Meadows Texts Shed New Light on Trump’s Georgia Effort


The committee’s Jan. 6 battle to qualify Mark Meadows’ testimony is shedding new light on the ways the Trump campaign weighed in indirectly inserting itself into the Georgia election audit as they were largely rejected by the secretary of state. from Georgia.

Testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant to the president and Meadows, shows that Meadows sought a “casual” trip to Georgia in December 2020, eventually arriving in the state in the midst of her review of absentee ballots.

Meadows apparently considered offering Trump campaign officials to help with the audit.

“I wanted to do more of a status check to see where things were, if they thought they needed more resources, if there was anything the White House could do to help ease the process. If they needed bodies, there were campaign officials who, you know, had been laid off and were looking for work,” Hutchinson said of Meadows’ visit.

State officials were also in the audit, and Meadows apparently hoped to ask “about what they were hearing from the State about the state of the election and, you know, if there was significant evidence that they knew of at the time.”

The state of Georgia has been doing its own investigation into former President Trump’s election interference and plans to call witnesses in late May after the state’s primary. Trump is involved in that primary, backing Republican rivals to Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

While Meadows apparently went to Georgia over the holidays to visit a son who lives in the Atlanta area, there were discussions inside the White House about how that trip could align with campaign goals in the state.

“The main purpose of this trip was to visit family. Her son lives in Georgia and they went to see his son for Christmas. Conveniently, his son lives very close to Cobb County, and Mr. Meadows had discussed at length the coordination of any visit with Georgia state officials during this trip,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson said the team ultimately decided not to accompany Meadows on the trip.

“Now, there was a point where I was going to go with him because he was going to do some more meetings, but then it was decided that he would do it a little more informal and casual, which is when he decided to go see how the ballots are counted,” said.

The revelation that Meadows considered offering campaign assistance in the highly-watched review of ballots in Georgia came shortly before President Trump’s now-infamous call with Raffensperger in January 2021.

Hutchinson’s testimony was released along with reams of other evidence obtained by the committee on Jan. 6 as part of a legal battle to force Meadows to provide other text messages and documents he says are privileged.

That includes a statement with Raffensperger describing how deeply disturbed he was with the Trump campaign’s efforts to get involved.

Raffensperger repeated that he ignored several efforts by the Trump campaign to contact him.

“They really want to talk to you,” Raffensperger recalled his aide telling him.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to. So she said, ‘Well, they really want to talk to you.’ I told him, ‘We have all these lawsuits going on. It’s not appropriate for me to talk to the president alone.’”

Raffensperger added that both the litigation and his own investigation made the contact unethical.

“We had ongoing investigations. We also had lawsuits with the Trump team and the Trump campaign and all these other organizations, and I just didn’t feel like that was the appropriate channel to go through. That they had their lawyers, we have our lawyers and we will follow the process, we will follow the law and the results will be what they will be, ”he said.



Reference-thehill.com

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