Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 14, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

55:01

Did Mark Meadows Plan The Coup?

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the explosive revelations that Mark Meadows had plenty of advanced knowledge of the events that took place on January 6th. To support the show and access additional content, including the weekly Weekender episode, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Given information that we've had to review as a committee, I think Mr. Meadows has significant reason to be concerned about his activities.
	And when we look at the real results of this investigation, it is not really, the foundation is not based on a legislative purpose.
	Hey, everybody.
	Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates Sexton here with Nick Halseman.
	Thank you for joining us.
	This is an important episode.
	We have to talk about one of the most important stories to come out in a long, long time.
	Put it into the context that only the Muckrake Podcast can.
	Nick, do you want to tell the people what that subject is?
	Yes.
	It's two words for you, Jared.
	Nancy Reagan.
	Yeah, so what's great about this is we're getting ready to literally talk about an attempted coup of the United States of America and the plot that has come into full focus.
	The thing that we have dedicated the past few years of our lives chronicling, investigating, talking about, examining, picking apart.
	And before we get ready to record, Nick is just like, we have to talk about the fact that Twitter was obsessed this weekend with the fact that Nancy Reagan Was apparently known around Hollywood for a certain sexual act.
	Yeah, for her throat game, which I had never heard of that phrase before until Twitter, until they started saying that.
	It was amazing.
	I had to look it up and everything.
	Yeah, listen, we don't have to spend more than about a minute on this, but certainly I was looking forward to it all weekend long, to sit down here and talk.
	Now here's the funny thing, was they even spelled her name wrong?
	R-E-G-A-N was what was trending for a little while there.
	But just the origin of it was, by the way, that some other woman, conservative writer or something, tried to say, here's Madonna.
	Ben Shapiro's sister.
	What's that?
	Ben Shapiro's sister.
	Oh, that's who that is?
	He's got Spawn?
	Or he's got siblings?
	And they are both deep, deep, deep in that right-wing grift.
	Wow, wow.
	Well, anyway, there's a picture of Madonna at 63 and Nancy Reagan at 63, and someone's like, well, be like Nancy.
	And then, boof, they dropped the hammer here that she was quite promiscuous, I suppose, on the MGM lot back when she was Nancy Davis, which who knew?
	Love it.
	Well, listen, I don't care who's promiscuous and isn't promiscuous.
	I think what's telling here, which is something that we've talked about a little bit in the past, Which is the myth of Ronald Reagan and the reality of Ronald Reagan are two completely different things.
	This entire idea that has been held up that Ronald Reagan was fiscally conservative, that he was for small government, that he was like this, Christian, moral, vanguard.
	And it turns out, in fact, that he was all about running deficits.
	He was all about huge government.
	He was actually into the occult.
	Not all that Christian.
	And, of course, him and Nancy had interesting paths back in Hollywood.
	I think it's really amazing every now and then when these things break out.
	And yet the right-wing mythology of Ronald Reagan still persists.
	Sure.
	I mean, remember, this wasn't Ronnie's first wife.
	Right?
	It was a second wife for him.
	I think maybe for her too, if I'm not mistaken, right?
	They didn't make their first marriages work.
	But it certainly adds a little more context to the notion that Nancy was in charge of what was going on for many reasons and many reasons of control.
	So hey, good for her.
	Well, and it just goes back to everything that we've talked about, which is just that there is a right-wing hypocrisy.
	And the only thing that actually matters is in principles.
	It's not actually fiscal conservatism, social conservatism.
	They're not actually pro-life.
	They're none of these things.
	What they are is a body that is dedicated to the pursuit of power.
	And Reagan hit it really, really well behind a veneer.
	A star-spangled eagle flying across the sky in the Statue of Liberty veneer.
	But, you know, once you get to 2016 and to 2020, of course, you have Donald Trump, who was not as good at upholding the veneer of, you know, right-wing conservativism as much as Ronald Reagan was, but they loved him just as much because all they cared about was power.
	So much so, in fact, that they were trying to carry out a full-scale, and it turns out, and we'll talk more about this in a second, a military-involved Coup of the United States of America in order to keep this absolute charlatan embarrassment and buffoon in power because it doesn't matter about the reality, it matters about power and profit.
	This is why you're the best podcast partner in the business because you saved me from, you know, no one else in the world could possibly go from that subject so beautifully and so profoundly to where we're at now.
	I gotta tell you, I'm sitting here trying to get the wheels going, the gears going, how we were possibly going to move from Nancy Ring into this.
	But we got there.
	Yeah, because you know I would have sullied myself with all sorts of lurid details of all that stuff, mourning wood in America.
	But we don't have to go there anymore.
	We're going to go to Mark Meadows and the various serious issues we have.
	So let's put that away because, you know, it's always good to laugh a little bit and loosen you up.
	Before you have to put the hammer down and really discuss the things that are important.
	Yeah, I tried real hard to get us there.
	I knew it was coming, you know, and we had to figure out some bridge.
	But unfortunately, this is something that we've been talking about for a while.
	We've been detailing.
	We've had our own theories about what January 6th, 2021 was, what the intentions were there.
	It wasn't hard to discern and predict exactly what was happening because These people are not particularly creative.
	They're not particularly innovative, competent.
	Thank God!
	They're not competent, and we'll talk about how that lack of competency might have actually saved the Republic of the United States of America here in a minute.
	But as these details are coming to light, the things that we suspected in our analysis and our reporting, it seems that they were right, they were correct, there was an actual coup, and we'll talk about the specifics of it.
	Book, do you want to go ahead and lay out some of the fundamentals of the story, what we have learned, where we're at, and then we'll take it from there.
