“He just agreed with me,” the former Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson told the select committee about her efforts to get speakers like the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones removed from the Jan. 6 rally. She texted Mr. Meadows on Jan. 2, 2021, and asked, “Would you mind giving me a call regarding this Jan. 6 event? Things have gotten crazy, and I desperately need some direction. Please.”
He called her almost immediately — on the same day Mr. Trump, with Mr. Meadows on the line, called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to find votes. The circular nature of who was agreeing with whom is a little maddening: When Larry Kudlow, then the head of the National Council of Economic Advisers, learned about the Raffensperger call, he berated Mr. Meadows, according to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s account. They report that Mr. Meadows told Mr. Kudlow: “I couldn’t stop the president. I tried, but I couldn’t stop him.”
This goes on endlessly: Mr. Meadows did transition calls with President-elect Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, and he texted Ms. Thomas about this being a fight between good and evil, as Ms. Haberman notes in her book. He texted jokes back and forth with a White House adviser about Rudy Giuliani’s claims of dead voters and arranged a meeting between Mr. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham about Mr. Giuliani’s claims, according to the journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Mr. Meadows pushed back against the Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser, during a long meeting at the White House and passed along a conspiracy theory about an Italian company changing votes to the Justice Department, according to one former official’s committee testimony.
In the last month, two prosecutors have used the same events to charge the same person, Mr. Trump, with a crime. On their own, in isolation, each indictment would make for the biggest case in American history. Instead, these two prosecutions are happening simultaneously, like the biggest possible experiment in how two prosecutors (or judges or juries) can approach the same issue.
The underlying situation remains the same, but the scope, style and tenor of the indictments are different. The federal case is narrower; the Georgia case is sprawling. The federal indictment is a document meant to argue and justify its existence to the reader. The Georgia indictment requires the reader to follow along with 19 indictees chaotically weaving in and out of a narrative unfolding over years.
