No MAGA Left Behind

Mark Meadows

President Donald Trump has pardoned a long list of his political allies for their support or involvement in alleged plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin.

The individuals listed in a proclamation, which Martin posted on X late Sunday, include high-profile figures like Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and the president’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among dozens of others.

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” read the document, which gives the date of November 7 in its text and the president appears to have signed.

It includes a “full, complete, and unconditional pardon” for those named, including some of the president’s co-defendants who were charged in Georgia for trying to subvert Trump’s 2020 election defeat

[CNN]

How Messed Up Is This? Meadows' Publisher Sues Him for Lying

 

I don't think I've ever heard of a lawsuit like this one. All Seasons Press, which specializes in conservative authors and which published former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows memoir The Chief's Chief, has sued its own author for damages for lying in the pages of his own book. The suit seeks compensation for damages:

More than $1 million for lost profits. 

Over $1 million in incidental damages including hits to the publisher’s reputation. 

Over $600,000 in out-of-pocket damages.

And All Seasons Press wants its advance of $350,000 paid to Meadows returned.

The lawsuit resulted after Meadows made news by cooperating with Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, which included admitting that he had lied about the 2020 election results that he wrote in the book. All Seasons Press stated in its complaint:

“Meadows’ reported statements to the Special Prosecutor and/or his staff [sic] and his reported grand jury testimony squarely contradict the statements in his Book, one central theme of which is that President Trump was the true winner of the 2020 Presidential Election and that election was ‘stolen’ and ‘rigged’ with the help from ‘allies in the liberal media,’ who ignored actual evidence of fraud, right there in plain sight for anyone to access and analyze.”

What a train wreck has followed Mark Meadows idiotic decision to leave his safe seat in Congress to work for the man who destroys everything he touches. 

Read the Fulton County Indictment

 

The indictment text is posted all over the InnerWebs. Here's the link I used:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/1ccdf52e-1ba2-434c-93f8-2a7020293967.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_5

Photo Al Drago, NYTimes

Here is background information on all 19 named defendants: https://abc11.com/who-was-indicted-with-trump-indictment-georgia-harrison-floyd-jenna-ellis/13652352/

Count 1 of the indictment (Violation of the Georgia RICO Act) details 161 overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy, the last such act occurring less than a year ago, on September 15, 2022, when Georgia-based Trump lawyer Robert Cheeley allegedly perjured himself about his involvement in the Georgia fake electors scheme.

Former NC Congressman and Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is among the 19 indicted co-conspirators, and is a named participant in a number of the overt acts:

...Mr. Meadows acknowledged that he had attended a meeting at the White House on Dec. 21, 2020, with Mr. Trump, members of Congress and others to discuss allegations of voter fraud in the state. The next day, Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., in an attempt to observe an election audit that was in progress. He was told by local officials that he was not authorized to be in the room.

Mr. Meadows also spoke with Frances Watson, the chief investigator for Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, who was conducting an inquiry into ballot signatures in Cobb County. A day later, Mr. Trump phoned Ms. Watson himself, and told her that “when the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised.”

Prosecutors have said that a special grand jury that investigated the matter had evidence showing that Mr. Meadows had set up another notable call: the recorded conversation on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump can be heard telling Mr. Raffensperger that he wanted to “find 11,780 votes” that would allow him to win in Georgia.

In a material witness certificate seeking Mr. Meadows’s testimony, Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court noted that Mr. Meadows also “actively participated in and spoke” during the call.... (Anna Betts, in the NYTimes)

 Poor Mark! He had to have thought that he was hitching himself to a shooting star when he resigned his safe 11th CD seat and took the job as Trump's chief of staff.

Must Be Something in the Water in CD11 ... Blood?

 

From Politico.com:

A family friend of Mark Meadows has agreed to plead guilty to accepting an illegal campaign contribution during an ill-fated 2020 run to succeed the former Trump White House chief of staff in Congress, according to newly-released court papers.

Lynda Bennett, who lost in a 2020 Republican primary campaign to Madison Cawthorn, accepted a contribution from a family member exceeding $25,000, according to charging paperwork filed by prosecutors. That contribution was given “in the name of another person,” according to the papers, signed by U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves and Corey Amundson, chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section....

