Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that 2,319 text messages from Mark Meadows now public, showing 34 Republican members of Congress texting with him about January 6, the fake electors, and declaring martial law.
Mark Meadows texts with 34 Republican members of Congress on and around January 6 trying to overturn the 2020 election results.Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene urged a top White House aide to talk to then-President Donald Trump about imposing martial law in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot, according to text messages revealed in a new report.
“In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law,” Greene had texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 17, 2021, CNN reported Monday.
The reference to “Marshall law” is an apparent misspelling of martial law, the emergency power that puts the military in charge of the government.
“I don’t know on those things. I just wanted you to tell him,” the first-term lawmaker’s text reportedly said. “They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next. Please tell him to declassify as much as possible so we can go after Biden and anyone else!”
Meadows did not appear to respond to Greene, CNN reported. Greene’s office did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the report.
Greene reportedly sent that text three days before Trump was set to leave office following his loss to President Joe Biden. Less than two weeks earlier, on Jan. 6, a violent crowd of Trump’s supporters broke through police lines and stormed the U.S. Capitol building, forcing those in Congress into hiding and temporarily delaying efforts to confirm Biden’s victory.
The mob was spurred toward the Capitol on that day by Trump, who had spent weeks falsely claiming he beat his Democratic challenger and that the election was rigged against him. Greene, who has a well-documented history of embracing right-wing conspiracy theories, also frequently sowed doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election following Biden’s win.
Elections experts, politicians from both parties and even Trump’s own attorney general have all denied Trump’s claims that the election outcome was affected by widespread voter fraud.
At roughly this time a decade ago, Mark Meadows was probably feeling pretty good about his career in North Carolina politics. The Republican had just easily won his first congressional campaign in the state, and the future appeared bright. Local voters proceeded to re-elect him by wide margins in the next three election cycles.
Following up on our earlier coverage, the former congressman’s position in the Tar Heel State has taken a significant turn for the worse. The Associated Press reported:
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said it has submitted to state prosecutors the findings of its voter fraud probe into Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, who was simultaneously registered to vote in North Carolina and two other states earlier this year. The State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday that it has turned over the case file detailing its investigation into Meadows’ North Carolina voter registration and listed residence to Attorney General Josh Stein’s office.
In a statement, the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation said prosecutors with the state attorney general’s office will determine whether to file criminal charges in the case.
In case anyone needs a refresher — the bureau’s investigation took roughly eight months — let’s review how we arrived at this point.
Before and after Election Day 2020, Meadows talked quite a bit about voting irregularities. Like so many members of Donald Trump’s team, the Republican was heavily invested in the demonstrably false idea that there was widespread fraud.
“Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around?” Meadows asked in August 2020. He later complained in his memoir about some people casting ballots despite not being “an actual resident of the state they were voting in.”
It was against this backdrop that the public learned that Meadows himself appears to have cast a ballot from his former home state of North Carolina, despite having moved away and no longer being an actual state resident.
Mark Meadows used two personal Gmail accounts for official government business AND a personal cell phone to receive texts about a coup attempt.
2,319 texts from Mark Meadows now public, showing 34 Republican members of Congress texting with him about January 6, the fake electors, and declaring martial law (or “Marshall Law,” sic), per Talking Points Memo.
The texts are part of a trove Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack that was obtained by TPM. For more information about the story behind the text log and our procedures for publishing the messages, read the introduction to this series. Meadows’ exchanges shed new light on the extent of congressional involvement in Trump’s efforts to spread baseless conspiracy theories about his defeat and his attempts to reverse it. The messages document the role members played in the campaign to subvert the election as it was conceived, built, and reached its violent climax on Jan. 6, 2021. The texts are rife with links to far-right websites, questionable legal theories, violent rhetoric, and advocacy for authoritarian power grabs.
One message identified as coming from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) to Meadows on January 17, 2021, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office, is a raw distillation of the various themes in the congressional correspondence. In the text, despite a typo, Norman seemed to be proposing a dramatic last ditch plan: having Trump impose martial law during his final hours in office. The text, which has not previously been reported, is a particularly vivid example of how congressional opposition to Biden’s election was underpinned by paranoid and debunked conspiracy theories like those about Dominion voting machines. Norman’s text also showed the potentially violent lengths to which some congressional Republicans were willing to go in order to keep Trump in power. The log Meadows provided to the select committee does not include a response to Norman’s message.
Reached via cell phone on Monday morning, Norman asked TPM for a chance to review his messages before commenting.
“It’s been two years,” Norman said. “Send that text to me and I’ll take a look at it.”TPM forwarded Norman a copy of the message calling for “Marshall Law!!” We did not receive any further response from the congressman.
Based on TPM’s analysis, Meadows received at least 364 messages from Republican members of Congress who discussed attempts to reverse the election results with him. He sent at least 95 messages of his own. The committee did not respond to requests for comment. Some of Meadows’ texts — notably with Fox News personalities and a couple members of Congress — have already been made public by the committee, media outlets, and in the book “The Breach.” However, the full scope of his engagement with congressional Republicans as they worked to overturn the election has not previously been revealed.
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