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Why to Delay a Mark Meadows Indictment: Bannon Is Using His Contempt Prosecution to Monitor the Ongoing January 6 Investigation

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In this post, I described that DOJ would be smarter to charge Mark Meadows with obstruction for his destruction of records relevant to an ongoing investigation than to charge him for misdemeanor criminal contempt of Congress. That’s because obstruction, a felony, would pose the risk of real jail time, which would be more likely to convince Meadows to cooperate with investigators and explain what he did as part of an attempt to steal the election.

On December 15, the House voted to send the Mark Meadows contempt referral to DOJ for prosecution. Much to the chagrin of the TV lawyers, DOJ has not taken overt action against Meadows on the criminal contempt of Congress referral.

But as I’ve repeatedly argued, that referral is better considered — and would be more useful to the pursuit of justice — as a referral of Mark Meadows for a violation of the Presidential Records Act and obstruction of the DOJ criminal investigation that he knew to be ongoing.

Among the things included in the referral are:

  • A link to this Politico report quoting “a source close to former President Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff,” insisting that, “all necessary and appropriate steps either were or are being taken” to ensure that Meadows is not deemed to have violated the Presidential Records Act by failing to share Presidential communications he conducted on his personal email and phone
  • Repeated references to Jonathan Swan’s coverage of the December 18 meeting at which Powell and others discussed seizing the voting machines
  • Indication that Meadows received notice on his personal phone (and so among the records withheld in violation of the PRA) the rally might get violent
  • A citation of a message that Meadows turned over to the committee (but presumably not, originally, to the Archives) in which Alyssa Farah urged, “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”
  • Citation of several communications Meadows had with state politicians involved in the fake elector scheme (which Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has confirmed they are investigating), including one where Meadows said, “I love it” and another where he said, “Have a team working on it;” Monaco’s confirmation puts Meadows on notice that his actions are the subject of a federal criminal investigation
  • A claim of election fraud sent to Meadows on his private email (and so among the materials he violated the PRA by withholding)
  • Citation of a tweet Meadows sent on December 21 reporting “‘Several members of Congress just finished a meeting in the Oval Office with President @realDonaldTrump, preparing to fight back against mounting evidence of voter fraud. Stay tuned”
  • Citation of this story describing that Meadows’ late December trip to Georgia to pressure election officials to find more votes could get him in legal trouble; when Fulton County DA Fannie Willis asked for increased protection in the wake of Trump’s calls for riots, she stated explicitly that she was criminally investigating, “former President Donald J. Trump and his associates,” putting Mark Meadows on notice that he’s under criminal investigation there, too

This entire process led Meadows and his attorney to make efforts to comply with the PRA, meaning they’ve been working to provide the communications cited here, as well as those Meadows intended to claim privilege over, to the Archives.

If they can’t comply — and some of the texts in question were sent via Signal, which is really hard to archive, and so may not have been preserved when Meadows sent his own phone back to his provider to be wiped and replaced — then Meadows will not just be in violation of the PRA (which is basically toothless) but also of obstructing the criminal investigation he knew was ongoing when he replaced his phone. Obstruction carries a far stiffer penalty than contempt of Congress does, and it serves as good evidence of involvement in a larger conspiracy.

As Carl Nichols, the Trump appointee presiding over the Steve Bannon criminal contempt case (and therefore likely to preside over one against Meadows if it were ever charged), criminal contempt is for someone from whom you’ve given up getting cooperation, not someone who still might offer useful cooperation.

Meanwhile if Meadows and his lawyer do belatedly comply with Meadows’ obligations under the PRA, it’s quite possible (particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling denying Trump’s attempt to override Joe Biden’s privilege waiver) that DOJ has to do no more to obtain these records than to send a warrant to the Archives. If not, Meadows is now on notice that he is the subject of several criminal investigations (the fake elector one and the Fulton County one), and he may think twice before trying to withhold communications that are already in possession of the Archives.

So whether or not DOJ has these documents in their possession right now, they have the means to get them very easily.

When I’ve pointed this explanation out to those wondering why DOJ has yet to (visibly) act on the Meadows contempt referral the January 6 Select Committee the House sent over on December 14, they ask why DOJ can’t just charge Meadows with contempt now and then follow up with obstruction charges later.

The answer is clear. Doing so will make any ongoing investigation far more difficult.

We can see why that’s true from the Bannon case. Bannon has already used his contempt prosecution as a means to obtain evidence about an ongoing obstruction investigation implicating Trump.

In these two posts, I described what we know about DOJ seizing the call records for Robert Costello, the lawyer for both Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, who is someone who has been at the center of Trump’s pardon dangling for years. There’s a full timeline here, but for the purposes of this post, the key details are:

  • On September 23, the House subpoenaed Bannon.
  • Around October 5, the lawyer for Bannon and Rudy started speaking with a lawyer for Trump, Justin Clark, about how to avoid responding on Bannon’s behalf.
  • Between then and Bannon’s deadlines, Costello twice invoked Trump to avoid complying (in an interview with DOJ, Costello admitted that, “CLARK would not identify for COSTELLO what would be covered under Executive Privilege” and “refused to reach out to the Committee on behalf of COSTELLO or BANNON,” though, “CLARK informed COSTELLO not to respond to item 17” (involving communications Bannon had with Rudy, Sidney Powell, and Mike Flynn).
  • Costello claimed he did not know the lawsuit Trump filed on October 18 was coming and also claims he had a draft in process to blow off another October 19 contempt deadline, but on the evening of October 18, he told a J6 staffer that Bannon would not show up.
  • Over the next three days, the J6 Committee went through the process of holding Bannon in contempt, completing the process on October 21.
  • On November 3, Costello met with the investigative team, ostensibly to persuade them not to indict Bannon; in the process, Costello made claims about his communications with Trump’s lawyers (as well as those for Meadows, Dan Scavino, and Kash Patel) that materially conflicted. In response, DOJ sought Costello’s call records, ultimately obtaining records dating back to the last act Costello did on Bannon’s behalf in the Build the Wall prosecution, March 5, 2021, thereby reflecting an interest in Costello’s actions that significantly precede the J6 Committee actions.
  • On November 12, DOJ indicted Bannon. At first, just Evan Corcoran and David Schoen (the latter of whom represented the former President in his January 6 related impeachment) filed notice as Bannon’s lawyers.
  • On December 2, Costello informed DOJ he would file a notice to join the Bannon defense team (he may have been tipped off by his firm that DOJ had asked for his call records for his business phone). DOJ noted that if Costello represented Bannon, it might impact Bannon’s ability to claim an Advice of Counsel defense. On December 8, Costello filed his notice of appearance on Bannon’s team.
  • On January 4, DOJ provided Bannon 790 pages of call records data pertaining to Costello (including from his law firm).

In the early appearances after Bannon’s indictment, DOJ said it wanted to go to trial immediately and believed the trial could take a matter of hours. Bannon, by contrast, wanted a fall trial, and believed the trial could take weeks. Carl Nichols, the Trump appointee who had a key role in the Harriet Miers contempt conflict who is presiding over the case, split the difference on time, and has otherwise seemed unconvinced by Bannon’s maximalist challenges to the indictment.

Nevertheless, because the trial did not happen immediately, until Bannon does go to trial (currently scheduled in July), then DOJ will be obliged to provide him a range of information that would be (as the Costello records clearly are) relevant to an ongoing obstruction investigation implicating Trump personally. And until DOJ has reason to claim a conflict has arisen between Costello’s representation of Rudy and Bannon (which would effectively tip Rudy off that he’s being investigated for January 6), anything shared with Bannon’s defense team will be shared with Rudy’s defense team (and probably, through Schoen, Trump’s).

Those wailing for immediate action got an indictment of Steve Bannon … which will, at most, lead to his jailing for a few months.

And in exchange, Bannon got records that suggest that DOJ treated his attorney as a suspect in a conspiracy to obstruct this (and the J6) investigation. Bannon got records that suggest that DOJ is investigating his lawyer’s activities going back at least to March 5. He was able to see some of the evidence DOJ has obtained in that ongoing investigation.

Until something resets the current status, the contempt prosecution of Bannon is far more useful to Bannon as a means to monitor the ongoing investigation into him and his co-conspirators than it is for DOJ. And DOJ is likely now limiting investigative steps into Bannon and Costello, accordingly, to avoid triggering a discovery obligation to share information with Bannon.

There are a whole lot of really good reasons why DOJ probably hasn’t acted on the Meadows referral yet — most notably that Judge Nichols, who would likely preside over a Meadows case as a related prosecution, has made it clear he believes criminal contempt is used only for those whom DOJ has no hope of coercing cooperation. If they charge Meadows with contempt, per Nichols, they have foresworn any hope of getting his cooperation.

Given what Meadows has already done, DOJ surely views the potential of Meadows’ cooperation as more useful than a time-consuming and restrictive contempt prosecution.

And that’s true, first and foremost, because charging Meadows with contempt now would further limit their ability to shield parts of their investigation from the suspected co-conspirators.

Update: Corrected the Build the Wall reference to mention Bannon, not Meadows.

When Lawyers’ Lawyers Need Lawyers: The Import of Robert Costello’s Toll Records — for Bannon, for Rudy, and for Donald Trump

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As I explained in this piece, the lawyer who represents both Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon — and who has been at the center of Trump’s pardon-dangling for almost three years — had two meetings with the Bannon prosecution team, where he made a number of claims that could not all be true. The first meeting Robert Costello had with DOJ was on November 3, with a follow-up on November 8, 2021.

Just two of the sets of mutually contradictory claims Costello made in his first interview are:

COSTELLO had not had communication with attorneys for TRUMP prior to that date. [October 18, 2021, when Trump filed a lawsuit challenging Executive Privilege waivers for the January 6 Committee]

And,

COSTELLO first had contact with [Attorney for Donald Trump Justin] CLARK on approximately October 4 or October 5, 2021.

Or:

COSTELLO did not discuss disposing of any documents requested in the Select Committee subpoena with any attorneys who represented former President TRUMP.

And,

Even though MICHAEL FLYNN was not an attorney, he was present during attorney-client-protected discussions. Those particular attorneys represented former President TRUMP and CLARK informed COSTELLO not to respond to item 17.

I would imagine there’s no better way to get the FBI to start investigating you for false statements then by making a bunch of mutually contradictory claims in one interview.