Josh Stein Drops a Bomb, and It's a Dud

 

Josh Stein

Yesterday afternoon, beginning at 3:55 p.m., NC Attorney General Josh Stein posted a series of tweets, the bottomline of which was this: "After an extensive investigation by the SBI and a thorough review by career prosecutors in my office, I have concluded that we will not be pressing charges against Mark or Debra Meadows concerning their own voting in North Carolina in the 2020 elections."

Because when you've got bad news for your Democratic base, news which seems to confirm that rich and powerful white men have different, rosier expectations from the justice system than ordinary schlubs, you dump it out on a Friday afternoon heading into a three-day weekend.

Stein preceded the declaration quoted above with a tweet implying that Mark Meadows is anyway a giant douche, perhaps to soften the actual blow of announcing that voting from an address in western North Carolina you'd never lived at or even ever visited gets a pass from the A.G.: "BREAKING: Mark Meadows has made numerous unfounded and damaging claims about voter fraud both before and after the 2020 election. In fact, the January 6th congressional committee identified him as a likely co-conspirator over his central role in the January 6th insurrection."

Hardly "breaking" news, but I get that the A.G. was trying to wrap his smelly carp of exoneration in some fancy holiday tissue for an audience looking for justice of the swift and sharp variety.

In tweets 5 and 6, Stein added a fig leaf of justification for the decision to let Meadows off entirely:

Given that NC law has a residency exception for people working for the federal government in Washington DC, the Meadows had a year-long lease for the Scaly Mountain property, and cell phone records indicate that Mrs. Meadows was at or around the property in October of 2020, we have concluded that there is not sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knowingly engaged in voter fraud. If further information relevant to these allegations comes to light in any other jurisdictions, we reserve the right to reopen this matter.

The key words: "beyond a reasonable doubt." And it's fair for our top lawyer to calculate the likelihood of conviction by a jury of his peers, even if the storm of criticism that erupted after Stein's announcement suggested that prosecution would be the right thing to do, even if perhaps not ultimately successful.

I want to give Stein the benefit of my doubts. I'd like to see him become governor. Maybe he knows that the Federal web is closing on Meadows for far greater misdeeds, and he doesn't want to get in the way of that.

But I also can't help remembering Lanisha Jones, the Black woman from Hoke County, who in 2016, out of prison on probation, thought she was eligible to vote. She wasn't. She made an honest mistake, The local Republican prosecutor threw the book at her for felony voter fraud. Mark Meadows didn't make a mistake. He registered to vote where he didn't live deliberately, and voted deliberately. He gets "not sufficient evidence," and it tastes bad on the tongue.

And add this to the rancid whiff of special treatment for rich white men: according to the News and Observer, Mark and Debra Meadows "refused to be interviewed by the State Bureau of Investigation" in its probe of the allegations. Those nice, upstanding folks refused. Try that yourself sometime when the SBI comes knocking. How would that have worked for Lanisha Jones?

Who Deliberately Lies in a Published Memoir? Why, Mark Meadows, Natch!

 

Under the Federal statute defining "conspiracy to the defraud the U.S.," the January 6th Committee believes that former NC Congressman and Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is worthy of referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution.

According to the News and Observer, the committee's report names Meadows some 50 times:

...the committee said it believes that Meadows included several “intentional falsehoods” in his December 2021 book, “The Chief’s Chief.” 

One example cited in the report involves Meadows’ recollection of Trump’s intentions after he spoke to supporters at the Ellipse, before many of them walked to the Capitol grounds. In his book, Meadows wrote that when Trump walked offstage, he told Meadows he “had been speaking metaphorically about the walk to the Capitol.”

“He knew as well as anyone that we couldn’t organize a trip like that on such short notice,” Meadows wrote. “It was clear the whole time that he didn’t actually intend to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with the crowd.” 

According to committee members, however, Meadows’ recollection in the book “appeared to be an intentional effort to conceal the facts.” 

“Multiple witnesses directly contradicted Meadows’s account about President Trump’s desire to travel to the Capitol, including Kayleigh McEnany, Cassidy Hutchinson, multiple Secret Service agents, a White House employee with national security responsibilities and other staff in the White House, a member of the Metropolitan Police and others,” the report states.