	Well, the one thing that was the headline across the last, you know, several days was this PowerPoint presentation that was attached to an email sent to Mark Meadows, which- Can I- Yeah.
	Real fast, I gotta say, and listen, I want people at home to know this.
	How to do a PowerPoint properly?
	We will admit when we are wrong.
	I am all about that.
	And I'll tell you, when we started talking about the January 6th committee, I said, I'm glad that they're having it, but I thought that it was largely going to be a perfunctory sort of a thing that they were going to go through with motions.
	And I think that for the most part, they have.
	But that does not mean that in the case of what we're dealing with today, what we're talking about, they uncovered some stuff.
	Right.
	Simply by going out there, subpoenaing people, asking them to testify.
	We have now discovered more and more, which has illuminated.
	So I will eat crow on that.
	This has had this has had consequences.
	There have been things that have been brought to light because of this committee.
	I just want to put that out there.
	But I think what you were feeling was the notion of, like, specific people going down.
	Well, that still remains to be seen.
	Right.
	Well, so, you know, because Bannon is criminal contempt and so is Meadows, but Bannon has now been able to delay this for months and months and months.
	And it looks like if Meadows can get in that same track there, he'll be able to go even beyond that.
	And so, you know, then the midterms come and the Republicans take over and just destroy the entire, you know, investigation.
	So, but, not the fail-safe, but the way that they can at least mitigate this to some degree is by releasing footage or stuff that they've discovered through all these things that they're going to get, and that's something.
	And so, obviously, the big one was this PowerPoint presentation, which laid out very clearly how they were going to pull off the entire coup.
	And it puts together most of the pieces that we were sort of missing, I think, while this was unfolding in real time.
	I would like to say, though, that this was sent to him.
	There's no evidence that he even opened it or looked at it or disseminated it much at all, although there is apparently reporting that this was shown to members of Congress.
	So, you know, somebody was reacting to it and seeing it, but it's not necessarily clear that Meadows was involved with it directly, which is probably why he was dumb enough to just turn it over to the investigative committee anyway, so they would find it.
	So this PowerPoint that Meadows had gotten hold of apparently made the rounds on Capitol Hill.
	was more or less seen by every staff member of the Republican Party.
	Basically, every elected staff or staff office had taken a look at this.
	And it originated supposedly by a guy named Phil Waldron, who is a retired colonel.
	I'm just going to say that one more time.
	This PowerPoint was circulated by a guy named Phil Waldron, a retired colonel.
	I'm just going to let that sit, open it up, let it marinate, just let people sniff it, see what it does, sort of appreciate it.
	I'm getting Jack Ripper images in my head from Dr. Strangelove.
	For a good reason.
	And this Waldron also, it has now come out, had spoke with Mark Meadows, the Chief of Staff in the White House to the President of the United States of America.
	Eight to ten times.
	I assume it was pleasantries.
	I assume it was, you know, polite conversation.
	How are you and yours?
	How's your golf game?
	Any ideas on how to carry out a coup in the United States of America?
	You know, what have you been up to?
	I assume these are just kind check-ins, those types of things.
	Yeah.
	Hey, how's it going?
	What did you last weekend kind of stuff?
	Yeah, but interestingly enough about the one detail that caught my eye was that the dates are written in European form which is either European or like Russia or it's military.
	Did you know that the military write it?
	Month, date, month, day, year, instead of what we do.
	Wait, wait, the other way around, sorry.
	Day, month, year.
	I've been looking at a lot.
	So working on the new book, I've been looking at a lot of military memoranda.
	So like I've been having to like do that mental backwards sort of moving things around when I'm doing like my work sided.
	So yeah, unfortunately, I've had to I've had to wrap my head around that lately.
	So that's a pretty big tell.
	And I think it's worthy of saying it was written by someone in the military.
	Maybe not Phil, but Phil's buddy, somebody there who wrote that thing out and when when they were creating the PowerPoint.
	And the name of this memorandum was Election Fraud, Foreign Interference, and Options for 6 January, which of course, a 38-page document that at one point got whittled down to 36 pages.
	And the entire idea behind this was to facilitate the idea that the election of 2020 had been infiltrated by a foreign actor or foreign actors.
	In particular, in this case, the idea was to claim that the Chinese had been able to infiltrate voting systems, which those of you who listen regularly have heard us talk about the fact that during the Arizona audit, A lot of these dum-dums out in Arizona were talking about fake ballots having bamboo fibers or being shipped in from China.
	This was the weaponization of xenophobic, racist conspiracy theories.
	And for anybody who pays attention to fascist conspiracy theories, authoritarian conspiracy theories, they all work the exact same.
	Which is that there is an outside influence, a foreign actor or enemy, who will get involved in internal affairs by the use of traitors, the Democratic Party, and will eventually make use of populations of color in order to manipulate them and turn them into a quote-unquote street army.
	In this case, it is that idea personified step by step by step for the Republican Party to use this recycled fascist conspiracy theory in order to overturn the election of 2020.
	I mean, even if you wanted to say it's less quote-unquote racist or nefarious than that, it's a lot easier to say, well, these satellites are controlled by Italy that affected our balance in America.
	You can't, how do you confirm that or not, right?
	That kind of vague notion of something from another country makes it seem A, plausible if you're already a xenophobe, and then B, you know, how do we ever know if that's really true or not?
	That's really all they needed, all they wanted.
	Well, and I've been Man, I have to tell you, doing the research I'm doing right now, in this present moment, it messes my shit up, Nick.
	Because I have to tell you exactly what they would do.
