Mark Meadows essentially pointed the finger at Donald Trump after finally deciding to testify in the Jan. 6 case.
The former White House chief of staff successfully ignored the House Select Committee's subpoena without getting prosecuted, and he wasn't named in special counsel Jack Smith's indictment, but Meadows took the stand Monday to assert that he was acting as Trump's right-hand man when he undertook efforts to overturn Georgia's presidential election results in 2020, reported The Daily Beast.
“He now cannot ever say, ‘I wasn’t doing this for the president, I was acting on my own,’” said Peter Odom, a former prosecutor at the Fulton County district attorney's office.
Meadows told a judge that he tried to connect Trump to others who could help him overturn his election loss at the former president's direction, which legal experts say would help Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis prove the allegations in her indictment.
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“He’s giving fodder to the prosecution,” said Jonathan R. Nash, a law professor at Emory University. “Trump can still say, I didn’t tell him to do that… but the prosecution has a lot to work with.”
While legal doctrine traditionally holds that the "master" should answer for crimes committed on his behalf, veteran University of Georgia law professor Ronald Carlson said that Meadows' testimony at his removal hearing was “largely exculpatory," because he did not say that Trump's campaign was behind the wide-ranging effort to flip Georgia's presidential election results.
“I didn’t see a smoking gun admission by Meadows on the main point — whether they were extending re-election campaigning," Carlson said. "He did not say these were political moves."