Mark Meadows' Voter Fraud Case Referred to AG

 

CBS17 was the first to report yesterday afternoon that the State Bureau of Investigation had completed its investigation of voter fraud allegations against former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and had submitted the file to the attorney general. It's up to the AG's office to assess the facts and bring charges or not.

Ordinarily, county district attorneys would investigate and potentially prosecute voter fraud cases, but when it came to light that Meadows had voted in 2020 from an address in Macon County where he never lived, Macon County DA Ashley Welch, a Republican, asked the AG's office to relieve her of the case.

In April, the Macon County Board of Elections removed Meadows from its voter rolls. He last voted in 2021 from an address in Virginia.

Mark Meadows Has the Gall

 

Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who's under investigation in North Carolina for voter fraud, has sued election officials in Lehigh County, Pa., for ... [suppressing my impulse to giggle] ... an "election integrity" issue (the use of ballot drop boxes).

We're currently at the 6-month mark in the NC State Bureau of Investigation's probe of accusations against Meadows -- that he voted absentee in 2020 using a Macon County address where he had apparently never set foot.

The Macon County Board of Elections removed Meadows from their voter rolls in April.

The Growing Voter Fraud in the Mark Meadows Family

Glenn Kessler, reporting in the WashPost:

Mark and Debra Meadows

On Oct. 26, Mark Meadows’s wife, Debra, appeared at the Macon County community building in Franklin, N.C., and filled out a one-stop voter application to cast an early ballot in the 2020 presidential election. She also dropped off an absentee ballot that she had requested for her husband, then the White House chief of staff, an election board official said.

On her one-stop application, provided this week by the North Carolina Board of Elections to The [WashPost] Fact Checker, Debra Meadows certified that she had resided at a 14-by-62-foot mountaintop mobile home for at least 30 days — even though she did not live there. At the top of the form is a notice that “fraudulently or falsely completing this form” is a Class l felony.

This form is the latest in a string of revelations concerning the former chief of staff — who echoed President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020 — and his wife. The New Yorker first reported that Mark and Debra Meadows submitted voter registration forms that listed as their home a mobile home with a rusted metal roof that sold for $105,000 in 2021, even though they had never lived there. North Carolina officials announced last week that Mark Meadows is under investigation for potential voter fraud.

The Fact Checker’s reporting shows that in 2020 Debra Meadows signed three forms — a voter registration form, an absentee ballot request for her husband and the one-stop application — that warned of legal consequences if falsely completed and signed. She also cast a ballot in a 2020 primary runoff using an address that was no longer valid for voting. Mark Meadows appears only to have signed a voter registration form; he did not vote in the primary.

The statement by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation made no mention of Debra Meadows, and officials declined to say whether the probe would also examine her actions.

Mark Meadows Under Investigation for Voter Fraud

 

Macon Co. D.A. Ashley Welch,
passing the buck

Late yesterday Nazneen Ahmed, spokeswoman for Attorney General Josh Stein’s office, confirmed the investigation by the State Bureau of Investigation into former President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after the New Yorker first reported that the former congressman, who represented North Carolina’s westernmost district, registered to vote in September 2020 using an address he had never visited. (NandO)

The request for the investigation came from Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch, who wants the Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Section to take over what would normally be the D.A.'s role in this matter. Ashley Welch is a registered Republican.

“We have requested that the SBI investigate alongside the State Board of Elections,” Ahmed said. “At the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review the findings.”

Allegations of voting misconduct against Meadows came to light after the weekly magazine spoke with the former property owner where Meadows claimed to have lived. She confirmed renting 495 McConnell Rd. in Scaly Mountain to Meadows’ wife, Debbie, for two months, but neighbors told her Mark Meadows never visited the property and his wife only spent a few nights there.

As of yesterday, Meadows’ remained registered to vote at that address.