	If this would have worked out, if they were able to steal the presidency in January of 2021, they would have manufactured the evidence.
	It would have happened almost immediately.
	You would have had some sort of an uncovery, somebody somewhere.
	And a large part of what we want to talk about today is about finding people who are willing to do this stuff.
	Right.
	Somebody down the line who's willing to manufacture this.
	Some bureaucrat, which is what Mark Meadows is, and we'll talk about his motivations and why he played a role in this.
	But you will find somebody who thinks it's for the greater good to manufacture evidence of such a threat.
	So if they would have won, if they would have kept control of the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, they would have figured out some way or another in order to go ahead and legitimize what they were trying to do in January.
	So in this case, they would have done it and then they would have made up the legitimatization of why they did it, which would have come somewhere down the road after they were able to actually carry it out.
	By the way, all this talk of January reminds me that it's December right now, and as we're heading into the holiday season, we have a live show on Thursday we have to tell everybody about on our Patreon side, because Those are always a rollicking good time.
	Again, I have to put a screeching halt to this very serious stuff that makes everything really hard to deal with.
	To at least let everybody know that, yes, we're going to be having another, again, a live show.
	Jared, tell everybody what time the live show is because I don't remember.
	So that's going to be this Thursday, December 16th at 7 p.m.
	Eastern.
	And I'm glad you brought this up because This is serious shit.
	Like, this is demoralizing and really, really frightening to understand that there was an attempted coup in the United States of America, which makes it all the much more important for a few things.
	We have to recognize that this happened, right?
	That there was an actual attempt.
	Like, it's not your imagination playing games with you.
	It's not paranoia.
	It's not alarmist.
	Like there actually was an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
	But on top of that, we have to celebrate the fact that it failed, that it didn't go through.
	And we have to strengthen our bonds to each other.
	We have to engage in solidarity and celebration.
	That way, whenever these fuckers try it again, we can have energy and faith in one another to fight it back.
	So, absolutely, it's important.
	And that is, again, Thursday, December 16th at 7 p.m.
	Eastern.
	It is the Monk Rake Podcast Holiday Party Live Taping of the Weekender.
	And by the way, to go ahead and let people know, there's stuff to look forward to.
	Nick, who has constantly said he thinks it's disgusting to dip french fries into a milkshake, is going to try it, and he's going to love it, and I invite you to be there.
	Right, because I'm constantly saying that, but nonetheless, you know, just to get back to this conversation, I do feel like, and we need to dive into this more because there's a lot of details to go through, but part of me starts to wonder, by the time we get through any of this reactive thing stuff that happened a year ago and more, almost two years ago, right?
	No, it'll be a year.
	It'll be a year.
	What is time?
	What is time?
	January 6, 2020.
	It is now, right?
	It is now, no, sorry, 2021.
	What is time?
	Anyway, I'll mark it down, but no less.
	So my fear is that by the time we get through all this stuff and reacting to the past and what's happened a year ago, like we're not going to be getting the things done that we need to to stop the local election officials from being taken over by Trump loyalists.
	Yeah, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time.
	every other election going forward, never to be had control of again.
	That makes me wondering, like, I know we kind of want to rehash and go through and, you know, figure out what happened in the past, but it just makes me worried that we're going to delay all this stuff and then not get the proper action done that we needed to get done.
	Yeah, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time.
	I mean, holy hell.
	In this case, I, you know, in order to look forward, I think you have to look back.
	And in this case, I think in order to really marshal the energy and the momentum necessary to stop this in the future, we can't simply believe, oh, there was some bad stuff that happened, but now it's over.
	Which, you know, politically, to go along with like Joe Biden becoming president and the Biden administration coming into power, you saw it as well as I did.
	The message of the inauguration and all of the rhetoric around it was, we've turned the page.
	Things are back to normal.
	We're going to figure this out.
	Of course, there was the whole, like, idea that we were going to reach across the aisle and figure something out with the Republicans, right?
	Well, that was necessary in order for a president to come into power, but it doesn't make it true.
	Things are not fine.
	Things are not going to be fine unless we marshal some sort of an understanding of what happened and where this is coming.
	Because I mean, I'm sorry, but this was a car that we barely jumped out of the way of and the car circling around the block and it's gaining power and speed.
	And in this case, like, listen, it's not just that Meadows had this PowerPoint, it's that Meadows also had, and of course, he's not the only one, he might have been the point person within the Trump administration, but there was a larger multifaceted ideal here, right?
	And the way that this plan would have worked out, on one hand, there was the idea to call it a national emergency.
	Which Trump would ask Congress to figure out and, you know, let the chips fall where they may.
	There was another idea that he said that he quote-unquote loved, which was the idea of alternate electors being sent, in which would be a constitutional crisis if it got carried out.
	Of course, they tried to get Mike Pence to overstep his boundaries as vice president.
	He said no, which hats off to you, Mike Pence.
	And then on top of it, it's now come out that there was a belief that while Meadows is talking to all of these extremists, all of these paramilitary groups, all of these insurrectionists, coup plotters, all of that, which we have to get into that a little bit more too, but there was a belief that the National Guard was on standby
	In order to protect those people against Antifa and other people.
	They legitimately thought that at January 6th, it wasn't just going to be insurrectionists.
	It wasn't just going to be coup attempters.
	It was also going to be a left wing protest movement, at which point they expected there to be violence.
	And if there wasn't going to be violence, they would start violence and they would bring in the National Guard and they would have the pretext for a larger national emergency narrative.
	They were creating a crisis in order to take advantage of it.
	And that's just becoming more and more clear that there was a military element Possibly an intelligence element, possibly a Department of Justice element.
