Mark Meadows Was The Point Man For Trump’s Coup D’Etat Ahead Of January 6 (Updated)

Update to Mark Meadows Knows Too Much. He Is Trying To Obstruct The January 6 Committee With a Frivolous Lawsuit (Updated).

The Washington Post reports House Jan. 6 committee poised to vote on holding Meadows in contempt for defying subpoena:

The House select committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob is poised to vote to hold Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, in criminal contempt for defying a subpoena.

In a 51-page report the bipartisan committee revealed that it has documents showing that Meadows said the National Guard “would be present to ‘protect pro Trump people’” on the day of the attack.

More at Politico, Meadows Jan. 5 email indicated Guard on standby to ‘protect pro Trump people,’ investigators say.

"It is imperative that the story not stop here with these documents, because what these documents do, is they point us to the questions that Mark Meadows needs to answer… Why was the Capitol allowed to be assaulted like that for so long?" – @brhodes w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/Xrrq1AOKI4

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) December 13, 2021

The report, released Sunday evening by Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), lays out the case for a contempt vote and highlights details from documents that Meadows and his lawyer turned over to the investigation before Meadows decided to no longer cooperate with the panel. Among them is the email in which Meadows made the comments about the National Guard, adding that “many more would be available on standby” to protect pro-Trump demonstrators.

The committee is scheduled to vote Monday night on holding Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, in contempt. The House is likely to vote later this week to approve the resolution, meaning Meadows would face criminal prosecution under the Justice Department.

[A] committee vote to hold Meadows in criminal contempt comes after months of negotiations between the panel, the former chief of staff and his lawyer, George Terwilliger III. The select committee has struggled to get those closest to Trump to cooperate with its investigation, including longtime adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who was indicted in November on two counts of contempt by the Justice Department after the House voted to recommend charges against him in October.

In its report, the committee said it wanted to question Meadows about text messages he exchanged with an unnamed senator about then-Vice President Mike Pence’s power to reject electors. In the messages, Meadows recounted a “direct communication with President Trump who, according to Mr. Meadows in his text messages, quote, ‘thinks the legislators have the power, but the VP has power too,’” to reject electors.

The committee describes Meadows as “one of a relatively small group of people who witnessed the events of January 6 in the White House and with then-President Trump.”

“As the violence at the Capitol unfolded, Mr. Meadows received many messages encouraging him to have Mr. Trump issue a statement that could end the violence,” the committee wrote. “One former White House employee reportedly contacted Mr. Meadows several times and told him, ‘You guys have to say something. Even if the president’s not willing to put out a statement, you should go to the [cameras] and say, “We condemn this. Please stand down.” If you don’t, people are going to die.’”

The committee did not provide more context on Meadows’s communications regarding the National Guard, and it is unclear whether he had been directed by Trump to call on the guard to protect his supporters. On Jan. 5, hours before the attack, Trump told a room of allies that he did not want violence. Several in the room took that to mean he didn’t want counterprotesters fighting his supporters. Moments later, the former president tweeted a condemnation of antifa, demanding that the loosely knit group of far-left activists “stay out of Washington.”

[T]he committee, in its report, said that, if Meadows had appeared for his scheduled deposition on Dec. 8, the panel would have asked him “a series of questions about subjects that we believe are well outside of any claim of executive privilege.” More specifically, the panel said it would have asked him about his use of personal email and cellphones.

The committee also said in its report that Meadows spoke “nonstop” that day with Kashyap Patel, then-chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller. “Among other things, Mr. Meadows apparently knows if and when Mr. Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the National Guard’s response to the Capitol riot,” the committee wrote.

In its report, the committee said it seeks more information from Meadows on text messages he exchanged with the organizer of the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse that preceded the attack on the Capitol. The organizer texted Meadows that things “have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction. Please.” The committee also wants to know more about messages Meadows received regarding “apparent efforts” to encourage Republican lawmakers in certain states to send alternate slates of electors to Congress in an attempt to undo Biden’s win. In texts, a member of Congress told Meadows that the plan was “highly controversial,” and Meadows texted back, “I love it.”

The documents also show that Meadows forwarded claims of election fraud to Department of Justice leaders for further investigation — “some of which he may have received using a private email account.”

Meadows, the committee’s report claims, also reportedly introduced Trump to then-DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who recommended to Trump that he be installed as acting attorney general and that state officials be told to appoint alternate slates of electors.