If Mark Meadows Were a Black Woman, He'd Be Prosecuted For Voter Fraud

 

The New Yorker article that outed Trump's last chief of staff Mark Meadows is here, and it's not behind a pay-wall. The fact seems to be that after Meadows sold his only North Carolina home in March 2020 and moved permanently to northern Virginia, he had no residence in North Carolina from which to vote, so he changed his registration and gave as his residential address a mountain cabin his wife had once rented for two months and which he had never visited, let alone slept a night in. A 14-by-62 foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain.

Mark Meadows' voting "residence" in Scaly Mountain

From a News and Observer editorial published yesterday:

Meadows was one of the most fervent peddlers of voter fraud conspiracies following the 2020 election, which Trump lost. He made baseless accusations of election fraud involving mail-in ballots — even attempting to pressure the Justice Department into investigating them — and assisted in numerous efforts to overturn the election. He’s stonewalled the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, only agreeing to cooperate after the House recommended criminal contempt charges, which could still be brought against him....

Others have been arrested and even imprisoned for honest mistakes that resulted in illegal voting, including a Black woman from Wake County who voted while on probation in 2016, not knowing it wasn’t allowed. 

Lying, on the other hand, is hardly an honest mistake. As a former elected official and top-ranking member of the White House staff, Meadows has no excuse for not knowing the law, and despite his power and influence, he is not above it. As with any instance of potential voter fraud, the North Carolina State Board of Elections should investigate it. And if it’s found that Meadows did fraudulently register for and vote in an election, he ought to bear the consequences of doing so.

Even Mark Meadows Thought It Was Hare-Brained?

 

The January 6th investigating committee has announced that it plans to seek contempt of Congress charges against former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. At the end of the NYTimes article detailing the evidence against Meadows are four paragraphs about a most interesting additional piece of magic that turned up as an attachment to one of Mark Meadows' emails: 

...a 38-page PowerPoint document containing plans to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory. That document, which Mr. Meadows provided to the committee, urged Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency to cling to power and included an unsupported claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.

Mr. Meadows’s lawyer has said he provided the document to the committee because he had received it by email and did nothing with it.

Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who has promoted false claims of election fraud, said that he had circulated the document among Mr. Trump’s allies and among lawmakers on Capitol Hill in the days before the mob violence. Mr. Giuliani has identified Mr. Waldron as a source of information for his legal campaign.

Mr. Waldron told The Washington Post that he had visited the White House several times after last year’s election and spoken with Mr. Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times.”

 

They did a PowerPoint presentation about how to seize the presidency. Somebody asked a retired Army colonel to build that PowerPoint, or else the retired Army colonel freelanced an illustrated rationale for armed insurrection, because of his unhinged devotion to DJT.

Meadows certainly knew plenty about all sorts of schemes, but according to his lawyer, he "did nothing with it" (with that particular PowerPoint, at least). If we believe that denial ... and I think I'm inclined to believe it.

Cawthorn, Secretary of Ignoring the 11th Dist. of NC

 

Mary Papenfuss, in HuffPost:

Photos posted by right-wing Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) are triggering speculation that he could be part of a mysterious shadow “cabinet” in Donald Trump’s pretend presidency recently exposed by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. 

 

The photo Cawthorn posted of the "shadow cabinet" meeting

 

Cawthorn tweeted photos of himself at a conference room table at Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey with the former president and “business leaders.”

“On Saturday, I hosted a round table with special guest [former] President Donald Trump and several key business leaders to create a path forward to victory for the country and to provide election security nationwide,” Cawthorn tweeted.

The “roundtable” also apparently doubled as a $50,000-a-head fundraiser for Cawthorn.

Meadows revealed in a Newsmax interview that he and “President Trump” were meeting with unidentified “cabinet members” to discuss “plans to move forward in a real way.”

He refused to detail the plans. Nor did Meadows identify the “cabinet members.” It was not clear if they were Trump’s former cabinet members from when he actually was president or part of some new panel assembled by Trump and Meadows.

 

2020 Sucks. So Does Mark Meadows

The "death march" on June 1, 2020.
Meadows is 3rd from right, next to Trump.

