Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows has been strangely silent amid Trump's indictments, so much so that many have speculated that he's flipped on his former boss. According to a new report, Meadows joked about Trump's wild-eyed claim that many votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the 2020 election.
Trump insisted that there were close to 5,000 dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election. Meadows' son, Blake Meadows, an attorney, looked into Trump's claims and, shockingly, found out they weren't true. Not even close.
The Washington Post reports:
In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters' names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows's son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.
The jocular text message, which has not been previously reported, is one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal investigation.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a Justice Department investigation of Trump's activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden's victory and convinced Trump's millions of supporters that the election had been stolen, people familiar with the probe have said.
Special Counsel Jack Smith appears to be investigating Trump's intentions, and that's not good for Meadows', too since he knew the election was not fraudulent, but ran with it anyway. And Trump knew, too.
The Trump campaign hired two firms to dive into the election to see if it was rigged. They found nothing. Even so, Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and maintained that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. Even after Meadows' son looked into it, and came up empty.
They all knew.
