Mark Meadows accused of earlier attempt to nullify the election – this time against Trump

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Multiple sources have told The Independent that the 2020 election was not the first election that Mark Meadows tried to upset.

The former White House chief of staff is set to become, Monday, the third person detained in contempt of Congress by a House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 mutiny after refusing to appear before a briefing last week.

A 51-page report presenting a case of contempt referral against Mr. Meadows, who represented North Carolina’s 11th District from 2013 until his resignation to become former President Donald Trump’s fourth (and final) chief of staff, alleges he is deeply involved in machinations to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. .

Mr. Meadows is said to have spent the days between November 7, 2020 – when most news organizations called for Biden’s presidential race – and the day Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory, and he lobbied Justice Department officials to investigate unfounded and absurd theories about how universal it is. Malicious actors may have manipulated voting machines to swing the 2020 election against then-President Donald Trump, exchanging phone calls and emails with electoral conspiracy theorists, including the author of the now-infamous PowerPoint presentation detailing how the National Guard could be used to seize the ballot in swing states.

The former congressman was reportedly one of the top White House officials who believed then-Vice President Mike Pence would be justified in hijacking the January 6 joint quadrennial congressional vote-counting session for Trump’s inauguration. the second. A term against the wishes of the American electorate.

According to multiple sources familiar with his conduct during his nearly four terms as a member of the House of Representatives, Meadows’ actions in the days and weeks leading up to the worst attack on the Capitol since the 1814 burning of Washington came as no surprise because they said he also attempted to undermine the will of deportation state voters four years ago. Years.

The sources, who all spoke to The Independent on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by Mr. Meadows, Trump or their allies, are North Carolina politicians who have been allies of Mr. Meadows in the past.

Each described his former colleague as someone who showed disrespect for the will of the electorate when election results conflicted with his own ambitions, as well as someone for whom hard and fast rules became mere suggestions when they got in the way. on his way to power.

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Each also revealed to The Independent an attempt by Meadows to nullify the results of the 2016 North Carolina presidential primary – an election Trump won – by ignoring state Republican Party rules in order to send a slate of delegates compatible with a losing candidate, Texas. Senator Ted Cruz, to the 2016 Republican National Convention.

According to a North Carolina veteran worker, Meadows initially pledged to remain neutral while Trump, Mr. Cruz and the 15 other candidates fought so during the long 2016 primary process, but reversed his stance shortly before the South Carolina primary on February 20, when Mr. Cruise at his campaign station in Greenville, South Carolina.

They said, “I don’t know what he was promised, but I know Cruz promised him something.”

Cruz finished third in the Palmetto State contest behind Trump and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, but Meadows continued to carry the torch for Cruz, even after Trump defeated him in the North Carolina primary by a 40.23 percent margin for the master. Cruz received 35.76 percent of the vote.

Mark Meadows stands behind Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House on July 29, 2020

(Getty Images)

The client, who described himself as being “very close” to Mr. Meadows and familiar with his thinking, said North Carolinian rapprochement with Cruz was such that it continued to work to undermine the will of his state’s voters long after it became clear that Mr. Trump won the primary in that year.

Mr Meadows did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by The Independent by text message to several phone numbers linked to him in public records. An emailed request for comment to his attorney, George Terwilliger, was also not immediately answered.

The North Carolina Republicans chose the 72 delegates the state party sent to the Republican National Nominating Convention in two different ways.

Half of the delegates are chosen by elections held at the individual party conventions in each state congressional district, with the balance named via a list drawn up by the head of the state party at the state convention at a later time.

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As a federally elected official, Mr. Meadows could have locked one of the available delegate positions on the president’s list, leaving the three delegate positions from the Eleventh Congress of Congress to GOP activists and other volunteers who were active in the district that had sent him to Congress twice before.

The worker said Mr. Meadows had confirmed he had no intention of allowing his name to be put in the nomination at his district convention but that he ended up being the first person to be nominated for the position of district delegate.

“He said I didn’t want to be a delegate…but he and another guy on his staff walked into the corner, they were dealing with it, they came down and queued up for nominations, and that guy nominated Mark to be the first in our district to be a delegate to the convention.” .

When he confronted Mr. Meadows, the client said he had been told: “There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes that you don’t understand.”

He said, “But I got it…I knew what was going on—they wanted to load things up for Ted Cruz at the event…He’d go to a mediated agreement and they could control what happened.” “That was the deceptive way it was played.”

A “mediation conference” is a conference in which no candidate receives enough votes to secure the party’s nomination during the first round of balloting. Once infrequently, such a scenario—which has not occurred since 1948—would theoretically have provided the conditions under which a losing candidate like Mr. Cruz could have been pinned to the GOP ticket despite the lack of support from most GOP voters. .

Another North Carolina Republican noted that Cruz’s delegates had “taken over” the district conventions because they took place at a time when he was still running in the primaries and had not yet withdrawn.

But when it came time to pick the rest of the delegates to the state convention — a process that was supposed to reflect the preferences of deportation state voters — the former official said Meadows doesn’t care much about what voters prefer.

The week we were negotiating the President’s slate, Cruz dropped out of the race. He’s no longer running for the nomination, Trump will now be our party’s nominee, and North Carolina will send a delegation that is – at best – 50/50. This is as close as you can ever get.”

The former official said the country’s top party figures had drawn up a list that would reflect voter preferences while being inclusive of state campaign officials for different candidates and complying with the party’s long-established rule of not allowing a potential delegate to appear differently. Lists that will be voted on at the conference. But Mr. Meadows reportedly tried to undermine this process so that more Cruz delegates would go to the national convention.

“Even though Trump was the nominee, even though Cruz pulled out, even though they still got a lot of delegates, Mark Meadows was working behind the scenes to blow up that slate,” the former official said.

“There’s nothing wrong with fighting for the best possible deal on the slate, but when your candidate drops out… there has to be some thought for our delegation to match… the reality of the party — that Trump is going to be the nominee — and that’s who the voters chose.”

A third Republican, from North Carolina, who had served in senior GOP positions, told The Independent that Meadows’ actions in the lead up to January 6 were not much of a surprise due to “the way he’s run business” in the past few years.

He recalled how Mr. Meadows had gone to great lengths to try to pressure state delegates to support Mr. Cruz even though he had lost the state primaries and later withdrew from the race.

He went so far as to try to convince people not to support anyone else [but Mr Cruz]They said. “He’s been very outspoken about trying to get people to change their voices.”

In the end, North Carolina delegates voted for Trump when they met in Cleveland to choose a candidate for the 2016 general election.

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They said, “They ended up doing the right thing anyway…because the way everything was set up, they were afraid not to.”

Asked if Mr. Meadows’ alleged involvement in Mr. Trump’s later attempt to nullify the 2020 election came as a surprise, the former North Carolina Republican activist said it wasn’t because Meadows had always been ambitious, and keeping Trump in office was the only way. to achieve its goals.

They said “I think he has more ambitions … down the road, and he’s been striving to make that happen.”

But the former top party official in the state was more frank about whether he thought Meadows’ behavior was out of character based on their previous interactions with the former congressman.

“I think he has a record of tampering,” he said, “and… I would put that… he might see the will of the electorate as just a suggestion.” “He has a record of being unprincipled and he has a record of trying to do things in a destructive way both in the short and long term.

He continued, “He tried a power game with us which we were able to find a way out of with the delegates…then he tied his wagon to Trump.” “What I would say is…more than anything else, he is a big, fat fake person.”

A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent.

Spokespeople for Cruz and the North Carolina Republican Party did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Independent.

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