It was previously reported that Meadows made a last-minute mad-dash for the Justice Department, claiming Trump declassified the information after Trump had already left the White House, according to Hutchinson. The DOJ refused to declassify the information, but Trump's allies maintain Trump filed the necessary paperwork in time. It was 15 minutes before President Joe Biden was sworn in as the president.
"At around 10:30 p.m. [the night before], I saw Pat Philbin power walking toward my office. Great, I thought. What could possibly be going wrong now?" she writes. Trump had already left the office and many other staffers carried their belongings out.
“How many copies of that Crossfire Hurricane binder did Mark make? Where are all the copies?” Pat asked Hutchinson. “How many of them have been distributed?”
"Slow down,” she told Philbin. “How many copies? I have no idea. There are some in our office…”
She described many binders thrown around the room with "still-classified but supposedly soon-to-be-declassified information, but the Crossfire Hurricane binders were easy to identify because of how thick they were."
“Did Mark already give copies to Mollie Hemingway and John Solomon?" Philbin asked. Hutchinson describes them as "the conservative journalists who the president and Mark were acquainted with."
“Yeah, he had a few of his Secret Service agents meet Mollie and John in Georgetown earlier tonight while you all were in the Oval Office with the boss," she told Philbin.
"The color drained from Pat’s face. 'Seriously?'"
The following day, a Secret Service agent dropped off a bag full of loose papers in the Whole Foods sack. It's unknown if the writers kept any documents and what they were given.
What is certain, however, is that the act of giving classified information to reporters is exactly what sent Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. "Scooter" Libby, to prison.
"In 2007, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton sentenced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to 30 months in federal prison, imposed a $250,000 fine and ordered Libby to undergo a further two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service," reported Politico on the one-year anniversary.
Libby was indicted in 2005 by a federal grand jury in wake of a federal investigation into who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. He ultimately made a plea deal and President George W. Bush commuted his prison sentence, but left the $250,000 fine in place. Libby was ultimately found to have lied to the grand jury, obstructed justice and false statements.
Richard Nixon's White House counsel John Dean wrote about the trial in 2006. Among the things explained are that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald found "Libby said that he was authorized" by Cheney and Bush to leak the name to the Times.
"This revelation has been accompanied by a number of public misstatements, which call for correction," Dean wrote at the time. "The most blatant of these is the claim that Fitzgerald's filing indicates that the President authorized the release of Valerie Plame's covert status at the CIA. In fact, the document is conspicuously silent on this fact. The filing does indicate that the President authorized the release of classified information, but it was different information — a National Intelligence Estimate that had been classified pursuant to an executive order."
It began with an op-ed in 2003 by Joseph Wilson, accusing the Bush administration of lying about Iraqi president Saddam Hussein attempting to acquire uranium to make nuclear weapons. It was the motivation for the administration to enter into a decade-long war.
Wilson's op-ed begins: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The special counsel found that the vice president's office saw this as a direct attack on them. Plame's name and information were leaked to the press, destroying her career as a covert operative. Libby was accused of using her information to discredit Wilson.
Fitzgerald's report said Libby "undertook vigorous efforts to rebut" Wilson because "Vice President Cheney, defendant's immediate superior, expressed concern to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson's [CIA-sponsored] trip [to Africa to determine if Iraq was getting uranium from Niger] was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."
Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized … to disclose the key judgments of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to Miller" because the information "was 'pretty definite' against Ambassador Wilson… and that the Vice President thought that it was 'very important' for the key judgments of the NIE to come out."
Libby claimed the president "later" authorized him to leak the information. It was never known whether "later" meant before or after he gave the info to Miller.
"The word 'later,' in the filing, is crucially ambiguous," wrote Dean. "Did the President authorize Libby's actions before Libby actually revealed the classified information to Miller, or afterward? The distinction may make a large difference in Libby's defense: If the authorization was retroactive, then Libby initially revealed classified information without permission to do so; thus, he would have reason to lie."
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Cheney's lawyer claimed that because Bush granted that it be publicly disclosed essentially meant it was declassified. The text specifically said, "Publicly disclos[ing] a document amounted to a declassification of the document."
Donald Trump has used similar claims, saying that because he took them out of the Oval Office they became declassified. Bush and Cheney had the benefit of still being in office at the time of the investigation.
The United States of America v. I. Lewis Libby started in 2007, and he was able to be bailed out by the administration so he wasn't charged with leaking classified information. He was only charged and convicted of lying to the grand jury and others, along with obstruction.
No special counsel has been called to investigate the case of Mark Meadows handing the classified binders to conservative reporters, as Hutchinson alleges. It's also unclear if he was given a similar order as Libby to share the information by former President Donald Trump.
A federal grand jury has been called in Washington, D.C. for Wednesday, Nov. 8.
He was unable to have the information declassified by the Justice Department in the last few minutes of the Trump administration.
