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.”
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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.'”
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“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.