CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Asks Maggie Haberman ‘How Devastating’ Is Bombshell Meadows Report For Trump?

CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins asked New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman just “how devastating” is the new Mark Meadows bombshell to former President Donald Trump.

ABC News reported extensively that Meadows has been spilling the beans to Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team under a grant of immunity about the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and in particular that “he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless.”

On Tuesday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Haberman, and CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig weighed in on the developments. Haberman called them “explosive” but difficult to assess:

COLLINS: And I should note, Maggie, CNN has not confirmed this reporting yet. This is from ABC News.

But if this is the case, if Mark Meadows did get this level of immunity, and he’s there, testifying, how devastating do you think that would be for Donald Trump?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Look, based on the details, in the ABC story? And I tip my hat to them for getting the details of this testimony. They are explosive. They are interesting.

They show Mark Meadows disavowing his own book, which bluntly everyone else had disavowed, so he might as well too, under oath. And it tells you that he knows what he has to do, when he’s in legal peril.

I don’t know what it means, because I don’t totally understand the description of the type of conditions, he was testifying under. I don’t know, whether immunity is being used colloquially, or whether there is something that is more tailored, such as in a proffer offer. I just don’t know. And I assume that that will become clearer as time goes on.

After some analysis by Honig, Haberman explained why Meadows might be a “problematic witness”:

COLLINS: Yes. I mean, and Maggie, we’re hearing from a Trump spokesman, tonight.

I mean, they kind of issue the same statement, with different sentences, and different orders, on we have sponsored these stories.

They say wrongful, unethical leaks, underscore how detrimental these cases are to democracy, the system of justice.

But I mean, this has kind of been something that people, in Trump world, have suspected for a long time that Mark Meadows was doing something, with prosecutors, because his name wasn’t on that indictment that came out of Washington.

HABERMAN: Correct. And there was very little of Mark Meadows actually, in that indictment that was clearly identifiably him.

My colleagues and I actually wrote about that, that he was walking this line, between sort of dealing with Jack Smith’s team. I don’t want to say cooperating, because I don’t have reasonably that’s what it is. But — and dealing with Georgia, which he had clearly turned his back on, and where he was charged.

The fact that he was charged in Georgia? I mean, and Elie would know more than I do about this. But this raises, for me anyway, some questions, about just how much immunity he would be given, because he is already a problematic witness, in a lot of ways.

He wrote a whole book that he testified much the opposite to, right? And he gave a bunch of other public statements. He testified in Georgia. There’s a lot of things that a defense lawyer could use, to try to poke holes at him. So, I don’t know what that means, right.

Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.