There were certainly other claims Costello made which he should have known to be false. For example, given that his other client, Rudy Giuliani, put out a statement asserting that Sidney Powell did not work for Trump, Costello likely knows that Powell’s presence at a meeting, along with non-lawyer Mike Flynn, would not implicate Trump’s privilege, even if a meeting between Costello client Bannon and Costello client Rudy could itself be considered privileged, which is a fantastic stretch in any case. But that’s a claim, he told the FBI, that he advised Bannon to make in refusing to respond to the January 6 subpoena by invoking Executive Privilege.

Nevertheless, the FBI did not have to obtain the content of Costello’s communications to test whether he lied at that meeting on November 3, given that so many of his fact claims could be tested simply by obtaining his call and email records to see whether he was speaking with Trump lawyers (and those for Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, and Kash Patel) and if so, when, about which Costello made affirmative denials in his meeting with DOJ. If he was discussing with other lawyers how to deal with the Select Committee investigation at a time he claimed he was not, the FBI would have deemed that a suspected lie worthy of more investigation.

And that’s what the FBI did, making eight requests for records (four for phone records, four for Internet records, apparently covering his work and personal emails and phones) resulting in 790 pages, total.

Given the abundant detail included in the Motion to Compel (undoubtedly included to provide hypothetical co-conspirators some idea of the extent of the record seizure, including that no content was obtained), Bannon’s claims seem to be predictably overblown. There appear to be three grand jury subpoenas and just one 2703(d) order (to an Internet provider, likely someone like Google). That is, some of the eight requests appear to be an effort to figure out which phones and email were of interest, in advance of obtaining toll record themselves. Indeed, Bannon makes much out of the fact that DOJ obtained payment method associated with Costello’s phone, available with a basic subscriber request. And unless Costello is a remarkably stingy user of SMS texting, the request for those toll records appears to be narrowly tailored either by time or interlocutor; there are just two pages of SMS text toll records.

Here’s a summary of what the government appears to have obtained:

Bates stamp range: US 001093-001883

US 001093: Grand jury subpoena

US 001145-001768: 623-page return from Internet provider showing IP activity, status (read or unread, inbox, etc.) and other details concerning emails and other activity offered by the carrier obtained with a Section 2703(d) Order on November 11, 2021 [US 001733] that includes a case number [US 001732-001735] and returned on December 7, 2021.  Returns include:

  • US 001151-001249: 98 pages showing IP activity for the email account sought from March 5, 2021 through November 12, 2021, as well as a report on what other services from the provider Costello uses
  • US 001733, 001735, 001740, and 001742: Several references to a 2703(d) order or equivalent
  • US 001765: Grand jury subpoena

US 001769-001789: Costello’s 302s

US 001834: Case number

US 001842: Case number

US 001863: Subscriber record showing payment method for Costello’s cell phone

US 001866: Costello’s data usage

US 001872; Grand jury subpoena

US 001874-001875:  SMS (text messaging) information, including the numbers to which texts were sent and from which they were received

The government doesn’t appear to be treating these records as evidence in their contempt case against Bannon. As the  Bannon filing notes, the government only turned them over on January 4, after stating (before they had obtained the bulk of these records) that the evidence in their case-in-chief against Bannon only consisted of 200 documents.

It is curious that Government counsel delayed producing these documents until January 4, 2022. On November 18, 2021, the parties appeared before this Court. At that proceeding, Government counsel insisted that the Government was ready for trial, that this is a simple and straightforward case, and that it was ready immediately to provide Mr. Bannon with the discovery in the case, which it described as “less than 200 documents,” with “most of” it purportedly comprised of “materials the defendant already has ….” [11/18/2021 Hearing Tr. at 3].

Costello first joined Bannon’s criminal defense team over two weeks after Bannon was indicted, and after DOJ pointed out that Costello’s representation would pose a problem for any Advice of Counsel defense. Given that DOJ obtained toll records from Costello’s firm, it’s possible they tipped him off and he joined the Bannon team to create this problem after that.

Bannon’s filing also notes that the government hasn’t provided the subpoenas obtaining this material, as they would have if the subpoenas targeted him, personally.

Nowhere in the Government’s production was a copy of a court order authorizing the Government’s actions, nor was there a copy of any subpoena for the records, nor was there even any application for a court order or for authorization from the Department of Justice for subpoenas intended to obtain defense counsel’s personal and professional telephone and email records.

That makes sense: Bannon can’t be held responsible for the things his (and Rudy’s) lawyer says while sitting with the FBI. Costello is the one who made mutually contradictory claims, not Bannon.

But, at least as Bannon tells it, the team that seized these records appears to have taken little care to protect Costello’s other clients.

Furthermore, there was nothing in the production that indicated any effort to limit the access of the prosecutors assigned to this case to defense counsel’s personal and professional records, nor was there any indication of any filter in place to distinguish between attorney-client privileged or work-product privileged information that could be garnered from the records the Government obtained and non-privileged materials, nor was there any indication of any filter intended to protect confidential and privileged related to other clients of Mr. Costello and his law firm or intended to keep the prosecutors handling this case from access to any such privileged material.

Indeed, after wailing a bit about DOJ’s oblique response when asked about this seizure, the Bannon filing returned to Costello’s other clients and “witnesses” consulted in those representations.

Beyond all of the above, the Government’s response ignores the damage its actions risked causing for other clients of Mr. Costello and his law firm, for telephone calls and emails to and from other clients and witnesses consulted in relation to their cases would now be exposed by the Government’s efforts to obtain records for all of the attorney’s emails and telephone records.

And in fact, in a letter responding to Bannon’s questions about these records, DOJ made no representations about work product related to Costello’s other clients, even while emphasizing what the prosecution team (which is different from DOJ as a whole) has in its possession.

Aside from the information that Mr. Costello voluntarily disclosed on behalf of Mr. Bannon during the investigation of this matter, the Government has not taken any steps to obtain any attorney work product relating to any attorney’s representation of Mr. Bannon or to obtain any confidential communications between Mr. Bannon, Mr. Costello, and Mr. Katz, or between Mr. Bannon and any other attorneys.

We have provided all discoverable material in the prosecution team’s possession, custody, or control relating to Mr. Costello’s and Mr. Katz’s involvement in the conduct charged in the Indictment. The Government understands its discovery obligations under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16; the Jencks Act; and Brady, Giglio, and their progeny, and will continue to comply with them should additional discoverable material come into the prosecution team’s possession, custody, or control.

That’s significant because of the temporal scope of the email metadata obtained: from March 5 through November 12, 2021, basically the last event for which Costello was representing Bannon in the Build the Wall criminal prosecution and his indictment on these new charges (though, again, Costello didn’t join his defense team for over two weeks). These records don’t include any period when Costello was criminally representing Bannon.

But they do cover a far broader period than would be necessary to understand what communications Costello had with lawyers for Donald Trump after Bannon was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee on September 23. Indeed, they cover a broader period than the entire January 6 Committee, which was created by House Resolution 503 on June 30, 2021.

Presumably, DOJ saw something in the initial records they were seeking — or in records obtained by others, or in another unseen ongoing investigation — to scope the Internet request for the entirety of the period between Costello’s past and current criminal representation of Bannon. Or they were already interested in Costello (for whom there was a possible referral in the Mueller investigation), and his interview with the FBI extended that interest.

That suggests this really isn’t about Bannon.

But the seized records do include the entirety of the period when Costello was helping Rudy review the contents of 16 devices seized by SDNY. Of note, Trump could have, but chose not to participate in that Special Master process. Because he moved to intervene, Dmitry Firtash is permitted to review the records seized from Victoria Toensing to protect his own interests, but Trump’s lawyers should not be getting notice of what was seized from Rudy.

Indeed, the conversations of interest regarding the Bannon representation happen to have taken place during a period during which Costello had gotten an extension to review the contents of the first seven devices seized from Rudy.

On September 28, 2021, I directed that Mr. Giuliani complete his review of the data contained on seven of these devices by October 6, 2021, which was later extended to October 12, 2021. These seven devices contain 2,226 items in total dated on or after January 1, 2018. Mr. Giuliani designated 3 items as privileged, and I am reserving decision on those 3 items. The remaining 2,223 items have been released to the Government.

Costello told the FBI he had no conversations with any Trump lawyers for this period. Even if he had conversations with other Trump lawyers during this review problem, it would conflict with what he told the FBI in his Bannon-related meeting.

It’s certainly possible that the only warrants at issue in the Special Master review are the Ukraine-related ones overtly used to seize Rudy’s devices, and that the SDNY team is completely excluded from accessing these records; if that’s the case, it would suggest there’s no investigation into Rudy out of DC, particularly not one in which JP Cooney or Molly Gaston are participating, both senior prosecutors at DC USAO.

Or there’s something far more interesting going on.

Update: I realized after I posted this that Costello’s 302s were included in the 790 pages Bannon complained about, meaning he claimed things were call records when instead they were the obvious justification for the call records. I’ve added and bolded those pages above.

While TV Lawyers Wailed Impotently, DOJ Was Acquiring the Communications of Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and (Probably) Mark Meadows

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Because TV lawyers continue to wail that DOJ isn’t doing enough to investigate Donald Trump, I want to dumb down this post.

While TV lawyers have been wailing impotently that DOJ has been doing nothing to investigate Donald Trump, DOJ and the National Archives have been acquiring the communications behind some of the most damning events leading up to January 6. DOJ has been doing so even as the TV lawyers guaranteed us they would know if DOJ were doing such things, yet insisting that DOJ was not.

Consider just the events leading up to the December 18, 2020 series of meetings at the White House, involving Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Mark Meadows, which some of the same reporters that reported it in real time are reporting as if it were new news.

Sidney Powell

According to the WaPo story on the grand jury investigation into Sidney Powell, a subpoena in that investigation issued in September asked for “communications and other records related to fundraising and accounting” related to Powell’s grift.

Federal prosecutors have demanded the financial records of multiple fundraising organizations launched by attorney Sidney Powell after the 2020 election as part of a criminal investigation, according to a subpoena reviewed by The Washington Post.

The grand jury subpoena, issued in September by the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, sought communications and other records related to fundraising and accounting by groups including Defending the Republic, a Texas-based organization claiming 501(c) 4 nonprofit status, and a PAC by the same name, according to the documents and a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the probe.

As part of the investigation, which has not been previously reported, prosecutors are seeking records going back to Nov. 1, 2020.

