Some intriguing
reporting from The Washington Post as a new indictment against Donald Trump
could come any day one dealing with the events surrounding January 6th.
The Post reports, quote, Mark Meadows, who was serving at Trump's chief of staff
at the time, 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 son
could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election.
CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams is with us now in Elliott.
Why would Mark Meadows involved in a joking conversation
about the lack of widespread voter fraud before January six?
Why would that be important?
So humor is itself knowledge.
He could not be joking about the fact that he thought
that these claims were baseless
if he didn't believe they were actually baseless.
And so it certainly could be relevant evidence
of, number one, the president's knowledge that he lost the election,
but also more importantly, no to the knowledge of people around him
like Mark Meadows, as to whether what they thought,
as are the president's claims,
it gets to the issue of intent, which we've been hearing about so much
the last few weeks where the special counsel has been focused. Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, the tricky thing, John, is that humor I think is, you know,
well out of context can be very hard to convey to other people.
And particularly when you're dealing with text messages,
they're going to have to the prosecutors are going to have to establish for a jury
what number one Meadows meant in the text message.
And number two, what the person who received it understood it to be.
And that that's a harder burden than you think.
Because think about you know, social media posts or texts of of our own
or anybody else's from years ago out of context.
They sort of don't really make a lot of sense.
And you're don't have to convince a jury
that that these
disinformation can help establish proof of a charge beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that can be tough.
So there was another line inside The Washington Post reporting
this sort had blinking red sirens around it.
I want to read that for you here, Eliot.
People in Trump's orbit have grown increasingly concerned about what they see
as Meadows retreat from the public scene as a prominent defender
of the former president.
He has reduced his public appearances, particularly on television,
where he was once a frequent guest.
He has not posted on Twitter in five months.
Why does Mark Meadows make the Trump team nervous?
Well, they have. The plot thickens.
Now, certainly,
Mark Meadows ought to make the Trump team nervous because he's valuable
potentially as a witness in general when running an investigation, John.
There are two types of witnesses.
One people who heard or saw things firsthand spoken out of the mouth
of the target of the investigation or two people who saw things second hand.
Mark Meadows falls in that first bucket.
He would have been number one
privy to firsthand conversations with the president.
But no two have overheard countless conversations
that the president had with other people or views the president had expressed
Mark Meadows could potentially be a very valuable witness now.
I wouldn't advise reading too
closely into whether somebody chooses a tweet or not
or whether you know, he goes on Jimmy Kimmel Live or not.
But the simple fact remains, Mark Meadows is an incredibly
could be an incredibly consequential witness
when his boss is being investigated for any number of federal offenses.
For Mark Meadows, for his attorneys to let him go in and talk extensively
to investigators, if, in fact, he did,
would they have to get him some kind of immunity and or potentially
and I'm not getting I don't want to get too far out
ahead here, but some kind of plea agreement
if potentially Mark Meadows had any legal exposure,
if he had legal exposure, of course, it would be
in his interest, in his attorneys interest to get some sort of immunity deal.
Now, he might not and prosecutors may not be looking at him
either in terms of the evidence they have or just the fact
that they just don't think he committed any crimes.
But if he is aware of or if prosecutors are aware
that he might have committed crimes, then certainly it's in his interest
to get some sort of deal
from prosecutors to either lessen the sentence they'll give him eventually
or just not charge him at all with the crime down the road.
And again,
we have no knowledge that he did commit any crime or not
his involvement, a plea deal worth trying to figure out how he would talk.
Anyone else you could think of quickly that would make the Trump team as nervous
as a possible witness, as nervous as they might be about Mark Meadows.
So certainly, again, the White House chief of staff,
if a president is being investigated as critical, all of those staffers
would have been incredibly consequential. No. One.
Cassidy Hutchinson.
We've heard her testimony
at the January six committee testifying as the things she heard the president say.
You know, I would also say some of these state officials
that the president
had interacted or corresponded with Brad Raffensperger in Georgia,
there was an audio recording of a conversation the president had with him.
I'm not saying
it's necessarily the smoking gun that leads to the president's conviction,
but it's the president's voice talking about the subject of the investigation
that the Justice Department's looking into.
And that's incredibly valuable testimony.
So folks like that, anyone either around the president
that he spoke to ought to
you know, they ought to be concerned about that testimony.
Elliott Williams, great to see you today. Thank you so much.