“He simply agreed with me,” the previous Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson advised the choose committee about her efforts to get audio system just like the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones faraway from the Jan. 6 rally. She texted Mr. Meadows on Jan. 2, 2021, and requested, “Would you thoughts giving me a name relating to this Jan. 6 occasion? Issues have gotten loopy, and I desperately want some course. Please.”
He referred to as her virtually instantly — on the identical day Mr. Trump, with Mr. Meadows on the road, referred to as Mr. Raffensperger and requested him to seek out votes. The round nature of who was agreeing with whom is slightly maddening. When Larry Kudlow, then the top of the Nationwide Council of Financial Advisers, discovered in regards to the Raffensperger name, he berated Mr. Meadows, in accordance with Carol Leonnig’s and Philip Rucker’s account. They report that Mr. Meadows advised Mr. Kudlow: “I couldn’t cease the president. I attempted, however I couldn’t cease him.”
This goes on endlessly: Mr. Meadows did transition calls with President-elect Biden’s incoming chief of workers, Ron Klain, and he texted Ms. Thomas about this being a battle between good and evil, as Ms. Haberman notes in her guide. He texted jokes forwards and backwards with a White Home adviser about Rudy Giuliani’s claims of useless voters and organized a gathering between Mr. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham about Mr. Giuliani’s claims, in accordance with the journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Mr. Meadows pushed again towards the Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, a former nationwide safety adviser, throughout a protracted assembly on the White Home and handed alongside a conspiracy concept about an Italian firm altering votes to the Justice Division, in accordance with one former official’s committee testimony.
Within the final month, two prosecutors have used the identical occasions to cost the identical particular person, Mr. Trump, with a criminal offense. On their very own, in isolation, every indictment would make for the largest case in American historical past. As an alternative, these two prosecutions are taking place concurrently, like the largest doable experiment in how two prosecutors (or judges or juries) can strategy the identical situation.
The underlying state of affairs stays the identical, however the scope, type and tenor of the indictments are completely different. The federal case is narrower; the Georgia case is sprawling. The federal indictment is a doc meant to argue and justify its existence to the reader. The Georgia indictment requires the reader to comply with together with 19 indictees chaotically weaving out and in of a story unfolding over years.