The subpoena reviewed by The Post was signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston, who is also handling politically charged matters related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including contempt of Congress charges brought against former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon for refusing to testify in front of the House committee investigating the pro-Trump riot. [my emphasis]

While the predication of that investigation seems to be based on Powell’s fundraising — soliciting money from dupes who believe her false claims of a stolen election — because proving that she knew those claims were false would require collecting everything about her efforts to manufacture false claims, it would get the communications explaining how to exploit those false claims as well. Plus, this September subpoena reveals just what DOJ did after moving to an overt phase. Prior to that, DOJ presumably obtained — first — preservation orders and — then — warrants on the emails that, according to Patrick Byrne, Powell claims she sent Rudy about her schemes.

On January 21 (a week before Trump started dangling pardons again), Sidney Powell’s lawyer revealed she is “cooperating” in that investigation, though in contemplating “cooperation” with the January 6 committee, she is reserving privilege claims about “advice” to Donald Trump.

A lawyer for Sidney Powell, a well-known, Trump-connected attorney, acknowledged that her organization’s fundraising connected to the 2020 election is subject to an ongoing federal criminal investigation.

Powell’s lawyer, Howard Kleinhendler, told CNN that his client “is cooperating” with the investigation into her organization, Defending the Republic, by the US Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia. That cooperation includes “rolling productions” of documents.

[snip]

Still, when the committee asks Powell about communications she had with Trump, that is “going to get a little hairy,” Kleinhendler told CNN.

He said Powell believes that the times Trump called her to ask for legal advice may be covered by attorney-client privilege — even if he never paid her to be his or his campaign’s lawyer. Powell never worked as a lawyer for the former President personally or for the Trump campaign, Kleinhendler said.

“We’ll have to deal with that, and we’ll have to try to discuss with the committee to see how” to handle privilege issues, Kleinhendler said.

Any emails obtained with a non-public warrant would be sent to a taint team that would review Sidney Powell’s privilege claims independently. Of particular interest, after Trump claimed Powell represented him on November 15, 2020, Rudy stated as clearly as he can manage on November 22 that, “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

With that statement, Rudy effectively waived privilege for any communications implicating both of them from that date forward, long in advance of that December 18 meeting at which Powell purportedly told him about all the communications she sent him in the interim.

Similarly, most of these events post-date the time, November 25, when Powell can credibly claim to be representing Mike Flynn in an effort to nullify the consequences of his lies and foreign agent work, because that’s when Trump pardoned Flynn. So she may want to claim privilege, but after November 25, all visible basis for that claim was affirmatively gone, and for anything seized from her email provider, she’s likely not going to be involved in making that claim anyway.

As I previously noted, the prosecutor in charge of that investigation dropped off three other January 6 prosecutions by March 29 of last year (though there is at least one other investigation, the obstruction investigation into Capitol Police Officer Michael Riley, on which she was also working in the interim).

Gaston originally pulled three January 6 cases in the investigation’s early days, those of Robert Packer, Robert Gieswein, and Derrick Evans, just the latter of which, involving a then-West Virginia state politician, had any possible public corruption component. But, at a time of immense staffing shortages at DC’s US Attorney’s Office, she dropped off those cases on February 18 (in the case of Packer) and March 29 (in the case of Gieswein and Evans). I’ve long wondered what, in the weeks after Merrick Garland came in, became a higher priority for the DC US Attorney’s leading public corruption prosecutor. We now know one thing she picked up in the interim was the prosecution of Michael Riley, the Capitol Police Officer who advised rioter Jacob Hiles to delete Facebook posts about his role in the riot. And by September, Gaston’s grand jury investigation into Sidney Powell’s grift had started taking overt steps like subpoenaing Powell’s nonprofit.

There continue to be some curious moves that suggest DOJ is shifting prosecutorial resources to unseen investigations in fairly urgent fashion.

Rudy Giuliani

Meanwhile, on January 21 (the same day that CNN reported that Powell was “cooperating” in the DOJ investigation, and so also a week before Trump started dangling pardons again), Special Master Barbara Jones reported on the progress of the privilege review of 16 devices seized from Rudy Giuliani on April 28, 2021.

Here’s a summary of what that review and the earlier known seizures of Rudy’s communications in the Ukraine-related investigation into Rudy:

Because of the temporal scope Judge Paul Oetken approved last year, Jones has completed a privilege review of all communications that date between January 1, 2018 through April 28, 2021 on 8 of the devices seized from Rudy (April 28 was the day the devices were seized). We can’t know what dates during which Rudy was using those 8 devices. It could well be that they were older phones with nothing recent.

But we know that of the communications on the phone with the most texts and chats — the phone designated 1B05 — the government received 99.8% of any communications dated between January 1, 2018 and April 28, 2021 and they received those communications no later than January 21.

Of particular note, Rudy at first tried to claim privilege over 56 items from phone 1B05. He thought better of those claims in 19 cases. And then, after Jones deemed 37 of them not to be privileged, he backed off that claim as well. During a period when Jones and Rudy’s team would have been discussing those 37 items, Judge Oetken issued a ruling saying that the basis for any privilege claims (but not the substance of the communications) would have to be public. After precisely the same kind of ruling in the Michael Cohen Special Master review, Trump backed off his claim of privilege for Cohen’s recording about the hush payments. That may be what persuaded Rudy to withdraw his claim of privilege over those materials here, as well.

And whether or not DOJ has already accessed the communications Rudy conducted during 2020 and 2021 on any of the 16 devices seized from him, we know all the phones Rudy was using in April 2021 are in DOJ’s possession and that Judge Oetken has already approved a privilege review to cover those communications.

Mark Meadows

On December 15, the House voted to send the Mark Meadows contempt referral to DOJ for prosecution. Much to the chagrin of the TV lawyers, DOJ has not taken overt action against Meadows on the criminal contempt of Congress referral.

But as I’ve repeatedly argued, that referral is better considered — and would be more useful to the pursuit of justice — as a referral of Mark Meadows for a violation of the Presidential Records Act and obstruction of the DOJ criminal investigation that he knew to be ongoing.

Among the things included in the referral are:

  • A link to this Politico report quoting “a source close to former President Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff,” insisting that, “all necessary and appropriate steps either were or are being taken” to ensure that Meadows is not deemed to have violated the Presidential Records Act by failing to share Presidential communications he conducted on his personal email and phone
  • Repeated references to Jonathan Swan’s coverage of the December 18 meeting at which Powell and others discussed seizing the voting machines
  • Indication that Meadows received notice on his personal phone (and so among the records withheld in violation of the PRA) the rally might get violent
  • A citation of a message that Meadows turned over to the committee (but presumably not, originally, to the Archives) in which Alyssa Farah urged, “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”
  • Citation of several communications Meadows had with state politicians involved in the fake elector scheme (which Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has confirmed they are investigating), including one where Meadows said, “I love it” and another where he said, “Have a team working on it;” Monaco’s confirmation puts Meadows on notice that his actions are the subject of a federal criminal investigation
  • A claim of election fraud sent to Meadows on his private email (and so among the materials he violated the PRA by withholding)
  • Citation of a tweet Meadows sent on December 21 reporting “‘Several members of Congress just finished a meeting in the Oval Office with President @realDonaldTrump, preparing to fight back against mounting evidence of voter fraud. Stay tuned”
  • Citation of this story describing that Meadows’ late December trip to Georgia to pressure election officials to find more votes could get him in legal trouble; when Fulton County DA Fannie Willis asked for increased protection in the wake of Trump’s calls for riots, she stated explicitly that she was criminally investigating, “former President Donald J. Trump and his associates,” putting Mark Meadows on notice that he’s under criminal investigation there, too

This entire process led Meadows and his attorney to make efforts to comply with the PRA, meaning they’ve been working to provide the communications cited here, as well as those Meadows intended to claim privilege over, to the Archives.

If they can’t comply — and some of the texts in question were sent via Signal, which is really hard to archive, and so may not have been preserved when Meadows sent his own phone back to his provider to be wiped and replaced — then Meadows will not just be in violation of the PRA (which is basically toothless) but also of obstructing the criminal investigation he knew was ongoing when he replaced his phone. Obstruction carries a far stiffer penalty than contempt of Congress does, and it serves as good evidence of involvement in a larger conspiracy.

As Carl Nichols, the Trump appointee presiding over the Steve Bannon criminal contempt case (and therefore likely to preside over one against Meadows if it were ever charged), criminal contempt is for someone from whom you’ve given up getting cooperation, not someone who still might offer useful cooperation.

Meanwhile if Meadows and his lawyer do belatedly comply with Meadows’ obligations under the PRA, it’s quite possible (particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling denying Trump’s attempt to override Joe Biden’s privilege waiver) that DOJ has to do no more to obtain these records than to send a warrant to the Archives. If not, Meadows is now on notice that he is the subject of several criminal investigations (the fake elector one and the Fulton County one), and he may think twice before trying to withhold communications that are already in possession of the Archives.

So whether or not DOJ has these documents in their possession right now, they have the means to get them very easily.

In other words, while TV lawyers have been wailing that DOJ has been doing nothing, DOJ has been acquiring the communications from at least two of the key participants in that December 18 meeting, and the Archives have been acquiring the communications of a third.

“I do share information[,] Rudy. You never read your emails, you never read your texts,” Sidney Powell purportedly said, while plotting a coup

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In Patrick Byrne’s February 1, 2021 telling of a series of December 18, 2020 meetings that was just retold by the NYT, Sidney Powell — who is currently under grand jury investigation — told Rudy Giuliani — who is currently under grand jury investigation– that she hadn’t been leaving him out of the loop. On the contrary, Powell explained as she tried to convince Rudy and with him the former President to adopt the plan she and Mike Flynn concocted to seize the voting machines, Powell had sent Rudy this information via email and text.

Finally, Trump stopped and scanned the three of us, and asked simply. “So what are you saying?” Thinking of the difference between the highly organized and disciplined approach I had experienced with Flynn and Sidney, versus the college sophomore bull-session approach of the Campaign and Rudy-World, I spoke up again: “Mr. President, I think you should appoint Sidney Powell your Special Counsel on these election matters and make General Flynn your Field Marshall over the whole effort. I know Rudy’s your lawyer and friend, and he can have a great role in this. Rudy should be personally advising you, and we don’t want to do anything to embarrass him. But it needs to be Sidney taking point legally on this. And if you really want to win, make General Flynn here the Field Marshall. If you do I put your chances at around 50-75%. You should see how he well he has this planned, it would run like clockwork…”

The President shook me off, saying, “No no, it’s got to be Rudy.”

