Meadows tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims
Former President Donald Trump's final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith's team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Sources told ABC News that Smith's investigators were keenly interested in questioning Meadows about election-related conversations he had with Trump during his final months in office, and whether Meadows actually believed some of the claims he included in a book he published after Trump left office -- a book that promised to"correct the record" on Trump.
'We did win this election' Trump was already questioning the integrity of the election months before Election Day. Then, within hours of polls closing on Nov. 3, 2020 -- as Trump was beginning to lose key states -- Trump claimed on national TV that it was all"a major fraud.
Also by then, Trump had run out of legal options. When the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 11, 2020, denied his final court challenge, Trump told Meadows something to the effect of,"Then that's the end," or,"So that's it," Meadows recalled to investigators, according to sources. Meadows has said publicly that he essentially introduced everyone on the call -- which is corroborated by transcripts of the call that were made public -- and he has said he was simply trying to help them resolve a dispute over Georgia's election results.
"he sheer volume of falsehoods that have been published about the president's time in the White House is astounding," the book says."I consider this book a small opportunity to correct the record." Meadows told investigators he believes the Justice Department was taking allegations of fraud seriously, properly investigating them, and doing all they could to find legitimate cases of fraud -- and he told investigators he relayed all that to Trump a few weeks after the election, the sources said.
Under the penalty of perjury, Meadows offered a vastly different assessment to Smith's investigators, telling them he's never seen any evidence of fraud that would undermine the election's outcome, according to what sources told ABC News.
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