Donald Trump Suffers Worst Hit in String of Legal Blows

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Donald Trump is facing further legal headaches amid suggestions that his former chief of staff testified before a grand jury as part of two federal investigations into the former president.

Several media outlets reported that Mark Meadows answered questions under oath after being subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith. He led investigations into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and his actions on January 6, as well as questioning his retention of classified documents.

Meadows is said to have answered questions related to both criminal investigations into the former president while appearing before a grand jury, ABC News reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Meadows has long been considered a key figure in the criminal investigation into the events leading up to the Capitol riots because of his closeness to the former president.

Donald Trump speaks to reporters before his speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center on March 4, 2023, in National Harbor, Maryland. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, has reportedly testified before a federal grand jury as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Meadows took on added significance as part of the classified documents investigation after reports surfaced that there was audio of Trump admitting in July 2021 that he had kept a secret Pentagon paper, and the former no longer had authority. president to declassify it.

Trump is said to have made the remarks during a meeting at his estate in Bedminster, New Jersey, with two people who helped write Meadows’ biography, though the former White House chief of staff was not present.

“Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows testified before a grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a promise to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so,” George Terwilliger, an attorney representing Meadows said in a statement to The New York Times and CNN.

Newsweek could not independently verify the reports and reached out to Terwilliger and Trump’s office for comment via email.

Attorney Andrew Lieb, a legal and political analyst, said Terwilliger’s statement suggests that Meadows did not invoke the Fifth Amendment when he appeared before the grand jury, or that he may have gotten an immunity deal.

“If both are true, this is really bad news for Trump, particularly with regard to a possible seditious conspiracy charge on January 6, because Meadows is the central figure in the White House on this issue and knows where all the body,” Lieb told Newsweek.

In recent months, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a landmark case in New York, and a jury found him liable in a civil sexual assault trial. to former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s.

However, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman suggested that if reports that Meadows has now testified as part of Smith’s federal investigations are accurate Trump could face even greater legal risk.

“Trump has been on the receiving end of a remarkable streak of bad blows from the legal system for the last few months when he was indicted in NY; but the revelation that Meadows testified against him is by far the worst on the string,” Litman tweeted.

Litman then cited several claims that emerged during the House Select Committee’s investigation into the live broadcasts of the Jan. 6 attack last year involving the former White House chief of staff.

It included Meadows’ former aide Cassidy Hutchinson testifying that she heard Meadows tell White House counsel Pat Cipollone that Trump did not believe his supporters who were heard chanting “hang Mike Pence” on January 6 were ” do anything wrong” and that the former vice president “deserves it.”

Meadows also testified that he saw Meadows burn documents “once or twice a week” in the lead-up to the January 6 attack.

Meadows, who was with Trump during the Capitol standoff, was previously subpoenaed by a congressional panel on Jan. 6 to hand over thousands of text messages.

Text Messages

The messages later revealed that Trump’s own family members, as well as GOP lawmakers and Fox News anchors, tried to persuade Meadows to convince Trump to convince his supporters to end the violence in Capitol, something the former president did not do for more than three hours.

Meadows is also believed to have been involved in schemes involving Trump allies to keep the former president in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, including a plan to fix the records of surrogate “fake electors ” to falsely claim that Trump won some key states where Biden beat him.

Attorney George Conway said it would be a “very bad sign” for Trump if Meadows testified to a grand jury about how important she was to the federal investigation on Jan. 6.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Conway said Meadows was the “gatekeeper” of how and when people interacted with Trump on Jan. 6.

“He’s the guy who opens and closes the door and talks to Trump, he’s the one who brought Ivanka down to talk to her father,” Conway said.

“He was basically at Grand Central Station that day. And if anyone can shed light on Trump’s state of mind, what he did and didn’t do, it’s Mark Meadows and that should be a very, very disturbing thing for Donald Trump. .”

There are also indications that Meadows is becoming an increasingly important figure in the classified documents probe, in which Trump is accused of mishandling top-secret materials then obstructing federal attempts to retrieve them.

As well as his connection to those at the July 2021 meeting where Trump admitted to keeping a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, Meadows is also a key representative of the former president at National Archives while the agency tries. to get Trump to return the documents, and had some role in discussing the matter with Trump, The New York Times reported.

The claims that Meadows testified to the grand jury came after The Wall Street Journal reported in late May that Smith’s office was “shrouding” the case with classified documents and that indictments could be came.

Update 06/07/23 at 10:11 am ET: This article has been updated with comments from Andrew Lieb.

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