New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman on Tuesday explained why Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, reportedly cooperating with special counsel Jack Smith in the former president’s federal election interference case in Washington, DC, could be bad news for the former president.
Meadows, as first reported by ABC News, was allegedly given immunity by Smith in exchange for testifying under oath, including once before a federal grand jury. Meadows allegedly told prosecutors he warned Trump that his claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election were baseless, and that the former president lied to the public when he said he won the contest shortly after polls closed.
While some of the details around the terms of the reported deal remain unclear, Haberman said the news could spell trouble for Trump given Meadows was one of his closest aides during the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
“This feels a little different in terms of some of the specifics of what he is said to have said, and this really drills down on him, according to ABC, saying bluntly this wasn’t stolen, he supposedly told Trump that they weren’t proving this and that he had questions about it,” Haberman told CNN’s The Source. “That was the first time I had heard anything like that.”
“There is no question,” Haberman added, “Mark Meadows was at the centre of so much of this. He was talking to so many people and he could speak to Trump’s mindset in a very specific way.”
Haberman also noted that what Meadows allegedly testified to prosecutors contradicts the claims he made in a book he published in November 2021.
Earlier in the segment, she said that ABC’s report shows Meadows “disavowing his own book which bluntly everyone else had disavowed so he might as well too under oath, and it tells you that he knows what he has to do when he’s in legal peril”.