WASHINGTON — Behind closed doors in a civic center outside Atlanta, state officials were scouring thousands of mail-in ballots on Dec. 22, 2020, when an unexpected visitor showed up: Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.
Joe Biden had won the electoral college one week earlier, but Meadows’s boss was still baselessly claiming he’d been robbed -- and pointing specifically at Georgia.
After Georgia’s deputy secretary of state blocked Meadows from entering the room where officials were matching voter signatures, Meadows struck up a conversation with her office’s chief investigator, Frances Watson, and got her phone number. To Watson’s shock, the next day Trump called.
“Mark asked me to do it, he thinks you’re great,” Trump said, while falsely claiming he had won Georgia “by hundreds of thousands of votes.” Trump, according to audio of the call, added, “Whatever you can do Frances, it’s a great thing, an important thing for the country.”
As he hung up, Trump said, “Mark appreciates it.”
Meadows, 62, had taken the job as chief of staff on the principle that his most important task would be “to tell the most powerful man in the world when you believed he was wrong,” he wrote in his memoir, “The Chief’s Chief.”
But instead of echoing the administration’s own Justice Department to tell Trump that his claims of a stolen election were wrong, Meadows went to extraordinary lengths to push Trump’s false assertions -- particularly during a crucial...
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