[snip]

The three male [White House Counsel] lawyers edged closer to the front, and then as though as some hidden signal, they all started being bitches.

First was some comment about it not being right to use the National Guard. “The optics are terrible, Mr. President,” said one. “It would have to be the DHS.” I liked the National Guard idea because we needed to reestablish trust of the American people in the electoral process, and the US institution with the most trust is the one where people dress in military uniforms. Yet the National Guard is local, they are all around us, our colleagues at work, our “Citizen Soldiers”. But perhaps in a sign of flexibility, Flynn and Sidney allowed as how one could use the DHS instead of the National Guard.

[snip]

I took another shot at it with the President. “Again Sir, I know that Rudy is a friend of yours, he’s wonderful. He’s America’s Mayor. I love Rudy, I don’t want to embarrass him. But you should see how what Mike and Sidney have got going. It is so organized, so well-planned-” Again he cut me off, saying, “No no, it’s got to be Rudy…” On the inside I slumped.

[snip]

Eventually President Trump said that we would all meet in 30 minutes in the living quarters, in the “Yellow Oval” (I believe the room is called). In the meantime, Rudy was coming in and we had to find a way to make things work between Rudy and Sidney. As we parted he said, “You know, in 200 years there probably has not been a meeting in this room like what just happened…”. As he was leaving he brushed past me, stopped, and speaking low and quiet, said something quite kind and meaningful, showing me that he knew a lot more about me than I had guessed.

A few minutes later Sidney, Mike, Alyssa, and I were in the Cabinet Room. waiting for Rudy. It was dark, and we had to find a couple lamps to turn on. Mike and I were intent on making sure the meeting went well between Sidney and Rudy, so everyone could work happily together.

After 10 minutes Rudy came in, tying his tie, and said in not too gruff a manner, but with perhaps the gruffness of a man disturbed from his evening meal, “You know Sidney, if we are going to work together you have to share information.” I did not take his tone as being too aggressive, but one of trying to turn over a new leaf in a relationship, perhaps.

Sidney immediately told him, “I do share information Rudy. You never read your emails, you never read your texts.”

“That’s not true Sidney! I just need you to stop keeping me in the dark-“

“”Rudy I don’t keepo [sic] you in the dark! You-”

“Sidney you have to stop keeping everything to yourself! I cannot work with you if you don’t share with me!”

Within moments the conversation had spiraled out of control. After a minute of squabbling I tried to interject something helpful. “Mr. Mayor, it is true that since I arrived, everything we ever brought Sidney, she always said, ‘Get this to Rudy right away.’ It’s true. Absolutely everything we turned up, she told us to share with you. She never asked us to keep you in the dark about anything.” [my emphasis]

As NYT tells this story, a bunch of subpoenas pertaining to Powell and seizure and privilege review of 16 Rudy devices later, Rudy “vehemently opposed” the idea of having the military seize the voting machines, acceded to asking DHS to do so, but — after all the other witnesses had left the room, according to the story — warned Trump that the plan would get him impeached.

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.

Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.

[snip]

Mr. Giuliani was vehemently opposed to the idea of the military taking part in the seizure of machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. The conflict between him and his legal team, and Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell and Mr. Byrne came to a dramatic head on Dec. 18, 2020, during a meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

At the meeting, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell presented Mr. Trump with a copy of the draft executive order authorizing the military to oversee the seizure of machines. After reading it, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Giuliani to the Oval Office, according to one person familiar with the matter. When Mr. Giuliani read the draft order, he told Mr. Trump that the military could be used only if there was clear-cut evidence of foreign interference in the election.

Ms. Powell, who had spent the past month filing lawsuits claiming that China and other countries had hacked into voting machines, said she had such evidence, the person said. But Mr. Giuliani was adamant that the military should not be mobilized, the person said, and Mr. Trump ultimately heeded his advice.

Shortly after the Oval Office meeting, Mr. Waldron amended the draft executive order, suggesting that if the Defense Department could not oversee the seizure of machines then the Department of Homeland Security could, the person said.

Around that time, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Giuliani to call Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, to ask about the viability of the proposal, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Cuccinelli said that homeland security officials could not take part in the plan.

[snip]

Even Mr. Giuliani, who had spent weeks peddling some of the most outrageous claims about election fraud, felt that the idea of bringing in the military was beyond the pale.

After Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell left the Oval Office, according to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Giuliani predicted that the plans they were proposing were going to get Mr. Trump impeached. [my emphasis]

The CNN version of this story (which, like Maggie Haberman, first started reporting this story out in December 2020, even before January 6, and long before the overt seizures of materials from two of the lawyers involved) chose not to grant Robert Costello anonymity for a quote about Rudy being “vehemently” opposed to the plan to use the military to seize the voting machines.

Reached earlier this month, Cuccinelli said his discussion with Giuliani “never developed to the point of talking about an executive order including such action that I recall.”

When asked about the executive order involving the military, Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello, said his client also shut that idea down when he became aware of it.

“As soon as he heard about this idea, he was vehemently against it, as was White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and then-President Trump,” Costello said.

But Giuliani and his team did continue to pursue other avenues for overturning the election based on the same conspiracies about election fraud cited in the draft executive order to justify the seizure of voting machines.

Trump also continued to entertain some of the same core elements of those executive orders, including the idea of installing a special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Nearly two weeks after White House aides pushed back on the suggestion of naming Powell to such a role, Trump raised the idea again during another Oval Office meeting, but this time floated Cuccinelli as a possible candidate, according to testimony provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by former senior Justice Department officials who were present.

Meanwhile, Flynn remained adamant that election equipment was going to be seized and personally reached out to at least one senior defense official in mid-December attempting to enlist their help with his cause, according to a source familiar with the outreach. [my emphasis]

There’s really not all that much new in the story as laid out here, except that a bunch of people who know their communications are in the FBI’s hands (and, in the case of Costello, who has spent the last nine months reviewing the content of those communications, including those Byrne describes Powell claiming to have sent Rudy) providing updated versions of the least-damning story they can tell here.

Just one more key part of the story that has changed.

As CNN described it in the 2020 version of the story (but NYT did not), Mark Meadows was also involved.

White House aides who participated in the meeting, including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and counsel Pat Cipollone, also pushed back intensely on the suggestion of naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud allegations Trump’s own administration has dismissed (or, as seems more feasible, hiring her in the administration for some kind of investigatory role).

Meadows shows up in yesterday’s NYT story only as not being the one who let Powell and Flynn and Byrne in the White House.

When Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell and Mr. Byrne arrived at the White House to discuss their plan to use the military to seize voting machines, they were not let into the Oval Office by a typical gatekeeper, like Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. Rather, they were escorted in by Garrett Ziegler, a young aide to another Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, according to Mr. Ziegler’s account.

“I waved in General Flynn and Sidney Powell on the Friday night of the 18th — for which Mark Meadows’s office revoked my guest privileges,” Mr. Ziegler said on a podcast, adding that he had done so because he was “frustrated with the current counsel” Mr. Trump was getting.

That guy — the former Chief of Staff who also was getting and sending a bunch of texts on his phone — that guy has also spent some time recently reviewing his communications. Not only did he review — and withhold — a bunch of communications before sharing some with the Select Committee, but once the Select Committee figured out that Meadows had violated the Presidential Records Act by failing to turn over those communications he conducted on his personal — but his emails! — devices, Meadows has been spending time trying to find such communications so he can share them with the National Archives to uncommit some crimes.

NARA, of course, has been ordered by a court to share such communications, even the ones that Trump might otherwise have invoked Executive Privilege over, with the Committee.

We’re going to get a lot of revised least-damning versions of these stories as more and more people review the communications that will be handed over to investigative bodies.

It’s worth comparing, then, the versions we’re getting now with those people were telling when they thought none of the emails and texts Sidney Powell sent would come out.

Update: Harpie is right. The Jonathan Swan version of this exchange, published exactly a year ago, is worth reading as well.

January 6 Deconfliction: “This Is Part of a Much Bigger Conspiracy”

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In a Detroit Free Press article on the forged electoral certificate presented from Michigan, the state’s awesome Attorney General Dana Nessel explained why, after investigating for almost a year, she is now referring the matter to the Grand Rapids US Attorney’s Office.

Nessel told Maddow that her office has been evaluating charges for almost a year but decided Thursday to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan.

“We think this is a matter that is best investigated and potentially prosecuted by the feds,” Nessel said.

The signatories of the failed attempt to award Michigan’s Electoral College votes to Trump include Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock, national Republican committeewoman Kathy Berden and Michigan GOP grassroots vice chair Marian Sheridan, among other pro-Trump activists in the party.

The decision does not preclude possible charges against the Republicans who falsely claimed that they cast Michigan’s Electoral College votes for Trump, Nessel said. And her office might still bring charges, she added.

“Under state law, I think clearly you have forgery of a public record, which is a 14-year offense and election law forgery, which is a five-year offense,” Nessel said.

“But, obviously, this is part of a much bigger conspiracy and our hope is that the federal authorities and the Department of Justice and United States Attorney General Merrick Garland will take this in coordination with all the other information they’ve received and make an evaluation as to what charges these individuals might (face),” she said.

Consider what happened to lead to this federal criminal referral. After electors sent fake certifications to the National Archives, NARA then sent them to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents.

Spokespeople for the Michigan and Arizona secretaries of state declined to comment on the documents. The offices confirmed that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, both Democrats, and their staff met with the panel in November.

“They mostly discussed election administration in Arizona, the 2020 elections, threats/harassment directed toward the office, and the Cyber Ninja’s partisan ballot review,” said Hobbs’ spokesperson C. Murphy Hebert.

Benson and her staff took questions from the committee on the 2020 election and events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, according to Tracy Wimmer, a spokesperson for Benson.

The National Archives sent emails to the Arizona secretary of state on Dec. 11, 2020, passing along the forged certificates “for your awareness” and informing the state officials the Archives would not accept them.

Arizona then took legal action against at least one of the groups who sent in the fake documents, sending a cease and desist letter to a pro-Trump “sovereign citizen” group telling them to stop using the state seal and referring the matter to the state attorney general.

