A key player in MAGA World’s plot to have the federal government seize voting machines to undo the 2020 election made sure then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows knew about the status of the plan, according to texts obtained by CNN.
The texts reportedly revealed that Phil Waldron — the retired Army colonel who created the notorious PowerPoint detailing strategies to steal the election on behalf of then-President Donald Trump — texted Meadows directly on Dec. 23, 2020 about a judge rejecting Arizona Republicans’ lawsuit demanding that state officials turn over election equipment.
Waldron, a devotee of Trump’s Bie Lie, reportedly complained that the judge’s dismissal of the suit would lead to “delay tactics” from the supposed perpetrators of his baseless election fraud conspiracy theories.
The former Army colonel also reportedly lamented that Arizona was “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade” of seizing the equipment in states where Trump was trying to overturn the election (states like Georgia, for instance).
“Pathetic,” Meadows replied, according to CNN.
The reported texts further cement Meadows’ involvement in pro-Trump hardliners’ authoritarian proposal; a scheme that would’ve centered on Trump ordering federal officials to seize voting machines across the country in pursuit of debunked MAGA conspiracy theories that claimed the machines had been hacked.
Waldron’s election steal PowerPoint (which was titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN”) publicly came to light early December last year when the House Jan. 6 Committee revealed that Meadows had turned over an email regarding the 38-page PowerPoint.
It’s unclear how exactly the PowerPoint reached Meadows. However, Waldron told the Washington Post that he met with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
The House Jan. 6 panel subpoenaed Waldron several days after the ex-colonel’s interview with the Post.
And Meadows stayed quiet the whole time.
OT
I ran across this little gem in the Twitterverse:
“Voting is a lot like driving a car:
Vote D to go forward and R to go backward.”
From CNN:
“Waldron, a retired Army colonel with ties to Trump’s one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn, has emerged as a key figure in the broader scheme to overturn the election and was the architect of several extreme proposals for doing so.”
And he lives just west of Austin.
One of the serious conspirators.
And Meadows is in deeper and deeper.
It used to be that pals would gather at Benny’s Bar on voting day, have a few beers and pretzels, swap stories about successful election interference and then they’d all go down to the local voting precinct and seize the jiggered voting machines, but the woke mob took all that away.
Last we heard, Meadows was turning stuff over, very likely with the intent of going for immunity in exchange for testifying about all he knows.
As a typical North Carolinian, he thought he knew enough about everything. But now that he knows more about the ways of the world, he just might actually start to understand that he did not, that democracy was (and is) in peril, and it’s time to come clean.
With a really swanky book deal (ghost written, of course, but based on interviews with him), Meadows can then pull in some big bucks. Enough to pay for the security he will need if he really does tell all, under oath, to the American people. He’ll be a hero (sort of) to some, and a major turncoat to many. But he’ll go down in history, in a manner similar to John Dean.
Fess up, Mark. You can buy a nice house on a mountain top in the hills of NC, and mellow out.