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Meadows Flips

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Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been granted immunity by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Donald Trump for a myriad of crimes including for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election and for crimes under the Espionage Act.

Meadows, according to ABC News, spoke with the Special Counsel’s team “at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury.”

ABC News adds that “Meadows informed Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump’s prolific rhetoric regarding the election,” according to sources familiar with the matter. Those sources say, “Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being ‘dishonest’ with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in.”

Importantly, ABC News reports that “Meadows said that by mid-December” of 2020, “he privately informed Trump that Giuliani hadn’t produced any evidence to back up the many allegations he was making, sources said. Then-attorney general Bill Barr also informed Trump and Meadows in an Oval Office meeting that allegations of election fraud were ‘not panning out,’ as Barr recounted in testimony to Congress last year.”

READ MORE: ‘Globalist RINO’: Trump Comes Out Against GOP Latest Speaker Nominee

ABC adds, “When the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 11, 2020, denied his final court challenge, Trump told Meadows something to the effect of, ‘Then that’s the end,’ or, ‘So that’s it,’ Meadows recalled to investigators, according to sources.”

Trump, to this day, has continued to state he won the election, and has fundraised off that false claim, which the Special Counsel has been investigating.

In a book he wrote after the election, ABC adds, Meadows claimed the election was “stolen” and “rigged,” with help from “‘allies in the liberal media,’ who ignored ‘actual evidence of fraud, right there in plain sight for anyone to access and analyze.'”

READ MORE: Trump Goes All in on Xenophobic Christian Nationalism in New Hampshire

“But, as described to ABC News, Meadows privately told Smith’s investigators that — to this day — he has yet to see any evidence of fraud that would have kept now-president Joe Biden from the White House, and he told them he agrees with a government assessment at the time that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in U.S. history.”

Before becoming Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Meadows was a far-right wing Republican U.S. Congressman from North Carolina. During that time he also chaired the far-right House Freedom Caucus.

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Trump’s Latest ‘Executive Time’ Grievance Session Reveals What He’s Really Worried About

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President Donald Trump used his executive time Friday morning in an hours-long Truth Social session, attacking late night television hosts and a Republican senator while pushing two of his primary agenda issues and celebrating the rising stock market.

His posts paint a president securing the Republican future and vanquishing his enemies. But his targets suggest a president focused on threats, real and perceived.

“Stop playing games and pass the Save America Act!” Trump wrote, seemingly out of nowhere Friday morning, ignoring the tumult and GOP anger his $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund and $1 billion White House ballroom security request had, disrupting vital funding legislation this week. The Save America Act is — at least at the moment — effectively dead in the Senate, and not on the list of the majority leader’s top priorities.

Trump has been repeatedly promoting the Save America Act, declaring if it passes Republicans won’t lose a race for the next 50 years.

“I gave up a lot of money in allowing the just announced Anti-Weaponization Fund to go forward,” he wrote. It has not gone forward and is causing massive upset in the Republican-controlled Senate. “I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal break in of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune. Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, justice!”

Trump’s claim he could have settled what was a $10 billion lawsuit is contradicted by reports showing the IRS was preparing to fight him, until Trump’s DOJ intervened.

Critics of the proposed $1.8 billion fund say it rewards criminals and could incentivize his supporters to take violent action on his behalf in the future.

READ MORE: Trump Envoy Invites Kids in Greenland to Come to America for Chocolate Chip Cookies

Trump also attacked Stephen Colbert after his final show Thursday night — and appeared to threaten other hosts with a similar fate.

“Stephen Colbert’s firing from CBS was the ‘Beginning of the End’ for untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts,” he wrote. “Others, of even less talent, to soon follow. May they all Rest in Peace!”

But Trump saved his enmity for an outspoken critic from his own party, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis calling him “weak and ineffective” while taunting him for retiring.

The North Carolina Republican lawmaker, Trump charged, “didn’t have the courage to fight it out in the Senate, remain in place, and run again for office, a thing he desperately wanted to do.”

“When I told him that I would not, under any circumstances, endorse him for another run, too much work and drama (he couldn’t have won, anyway!), he immediately quit the race and publicly announced that he was going to ‘retire.’ I said, ‘Wow, great news, that was easy!’ The media said how brave he was to take me on, but he wasn’t brave, he was just the opposite – he was a quitter!”

Despite reports that Trump’s actions may hamper his agenda and GOP congressional majorities, the president wrote that Tillis can now “have all the fun he wants for a few months, with some of his RINO friends, screwing the Republican Party. In the end it will only get bigger, and better, and stronger, than ever before!!!”