“By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona’s November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” Hobbs wrote to one of the pro-Trump groups.

Arizona took immediate action; given Nessel’s comments, Benson appears to have referred the matter to Nessel. Some of these details were made public last March after American Oversight obtained them. But after the January 6 Committee put them all in context and focused renewed attention to how the fake certificates fit into a larger effort, it led Nessel to hold off on pursuing potential 14-year charges against some of the most powerful Republicans in the state, and instead to formally refer the investigation to the Feds, based on the logic that the obviously coordinated effort to forge fake electoral certificates is part of a larger whole.

This is not dissimilar from how legal action from Florida’s charity regulator led to state action as well as a grand jury investigation into Sidney Powell’s grifting.

For months, a federal investigation running out of Washington, D.C., has been demanding documents and asking potential witnesses questions about Powell, according to three people familiar with the matter. Similarly, a separate investigation into Powell’s anti-democratic activities took place in the Sunshine State earlier this year—and has already produced results, and punished Powell and her far-right group.

The federal probe, which has not been previously reported, is examining the finances of Defending the Republic, an organization founded by Powell to fund her “Kraken” lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, the sources said.According to two of the people familiar with the matter, a grand jury was empaneled, and subpoenas and documents requests have gone out to multiple individuals as recently as September.

Defending the Republic’s finances have already prompted an investigation and a settlement with Florida’s charity regulator. The group paid a $10,000 fine in September as part of a settlement agreement related to its solicitation of contributions and failure to register as a charitable organization in the state.

[snip]

Defending the Republic’s finances first attracted the scrutiny of regulators in Florida shortly after Powell founded the group in November 2020 when authorities received a complaint and subsequently issued a subpoena to internet hosting service GoDaddy for information about the group’s website.

In a June press conference, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said Defending the Republic was “found to be soliciting contributions from the State of Florida or from persons within the State of Florida” on the internet “without having filed in the State of Florida” as a charitable organization.”

On Aug. 24, Defending the Republic paid a $10,000 fine as part of a settlement agreement with Florida authorities over its fundraising.

As part of that agreement, Powell’s group agreed to register as a charity in Florida and submitted a projected budget of over $7 million. The settlement agreement also required Defending the Republic to submit an audited financial statement for the group’s operations between December 2020 and July 2021 by Nov. 30, including a balance sheet and a list of expenses and revenue.

Meanwhile, Fulton County’s DA, Fani Willis, has been investigating Trump’s call to pressure Brad Raffensperger to cheat and will reportedly make a prosecutorial decision in the months ahead.

The prosecutor weighing whether Donald Trump and others committed crimes by trying to pressure Georgia officials to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory said a decision on whether to bring charges could come as early as the first half of this year.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an interview with The Associated Press last week that her team is making solid progress, and she’s leaning toward asking for a special grand jury with subpoena power to aid the investigation.

“I believe in 2022 a decision will be made in that case,” Willis said. “I certainly think that in the first half of the year that decisions will be made.”

[snip]

Willis declined to speak about the specifics, but she confirmed that the investigation’s scope includes — but is not limited to — a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a November 2020 phone call between U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Raffensperger, the abrupt resignation of the U.S. attorney in Atlanta on Jan. 4, 2021, and comments made during December 2020 Georgia legislative committee hearings on the election.

Regardless of what Willis decides, she can also refer actions to the Feds because it, like the forged electoral certifications, “is part of a much bigger conspiracy.”

The point is (besides that we should be grateful that Democrats elected a lot of smart, fearless women in recent years) that there are lots of moving parts to this “much bigger conspiracy.” And all those moving parts have, as an option, referring their investigative findings to DOJ to drop it into the “much bigger conspiracy.”

So during the year when DOJ has been laying what Merrick Garland called “the evidentiary foundation for more complex cases,” states and local authorities have been conducting investigations that can be joined to that evidentiary foundation.

These are all parts of a much bigger conspiracy.

All these moving parts require coordination, however, or “deconfliction,” both in an effort to maximize cross-fertilization between the investigations and to ensure no investigation screws up the criminal investigations that might lead to real consequences. While there has been no reporting on how this is being done at DOJ, we can be sure it is, not least because DOJ and the Committee are muddling through the Executive Privilege questions in tandem.

Robert Mueller, for example, had his own congressional liaison, and referrals from the Senate Intelligence Committee led directly to plea deals with Sam Patten and Michael Cohen that, in turn, led to information both (and in the latter case, Trump’s lawyers) had shielded from the Committees.

Adam Schiff, now a member on the Select Committee, knows well that Mueller also used a House Intelligence Committee interview with Roger Stone as a basis for an obstruction prosecution against Trump’s rat-fucker. While the details are less clear, I also suspect that Steve Bannon’s interviews with HPSCI served to tee up the fruitful grand jury appearance for him in January 2019 about which Stone is still furious.

Liz Cheney brings a different knowledge base to the challenge of deconfliction. Her dad played a central role in screwing up the Special Prosecutor investigation into Iran-Contra by offering key witnesses immunity. He’s one reason why congressional committees hoping to preserve criminal investigations tread carefully. Hopefully, Congresswoman Cheney can apply lessons learned from her evil genius father to the forces of good on the Select Committee. She has the most to lose if this Committee doesn’t succeed.

As noted above, the most visible sign of this deconfliction has come on privilege reviews. In July, at the same time that DOJ established their contact policy fire-walling President Biden from learning about any ongoing investigations, DOJ got privilege waivers for former DOJ personnel to appear before Congress. After that, when the Select Committee, as an independent branch of government that is also fire-walled from the criminal investigation, asked for investigative materials from the Archives, Biden conducted privilege reviews of that material and waived privilege over much, but not all, of it. If and when that material is released, however, it would be available to anyone with a need, including DOJ.

In fact, the back and forth between the Committee and DOJ has likely already made investigative materials available to DOJ. That’s because, after the Select Committee made it clear Mark Meadows had violated the Presidential Records Act with regards to some of the materials he shared with the committee, Meadows undertook efforts to fix that. To the extent he is able to provide his personal emails and Signal texts to NARA (some of the latter are likely are unavailable), that material would become available to DOJ without subpoenaing Meadows. And to the extent this process reveals that materials of investigative interest to a grand jury were deleted when Meadows obtained a new phone, it will give DOJ reason to use legal process to either hold Meadows accountable for obstruction, or reason to get it from others, like Jim Jordan. To say nothing of the fact that Meadows can’t prevent DOJ from subpoenaing the call records that led him to renege on efforts to cooperate with the January 6 Committee. That’s why I doubt DOJ will hold Meadows in criminal contempt, because they would be better served to get that information — and coerce cooperation, if he chooses that route — via their own legal process. Effectively, then, Bennie Thompson wrote a rough draft of a warrant affidavit for the FBI.

It’s in the subpoenas for witnesses, however, that I’m most curious about with regards to deconfliction between the DOJ and Select Committee investigation. Consider: There are two Trump associates who were key in sowing the Big Lie, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who are known to be under criminal investigation right now. That’s a topic the Select Committee is focusing closely on. But in spite of the fact that Bennie Thompson has expressed an interest in interviewing Rudy, thus far Thompson remains coy about how he’ll reach out to get Rudy’s testimony. There has been no public mention of getting Powell’s testimony or, for that matter, Lin Wood or Patrick Byrne, who — based on public reports — are part of that grifting investigation as well (and Byrne would be interesting of his own accord because he was honey-potted by a Russian spy). And for that matter, at least by the time he sued the committee, Mike Flynn’s call records hadn’t been subpoenaed either.

I’m equally interested in the timing of the Stewart Rhodes subpoena: November 23. That was after DOJ obtained an arrest warrant for James Beeks, the last member of The Stack, on November 18, but the day before they arrested him. By that point (probably long before), DOJ had to have known they were going to pursue sedition charges against him. But for some reason, they held off on the sedition charges when they superseded the Oath Keepers indictment on December 1 (before they otherwise would have needed to charge Beeks) to include him and tweak the Civil Disorder language in the indictment. There may be very good reasons they needed to wait: They needed to find Rhodes; they needed to finish exploiting his phone; they needed to resolve how they were going to treat the field commander, Mike Simmons, whose status in the investigation changed pretty dramatically between the December indictment and the Sedition one. But in that period while they held off, the Select Committee tested whether Rhodes wanted to go lie under oath to Congress. He declined.

It was worth a shot!

I find it equally curious that the Select Committee chose to target colleagues who played a more ambivalent role in the insurrection on January 6, rather than people like Paul Gosar or Mo Brooks, who have clear ties to organizers and other insurrectionists.

Similarly, I share Justin Hendrix’s curiosity why — especially in the wake of his article showing that The Donald isn’t being used in FBI affidavits — the Select Committee isn’t pursuing the role of the post-Reddit social media site in the insurrection, even while they expand their prior requests on more traditional social media.

In short, DOJ and the Select Committee are necessarily deconflicting their efforts, even if the Committee remains fire-walled from what DOJ has planned in the weeks ahead. But understanding that raises interesting questions about the Select Committee choices.

These pieces are all parts of a much bigger conspiracy. And until we see all those pieces we won’t see how they all work together.

But there are increasing signs that others are putting those pieces together.

Update: On January 18, the committee subpoenaed Rudy, Sidney Powell, and two others.

Update: On January 28, J6 subpoenaed the fake electors.

Select Committee Witness Requests

Trump Breached His Own Privilege by Blabbing to Sean Hannity

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The January 6 Committee is inviting Sean Hannity for a voluntary interview with the committee.

It’s unclear whether he’ll take them up on that investigation. But it seems the damage has already been done. That’s because texts involving Hannity make it clear he knew about the White House Counsel’s concerns about Trump’s actions.

The Select Committee is in possession of dozens of text messages you sent to and received from former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows and others related to the 2020 election and President Trump’s efforts to contest the outcome of the vote. At this time, we are specifically focused on a series of your communications with President Trump, White House staff and President Trump’s legal team between December 31, 2020, and January 20, 2021. For example, on December 31, 2020, you texted Mr. Meadows the following:

“We can’t lose the entire WH counsels office. I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he is being told. After the 6 th. [sic] He should announce will lead the nationwide effort to reform voting integrity.

Go to Fl and watch Joe mess up daily. Stay engaged. When he speaks people will listen.”

