PowerPoint Meadows is not a place. It’s my new nickname for former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as well as a description of the latest Big Lie mess he finds himself in.
Meadows is claiming executive privilege and plans to assert his Fifth Amendment privilege before the Dipshit Insurrection Committee. The first claim is absurd on its face, the second is his right as an American citizen although his lord and master once said this about that:
Here’s how the WaPo story about the Coup Plot PowerPoint begins:
A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election, spoke with President Donald Trump’s chief of staff “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot.
Phil Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.
A version of the presentation made its way to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan. 5. That information surfaced publicly this past week after the congressional committee investigating the insurrection released a letter that said Meadows had turned the document over to the committee.
Waldron was working with Rudy Giuliani and the Willard Hotel coup plotters. The presentation title says it all: Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN. The whole damn presentation can be found at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Here are a few selected slides beginning with PowerPoint Meadows himself:
Who knew that there was a red embedded in every voting machine?
Those slides give you the gist of Waldron’s report and the wackadoo thinking behind it. The stuff about Smartmatic and Hugo Chavez has been debunked. In fact, the spreaders of it are being sued within an inch of their lives by the company.
The Willard Hotel coup plotters seem to think that putting their crazy claims on PowerPoint would somehow make them plausible. It only does to true believers in the Big Lie. How’s that for an oxymoron?
The MSM is not covering the PowerPoint for what it is: a smoking gun proving the link between outside groups and the Trump White House.
Eric Boehlert does a virtual eye roll over the coverage in his latest Press Run newsletter:
A criminal conspiracy to overthrow last year’s election, the PowerPoint is a heavy-handed plot twist that most Hollywood scriptwriters would dismiss as not being believable. Yet here we are, as Trump plans his re-election run and we learn more about the runaway criminal enterprise he oversaw as president.
We’re learning about it slowly though, and what seems to be reluctantly by the Beltway press, which instead of touting the PowerPoint as a smoking gun that reveals the GOP’s proudly anti-democratic ways, are treating the proposal timidly — an oddity that doesn’t demand much attention. Virtually none of the coverage I’ve seen has included key context, such as quotes from experts on authoritarianism regarding the stunning implications of a White House likely consulting a sabotage plan like that.
Following the Mueller probe made me leery of trumpeting the latest revelations. There were too many dead ends and blind alleys then, but this PowerPoint presentation is different. It’s a justification for the attempted coup on 1/6 as well as a road map for future action.
There are several reasons for Mark Meadows’ refusal to cooperate with the Dipshit Insurrection Committee. One was the blowback from the Impeached Insult Comedian over the debate/COVID story in his book. But the primary reason is the revelation of the Coup Plot PowerPoint and the accusation by Waldron that he met with Meadows on multiple occasions. I’d take the Fifth too if I were him.
That concludes the opening chapter in the curious case of PowerPoint Meadows. It’s fitting that it involves project: all Trumper scandals do. Stay tuned.
The last word goes to Joe Walsh:
Power corrupts
Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.