Former House Republican Smells a Rat Over Mark Meadows Being Left Out of New Trump Indictment: ‘A Massive Indicator’

MSNBC’s Morning Joe parsed through the 45-page indictment of former President Donald Trump for much of Wednesday’s show, and one of their guests, former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) brought up a name that didn’t appear in the indictment: Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Riggleman’s segment covered a lot, including Hunter Biden’s laptop (“The ‘whataboutism’ defense is huge”) and how much money Trump and the Republican National Committee made off of the Big Lie (“the biggest conspiratorial grift in the United States”). But he brought up Meadows a couple of times saying that among congressional Republicans, “[t]here’s a huge pucker factor going on with some people in the Mark Meadows text.”

Before he left, he ended his segment telling hosts Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist:

When you’re looking at the text messages from Mark Meadows, you know, alternate electors and state legislators were texting with Mark Meadows. Not only that, the people that were doing the crappy studies [in] Michigan … all that stuff runs through those text messages. So to come full circle, when you look at it, the amount of money that was coming in. The other thing is absolutely fascinating is that Mark Meadows, at this point, you’re right, Joe, at this point was not as far as the definition, not on the descriptors for the co-conspirators. And I think to have the chief of staff who was involved with every single person on that co-conspirators list, think about it, every single person Mark Meadows was actually dealing with, every person. For him not to be on there is just a massive indicator to me.

Scarborough continued on the Meadows line after Riggleman left, pointing out that Meadows had turned over a lot of evidence including text messages that likely “not only embarrassed a lot of [Trump’s] allies at Fox News, but also provided a roadmap, a roadmap that [special prosecutor] Jack Smith walked down all the way to this 45-page indictment.”

Geist went even further, saying that Meadows could be looking for “redemption”:

In effect, he said, “That’s my testimony. Take it, take it. I want to help you along here. I’m just not going to show up and be seen on camera testifying.” And then more recently, of course, two weeks ago, we saw him walk into a federal courthouse offering no comment on January 6 because it’s an ongoing matter. So you can see where Mark Meadows, despite what we learned during those January 6 hearings, his extreme cowardice on that day, and it was, he said, “There’s nothing I can do about this. The big guy wants this and it’s just going to happen,” that he is now perhaps trying to seek some form of redemption by helping Jack Smith make his case.

Brzezinski had an even simpler explanation:

Or “I just don’t want to go to jail.”

Watch the video above via MSNBC.