Former Congressman Mark Meadows (NC-11) has left a trail of political havoc pretty much everywhere he's been. One of his earliest fender-benders was the 2013 government shutdown to stop Obamacare. That did not gild the GOP with glory. In 2018 (still in the House as leader of the Freedom Caucus) he helped get Trump a little more money for "border security," which certainly endeared him to Twitterman, and soon (March 8, 2020) Mark Meadows was elevated to White House Chief of Staff (Trump's 4th).

But to get to the White House, Meadows needed to extricate himself from his North Carolina congressional seat. Hmmm. 

Mark Meadows' To Do List, December 2019

1. Find a trustworthy successor, someone you know will play ball. (Ah, wife's personal friend and Tea Party debuttante, Lynda Bennett of Maggie Valley.)

2. Advantage Lynda Bennett's campaign every underhanded way you can.

3. Take the P.R. heat from a crowd of Republican primary candidates running with Bennett who think you crossed the line in advantaging her. Especially critical of you is young Madison Cawthorn, one of about 15 candidates vying for the office. Also Jim Davis, NC Senate member, favored by the Republican establishment.

4. Hide and watch Bennett get only 21% of the primary vote (though finishing as Number 1) and face a run-off against -- surprise! -- Madison Cawthorn.

5. Get Trump to endorse Bennett in the run-off. Check.

6. Watch in shock as Slickster Cawthorn runs away with the election, fueled partly by his Bachelor vibe and partly by widespread Republican resentment at the way you sprung your retirement on the district.

Meadows attempted to repair all this damage to his reputation back home by immediately pivoting to wholehearted endorsement of Cawthorn, shoveling corporate help his way and getting him into the presence (though carefully distanced) of Donald J. Trump along with star billing at the Republican National Convention. Reality show stuff. Maybe good TV, but the whole saga smells situationally tawdry, like a bacteria-laden swamp. Plus Golden Boy has turned leaden, sandblasted by a series of unfortunate revelations.

This morning WashPost reporter Josh Dawsey published "Meadows Under Fire as Trump Chief of Staff," and we learn again the hallmarks of the Meadows touch. He's criticized anew for being "ineffective," a "bungler," a sender of mixed messages, secretive. He claims to rely on -- as a kind of job manual -- “The Gatekeepers,” a book on presidential chiefs of staff by Chris Whipple. Chris Whipple, though, went on the record to say this: “It’s hard to count the ways Meadows has failed as chief of staff. It’s been an unmitigated disaster.”

Photo by Amanda Volsard,
for the WashPost

But Meadows thrives because he's attached himself to Trump as fawning sycophant, the one who agrees and enables, the one willing to take a bullet -- whether hot lead or hot virus. He jumped into the helicopter with Trump to Walter Reed, the only staffer to do so. Then he practically slept at Trump's feet in the hospital. He wasn't afraid of COVID. In fact, he'd already survived one self-quarantining the actual day after he was named chief of staff. So what's this flu-like chest cold to one so devoted to the leader? He even apes Trump's dress style. It's embarrassing.

"Unmitigated Disaster"

Among the other torn sheets of Meadows' tenure in the White House, none is more galling and life-threatening than his hand in getting Scott Atlas, the "herd-immunity" king, into intimate contact with Trump. Dawsey reports that Meadows "helped empower Scott Atlas," a single act that will eventually be credited for tens of thousands more preventable deaths from the coronavirus.

Meadows has also (and rather notoriously) flirted with young-Earth creationism, the ultra-conservative belief that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Anyone who encourages that will also believe any cockamamie medical theory in 2020 and be a lethal threat to all of us.

Too Bad So Sad -- Mark Meadows Finds the Worm in His Cabbage

Big story in Politico this Monday morning about how Congressman Mark Meadows' apotheosis as Chief of Staff to Twitterman has turned out to be a longterm migraine and not the picnic Meadows apparently thought he was being gifted with. "Three-and-a-half months in, he has told people he is struggling with the chief’s job and that if Trump wins reelection, he’ll stay in the role only for an additional year, if that long."

If that long. Indeed.

Like any good fiscally conservative Republican, he says he likes all the perks of flying on Air Force One, the presidential mess, the little match books with the presidential seal that he can pocket for his friends. It's good being crammed into the armpit of the most powerful individual on earth, so far as the trimmings are concerned, but not so good presiding over the great dumpster fire of a failed and still failing presidency.