	You name it, it's all up and down the line.
	The entire apparatus of the Trump administration and parts of the military were interested in carrying out a larger operation here.
	Well, here's how I see it.
	I'm curious to see if you agree, but this whole thing, the whole coup, the whole, all this plotting revolved around delaying the certification of the votes on January 6th.
	It seems to me that if they felt like they could have done that, even if it was like 24 hours, That would have given them the, you know, the legitimacy to then enact all these different things and take control over the count.
	So they were, of course, really looking forward to, yes, if Antifa showed up and then, you know, there's songs about the National Guard trying to, you know, quell, you know, people protesting.
	So clearly they were hoping to have even a bigger, you know, melee go on, that they could then enforce whatever martial law or declare, you know, national emergency.
	But that's what it seems like to me is that this all centered around we have to figure out some way because maybe then in their addled minds, you know, because January 6th came and went.
	Now the Constitution gets really murky because we didn't follow it exactly the way it says we did.
	We now have a lot more leeway, and they couldn't quite get it done.
	By the way, I don't know about you, but I was really surprised on January 6th that after they got the people out of the Capitol, they resumed the count that night.
	I was very surprised they did that.
	Maybe it was because of this notion that they realized, too, if we let them have any little uh, wavering of what the constitution exactly lays out, then we're in trouble.
	But, um, that's what that seems to me to what, what their whole goal was is to somehow get this count delayed at least another day.
	So I think when looking at what happened here, and again, this goes back to what I said at the beginning of the podcast, which is just how colossally like incompetent the Trump people were, right?
	Like, and, and, And continue to be.
	I assume they haven't solved their incompetence post-presidency.
	You have a lot of people who were chasing a lot of different ideas in a lot of different directions.
	And this has to do with something that we've been chronicling a lot lately, which is the Republican Party, it may not be a big tent.
	But there are a bunch of crazy assholes in that tent.
	You know what I mean?
	And they all have different ideas, and they're all sort of buzzing and bouncing off of each other.
	There's so many different groups underneath that very, very small tent.
	Some of them believe, I don't know, that China tried to steal the election.
	Others believe there's a satanic cabal, you know?
	Like, they're trying to navigate all these things at the same time.
	They're not good at communicating.
	They're not good at planning or plotting.
	In this case, At the top of it, Donald Trump.
	We've talked about this.
	You have not just an incompetent guy, but also a coward and more or less an organized crime mafioso, right?
	He never wanted to go on the record and say the thing that would get him arrested if it got found out.
	You know what I mean?
	He's very, very careful about that.
	He's always interested in the self-interest.
	For a coup to be carried out, You have to basically get in a room and say we're carrying out a coup.
	You know what I mean?
	You have to say this is what we're doing.
	Meanwhile, Trump, who is part grifter, part in institutional fascist, it's in him.
	Right.
	He is all these people who are coming in and they're like, hey, boss, I think we're going to carry out a coup.
	And he's like, that's great.
	I love it.
	You know, have fun with that.
	Good luck with it.
	He never put his entire foot in it.
	He was more than happy, more or less, to kick the can down the road.
	So all of his subordinates fighting amongst each other would try and carry something out.
	So what do you get at the Capitol on January 6th?
	You get an insane hodgepodge of multiple people carrying out multiple operations towards different ends with the same idea.
	The problem here is that it There's no other way to say it.
	It was a bumblefuck coup, is what it was.
	It was basically a bunch of people trying to do the same thing in different ways, getting in each other's way.
	And meanwhile, Trump was off to the side saying, I don't want to be involved in this, but I'll reap the rewards.
	So what would have happened?
	If the plan would have come to fruition, what if there had been a giant riot between the left and the right outside?
	What if Mike Pence had gone ahead with what he was given?
	What if you had other members of the administration who would have said, yeah, I'll go along with that, or people in Georgia who would have went along with that?
	The consequences of any of those things, just like one of those dominoes falling in a different place, I mean, we could be living in a completely different country right now.
	Yeah.
	And by the way, what you're describing is exactly true in terms of, so they were all different plans, and they just sort of all were getting mixed up in the same cauldron.
	The most important plan in my mind simply was Pence saying these six states don't agree, on what the vote was, and so I can't accept them.
	And then suddenly that means that no one has 270 votes, and that triggers the 14th Amendment where the representatives get to vote for president.
	That was the coup in my mind.
	That was the big one.
	Now, obviously, to get the grist, to get the momentum behind them to allow him to do that, they wanted this insurrection.
	Like that was, I guess we could argue they worked hand in hand, even though they were sort of separate figures And then the worst part about this is that when you say carrying out a coup, and you put that in quotes, that just means saving the republic to a lot of people in this country.
	And that was the other part of the thing where the first coup never works.
	Well, the second coup is going to have a lot easier time because most of the people in the country that are on that side anyway don't hear Of course it wasn't a coup.
	It was saving the republic.
	That's what we have to do and we have to do it again when it happens.
	That's where we're at now and this is how you slowly, it's basically a democratic coup if you think about it.
	Yeah, and that's the damnedest thing here because the entire point, again, of the Trump presidency and him becoming president and what his presidency was, is it was a whole lot of people standing back and going, what in the hell is Trump doing?
	Oh, oh, it worked.
	Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay.
	I, I thought life and reality was one thing.
	It turns out the entire time I was under false pretenses.
	Like, you can get away with that.
	You can do those things.
	By the way, I think that you described the reaction that people had with JFK.
	Oh, yeah.
	Who might have been slightly even in on it.
	And they're like, whoa, they actually pulled that off?
	Like, I have a feeling that happened across some of these places.
