With Mark Meadows reportedly pleading guilty in exchange for testifying against his former boss, it arms federal prosecutors with a lot of firepower, according to a former prosecutor appearing on CNN.
Asked why this spelled trouble for Trump, Eli Honig, a former New York federal prosecutor, said that the former president's Chief of Staff has a holy grail of insights to what transpired on Jan.6 when the Capital was under siege.
"Because now the DOJ believes they can use Mark Meadows' testimony," he told CNN's Kaitlin Collins on "The Source." "And Mark Meadows was Donald Trump's right hand -- at his side literally throughout the key weeks, days and months leading up to and during Jan. 6 as well."
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Trump stands accused in Washington D.C. of defrauding the country and conspiring to undermine the 2020 presidential election results.
New York Times' Maggie Haberman, who appeared on the panel alongside Honig, was struck by how massive Meadows' flip really is in terms of the affect it has in Trump world.
"This was the first example we have seen in detail," she explained. "Look, he testified in Georgia for several hours -- so there's examples there that are under oath or at least threat of perjury."
"But this feels a little different in terms of some of the specifics of what he's said to have said."
Haberman then echoed reporting by ABC News that sourced Meadows "stating bluntly" to Trump that the election "wasn't stolen" and that not only were they not gonna prove it but that "he had questions about it."
"That was the first time I had heard anything like that," the deeply sourced Haberman, who wrote a book on the the former president and has been likened to a "Trump whisperer" in her own right, said.
And she agreed with Honig's assessment, that wherever the Trump sun rose, Meadows was there to shadow him.
"Mark Meadows was at the center at so much of this," she said. "He was talking to so many people."
"And he could speak to Trump's mindset in a very specific way."