“Look at what has happened on Meadows’ watch: the walk to Lafayette Square, the complete mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis, the defense of the Confederate flag and the botched handling of the intelligence on the Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers. We could go on and on. It has been one of the worst stretches of the Trump presidency,” said Chris Whipple, who's written extensively on White House chiefs of staff. “He took the job, so he owns it. That was his first big mistake.”

When did you first discover you had traded a safe seat in Congress in perpetuity for a thankless post in charge of sitting outside Jared Kushner's door? "...Meadows quickly learned to yield to the existing power structure rather than trying to commandeer it. That means essentially recognizing the West Wing is Jared Kushner’s domain...."

D'oh! Second fiddle to the boy genius! Does the upholstery on Air Force One really make up for that humiliation?

The Collaboration of Mark Meadows and Virginia Foxx

The photo-op at St. John's Church. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is at far right.
SecDef Mark Esper is at far left, who has said he didn't know where he was going that evening.
Presumably Meadows knew and collaborated in the operation

Former Congressman Mark Meadows is from North Carolina. By way of East Berlin? I ask because East Berlin was the home of the Stasi, the East German secret police who taught collaboration with tyranny as self-advancement.

Meadows' sycophancy toward Trump was already legendary. He willingly gave up a seat in the US House in order to be in that man's armpit every day, praising his ideas, facilitating his desires, fanning his fantasies, taking a hike through a park which still reeked of chemicals, trailing behind his Great White Shark like a remora.

Consider that other accomplished Republican collaborator from the Carolinas, Lindsey Graham, who in the presence of Trump acts like a sorority chick who just got pinned. Anne Applebaum reports, "A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, 'he brags about having just met with Trump' while exhibiting 'high school' levels of excitement, as if 'a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me!' "

Yes, I've been reading Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic on the psychology of collusion in an authoritarian state, an exhaustive and exhausting trip through the 20th Century and its many outbreaks of tyranny and the collusion of some of the people. Applebaum writes persuasively about the several types of collusion, from the unwilling and reluctant to the ideologically propelled, with lots of examples from the history of the last 100 years. I recommend you read her on your own time.

A remora attaches itself to a Great White

Look at Congresswoman Virginia Foxx. She becomes a giddy cheerleader (senior citizen league) in Trump's presence, a fawning autograph-hound giggling in the presence of an iron-fisted male she admires. Those of us who've known her personally for decades know her authoritarian instincts and her imperious nature. She drives a car likes she thinks: I'm the only person on this road.

Her toadying to Trump is just as inexcusable as Meadows' and Graham's, if less public and considerably less consequential. Her motivation? Gotta be personal gain. She's gotten progressively richer in public office, and it doesn't hurt building that wealth to be in the front row of group photos featuring ultimate power. Meanwhile, she's quite pious, published "God Is in the House" in 2016 (her version of waving the Bible in front of St. John's), and she issues self-congratulatory little homilies about religious and civic virtue at the drop of a body, most recently following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, offering thoughts and prayers for the family and then saying this in classic collaborator style: "I applaud both President Trump and Attorney General Barr’s decision to conduct a full inquiry into this horrific incident." 

"Full inquiry"? What? Not a word about Trump's militarizing the streets of the nation's capitol, his lack of respect for protestors, his unconstitutional grabbing of power and the deployment of the top officials in his government -- Mike Pompeo at State and William Barr at Justice -- as accessories in his subversion of the Constitution and its whole framework of checks-and-balances.

Why, even the Pope in Rome condemns such collusion with immoral authoritarianism. Southern Baptists ... not so much. Which perhaps explains Foxx's current self-descriptor as "a Catholic-Baptist," since the absolution you can't get from the one, you can probably get from the other.

Mark Meadows Took His Hatchet to the White House

We would expect little else from the congressman from North Carolina, who loved shutting down the government to get his way.

Mark Meadows, newly installed as Trump's fourth chief of staff, is reportedly increasing tensions in the White House, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed his career as congressman from the NC-11. We learn, for example, from this Bloomberg reporting that it was Meadows who fired press secretary Stephanie Grisham:

Meadows’s moves -- especially Grisham’s replacement, which she and her staff learned was under consideration in a report last week by Axios -- have suddenly dialed up tension in a building that has long been riven by infighting, according to multiple people familiar with the situation. 