	But that's the nature of reality.
	And the thing that The thing that really sticks in my crawl, and I've never said sticks in my crawl, I've always wanted to say it out loud.
	I'm really happy I got the opportunity.
	Wait, say it again?
	Sticks in my crawl.
	In your crawl?
	The thing that really gets to me.
	I thought I heard something like CRAW, like C-R-A-W.
	Look that up as I'm finishing this thought.
	The thing that really bothers me when people are dealing with this situation, Is that they look at it in a vacuum.
	Do you have the official word on that, by the way?
	Yeah, it's like, you know, you get something stuck in your, in one's craw.
	Craw?
	C-R-A-W.
	Kind of like you, you got like a, you know, a thorn in your paw.
	Like it's... My family, my family has always said craw.
	I'm sorry, my family's always said crawl.
	Yes, that's interesting.
	I love, you know, the indigenous... The American English is a wonder of something.
	So, you know, what has bothered me about people's reaction to this?
	On one hand, there's a lot of people who are like, well, it wasn't a coup.
	It was a lot of LARPing.
	It was a lot of people pretending to be one thing.
	And that's partly true.
	There were a lot of people at the Capitol who undoubtedly never thought that they were going to be taking part in a coup.
	And the next thing they know, they're in the Capitol looking around and they're like, how about this?
	There were a lot of grifters there, absolutely.
	But there were people there who had decided that they wanted to use this to either assassinate public officials or carry out a coup.
	What ends up happening is the narrative after January 6th, this idea that, oh, it was a bunch of tourists.
	Then all of a sudden you start saying, no, it was a it was a false flag operation.
	It was actually the left.
	Then all of a sudden you start saying, no, it was a sting.
	It was a patriot purge, which is, of course, what not just Alex Jones, but now Tucker Carlson are pushing.
	When you start saying that, all of a sudden in the minds of people who maybe in the past wouldn't have been carrying out a coup or wouldn't have gone that far, they start thinking, man, this government's out of control.
	This situation is really, really problematic.
	Somebody needs to step in and make something happen.
	And I want to point out real fast, and I want to talk about Mark Meadows.
	I want to talk about who Mark Meadows, who becomes the chief of staff for Donald Trump, who he is.
	And Mark Meadows, before he gets into politics, do you know how he made his money, by the way?
	Besides, undoubtedly, family connections.
	Oh, I had no idea we were going to go before the Freedom Caucus and get into his origin story.
	I'm excited.
	No, please tell me.
	Mark Meadows opened a restaurant.
	And the moment that that restaurant made him any money, he immediately sold it because obviously he didn't care about cooking, feeding people, being a restaurateur.
	He cared about making money and using it because that's what we're talking about here.
	We're talking about a certain breed of people who only care about material wealth and power.
	Immediately he becomes a real estate investor.
	And as he's developing real estate and all of this, which is where all of these grifters end up, I mean it's not a coincidence that The president that he's serving was a real estate grifter, right?
	It's just about taking money and rolling it around.
	So all of a sudden he starts selling a bunch of land to a bunch of young earth Christians to have their own little compound, their own little whatever.
	He uses that money to then get involved in the Freedom Caucus.
	He's a business person who wanted to go in and use the grift of conspiracy theories To enrich himself, roll back regulation, roll back federal oversight of people like himself.
	Next thing you know, like a lot of these people who end up there on January 6th, he ends up in the White House overlooking a coup attempt.
	There is a large trajectory of being like, ah, this is for materialism.
	This is just for what I need, what I want for my pocketbook.
	I'm not really an ideologue.
	And the next thing you know, those interests take you down a road.
	And you start making choices that have giant historical, political, and social import.
	That's how these things happen.
	Well, I guess this is our chance to, every episode we should have a segment where we stress that the congressmen and women should not be allowed to invest in anything in the stock market while they're in office as well.
	Which, by the way, just as a parenthetical, I have no doubt that it's equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans who violate this and use insider trading up the wazoo.
	But nonetheless, let's get back to Mark Meadows.
	Yes, you buy your way in, right?
	This is the process now.
	Because by the way, creating a restaurant, having it be successful, selling, getting into real estate, this is the American dream, man.
	Up until the part about denying where Obama was born, he's living the American dream.
	And I don't know how many people would have said, oh, what's the problem with what he did?
	But obviously, when this is your end goal, you've been planning this.
	He didn't just suddenly one day after in the middle of selling some real estate, oh, I want to be a congressman.
	I'm sure he had a 10-year plan.
	This whole thing was all laid out and how he wanted to do it.
	And this is the easiest way to do it.
	Yeah, and you gotta think that in the past people would be getting into politics because they felt driven and compelled to make the world better.
	That's not what Meadows was ever interested in.
	He recognized, and this goes along with the consensus of an American political thinking.
	He recognized, like a lot of these grifters, like a lot of these assholes, well, you make a lot of money, then you buy your way into politics so you can make more money later.
	You need to go in and change things so that you can make more money on the other side.
	And then on top of that, you get some sweet, sweet money because corporations, lobbying groups, all of those people, they're going to invite you onto boards.
	They're going to have you come out and lobby on their behalf.
	They'll fly you around the world There's basically a wink and a nudge as you come in one side of the turnstile.
	As you go out the other, you're going to make unbelievable amounts of money.
	This is one of the reasons why our political process has become so screwed up, is because people like Mark Meadows are in there.
	And again, while he's sitting there in North Carolina, probably flipping burgers or catfish or whatever the hell it was, Like, if you told him one day you're going to be at the President of the United States of America's side trying to carry out a coup, it probably never even would have occurred to him.