READ MORE: Trump: $400 Million White House Ballroom Is ‘My Gift to the United States of America’

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‘Political Survival’ Fears Driving Senate GOP to ‘Breaking Point’ With Trump: Report

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This has been a challenging week for Senate Republicans, and they are reaching a “breaking point” with President Donald Trump over fears for their own “political survival,” reports Punchbowl News.

One prominent Senate Republican had just lost his primary race to a Trump-backed opponent when the president snubbed another prominent Senate Republican to endorse his ultra-MAGA rival in Texas — leading to fears the Democratic candidate could win that longtime red seat.

Then on Thursday, Senate Republicans met with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for nearly two hours. Reporters said it did not go well. Republicans are furious over not just the president’s $1.8 billion compensation fund for alleged victims of DOJ weaponization during the Biden administration — but also for the timing the White House chose to announce it, disrupting their efforts to pass a critical reconciliation bill so thoroughly Majority Leader John Thune sent them home.

“Eventually,” Punchbowl reports, “Senate Republicans were going to prioritize their own political survival over President Donald Trump’s wants and needs. They have. But it just might be too late.”

READ MORE: Targeted by Trump Senator Scorches President’s Pet Project

Now, some say, the prospect of the GOP losing control of the Senate seems more likely than it did just a few months ago.

“Many Republicans fear Trump is determined to bring them down with him — along with their shared legislative agenda,” Punchbowl observed. “Senate Republican leaders are now coming to grips with the reality that advancing Trump’s priorities may be in conflict with their efforts to retain the majority.”

Punchbowl cites an “erosion of good will” between Senate Republicans and Trump that has been “building steadily for months over campaign strategy disputes, uneven White House messaging and Trump’s attempts to get rid of the filibuster.”

The White House “isn’t making life easier” for Capitol Hill Republicans.

Some see the president’s actions as severely limiting the Republicans’ ability to pass their agenda — and his.

Political journalist Isaac Saul this week noted that Trump has successfully managed to oust several congressional Republicans — with one more possibility on the way — but by doing so he has severely imperiled his critical majority in the U.S. Senate.

“One understated reality of what Trump has done: He basically just nuked his Senate majority for the next six months,” wrote Saul.

The enmity between the Senate GOP and the White House has become so great that one reporter on Thursday point-blank asked Trump if he is “losing control” over Senate Republicans.

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I really don’t know.”

READ MORE: Ex-Republican Pundit Has a Strategy to Defeat Trump and the GOP

 

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‘Galactic Blunder’: Republicans Furious Over Timing of Trump’s $1.8 Billion Fund

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Senate Republicans had already grown vocal in their opposition to President Donald Trump’s unprecedented $1.8 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of Justice Department “weaponization” during the Biden years. After a nearly two-hour meeting Thursday with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that participants described as “incredibly hostile,” their opposition hardened — and the reasons why became clearer.

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) spoke with CNN’s Manu Raju on Thursday, and denounced the legislative strategy behind the $1.8 billion fund — but not the fund itself.

“Ron Johnson told me the Trump administration should have focused on getting ICE/CBP bill passed and the decision to unveil $1.8B fund now (when they’re trying to pass the bill) was a giant mistake,” Raju reported.

“Somebody described it as a galactic blunder, and I think that’s probably true,” Johnson told the CNN anchor.

“Similar sentiment among GOP leadership,” the Washington Examiner’s Ramsey Touchberry added, “who feel [the] situation is a mess of the admin’s own making and Blanche meeting/WH guidance on anti-weaponization fund made it worse, per source.”

“Lots of frustration among Senate Republicans over the timing of the anti-weaponization fund — and the fund itself,” the Washington Post’s Riley Beggin noted. “One GOP aide told me about half of Senate Rs don’t like it.”

Mediaite notes that “NOTUS’s Reese Gorman reported on the Republicans not being ‘happy’ with the Trump administration over the fund, which critics are slamming as a massive ‘slush fund’ to pay Trump allies and donors.”

“They have f—— this up on too many levels to count,” a senior GOP Senate aide told Gorman, Mediaite reports. “The only thing more toxic than demanding taxpayers foot the bill for a billion-dollar ballroom is demanding taxpayers give billions of dollars to J6 rioters.”

Axios adds that U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told reporters that the $1.8 billion fund was dropped like “a bomb in the middle of a pretty well planned out reconciliation bill.”

Politico reported Thursday that Blanche had struggled “to quash GOP concerns” surrounding the fund. “Blanche met privately with Senate Republicans as the administration and GOP leaders tried to defuse the controversy over the fund.”

 

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