Among other things, this text suggests that you had knowledge of concerns by President Trump’s White House Counsel’s Office regarding the legality of the former President’s plans for January 6th. These facts are directly relevant to our inquiry.

Similarly, on January 5th, the night before the violent riot, you sent and received a stream of texts. You wrote: “Im very worried about the next 48 hours.” With the counting of electoral votes scheduled for January 6th at 1 p.m., why were you concerned about the next 48 hours?

Also, on the evening of January 5th, you texted Mr. Meadows: “Pence pressure. WH counsel will leave.” Wha communications or information led you to conclude that White House Counsel would leave? What precisely did you know at that time?

Effectively, Trump breached the privileged advice the White House Counsel gave him by blabbing it to Hannity (or by Meadows doing so). The Committee can’t get that advice directly. But whatever got shared with a journalist has lost its privileged status.

Mike Flynn Forgets He Was Shit-Canned by Presidents of Both Parties

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In a lawsuit attempting to kill an existing subpoena from the January 6 Committee and an as-yet unidentified subpoena to Verizon, Mike Flynn accuses Bennie Thompson of opposing Barack Obama. That’s the only logical conclusion one can draw from Flynn’s claim that the people behind the subpoena of him, “belong to the political party that opposed the President under whom General Flynn served.”

The body that issued the Subpoena is composed of 9 members, 7 of whom belong to the political party that opposed the President under whom General Flynn served. The remaining two members were Republicans hand-picked by Speaker Pelosi because they were vocal opponents of former President Trump from within the Republican Party.

As Flynn himself points out in his lawsuit, he served Barack Obama as Defense Intelligence Agency head for over two years, a total of 744 days. He served Donald Trump as National Security Advisor for around 24 days, a laughably short tenure even by the standards of the Trump Administration.

Plaintiff Lieutenant General Michael Flynn is a retired Lieutenant General in the United States Army, served as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from July 2012 to August 2014, and was the National Security Advisor at the start of the Trump Administration.

Mike Flynn was shit-canned by both Presidents.

Nevertheless, a man fired by Presidents of both parties wants to claim a mere subpoena is a witch hunt against him.

Flynn, predictably, gets a lot else wrong in this lawsuit. His depiction of how Billy Barr attempted, but — even after appointing a team that altered DOJ documents as part of their attempt — failed to blow up the prosecution of him gets details big and small wrong.

He was famously led into a perjury trap by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pled guilty to making a false statement after the government threatened his son and then agreed not to prosecute his son if he pled guilty. He later sought to withdraw that plea under the guidance of new counsel after the discovery of exculpatory evidence that was withheld from him prior to his guilty plea. When the Department of Justice decided to drop the charges against him, a court stayed his sentencing while the Court considered whether to force the Department of Justice to prosecute him. Ultimately, General Flynn received a Presidential pardon.

There was no perjury trap, his very good Covington lawyers were especially worried about Flynn’s exposure as a secret agent of Turkey, none of the evidence was deemed to be exculpatory, and he had already been prosecuted.

It is true that after Sidney Powell did more harm then good, Trump pardoned the man he shit-canned. It’s also true that Flynn remained equivocal about whether Donald Trump knew about his efforts to undermine sanctions during the Transition — though transcripts of his calls with Sergey Kislyak show that he told Russia’s Ambassador, at least, that Trump did know.

But there are several details in this lawsuit — like all of these lawsuits challenging the January 6 Committee, which appear to be at least partly an attempt to coordinate cover stories — of interest.

As Josh Gerstein observed, the lawsuit is full of dated information.

On January 6, 2021, a large group of people in Washington, D.C., entered the U.S. Capitol, breached security, and disrupted the counting of Electoral College votes until order was restored. The U.S. Department of Justice has arrested more than 500 individuals in connection with those activities on January 6th. General Flynn was not part of, nor was he present, at the Capitol grounds during any of those activities at the Capitol that day. Like most Americans, he saw those troubling events unfold on television.

[snip]

Former President Trump appealed the district court’s order, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals enjoined NARA from releasing the disputed Presidential records pending its ruling. See Mem. Op. 17, Trump v. Thompson, No. 1:21-cv-2769 (D.D.C. Nov. 9, 2021).

On November 30, 2021, the D.C. Circuit held oral argument on the merits of former President Trump’s appeal. This case is still pending.

While I’m not surprised the Dhillon Law Group cited details about the January 6 investigation that are four months out of date, you’d think they — or Flynn, via Jesse Binall, who was part of the Sidney Powell team that represented him — would have heard of the legal thumping that the DC Circuit gave Jesse Binall on December 9.

As Katelyn Polantz observed, by filing this in his home district in Florida (albeit in the wrong district at first), Flynn sets up the possibility of a circuit split with the DC Circuit decision that Dhillon Law Group hasn’t heard about yet.

So this may be part of a concerted plan, but one that being implemented with the legal incompetence characteristic of Trump (and Flynn) lawyers.

Particularly given how dated this lawsuit is, I’m particularly interested in Flynn’s reliance on the investigation into Sidney Powell’s grift to explain his hesitations about cooperating with the Committee.

Flynn bases his knowledge about the investigation into Sidney Powell on a November 30 WaPo story (though he credits NYT with the scoop), not personal knowledge of the investigation.

In 2021, General Flynn was briefly a board member of a nonprofit founded and led by his defense counsel, Ms. Powell, called Defending the Republic. In September 2021, a federal prosecutor handling the January 6 Capitol attack as well as the criminal contempt of Congress proceedings against individuals referred by the Select Committee also subpoenaed the records of Defending the Republic in connection with a criminal investigation into its activities.

[snip]

In September 2021, the Department of Justice obtained a grand jury subpoena for records of a nonprofit General Flynn briefly served as a director, which was founded and led by his criminal defense counsel, Sidney Powell. The subpoena was signed by an Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting matters related to the January 6 Capitol attack as well as contempt of Congress charges against Stephen K. Bannon for not complying with the Committee’s subpoena. Isaac Stanley-Becker, Emma Brown, and Rosalind Helderman, Prosecutors Demanded Records of Sidney Powell’s Fundraising Groups As Part of Criminal Probe, NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 30, 2021.

Here’s a December 1 Daily Beast story with other details of the investigation (which may come from Lin Wood or Patrick Byrne). Here’s my post noting that the virgin birth of the grift times awkwardly with Flynn’s own pardon.

In language immediately preceding one of those descriptions, Flynn misleadingly claims that the Committee subpoena against him starts “just before” DOJ “sought to dismiss the charges against him in May of 2020.”

(The Subpoena curiously seeks documents from General Flynn starting just before the Department of Justice sought to dismiss the charges against him in May of 2020, and long before the 2020 election or the January 2021 attack on the Capitol.) In late 2020, General Flynn publicly stated his concerns about the integrity of the 2020 elections, as did many other citizens. General Flynn did not organize or speak at any events on January 6 in Washington D.C.

The start date for the subpoena actually starts on April 1.

Still, I find it interesting that Flynn is so worried about what happened during Billy Barr’s failed attempt to blow up his prosecution. And I find it interesting that Flynn claims to have no firsthand knowledge of the investigation Molly Gaston is leading into Sidney Powell’s grift.

Incidentally, Gaston originally pulled three January 6 cases in the investigation’s early days, those of Robert Packer, Robert Gieswein, and Derrick Evans, just the latter of which, involving a then-West Virginia state politician, had any possible public corruption component. But, at a time of immense staffing shortages at DC’s US Attorney’s Office, she dropped off those cases on February 18 (in the case of Packer) and March 29 (in the case of Gieswein and Evans). I’ve long wondered what, in the weeks after Merrick Garland came in, became a higher priority for the DC US Attorney’s leading public corruption prosecutor. We now know one thing she picked up in the interim was the prosecution of Michael Riley, the Capitol Police Officer who advised rioter Jacob Hiles to delete Facebook posts about his role in the riot. And by September, Gaston’s grand jury investigation into Sidney Powell’s grift had started taking overt steps like subpoenaing Powell’s nonprofit.

Anyway, back to Mike Flynn.

Unlike the other people suing, Flynn appears to be uncertain about whether Verizon received a January 6 Committee subpoena targeting him. John Eastman returned the subpoena targeting him with his lawsuit. Alexander included the notice of the subpoena — dated December 2 — he received from Verizon. Meadows also included the notice of the subpoena.

But Flynn doesn’t include documentation like that to substantiate his basis for believing that Verizon got a subpoena targeting him. Rather, he says that he thinks Verizon got a subpoena targeting him — from the January 6 Committee — because they got one for Mark Meadows.

Upon information and belief, the Select Committee is not only targeting a wide variety of individuals with sweeping subpoenas, but also is obtaining extensive private records about various individuals—including cooperating witnesses—by issuing subpoenas to their telecommunications providers.

For example, the Select Committee issued a subpoena to Verizon Wireless seeking subscriber information and cell phone data associated with former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows (the “Verizon Subpoena”). The subscriber information requested includes subscriber names and contact information, authorized users, time of service provided, account changes, associated IP addresses, and other metadata. The cell phone data requested could include all calls, text messages, and other records of communications associated with that phone number. This data can be used for historic cell site analysis. The Verizon Subpoena requested all of Mr. Meadows’ personal cell phone data for four months: from October 1, 2020, and January 31, 2021.

That is, unless Verizon has lost track of whom to bill for his cell service (or unless the General is confused about who is service provider is), it appears that Flynn — who was, for a period, on the board of the Powell nonprofit already being investigated by a grand jury in September — didn’t get a letter on December 2 alerting him that January 6 had subpoenaed his phone records.

Don’t get me wrong: particularly given his propensity to lie, Mike Flynn is not wrong to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions from the January 6 Committee (though he still is on the hook for the document request). That would be true even if Molly Gaston weren’t investigating Sidney Powell, but with the investigation, he’s quite right to invoke the Fifth (again — he did so with the SSCI Russian investigation too).

But if there’s a reason why the House Committee didn’t feel the need to ask for his phone records, that may be the least of his worries.

The most interesting aspect of the January 6 investigation that no one is covering — not even in a NYT story on criminal referrals — is the means by and extent to which the Committee is deconflicting with DOJ. There must be a legislative affairs person doing this near full time, unless Thompson and Liz Cheney — the daughter of someone who played a key role in screwing up Iran-Contra by refusing to do this — are doing this at a higher level. But the story about whom the Committee hasn’t subpoenaed — which includes both Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, both known to be under investigation by DOJ — is as interesting as who they have.