	But it's that It's ongoing corruption of the soul, to borrow a phrase, right?
	You end up in there, and it's not even like he's dealing with a good person.
	He doesn't think Donald Trump is a Christ figure or a messiah.
	He thinks, going back to what you said, that he's saving the republic.
	He somehow or another combines his own personal outcome and interest with the interest of the United States, and as a result, all laws are off.
	Right.
	Well, you know, part of this, by the way, to me, not that he's a sympathetic character, but the part of this is, OK, Trump has got all these crazies visiting him in the Oval Office, which, by the way, there was a, you know, you used to hear how insulated presidents were and they were in their own little bubbles, right?
	But there's like a good reason for that, because you shouldn't be able to call, like, you know, your fourth cousin once removed and who happens to be the president and just start talking to him on a cell phone.
	But Trump is lonely.
	He's lonely.
	Trump is an exceedingly lonely, broken person.
	I mean, we talked about this on the podcast, too.
	He was talking to Sean Hannity every night for hours at a time after Sean Hannity's show.
	He would watch the show to see Hannity talk about him and then talk to him on the phone.
	Like, he's a broken person who allowed in everybody from Mark Meadows, Sean Hannity, Lynn Wood, who's a crazy person.
	I mean, one conspiracist after another.
	And he just continued to have these people move in and out because his own self-interest, you know, all he needed was praise and worship.
	Right, but half of their policies were created on Fox News, knowing he was watching it.
	That was probably more frightening than anything else.
	Lin Wood was on Fox News.
	That's how he ends up in the White House.
	And fucking Bill Barr is the only reason why he was there.
	But the thing with Meadows is possible.
	All this shit's happening.
	He's telling them all these things.
	It's crazy.
	It's insane.
	He goes, yeah, don't worry.
	I'll follow up on these things.
	And he did.
	You know, with maybe the guise of, well, I'll at least say I emailed the dude because President Trump told me and he's the commander-in-chief and whatever, with maybe no intention of necessarily anything happening or hoping that people on the other end of this thing would realize how insane this is and it wouldn't happen.
	I mean, by the way, you know, they're now raking him over the coals for using a private cell phone, which is an admission of guilt in some degree, because here's the thing.
	How does the January 6th Committee know that he was using private communications?
	Well, guess what?
	The people he sent the other messages to are turning those in.
	And so they have the conversation, but just from the other side.
	And this is how we know that he violated the Presidential Records Act, which should, again, should have been a major crime when you do that.
	But we've known, I think, that Every administration has done this.
	I mean, going back to, you know, Bush had emails.
	We want to talk about Hillary's emails.
	H.W.
	destroyed emails up the wazoo in the millions.
	That would have, without question, been a real problem for them.
	But nonetheless, so anyway, that's the real question here.
	Was Meadows just going to be like, yeah, sure, don't worry about it.
	I'll follow up.
	And then all of a sudden, boom, that happened.
	Or, you know, was he serious about this and hoping that they could kind of get this through?
	So, knock on wood, in the next six months, my guess, is you're going to see a major article that comes out that is probably going to be leaked by the January 6th Commission.
	And what it will be is more or less a reconstruction of the communication network on January 6th.
	And by communication network, what I mean is that, undoubtedly, Meadows, And probably a few others.
	I assume Giuliani was involved in this at some given point.
	If I found out that Steve Bannon was part of this, I would not be shocked.
	And what you're going to find is it's going to link up with one of the things that we've heard in the past month or so, which is that a lot of the main characters in the January 6th coup attempt were carrying burner phones, right?
	That they had all gotten disposable cell phones in order to communicate with people.
	We've already heard that they have said that they communicated with members of the Trump administration.
	I have to imagine at some point or another that we're going to find out that there was a A very, very concise web of contacts within all of this.
	And then it's a matter of whether or not we find out what was said.
	Because text messages are probably going to be part of it.
	Because we know that a lot of these people are reaching out to Meadows as the shit starts to hit the fan.
	And they're waiting on Meadows or Trump to say, go.
	Right?
	Which, I don't think they did, because again, it's about passing the buck.
	It's about organized crime, not taking that upon yourself.
	But if anyone can get... Well, really, they're waiting for them to say, stop.
	And if there's no stop, then that means go, basically, right?
	Well, there's... that's a completely different way to look at it, but no less accurate.
	And so what we're probably going to find is that a lot of this was probably done through phone calls that could only be traced If there was either a wiretap or, and this is the weirder aspect of it, that I have to imagine we might miss this a little bit.
	We might swerve this on the road, almost like missing down here in Georgia and Armadillo in the middle of the highway, that DNSA happened to capture some of these conversations, which would be its own messed up giant course of bullshit.
	It might just end up coming out.
	It might fizzle.
	It might be another one of these things that you look at and you're like, oh my God, look how close we came to this giant meltdown coup.
	And I hope that we pay attention to it.
	But I have to imagine that a lot of this stuff is going to come to the surface probably sooner than later.
	Well, obviously that's the trajectory that the Democrats have to hope for because later is not happening.
	They're going to be out of office.
	But here is the concern.
	The concern, and I just want to spend a second on this because I think it's important.
	I have my thoughts on it.
	I want to hear yours.
	Why do you think That this isn't the headline in every newspaper.
	It's not the main segment on all the shows.
	All of these revelations that we're talking about are massive, historical, like the major, major revelations.
	And yet we live in a culture that isn't paying that close attention to them.
	People are still nay-saying it.
	There's not a lot of eyes on this, not as many as there should be.
	We're not dealing with it the way we should.
