Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff for former President Donald Trump in the White House, has met with the team of special counsel Jack Smith at least three times this year, including once in front of a federal grand jury. This meeting occurred only after Smith gave Meadows immunity from testifying under oath, according to people familiar with the situation.
According to the sources, Meadows broke with Trump’s frequent statements about the election by telling Smith’s team that, in the weeks following the 2020 presidential election, he constantly reminded Trump that the claims of massive voting fraud that were being made against them were unfounded.
The sources also state that Meadows informed the federal investigators that Trump was being “dishonest” with the electorate when he declared victory a few hours after polls closed on November 3, 2020, before the results were in.
Meadows reportedly told Smith’s squad, “Obviously we didn’t win,” according to a source.
One of the former president’s closest and most senior White House aides, Meadows has been referred to by Trump as a “special friend” & “a great chief of staff — as good as it gets.”
The accounts of the things Meadows is said to have told investigators provide more context for the evidence Smith and his colleagues have gathered in their prosecution of Trump for allegedly attempting to maintain illegal authority and “spread lies” regarding the 2020 election. The accounts reveal the extent to which Meadows and other Trump supporters have gone in order to uphold and defend the president.
Sources told ABC News that Meadows’s book, which aimed to “correct the record” on Trump, was published after Trump left office. The sources said that Meadows’ investigators were very interested in asking Meadows about election-related conversations he had with Trump during his last months in office, as well as whether Meadows truly believed some of the claims made in the book.
Following Meadows’ purported statements to investigators behind closed doors, ABC News has found multiple claims in the book that seem to be in conflict with each other.
In Meadows’ book, it is claimed that the election was “stolen” & “rigged” with the assistance of “allies in the liberal media,” who disregarded “actual evidence of fraud, displayed in plain sight for anyone to access & analyze.”
As revealed to ABC News, however, Meadows discreetly informed Smith’s investigators that, as of this writing, he has not seen any evidence of fraud that would have prevented Joe Biden from becoming president. He also informed them that, according to a government assessment made at the time, the 2020 presidential election was the most secure in American history.
The material that Meadows gave to the grand jury earlier this year is protected from being used against him in a federal prosecution by the immunity order granted by Smith’s team.
According to people familiar with the situation, Meadows’ attorney asked to have his client granted immunity so that the latter could appear before the grand jury. Days before Meadows’ March grand jury appearance, sources claimed that U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the federal court in Washington, D.C., issued an immunity order after a senior Justice Department official approved the request.
According to sources, prosecutors anticipated Meadows to assert his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination if immunity had not been granted.
“This election was won by us”
Months in advance of election day, Trump was already casting doubt on the election’s integrity. Then, when Trump was starting to lose important states on November 3, 2020, and just hours after the votes closed, he declared on national television that it was all “a major fraud.”
As he put it, “We did win this election,” Trump said.
Given that ballots were still being tabulated and results from several states were still pending, Meadows told investigators before this year that he had long suspected Trump was lying when he made that claim.
However, evidence presented in public has revealed that Meadows assisted Trump in investigating fraud claims coming to him from sources such as Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer Trump appointed to oversee the legal defense of his candidacy. Meadows did this in the weeks following the election.
However, sources claimed that Meadows told Trump in private by mid-December that Giuliani had not provided any proof for the numerous accusations he was making. In a meeting held in the Oval Office, then-attorney general Bill Barr also told Trump and Meadows that the claims of electoral fraud were “not panning out,” as Barr recalled in a statement to Congress last year.
In public, Meadows stated that by late December, he “hadn’t reached a conclusion” about the election as a whole and that he continued to believe that “a number of allegations” need “further investigation.”
By that point, Trump’s legal options had also run out. Meadows told investigators that Trump said something along the lines of “Then that’s the end” or “So that’s it” after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final legal appeal on December 11, 2020.
Barr noted that Trump persisted in his insistence that there was widespread fraud despite the fact that the Justice Department wasn’t “looking for it.”
Meadows was specifically questioned if Trump had ever told him he had lost the election during his interview with investigators. According to reports, Meadows told investigators that he had never heard Trump say it.
The now-famous phone call between Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and Trump on January 2, 2021, was arranged in part by Meadows. Raffensberger was pushed by Trump to “find 11,780 votes… because we won the state.”
According to transcripts of the call that were made public, Meadows has stated in public that he essentially introduced everyone on the phone and that he was only attempting to assist them in resolving a disagreement about Georgia’s election results.
During the call, Trump brought up claims of forged votes concealed in luggage, which, in Barr’s testimony, the Justice Department had previously “a hard looked at” and refuted.
According to what ABC News reported, Meadows told Smith’s investigators that he frequently considered leaving at that time due to worries about the potential consequences of how some fraud allegations were being handled, but he ultimately stayed because he wanted to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
“The sheer amount of lies”
Meadows released his book, “The Chief’s Chief,” over a year after Trump took office with the help of a ghostwriter.
“[T]he sheer volume of lies that have been published regarding the president’s time in the White House is astounding,” according to the book. “I consider this book a tiny chance to correct the record.”
In December 2021, Trump released a statement endorsing the book, claiming it “rightfully spends a lot of time talking regarding the large-scale Election Fraud that took place… also known as the Crime of the Century.” Trump even marketed the book directly.
However, sources tell ABC News that Meadows acknowledged he didn’t genuinely believe any of the claims made in his book when he spoke with Smith’s investigators.
The sources claim that Meadows informed investigators that he disagrees with the statement made in his book that “our many referrals to the Department of Justice weren’t seriously investigated.”
According to the sources, Meadows told investigators that he thought the Justice Department was treating charges of fraud seriously, conducting thorough investigations into them, and making every effort to identify actual incidents of fraud. Meadows also stated that he contacted Trump about all of this a few weeks after the election.
Similarly, as sources told ABC News, Meadows told investigators that Giuliani never showed proof of any major election fraud, but his book mentions Giuliani’s attempts to uncover “the fraud, & the dirty tricks on election night.”
“The people who rigged this election were aware that eventually, these irregularities were going to come to light … [So] they executed the operation, then targeted anyone who tried ask inquiries regarding what they had done,” according to his book.
In November 2021, Meadows went one step further to promote his book on right-wing media. In response to a podcast host’s question about whether Meadows thinks the 2020 election result was rigged, Meadows said, “I do think that there are a lot of illegitimate states… “I’ve observed at least illicit activity in Pennsylvania [and] in Georgia,” the speaker said, alluding to the two crucial states where Biden won the presidency.
According to individuals who spoke with ABC News, Meadows gave Smith’s investigators a very different evaluation while under penalty of perjury, claiming he had never seen any proof of fraud that would cast doubt on the election’s outcome.