„I love him!This is how Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, responded to a congressman’s suggestion to ignore the election results. The plan was simply to replace the electoral votes chosen in the presidential election, who would then vote for Joe Biden in the US tiered system, with people who would vote for Trump. “Very controversial,” the congressman wrote. But Meadows immediately liked it.
This SMS exchange is part of the new documents obtained by the US Congressional Committee. Once again, the level of involvement of former President Trump’s senior officials in preparing for a coup d’état that would eventually culminate in the storming of the Capitol on January 6.
The documents were sent to the Commission of Inquiry from Meadows himself. The committee summoned the former chief of staff and recently agreed to cooperate. He sent a limited amount of documents and text messages from his phone. Limited, because Meadows calls so-called Executive FranchiseWhich protects the secret communications between the president and his closest aides. After sending this evidence, Meadows filed a complaint against House Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who is responsible for investigating the circumstances of ‘January 6’.
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Image via The Independent
Among the documents the commission received from Meadows was an email from an influential conspiracy theorist, with a PowerPoint presentation attached. The 38-slide presentation accompanying this email is titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference, and Options Before January 6,” according to a confirmation letter sent to Meadows by the investigative committee on Tuesday. The purpose of the show wason the hill“To be shown, and this is for the representatives of the people on Capitol Hill. The British Guardian and other media saw a PowerPoint presentation with the same title, the same door, but two slides lower.
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Read also: What is the role of Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon and Dan Scavino?
Meadows received the email containing this PowerPoint presentation on January 5, the day before Congress could certify Biden’s election victory. It presents a myriad of theories about election fraud, from the interference of Venezuela and China, to corrupt voting machines, to the dead who allegedly voted. These are the theories that Trump’s lawyers have put forth in dozens of lawsuits as they tried to invalidate the election results. They were completely wrong in all but one of the cases. Attorney Rudy Giuliani also admitted to the judge that the case he brought did not reveal fraud.
The investigative committee is threatening Meadows with a lawsuit if he refuses to testify about his knowledge and participation in an attempt to prevent Biden from being nominated. This week, Trump himself also suffered a legal defeat in the case. Trump invokes the same executive privilege for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. A federal court in Washington ruled Thursday on appeal that the former president cannot invoke secrecy and that he must submit documents requested by the commission.
