Former President Donald Trump's final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith's team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath...
www.yahoo.com
The sources said 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 the sources, 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.
Trump has called Meadows, one of the former president's closest and highest-ranking aides in the White House, a "special friend" and "a great chief of staff -- as good as it gets." (trump gonna back track on that soon)
According to Meadows' book, 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."
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.
Trump was already questioning the integrity of the election months before Election Day. Then, within hours of polls closing on Nov. 3, 2020 -- as Trump was beginning to lose key states -- Trump claimed on national TV that it was all "a major fraud."
"Frankly, we did win this election," Trump declared.
Meadows told investigators earlier this year that he's long believed Trump was being dishonest when he made that statement, given the fact that votes were still being counted and the results from several states were not in yet.
But Meadows said that by mid-December, 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.
Also by then, Trump had run out of legal options. 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.
Still, Trump wouldn't back down, insisting there was widespread fraud but that the Justice Department wasn't "looking for it," Barr recalled.
Aided by a ghostwriter, Meadows published his book, "The Chief's Chief," nearly a year after Trump left office.
"[T]he sheer volume of falsehoods that have been published about the president's time in the White House is astounding," the book says. "I consider this book a small opportunity to correct the record."
Trump even promoted the book himself, issuing a statement in December 2021 saying the book "rightfully spends much time talking about the large-scale Election Fraud that took place ... also known as the Crime of the Century."
But sources told ABC News that when speaking with Smith's investigators, Meadows conceded that he doesn't actually believe some of the statements in his book.
According to the sources, Meadows told investigators that he doesn't agree with what's in his book when it says "our many referrals to the Department of Justice were not seriously investigated."
Meadows went even further while promoting his book on right-wing media in November 2021. When asked by a podcast host if he believes the outcome of the 2020 election was fraudulent, Meadows responded, "I do believe that there are a number of fraudulent states ... I've seen at least illegal activity in Pennsylvania [and] in Georgia" -- referring to two key states that clinched the White House for Biden.
Under the penalty of perjury, Meadows offered a vastly different assessment to Smith's investigators, telling them he's never seen any evidence of fraud that would undermine the election's outcome, according to what sources told ABC News
Under the immunity order from Smith's team, the information Meadows provided to the grand jury earlier this year can't be used against him in a federal prosecution.