Meadows told Grisham over the weekend he wanted her to give up the press secretary position and serve only as the White House communications director. She declined, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

Grisham has a powerful advocate in the White House: first lady Melania Trump, who promptly brought the ousted press secretary back to the East Wing as her personal chief of staff. The only formal announcement about the staff changes on Tuesday came from the first lady’s office, which some of the people suggested was a sign of her displeasure.

 Blunt force trauma. It's a Meadows trademark.

Mark Meadows, Finally Rising To the Level of His Incompetence

Congressman Mark Meadows (NC-11) will resign his seat early and go to the White House to be Twitterman's Chief of Staff. Good luck with that, Bro!

Meadows leaves plenty of wreckage in his wake. He waited until the day before the end of candidate filing last December to announce he wouldn't be running for reelection, but he had his wife's BFF Lynda Bennett all prepped to step up and run for the seat. Turned out, about a dozen others also wanted a shot at it, and their dyspepsia grew as they discovered how Meadows had tried to manipulate the results.

Lynda Bennett did come in first in the primary but with only 22.72% of the vote. She'll face a run-off on May 12th against second-place finisher Madison Cawthorn who evidently spoke for many 11th District Republicans in his anger at Mark Meadows:

“I am calling for a runoff,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind the people of Western North Carolina are sick and tired of watching the politicians trying to force their will upon us and every single vote that was cast against Lynda Bennett was a vote against what Mark Meadows has done.”

Third-place finisher and long-time member of the NC Senate Jim Davis said, “I don’t get Mark Meadows claiming she [Lynda Bennett] was the best-qualified candidate in the race, which is total hogwash, but he has the right to do that,” he said. “This just reeks of the coronation of a candidate, and one of the less qualified candidates in the race,” he added.

During his time in the US House, Meadows was pretty much single-handedly responsible for two government shutdowns and for the ousting of House Speaker John Boehner. "In 2013, he engineered a shutdown in an attempt to strip funding from the Affordable Care Act. In 2018, Meadows encouraged President Donald Trump not to accept a bill to fund much of the government without $5 billion in wall money and rallied others on the right to do the same" (Joel Burgess, Asheville Citizen Times).

Freedom Caucus vandal inside the Oval Office with the stable genius. A match made in pandemonium with plenty of gall.

The Most Interesting Congressional Race in North Carolina

Following Tuesday's primary in North Carolina, two Democratic women in CD 2 and 6 look poised to take seats in the US House that have been held by Republicans. Deborah Ross in CD2 absolutely buried her Democratic primary contenders, taking right at 70% of the total vote against three rivals. In CD6, Democrat Kathy Manning took over 48% of the vote against four rivals, beating her nearest competitor,  Rhonda Foxx, by 33,361 votes. The Cook Partisan Index rates both districts as "Likely Democratic" for 2020.

But I'm looking also to CD11 for my 2020 excitement, even though Cook still considers it "Solid Republican" even with all of Asheville restored to the district after being previously gerrymandered out. I'm looking that way because of the Democrat who won Tuesday's primary against four rival candidates, Moe Davis, who doubled the votes of his nearest second-place contender.

I've been following Davis since he burst out into the public soon after his (admittedly late) filing for the office. Morris "Moe" Davis retired from the US Air Force at the rank of colonel and already had a high pre-candidacy national profile. He served two years as Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay and resigned in protest because his superiors in the Air Force Judiciary and the General Counsel of the Department of Defense overruled his decision to disallow evidence obtained via CIA torture. In resigning his position, Davis declared that he wasn't going to take orders from people who think "waterboarding is A-Okay."

In other words, he's a commendable hard-nose. He's got a clear pattern of courting controversy, or at least not skirting around it when it blocks his path of moral certitude (he said the Supreme Court was "meddling" when it chose to review the Military Commissions Act). He's not afraid to defy authority when he thinks he's right, and you've got to admire his fortitude. He's been on all the broadcast and cable news programs as a recognized expert in national security, especially security from terrorists who he thinks should be prosecuted the fair way and not via the CIA torture wheel, but he's also defended Guantanamo as a "humane" detention center (which makes him suspicious to some liberals).

