I read through the ‘Meadows powerpoint’ a couple of times so you don’t have to. I know Meadows didn’t write it, some colonel did, but it was turned over to the Jan 6 committee responsive to a subpoena. It either has some legitimacy, or Meadows is facing an obstruction of Congress charge, so we’ll go with it.
The powerpoint is written in a pretty straightforward style for a military author. Data followed by courses of action, with some key points in the first few slides in case the reader is in a hurry. I’ve read a few hundred like it in my career, and I’m not impressed.
A lot of slides are wasted presenting infographics purporting to show ‘fraud’ but only serve to point to stuff on a random field of data or process flow. The powerpoints don’t contain any links or tie-ins to objective evidence nor to contextualizing standards for how to interpret them. Total crap, and basically worth ignoring.
Then the powerpoint makes a claim that some kind of ballot ‘audit’ is required to ‘restore confidence in the election’. This begs the question: “Is there really a crisis of confidence in the election?” The extreme urgency and tone of the proposed remedies clearly implies that the author thinks the answer is ‘yes’, but we all know it isn’t. The author provides no evidence, and taken in context with the fact that republicans are pushing the idea of fraud to create a crisis of legitimacy, is clearly a crock.
Then you get to a second issue. The powerpoint argues that ‘only legitimately cast paper ballots’ need to be counted to determine the ‘legitimate’ winner of the election. This begs the question of whether a cherry-picked set of ballots, cast a particular way and auditable in a limited time (IE, from small, rural precincts) are really a valid substitute for the total will of the voters, especially in a close race. Obviously it is not.
Before we get to the real issue that isn’t actually in the powerpoint, we need to go back and pull a little bit of context.
By the week after the election, there was no plausible, legal path for Trump to retain the White House. Enough swing states were certifying or transmitting their results that it was clear the first slate of electors was going to favor Biden. State legislatures weren’t showing the willingness to convene ‘emergency sessions’ to rewrite the states election laws and create processes to bypass the election results. Secretaries of state, especially republicans, weren’t keen on substituting their own whims for the vote totals either. Since the job of the SoS is to oversee elections and ensure their integrity, admitting to significant fraud so soon after an election would have been an effective admission of malfeasance, and certainly carried with it legal jeopardy.
By Jan 6th, 2021, transition activities were well under way. Most parts of the federal government were treating Joe Biden as the president-elect, and preparing key staffers for transition into formal roles.
The strategy laid out in the powerpoint to drive a contingent election or alternate certification was, in reality, always a nonstarter. Speaker Pelosi has plenty of options. As just a couple examples, If alternate slates of electors are registered into the count, threatening a contingent election, she can simply refuse to seat enough republicans to ensure the contingent election in Biden’s favor. The federal contested election law provides enough cover (challenge ‘duly elected’ status consistent with claims of fraud) that the courts won’t have time to matter between Jan 3 and Jan 21. If Pence refuses to count legal votes, Speaker Pelosi could pro-forma challenge a state and terminate the joint session, referring the issue to a committee that never meets and ending the count. There were a number of legal analyses on this topic floating around at the time so I won’t bother to repeat them.
The more extreme and possibly farfetched scenarios blast off from the world of existing law into some kind of outer-space of coup-adjacent thinking. A federalized recount over the objections of state legislators? In three weeks? Pence unilaterally providing a certificate of victory to Trump? None of those scenarios end with a consensus Trump victory. It simply isn’t going to happen by following the main forms of existing law. At best, an extreme muddying of the waters would provide for three claimants to the powers of the Presidency on inauguration day.
If Trump can’t win using existing law, and his only option is to flip the chessboard, then it becomes clear that the push is an intermediate step, not an end goal. All of the big lie, the gambits with state legislators and on the floor of the joint session, are nothing more than a pretext. And this gets to the critical word of this diary. Pretext.
You see, the Meadows Powerpoint raises a colossal, critical, lynchpin, keystone, foundational and overwhelming question: “What happens following this pretext?”
What we do know is that, whether through a ‘recount’ or through a certificate from the VP, Trump would declare victory. There’s no provision in the constitution or federal law for such late recounts or other activity. There is no provision to reconvene the joint session and certify some kind of ‘new’ electoral votes. The failsafe is the contingent election in the House. Jan 6th is the final count.
The only outcome would be chaos and a declaration of victory by the current occupant of the White House with only days or hours to act. There would need to be a plan to consolidate that ‘victory’. And fast. Any plan like that would be frightening and make all of the big lie pretext stuff look like a schoolyard argument.
At this point, I don’t know if any concrete evidence has surfaced in public as to what that follow up plan was. There are so many directions such a plan might have gone that I won’t speculate specifics. One line of evidence is telling:
We had a memo from the joint chiefs in August publicly refusing to participate in the ‘resolving an election dispute’. We had a secretary of defense who purportedly was fired for refusing to order the use of the military in accordance with Trump’s wishes related to the election. We had a chief of staff who stated that the national guard’s role was to ‘protect pro-trump people’. We had the Trump administration make heavy-handed use of federal goons on more than one occasion against peaceful protesters.
Scary stuff.