CLOSING IN: Special Counsel subpoenas Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for Jan 6th grand jury
Good things are happening now that Mr. Smith has gone to Washington — particularly when the Mr. Smith in question is Jack Smith, the Special Counsel investigating Donald Trump for both his “potential” involvement in the January 6th insurrection and his purloining of massive quantities of classified documents to bring to his Mar-a-Lago lair.
Trump must be getting particularly nervous given that he surely knows that Justice Department investigations of complex crimes and potential RICO prosecutions generally start at the bottom and work their way up the ladder to the kingpin, the main conspirator directing the accomplices.
With Mr. Smith having sent a subpoena last week to Trump’s former Vice-president Mike Pence — who has already announced that he will contest the subpoena on executive privilege grounds in a longshot bid to avoid grand jury testimony — the investigation has arrived at the rung immediately below the disgraced former president.
Yet, until today, there was still one major player in the Trump White House who hadn’t been visited by a process server requesting his presence at Smith’s grand jury: former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
According to CNN, that oversight has finally been remedied — as their source tells them that Meadows has now been subpoenaed by the special counsel.
The failure to subpoena Meadows, who was reportedly intimately involved in the Trump administration’s post-election loss scheming, was seen by some as a potential sign that he was cooperating in the investigation against his former boss in order to gain some clemency for his own role in the events leading to the violent invasion of the Capitol by the MAGA hordes.
Meadows was famously on the line when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ask him to “find 11,780 votes” and was also reportedly a participant in the December 2020 meeting in which the alternate elector scheme was discussed.
The testimony of Meadow’s former aide Cassidy Hutchinson before the House Select Committee on January 6th revealed that Meadows used the fireplace in his West Wing office to burn documents that have yet to be identified.
(At least he avoided taking those presumably classified — or incriminating — documents home, unlike his former boss.)
Meadows was also with Trump during most of that January 6th and could provide testimony as to what else he may have said or done that day.
Meadows was previously subpoenaed by the House Select Committee but ignored the subpoena without apparent consequences.
It’s likely that Meadows — like Pence — will attempt to mount an executive privilege defense to avoid having to testify before Smith’s grand jury. It’s unlikely, however, that either man will be successful given that Trump’s executive privilege expired the moment he left office.
After two years of the left-leaning Twitterverse assailing Attorney General Merrick Garland for his lack of action in bringing Trump and his cabal of co-conspirators to justice, it appears as if Special Counsel Jack Smith has finally upped the amperage on the investigation and moved the pace forward to a point where we can finally envisage a few well-deserved indictments.
While still too slow and too late, it’s at least an improvement on what was going on before Smith was appointed.
Original reporting by Kaitlan Collins at CNN.