Two Months after Insinuating Ali Alexander Should Be Held Responsible for January 6, Jonathan Moseley Claims To Be His Lawyer

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Like Mark Meadows and John Eastman before him, Ali Alexander has sued Verizon in an attempt to keep evidence about a coup out of the hands of Congress.

The lawsuit seems significantly intended to provide information to others involved in the coup, both by identifying which texts Alexander shared with Congress and which (by omission) he did not, but also by communicating that everything he did provide to Congress constituted telephony communication. That seems to suggest that Alexander did not share any communications involving Signal, Telegram, or other messaging apps.

On November 24, 2021, Mr. Alexander provided the Select Committee with over one thousand and five hundred (1,500) mobile messages sent and received by him and people he corresponded with. All of these were using his Verizon phone service. Mr. Alexander expressed his concerns to the Select Committee about compromising the privacy rights of uninterested parties, and members of political group(s), and productions that exceeded the scope of H. Res. 503.

More importantly, Alexander provided the Select Committee with a privilege log of his text messages noting where the subject matter of the text was not pertinent to the Committee’s scope of inquiry or otherwise privileged but did not identify the party or the phone number of the sender or recipient of the text unless it was Mr. Alexander.

[snip]

At Alexander’s December 9, 2021 deposition, he testified that he had a few phone conversations with Representative Paul Gosar and no verbal phone conversations with Representatives Andy Biggs or Mo Brooks that he recalls. The Select Committee asked him about all three Members of Congress. Mr. Alexander testified that he had phone conversations with Rep. Brooks’ staff about a “Dear Colleague” letter and how his activists could be helpful. Mr. Alexander believes he exchanged a text message with Rep. Brooks, contents which he provided to the Committee. He also testified that he spoke to Rep. Biggs in person and never by phone, to the best of his recollection. In January, Mr. Alexander held an organizing call where Members of Congress might have been present and some were invited. He doesn’t recall who was in attendance because there was no roll call of attendees because the call was so large.

On January 6, 2021, it was reported that Mr. Alexander had a call with fundraiser Ms. Kimberly Guilfoyle. Mr. Alexander volunteered this information on a radio show that early morning. The Select Committee asked him about this call. He stated that it was a short and pleasant call. Ms. Guilfoyle thanked Mr. Alexander for being a leader on voting rights and creating the “Stop the Steal” movement. The two spoke about the ongoing Georgia election and the GOP primaries that would take place in 2022. The Select Committee seemed satisfied with Alexander’s explanation of that short call.

The more remarkable part of the lawsuit, however, is his legal team.

As I previously noted, Alexander is represented by Paul Kamenar, the lawyer who played a key role in attempting to cover-up Roger Stone’s role in coordinating with Russia in 2016 by delaying the testimony of Stone’s aide, Andrew Miller. Alexander had at least two other lawyers at his deposition last week, including Baron Coleman and Joseph McBride, who recently told Ryan Reilly (in regards to his representation of a different January 6 defendant) that he doesn’t give a shit about spreading bullshit conspiracy theories.

But as HuffPost went into more detail explaining why the idea that Rally Runner was some sort of undercover law enforcement agent was absurd, McBride shifted a bit. He said his job was to defend his client, and he didn’t “need to be right” in everything he claimed.

“If I’m wrong, so be it, bro. I don’t care,” McBride said. “I don’t give a shit about being wrong.”

McBride said he was simply “theorizing things” and “not publishing conclusive findings,” and he said his appearances on Carlson’s show were a part of his effort to combat the narrative being given about his Jan. 6 clients.

“If this guy turns out to be some, some guy who runs around the Cardinals’ stadium with his face painted, then that’s great,” he said. “If that’s the truth, then so be it, and God bless America.”

McBride is not on Alexander’s lawsuit, though Kamenar — Alexander’s Roger Stone cover-up specialist — is (Kamenar cc’ed Coleman on the letter he sent to Verizon alerting him to this suit).

The surprising appearance, however, is from Jonathon Moseley. Moseley currently represents Kelly Meggs — one of the Oath Keepers with ties to Roger Stone — and until Tuesday, also represented Zach Rehl, one of the Proud Boys accused of conspiring with Stone associate Joe Biggs to mastermind an attack that encircled the Capitol and involved Stone associate Alex Jones, using the excuse of permits obtained using covers by Alexander, luring unwitting Trump fans to the East doors just before they opened from inside.

Moseley’s legal promiscuity among these coup plotters is itself notable.

Crazier still is his claim to be representing Alexander just over two months after — back when he was ostensibly representing Rehl — filing a motion suggesting that Alexander (whom he repeatedly called “Ari”), not Rehl, should be the one held accountable for any crimes arising from the riot.

The one person who claims to have been the National Organizer of the “Stop the Steal movement” through events across the country and the “Stop the Steal rally” in Washington, D.C., is Ali Alexander, born Ali Abdul-Razaq Akbar. See Allam, Hannah; Nakhlawi, Razzan (May 16, 2021). “Black, Brown and extremist: Across the far-right spectrum, people of color play a more visible role”. The Washington Post, accessible at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/minorities-far-right-visiblerole/2021/05/16/e7ba8338-a915-11eb-8c1a-56f0cb4ff3b5_story.html

The mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was overwhelmingly White,1 but the official speaker lineup for the rally that day was more diverse. Vernon Jones, a Black former Georgia state lawmaker, and Katrina Pierson, a Black adviser and former spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, were among the speakers parroting the baseless assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Another familiar face was main rally organizer Ali Alexander, born in Texas as Ali Abdul-Razaq Akbar, of mixed Black American and Middle Eastern descent.

Id. (emphasis added).

Ari [sic] Alexander is – as far as Defendant Zachary Rehl knows – entirely innocent of the crimes committed on January 6, 2021. Surely, the FBI is busy identifying and charging those who actually attacked police officers. We are confident that the FBI will complete that important task of bringing to justice those who actually battled with police before silencing parents who are petitioning for the redress of grievances in school board meetings, thus alienating suburban mothers.

However, without undermining Alexander for exercising his rights as a citizen, the one person who CLAIMS credit for organizing the “Stop the Steal” rally and movement including in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, 2 is being basically ignored while Zachary Rehl who DID NOT organize anyone or anything but himself, and tell his friends that he would be there, too, is sitting in a jail cell for things he did not do. Zachary Rehl did not get to see his child being born while being locked up since March. His wife with a newborn is struggling arrange a forbearance on the mortgage on their modest rowhouse.

See, video interview with Ali Alexander, with Jenny Chang, “Ali Alexander on What Will Happen on January 6,” NTD News, December 31, 202[sic], https://www.ntd.com/ali-alexander-on-what-will-happen-on-january-6_547084.html. Ari [sic] Alexander is presented as the “National Organizer of ‘Stop the Steal.’

Without question, some idiots and brawlers also showed up who committed criminal acts of brawling with police, apparently initiated violent assaults on police, and reportedly (though counsel has not seen it directly) there were calls before the rally that were for a variety of violent acts that are not peacefully expressing a message under the First Amendment. [all emphasis Moseley’s]

Even ignoring the overt racism suggesting that one of the few brown people involved in the riot should be the one held accountable for it, Moseley as much as says that Alexander more responsible than Rehl for any violence that happened.

Now, Moseley claims it will badly harm Alexander if Congress learns even just the phone numbers of people Alexander engaged in telephony communications with.

It has long seemed as if there was a concerted effort to ensure certain January 6 defendants receive the kind of representation that might not protect their own interests, but would firewall those they had close ties to. But Moseley’s sudden conversion to representing Alexander strains credulity.

Finally, Everyone Is Talking about Trump’s Obstruction on January 6

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Twice in the last 24 hours, Liz Cheney has read from texts that Mark Meadows already turned over to the January 6 Committee, showing that everyone from Sean Hannity to Don Jr were desperately contacting Meadows begging him to get Trump to do something to halt the assault on the Capitol.

After reading the names of all the people who’ve protected Trump since, Cheney then described that Meadows’ testimony is necessary to determine whether Trump, “through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’ official proceedings to count electoral votes.”

Hours passed without necessary action by the President. These privileged texts are further evidence of President Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes. And Mr. Meadows’ testimony will bear on another key question before this Committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’ official proceedings to count electoral votes?

With her forceful comments Cheney was, as TV lawyers have finally discovered, invoking the clause of the obstruction statute that DOJ has used to charge hundreds of the most serious January 6 rioters. Liz Cheney was stating that Trump’s actions on January 6 may demonstrate that he, along with hundreds of people he incited, had deliberately attempted to prevent the vote count.

Even as she was doing that a second time today, the judge presiding over most of the Proud Boys cases, Tim Kelly joined his colleague Dabney Friedrich in rejecting the challenge that Ethan Nordean had taken to that same application.*

Again, this issue is not over. There are 2 other ripe challenges to the application, and plenty more pending.

But for the moment, it seems that all three branches of government — prosecutors charging obstruction, judges affirming the viability of the application, and senior members of Congress invoking it as part of the January 6 investigation — agree that the events of the day may amount to obstruction.

Back when I begged TV lawyers to start focusing on this application, I laid out the things that Trump had or may have done, that might be proof of obstruction.

  • Agreeing (and ordering subordinates) to plan and participate in an effort to obstruct the vote certification
  • Encouraging the Proud Boys to believe they are his army
  • Personally sowing the Big Lie about voter fraud to lead supporters to believe Trump has been robbed of his rightful election win
  • Asking subordinates and Republican politicians to lie about the vote to encourage supporters to feel they were robbed
  • Encouraging surrogates and campaign staffers to fund buses to make travel to DC easier
  • Using the January 6 rally to encourage as many people as possible to come to DC
  • Applauding violence in advance of January 6 and tacitly encouraging it on the day
  • Recruiting members of Congress to raise challenges to the vote count
  • Asking members of Congress to delay evacuation even as the rioters entered the building, heightening the chance of direct physical threat (and likely contributing to Ashli Babbitt’s death)
  • Asking Mike Pence to do something unconstitutional, then targeting him after he refused, virtually ensuring he would be personally threatened
  • Possibly muddling the line of command on which civilian agency would coordinate response, ensuring there would be none
  • Possibly taking steps to delay any Guard response at the Capitol
  • Possibly ignoring immediate requests from help from leaders of Congress

The January 6 Committee has already collected evidence demonstrating many of these issues, for example, the efforts to sow the Big Lie, including coordination with Congress, reveling in the collecting mobs, directing Guard deployment in ways that would support the insurrection, the unbelievable pressure on Mike Pence to violate his oath to the Constitution. In the interim four months, the press and Committee have identified other potential means of obstruction, such as ordering Alex Jones to bring his mob to the Capitol.

