Dem
51
GOP
49
Yesterday, the 1/6 Committee released another group of transcripts from its investigation. Is this drip, drip, drip sharing of information imposed by the amount of stuff the Committee has and the short timeline they have to get through it? Is it designed to maximize the amount of bad news coverage for Donald Trump, et al.? Both? We don't know, but the only person competing with Trump for control of the current news cycles is Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY).
There was a lot of juice in the new release, but also two particularly big storylines. The first of those is that then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was working very hard to keep secret much of whatever he was doing. He held numerous "close hold" meetings, which are not logged in the official records of White House activities. He also made sure that the number of people at these meetings remained small. These are not the behaviors of someone who is above the level, needless to say.
The second big storyline, also involving Meadows, is that it was allegedly not enough to keep certain things "off the record." According to Cassidy Hutchinson, he developed a habit of burning documents in the fireplace in his office. She said she saw him do it at least a dozen times between December 2020 and mid-January 2021. Those, of course, would be the weeks after Trump lost the election, and during which he and Meadows and others were scheming to somehow overturn the result.
Even if the things Meadows burned were menus for Great Wall Szechuan House and Inferno Pizzeria Napoletana, that is a violation of the Presidential Records Act. If the documents were government property, then that's a whole new level of illegal. It might also explain why we don't know for sure, and may never know, exactly what Trump took home with him when he left office. After all, if some key document is missing, it could be in a desk drawer at Mar-a-Lago, or it might have gone up in smoke. Anyhow, if there were others who saw Meadows do this, and can be persuaded to speak on the record, then the hole he's in just got much deeper.
The House is holding pro forma sessions for the rest of this week, and they may hold one on Monday of next week. So, the Committee has a few more days left to spill whatever beans it's going to spill before Republicans get control of the whole pot. (Z)