The January 6 Committee wants information about how the Trump White House tried to corrupt the military for use in a military coup d’etat as occurs in third world countries. Trump wanted the National Guard to supplement and support his private militia of right-wing domestic terrorists attacking the Capitol on January 6.

UPDATE: Former FBI official unleashes on Trump’s coup: ‘I’ve been careful — but this was a subversion of our military’:

Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi said on Monday that while he has so far withheld assigning blame to President Donald Trump for the security failures that occurred on Jan. 6, new reports about how the White House wanted to use the National Guard have changed his mind.

“Make no bones about it,” Figliuzzi said during an appearance on MSNBC. “I have been measured. I have been careful. I’m an evidence guy. But I’m now seeing the evidence, and this was an attempt to subvert the military for an authoritarian purpose. That’s not good.”

“I think Americans, who are generally attuned to things going the right way, the system, the process, the rule of law, maybe glossed over the May testimony and now need to get hit over the head with it, but that blow to the head has just come,” he continued. “Let me assure you. You can’t do both. You can’t say, well, the Guard’s going to be on call to protect the protesters when you’re watching the fact that there’s violence coming. You know it’s coming. You know there’s no counterprotest planned. You can’t do both. You need to protect the target from the threat. The target was the United States Capitol and the peaceful transition of power in a presidential election. That’s the way this works. We’ve been hit over the head with the truth about what the National Guard was going to be deployed for, and it is a subversion of our military.”

Politico reported last week, ‘Absolute liars’: Ex-D.C. Guard official says generals lied to Congress about Jan. 6:

A former D.C. National Guard official is accusing two senior Army leaders of lying to Congress and participating in a secret attempt to rewrite the history of the military’s response to the Capitol riot.

In a 36-page memo, Col. Earl Matthews, who held high-level National Security Council and Pentagon roles during the Trump administration, slams the Pentagon’s inspector general for what he calls an error-riddled report that protects a top Army official who argued against sending the National Guard to the Capitol on Jan. 6, delaying the insurrection response for hours.

Matthews’ memo, sent to the Jan. 6 select committee this month and obtained by POLITICO, includes detailed recollections of the insurrection response as it calls two Army generals — Gen. Charles Flynn, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations on Jan. 6, and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff — “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their characterization of the events of that day. Matthews has never publicly discussed the chaos of the Capitol siege.

On Jan. 6, Matthews was serving as the top attorney to Maj. Gen. William Walker, then commanding general of the D.C. National Guard. Matthews’ memo defends the Capitol attack response by Walker, who now serves as the House sergeant at arms, amplifying Walker’s previous congressional testimony about the hourslong delay in the military’s order for the D.C. National Guard to deploy to the riot scene.

“Every leader in the D.C. Guard wanted to respond and knew they could respond to the riot at the seat of government” before they were given clearance to do so on Jan. 6, Matthews’ memo reads. Instead, he said, D.C. guard officials “set [sic] stunned watching in the Armory” during the first hours of the attack on Congress during its certification of the 2020 election results.

Matthews’ memo levels major accusations: that Flynn and Piatt lied to Congress about their response to pleas for the D.C. Guard to quickly be deployed on Jan. 6; that the Pentagon inspector general’s November report on Army leadership’s response to the attack was “replete with factual inaccuracies”; and that the Army has created its own closely held revisionist document about the Capitol riot that’s “worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.”

The memo follows Walker’s own public call for the inspector general to retract its detailed report on the events of Jan. 6, as first reported by The Washington Post. Walker told the Post he objected to specific allegations by the Pentagon watchdog that Matthews’ memo also criticizes, calling the inspector general’s report “inaccurate” and “sloppy work.”

Reached for comment on Matthews’ memo, Walker, the former head of the D.C. Guard, said the report speaks for itself and that he had nothing further to add. A Jan. 6 committee spokesperson declined to comment.

The new memo from Matthews, who now serves in the Army reserves, emerges as officials involved in the response that day try to explain their decision-making to investigators. The House select committee has probed the attack for months, and earlier this year top officials testified before the House oversight panel.

Reached for comment, Matthews said the memo he wrote is entirely accurate. “Our Army has never failed us and did not do so on January 6, 2021,” he said. “However, occasionally some of our Army leaders have failed us and they did so on January 6th. Then they lied about it and tried to cover it up. They tried to smear a good man and to erase history.”

Flynn, now the commanding general of the U.S. Army Pacific, and Piatt didn’t respond to messages.

Politico then goes through the tick-tock of Col. Earl Matthews’s memo in detail.