This is not a guarantee that Trump will be prosecuted. But all three branches of government now agree on the framework with which he might be held accountable.

*As I now understand it, Kelly announced yesterday that he will be denying the motion to dismiss later this week. He has not done so formally yet, but announced it yesterday in conjunction with his denial of renewed bail motions from three defendants.

Mark Meadows Promised the Kind of National Guard Protection that Proud Boy Charles Donohoe Seemed to Expect

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I argued last week that any contempt report for Mark Meadows will serve as much as a draft warrant affidavit for the FBI as it would the basis for a criminal contempt indictment.

The committee released their report last night and, as I expected, it describes some of the more damning evidence already obtained regarding Meadows. It includes 12 bullet points (included below), many derived from documents already turned over, describing Meadows’ role in sowing disinformation about the election and his early knowledge of the violence that might result.

As Politico reported, one of those bullets described Meadows emailing someone and saying that the National Guard would “protect pro Trump people.”

Mr. Meadows sent an email to an individual about the events on January 6 and said that the National Guard would be present to ‘‘protect pro Trump people’’ and that many more would be available on standby.

Former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller told Congress that’s what Trump ordered him to do on January 3. But if Meadows passed on that privileged order the President gave to Miller, either directly or indirectly, to people involved in the riot, it might have helped them to plan.

And that’s interesting, because when Proud Boy Charles Donohoe saw a public report about the Guard being called in at 3:45 PM of on the day of the riot (these texts reflect the Washington State time zone in which Ethan Nordean’s phone was seized), he responded with surprise that the Guard would “attack … Trump supporters.”

If Meadows had a hand in alerting the Proud Boys that they would not face any response from the Guard, it would go a long way to explaining how they planned their operation in the way they did.

It also might explain why, minutes after Donohoe had just reported, minutes earlier, that “we are regrouping with a second force,” that second assault was abandoned.

As some of the bullets make clear, Mark Meadows had advance warning from organizers that things would get violent on January 6. And as the riot developed, he was in constant communication with Kash Patel, the Chief of Staff at the Defense Department that proved unwilling to deploy to protect the Capitol.

And it’s just possible he shared information that was central to the expectations of and plans by the militia that organized the assault.

Mr. Meadows was one of a relatively small group of people who witnessed the events of January 6 in the White House and with then-President Trump. Mr. Meadows was with or in the vicinity of then-President Trump on January 6 as he learned about the attack on the U.S. Capitol and decided whether to issue a statement that could stop the rioters.28 In fact, 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, and one former White House employee reportedly contacted Mr. Meadows several times and told him, ‘‘[y]ou 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.’’29

Moreover, Mr. Meadows reportedly spoke with Kashyap Patel, who was then the chief of staff to former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, ‘‘nonstop’’ throughout the day of January 6.30 And, 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, a point that is contested but about which Mr. Meadows provided documents to the Select Committee and spoke publicly on national television after President Trump left office.31

Beyond those matters, the Select Committee seeks information from Mr. Meadows about issues including the following:

  • Mr. Meadows exchanged text messages with, and provided guidance to, an organizer of the January 6th rally on the Ellipse after the organizer told him that ‘‘[t]hings have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction. Please.’’32
  • Mr. Meadows sent an email to an individual about the events on January 6 and said that the National Guard would be present to ‘‘protect pro Trump people’’ and that many more would be available on standby.33
  • Mr. Meadows received text messages and emails regarding apparent efforts to encourage Republican legislators in certain States to send alternate slates of electors to Congress, a plan which one Member of Congress acknowledged was ‘‘highly controversial’’ and to which Mr. Meadows responded, ‘‘I love it.’’ Mr. Meadows responded to a similar message by saying ‘‘[w]e are’’ and another such message by saying ‘‘Yes. Have a team on it.’’34
  • Mr. Meadows forwarded claims of election fraud to the Acting leadership of DOJ for further investigation, some of which he may have received using a private email account and at least one of which he had received directly from people associated with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.35
  • He also reportedly introduced Mr. Trump to then-DOJ official Jeffrey Clark.36 Mr. Clark went on to recommend to Mr. Trump that he be installed as Acting Attorney General and that DOJ should send a letter to State officials urging them to take certain actions that could affect the outcome of the November 2020 election by, among other things, appointing alternate slates of electors to cast electoral votes for Mr. Trump rather than now-President Biden.37
  • Mr. Meadows participated in meetings and calls during which the participants reportedly discussed the need to ‘‘fight’’ back against ‘‘mounting evidence’’ of purported voter fraud after courts had considered and overwhelmingly rejected Trump campaign claims of voter fraud and other election irregularities. He participated in one such meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump and Members of Congress, which he publicly tweeted about from his personal Twitter account shortly after.38 He participated in another such call just days before the January 6 attack with Mr. Trump, Members of Congress, attorneys for the Trump re-election campaign, and ‘‘some 300’’ State and local officials to discuss the goal of overturning certain States’ electoral college results on January 6, 2021.39
  • Mr. Meadows traveled to Georgia to observe an audit of the votes days after then-President Trump complained that the audit had been moving too slowly and claimed that the signature-match system was rife with fraud.40 That trip precipitated Mr. Trump’s calls to Georgia’s Deputy secretary of state and, later, secretary of state.41 In the call with Georgia’s secretary of state, which Mr. Meadows and an attorney working with the campaign also joined, Mr. Trump pressed his unsupported claims of widespread election fraud, including claims related to deceased people voting, forged signatures, out-of-State voters, shredded ballots, triple-counted ballots, Dominion voting machines, and suitcase ballots, before telling the secretary of state that he wanted to find enough votes to ensure his victory.42 At one point during the call, Mr. Meadows asked ‘‘in the spirit of cooperation and compromise, is there something that we can at least have a discussion to look at some of these allegations to find a path forward that’s less litigious?’’43 At that point, Mr. Trump had filed two lawsuits in his personal capacity and on behalf of the campaign in Georgia, but the United States had not filed—and never did file—any. Mr. Meadows used a personal account in his attempts to reach the secretary of state before.44
  • Mr. Meadows was chief of staff during the post-election period when other White House staff, including the press secretary, advanced claims of election fraud. In one press conference, the press secretary claimed that there were ‘‘very real claims’’ of fraud that the Trump re-election campaign was pursuing and said that mail-in voting was one that ‘‘we have identified as being particularly prone to fraud.’’45

29Documents on file with the Select Committee (Meadows production); Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It, (New York: Penguin, 2021), p. 476.

30 Adam Ciralsky, ‘‘‘The President Threw Us Under the Bus’: Embedding with Pentagon Leadership in Trump’s Chaotic Last Week,’’ Vanity Fair, (Jan. 22, 2021), available at https:// www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/embedding-with-pentagon-leadership-in-trumps-chaotic-lastweek.

31Documents on file with the Select Committee (Meadows production); Transcript, ‘‘The Ingraham Angle,’’ Fox News, (Feb. 11, 2021), available at https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/ biden-warns-china-could-eat-our-lunch-after-phone-call-with-xi; Transcript, ‘‘Hannity,’’ Fox News, (Feb. 12, 2021), available at https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/new-yorker-who-lostmother-in-law-in-nursing-home-blasts-disgrace-cuomo; Testimony of Hon. Christopher C. Miller, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform, (May 12, 2021), available at https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/Miller%20Testimony.pdf.

32Documents on file with the Select Committee (Meadows production).

33Documents on file with the Select Committee (Meadows production).

34Documents on file with the Select Committee (Meadows production).

35Documents on file with the Select Committee.

36Michael Bender, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2021), p. 369.

37Documents on file with the Select Committee.

38Marissa Schultz, ‘‘Trump meets with members of Congress plotting Electoral College objections on Jan. 6,’’ Fox News, (Dec. 21, 2021), available at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/members-of-congress-trump-electoral-college-objections-on-jan-6; Tweet, @MarkMeadows, (Dec. 21, 2020 at 6:03 p.m.) (‘‘Several members of Congress just finished a meeting in the Oval Office with President @realDonaldTrump, preparing to fight back against mounting evidence of voter fraud. Stay tuned.’’).

39 Caitlin McFall, ‘‘Trump, House Republicans held call to discuss Electoral College rejection: Brooks,’’ Fox News, (Jan. 2, 2021), available at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-splits-electoral-college-certification; Tweet, @RepMoBrooks, (Jan. 2, 2021 at 7:17 p.m.) (‘‘Our fight for honest & accurate elections gains momentum! @JimlJordan & I co-lead conference call w 50+ Congressmen who join & fight for America’s Republic! . . . President Trump & CoS Mark Meadows speaking. Morale is HIGH! FIGHT!’’); Paul Bedard, ‘‘Exclusive: Trump urges state legislators to reject electoral votes, ‘You are the real power’,’’ Washington Examiner, (Jan. 3, 2021), available at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/exclusive-trump-urges-statelegislators-to-reject-electoral-votes-you-are-the-real-power.

40Linda So, ‘‘Trump’s chief of staff could face scrutiny in Georgia criminal probe,’’ Reuters, (March 19, 2021), available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-georgia-meadows-insight-idUSKBN2BB0XX.

41 Id.

42 ‘‘AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s made-up claims of fake Georgia votes,’’ Associated Press, (Jan. 3, 2021), https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-donald-trump-georgia-elections-atlantac23d10e5299e14daee6109885f7dafa9; ‘‘Here’s the full transcript and audio of the call between Trump and Raffensperger, Washington Post, (Jan. 2, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3- 322644d82356—story.html.

43 ‘‘Here’s the full transcript and audio of the call between Trump and Raffensperger, Washington Post, (Jan. 2, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-calltranscript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356—story.html.

44Documents on file with the Select Committee.

45Transcript of November 20, 2020, White House Press Conference, available at https:// www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/press-secretary-kayleigh-mcenany-white-house-press-conferencetranscript-november-20.