	Why do you think that we are failing to not just talk about this, but grasp it and really deal with it?
	Probably because a huge chunk of very valuable demographic of people who are consumers and buy things don't believe that it was a coup.
	And so they don't want to, you know, lose business, the media by releasing the stories that would then turn these people off from that those platforms and not they can't make their money.
	But the more specific answer to that is, yeah, there are a group of people that don't believe that was accused.
	So that's one thing.
	I think you could argue that the last four years of Trump has just made it that way, where the things that are so ridiculous and so historical or should be treated historically are just now another news bit on a Friday, late Friday news dump.
	Yeah, I think in the media, it's a really ugly reflection.
	You know what I mean?
	Because these are a lot of the people who are involved in this, like a Mark Meadows, right?
	Mark Meadows before COVID probably was at a lot of cocktail hours with some of the people who should be talking about this and covering it, right?
	And they basically would hoist a few drinks and they'd be like, you know what?
	You're on one side of the aisle.
	I'm on the other side of the aisle.
	Doesn't mean we can't, you know.
	Have a drink or two and laugh about things and share some gossip because that is the sort of environment and having to look at it and reckon with the fact that this guy tried to carry out a coup.
	The fact that so many people went along with it, that so many wealthy people went along with it.
	Undoubtedly, at this point, a lot of intelligence people went along with it.
	A lot of administration people went along with it.
	The fact that all of this was possible in the United States of America, I think, is a really twisted, ugly reflection that people don't want to look at.
	I think that's one of the reasons why.
	I think the consumerist angle that you just brought up is interesting, which is, If there was an attempted coup, are you going to go out and buy things?
	Are you going to go out and do things?
	Or are you going to batten down the hatches because there's a real imminent threat amongst you?
	And there is, and that's probably how we should be treating it.
	That's not great for business.
	Well, there are certain businesses where it's pretty good.
	Well, you can buy silver, you can buy oxidizers, you can buy guns, you can buy bomb shelters.
	And then finally, I just want to say that I think the other side of this, why Americans aren't howling from the rooftops about this, So many of them are trapped in a mythological America where either this couldn't happen or it was taken care of and now we have a democratic president and everything is totally fine and everything will be and I never have to worry about it again because neoliberalism has taught them that politics isn't really something that you need to pay attention to other than for entertainment.
	It's not a real thing that you have to negotiate or really, really, uh, you know, imprint your will on or participate in.
	So for a lot of people, this is sort of an interesting tidbit that they can bring up in passing, but it's not really something to reconcile.
	It's not really something to think about or try and do something about.
	I mean, perhaps you can argue that our republic or our democracy over these years requires people who are alarmists and who will sound the alarm over everything and little thing, which keeps everybody else on their toes a little bit.
	So maybe that mindset doesn't overtake everybody in the country.
	Because remember, even like when Nixon, the day Nixon left office, his approval rating was still 25 percent.
	There was still a bunch of people in this country who didn't think he did anything wrong.
	So maybe that's part of the process We simply need people like you who are going to sound that alarm as much as possible.
	It's balanced by people who think that you're insane, and we shouldn't listen to you, and then everybody in the middle, right?
	So we have this interesting tug and pull.
	And every so often, this side pulls a little bit harder, and more people get pulled that way, and then it's the other way.
	This isn't a game.
	This isn't like Battle of the Network, Hollywood Stars, whatever.
	Now the Republic is in the balance.
	And if they pull too hard the other way, then everybody topples over that cliff, and then we don't have it anymore.
	And you're right.
	There's a complacency that's built in to our system over hundreds of years.
	By the way, what's frustrating about that is we've never had so many people vote like we did in this last election.
	It should be a cause for rejoice.
	We finally are having the true democratic process and people contributing that way, but then what's the reaction on the right?
	It gets worse.
	Right.
	So we can't have that.
	Instead of a moment where, oh my god, we're going to finally really get this going and everyone's going to be invested in this, it's like, no, we need to figure out how to get everybody out of this again and go back to where it was where we don't have hardly anybody voting and we don't want people caring about voting.
	There's your answer.
	Why does Meadows not want to cooperate?
	Why do they not want to give up their, you know, whatever.
	This is a real investigation and this is a serious thing.
	What are you hiding?
	Like, you know, the answer has to be that there are some terrible things that you guys are all hiding.
	And this is all wrong.
	And this is all bad.
	It's not indifferent.
	It's bad.
	And this is the proof by just by not wanting to be part of that.
	So.
	Yeah.
	And there's a lot to unpack there.
	I want to start first of all.
	I think that's true.
	I think that there are moments Like, just to pull the curtain back, you and I are getting ready to tape a podcast talking about a certain movie that I'm really, really excited for people to hear this podcast and the conversation we're about to have that's about a moment of complacency.
	In America, right?
	Where you're not worried that much about politics.
	You're not worried that much about being involved.
	And, you know, a lot of people look back on time periods like that and they're like, oh, those were the good days.
	You know what I mean?
	But meanwhile, there's still widespread suffering.
	There's still a lot of bad problems.
	And then occasionally there are moments, and I always talk about this.
	Whether it's, you know, just in conversations or with students and stuff, I always talk about the moment that you're driving, and you're driving for hours and hours and hours, and the road starts to hypnotize you a little bit, and you kind of forget that you're driving.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Like, you get in your head, you're listening to music, you know, an audiobook or whatever, and then all of a sudden, you're like, oh my god, I'm behind the wheel of a car!
	Oh, shit!
	You know?
	And you're like, I could do anything that I wanted right now.
	I could go off the road, I could do whatever.
	But the truth is that you're always in that situation in your life.
	Life is perilous.
