a smile and handshake.
If Meadows wins his removal, attorneys for his co-defendants are expected to try to argue the ruling applies to everyone charged in the case.
Four of the defendants have followed Meadows’s lead and sought to move their cases to federal court: Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, former Georgia Republican Party chairman David Shafer, Georgia state Sen. Shawn Still, who was part of a pro-Trump slate of electors in 2020, and Cathy Latham, another alternate elector who is also charged for her alleged role in a breach of election data in a rural county where she served as chair of the local GOP. Shafer, Still and Latham argue that although they were not federal employees, they took actions at the direction of the president, making them federal officials.
Trump has not yet filed to remove his case to federal court. Another co-defendant, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, said last week he would also seek to move his case to federal court, though he has yet to file.
Given that Meadows was a White House official working on behalf of the sitting president at the time, if a federal judge is not persuaded by his argument, the others may have a tough legal road ahead.
The 98-page indictment approved by a grand jury this month describes acts by Meadows in the weeks after Trump lost the presidential election, including meeting with state lawmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania and visiting the Georgia site where signatures on absentee ballots were being verified. It alleges those efforts were part of an illegal racketeering conspiracy to overturn the results. The indictment alleges that Meadows also illegally solicited a public official to violate his oath by joining Trump on the Raffensperger call.
On several occasions Meadows claimed to have no knowledge of the Trump campaign’s efforts to contest the election results. When questioned about an Oval Office meeting he attended with Trump and Michigan state lawmakers, Meadows said that he didn’t know that the campaign was contesting the results in that state.
In one White House meeting cited in the indictment between Trump and Pennsylvania lawmakers, Meadows disputed that he attended the meeting other than to inform three of them that they had tested positive for the coronavirus and would have to leave without seeing the president.
Hilbert also testified Monday, but he declined to answer several questions, citing attorney-client privilege.
Meadows was repeatedly pressed by prosecutors on why he had visited a suburban Atlanta facility where state officials were auditing ballot signatures. Meadows insisted he had traveled there on his own volition as a White House chief of staff because he was already in Georgia visiting his two adult children for Christmas. He said he read about the site in the paper and arranged with his Secret Service detail to visit the facility so that he could have firsthand information to give Trump, who was concerned about the Georgia recount. Meadows repeatedly insisted it did not cross the line into political work for the Trump campaign and said he communicated only with Trump and White House lawyers about it.
During the Georgia visit, Meadows met the investigator overseeing the audit. The next day, Trump called her. In a text message included in the indictment, Meadows wrote on Dec. 27, 2020, inquiring if “there was a way to speed up Fulton county signature verification in order to have results before Jan 6 if the trump campaign assist financially” — a message Willis’s team could use to argue that Meadows was acting on behalf of Trump’s campaign.
Meadows claimed that Trump’s effort to find fraud in the 2020 election took a small fraction of his time — “for me, it was not a top paramount issue” — with many other important tasks on his plate. They included negotiating the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, pushing the National Defense Authorization Act through Congress, developing at-home tests for the coronavirus — “which we were myopically focused on” — as well as issuing presidential pardons and preparing for a “peaceful transfer of power.”
Meadows also noted that following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, he held a daily phone call with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley to assess fresh threats and “to see if any of our adversaries were coming after us.”