He's a "risk" candidate at a time when too many Democrats want "safe." He endorses universal health care ("whether it is called Medicare For All or any other name"), access to abortion, legalizing marijuana, and confronting income equality. His website is no-nonsense and straight to the kisser, sort of like his military career. He says this:

He stood up to the Bush Administration on torture. He stood up to the Obama Administration to defend the right to free speech. Moe Davis risked his career to do the right thing for our country. That’s the kind of character he will bring to Washington as Congressman in North Carolina’s 11th District.

He was born and grew up in Shelby, NC, studied criminal justice at AppState, graduated in 1980 and earned his Juris Doctor from NC Central in 1983. He immediately joined the Air Force as a JAG officer where he served with distinction.

(Full disclosure. I contributed a little to Davis during the primary and will likely do so again.)


The Republican Moe Davis Will Be Running Against

Madison Cawthorn

There will be a hot run-off on May 12th between front-running (and Mark Meadows endorsed) Lynda Bennett and the very young Madison Cawthorn (born in 1995). There were a dozen Republicans running in the primary (listed and described here), and most of them are mightily pissed off at how Meadows kept his decision not to run for reelection a secret until the day before the filing period ended and then advantaged his wife's best friend Lynda Bennett for the seat.

On Tuesday, Bennett took 22.72% of the vote to Cawthorn's 20.40%, and Cawthorn has already called for the run-off, drawing endorsements from several other trailing candidates. Cawthorn was quoted in the press:

There’s no doubt in my mind the people of Western North Carolina are sick and tired of watching the politicians [Mark Meadows] trying to force their will upon us and every single vote that was cast against Lynda Bennett was a vote against what Mark Meadows has done. Republicans in the race were furious that Meadows endorsed Bennett, a close friend of him and his wife, after telling other candidates he would not endorse anyone in the primary.

The odds are rarely on the side of second-place finishers in run-offs, but in this case the odds are hard to figure because of anger in the district at Meadows' trying to manipulate the outcome.

More Intrigue in the 11th Congressional District of NC

We previously followed the speculation by conservative blogger Brant Clifton that Rep. Mark Meadows' sudden decision to retire from his NC-11 congressional seat might have been an effort to advantage one of his own staffers, Wayne King.

Lynda Bennett

If new reporting by Ally Mutnick for Politico is true, that theory was all wet -- soaking, saturated, and dripping. Mutnick is reporting that Meadows' actual scheme was meant to advantage his wife's friend, Lynda Bennett, who appears to have had advance notice of Meadows' decision:

Online records revealed her campaign website domain had been registered on Oct. 28 by a Scott Meadows, who appears to be the brother of the congressman. The campaign's Facebook page was created on Dec. 18, a day before the retirement. And shortly after midnight on Dec. 19 — about five hours before Meadows announced — Bennett posted photos of herself with the congressman and his wife at local GOP events in the state.

After launching her run, Bennett was quickly endorsed by the Asheville Tea PAC, a local organization which said in a release that its board convened for a 6:15 a.m. conference call on the day of Meadow’s announcement to throw support behind a successor.

"It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this happened. It just doesn’t," said Jeff Miller, a city councilman in Hendersonville, who was the 2010 GOP nominee in the district. "It just looks very suspicious."

"It was very discourteous to other Republicans who were respecting Congressman Meadows and not primarying him for him to pull out this close to it and leave everybody in a lurch," Miller said.

So what about Meadows' own deputy chief of staff Wayne King, who registered to run just after Meadows announced his retirement and who doesn't actually live in District 11?

Meadows' plans were kept so secret that Wayne King, the congressman’s deputy chief of staff and district director who has been eyeing the seat, did not learn about the retirement until shortly before the public announcement. He said he was asked to break the news to the district staff on Dec. 18, a Wednesday and the day the House voted to impeach Trump.

So Lynda Bennett is the chosen one. We'll see if Republicans in the 11th District agree on March 3rd.