	Things happen.
	You know, like the fact that, you know, things aren't happening right now is we should consider ourselves lucky, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't consider the possibilities.
	In this case, we came very close to a coup.
	We actually did.
	And the fact that we talked about that was not based in us being wild-eyed.
	It was simply actually paying attention to what was being said.
	Trump didn't hide any of this.
	Every speech that Trump made before the election and after the election laid the rhetorical foundation for this.
	There is, they're gonna steal it, they're gonna steal it.
	Oh, I bet China's gonna help steal it.
	Oh, blah, blah, blah.
	He laid it all out there.
	The Republican, and by the way, the Republican Party was on messaging together with that.
	They had decided at the party level that that was what they were going to sell people, which was going to lay the foundation for the possibility of challenging an election.
	We now know where we're going in 2022 and 2024.
	They're going to try and rig the systems to where they will be able to disenfranchise people or they'll have a fail safe where they could possibly override people's ability to vote.
	This isn't a matter of looking for shadows where there aren't shadows.
	It's looking into the dark and trying to see what's there.
	It's a very obvious situation.
	And all of this information, it really should have people up in arms.
	It really should.
	We should be living in a country right now that is just like, You know get to the bottom of this shit or else like this is this is like priority number one so we can move forward But it's it's just we're not gonna do it.
	We're gonna slip back into complacency, right?
	Well, you know, this is kind of like there are movies out there that have like maybe a big reveal at the end Then you get to go watch it again a bit go back and watch and see all the little clues and oh my god I can't do I miss all that.
	Well, guess what?
	This wasn't that movie those clues Were not the clues.
	Those were big fat close-up.
	It was not Not subtext!
	No, this is not like, you know, a name on a door in the background that's a little bit out of focus, whatever.
	No, this was right in your face the entire time, so that's the difference.
	People had to choose not to see it.
	Right.
	But they'll have that reaction sometimes, like, you know, the people like Stuart Stevens, I have to imagine when they got out of their fog of being a right-wing, you know, sycophant or whatever they were,
	You know he must have had reflection later and be like oh my god I can't believe like look at that, but we were like yeah That was happening, and we all knew that then except for you You know it's like when you fall in love with a woman who's or a man or whatever was it was terrible And no one wants to tell you how bad you know because you're so in love whatever then you realize later Oh my god.
	What happened?
	What was I thinking?
	We need that slap in the face, and they need to figure this out a lot quicker because otherwise, right, the court of public opinion is probably as important as any of this stuff.
	And if we can't get that swayed, even with all this undeniable evidence that's coming out – and, yeah, you and I both know this PowerPoint thing, that's a walk in the park.
	A month from now, we are going to be talking about direct communications between these people that implicates everybody.
	I can almost guarantee that that's going to come out.
	And we won't even be thinking about this PowerPoint thing.
	That is the question.
	Is that going to be the final straw here for enough people that we can keep this republic intact? - I don't know.
	I Don't know man.
	I I wish it Was there's a there's a strange feeling and I don't know if you get it But as as you know, we've been on this trail We've dedicated so much of our time and so much of our lives just to talking about this explaining it getting in deep in it and and just really I Figuring out what has happened, where it's come from and where it's going.
	Like this stuff comes out and at some point, like you're just like, yeah, of course there was a PowerPoint circulating among Republican leadership on how to carry out a coup and doing a, you know, this, this national emergency thing.
	And you're not even surprised by it.
	Like you'll notice if you've, if you've listened this long in the podcast, This has not been a surprise podcast.
	This isn't you and me being like, oh my God, can you believe it?
	Nobody in our audience who listens is surprised by this.
	It's simply, you know, it, for me, I don't know if I've ever said this on the podcast, I'm very nearsighted.
	I, I like, I, I, I, without glasses or contacts, like I, it's blurry, like you wouldn't believe, you know what I mean?
	This is simply being able to see the blur ahead of you and know what it is, and then you put the glasses on, and you're like, yeah, that's what I thought it was.
	Yeah, okay, now it's in much more dazzling clarity, because none of this was hidden.
	None of this was unpredictable.
	We knew who these people were.
	We listened to them.
	We took them at their words.
	We did not engage in willful delusion.
	We did not believe in American exceptionalism that would keep this stuff from happening.
	We didn't believe that it was a wild-eyed alarmist thing to think that these crooks and assholes would try and carry this out.
	We knew who they were.
	We looked at the facts.
	We did not engage in willful delusion.
	So it's not surprising.
	And you're exactly right.
	There's undoubtedly going to be more.
	All right, everybody.
	So we're going to be back.
	A reminder...
	December 16th, 7 p.m.
	Eastern, the official Muckrake podcast holiday get-together, bonanza, jamboree, and petting zoo.
	We look forward to this.
	It's always a good time, right before the year ends, to get together, to appreciate each other, celebrate the wins, have a few laughs, watch Nick eat something that he originally thought was disgusting, but find out that it's really, really delicious.
	Last time, it was a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
	Incredible.
	He really thought Reese's Peanut Butter Cup was going to be disgusting.
	And have you eaten those since, by the way?
	I think I might have had one since then and enjoyed it.
	Just one?
	So you've doubled the amount that you've had?
	Yeah, just one.
	Maybe.
	Okay.
	Well, so again, that is Thursday, December 16th at 7 p.m.
	Eastern.
	All you gotta do to get in on the fun is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	You'll be able to go.
	You'll be able to watch us tape this live.
	You'll be able to interact with other fans of the show.
	We are so grateful for the community.
	We want you to join.
	patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	You can find me at J.Y.
	Sexton.

▲