“Meadows now holds the title of senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit founded by former senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). After a bipartisan lobbying firm grew too big for that Capitol Hill townhouse, Meadows and DeMint swooped in to pick up the lease and turned it into both a modern think tank — it includes a TV studio for members to do media hits — and a social networking club.” - Washington Post
Does the "Conservative Partnership Institute" have a fireplace?
Louie Gohmert and Lauren Boebert are in the video.
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"We have all the transcripts from Cassidy Hutchinson," said Schneider. "We're learning more details, particularly how she told the committee how she saw Chief of Staff Mark Meadows burning documents in his office fireplace around a dozen times, which she says amounted to once or twice a week between December 2020 and January 2021. She says at least twice she saw Meadows burning documents after he had meetings with Republican Congressman Scott Perry, who, in fact, was subpoenaed by the committee but never complied."
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Cassidy Hutchinson saw Mark Meadows burning documents in his fireplace 'once or twice a week'
December 27, 2022
You can’t taste the final dish but many of the ingredients are out in full view in this Washington Post article:
“As members of Congress, Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) formed a brutally powerful duo on Capitol Hill last decade, developing a niche specialty in blowing things up.
In 2015, Meadows delivered the blow that helped sink the incumbent House speaker, John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), and Jordan led the charge over the next two weeks to help defeat the establishment choice, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), for speaker.
But for the past week, the co-founders of the House Freedom Caucus have been on opposing sides of Washington’s biggest fight: McCarthy’s marathon attempt to become House speaker.
Jordan served as lead emissary to the many conservatives who don’t trust the veteran GOP leader. All week he darted around the House floor, buttonholed defectors, hustled to talk to top McCarthy advisers and then ducked into at least a dozen closed-door meetings.
Three blocks away, in a corner townhouse that is home to a conservative nonprofit, Meadows played host to daily meetings of up to 20 staunch McCarthy critics, turning this corner of Washington into the new nerve center of “Make America Great Again” Republicans in Congress.
Meadows, who served seven years in the House and left in 2020 to become White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, has asserted that he played no role in the uprising against McCarthy.
“That’s not me, that’s member-led,” Meadows told CNN reporters as he entered the townhouse Thursday morning.
But newer members of the Freedom Caucus acknowledged that Meadows served as spiritual adviser during their recent clashes with McCarthy, through the lens of his own battles last decade with Boehner.
“Mark is a friend and, as somebody who’s been through this place, a mentor,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), just entering his second term, said Friday. “He’s been through this place, he understands the dynamics, has the relationships. So to be able to rely on some of his counsel has been important…
Now, after all the concessions these conservatives won, today’s Freedom Caucus is poised to have more influence than Meadows and Jordan dreamed of when they founded it eight years ago as a breakaway group for roughly three dozen Republicans. But these recent fractures raise doubts about the Freedom Caucus’s ability to stay united and questions about whether the members will flail and waste this new political muscle.
All signs indicate that Meadows and Jordan remain very close friends, but their split on McCarthy reflects the awkward future for a hard-right conservative caucus founded at a time when none of them had a foothold in power.
Meadows now holds the title of senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit founded by former senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). After a bipartisan lobbying firm grew too big for that Capitol Hill townhouse, Meadows and DeMint swooped in to pick up the lease and turned it into both a modern think tank — it includes a TV studio for members to do media hits — and a social networking club.
Young conservatives gather for “First Friday” happy hours in the courtyard, and Freedom Caucus members and their allies use the outpost as a regular hangout for venting about everything from the Biden administration to establishment Republicans.
It’s a lot nicer setup than the dingy basement of the now-shuttered Tortilla Coast restaurant on Capitol Hill, which the far-right lawmakers used as their gathering spot seven years ago.
“The food’s not as good, but the coffee is better,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has never joined the Freedom Caucus but is a regular guest as an ideological kindred spirit.
The past week, as the meetings inside the Meadows group grew longer and McCarthy kept getting embarrassed, veteran Republicans saw the hand of their old adversary at work.
“Pretty telling,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a close ally of previous speakers Boehner and Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), said early Friday. “If they’re meeting in his townhouse, he’s at least a fly on the wall. But knowing Mark — and I know him pretty well — I’m sure he’s trying to exert some influence.”
Meadows never reached a peaceful accord with McCarthy, and that enmity and distrust lasted long after he left the House to become Trump’s chief of staff.
In the days leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, McCarthy accused Meadows of poisoning Trump’s thinking so much that he believed the 2020 election had been stolen.
“I can only imagine that’s coming from Mark. Mark’s lying to him,” McCarthy wrote in a text message to a top Meadows aide, according to documents produced by the Jan. 6 committee.”
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Washington Post
Closest of friends, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan split over Kevin McCarthy
January 7, 2023 at 4:40 p.m. EST
"Mark Meadows in the spotlight
While the committee made the historic move of referring Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, it also named several Trump allies as potential co-conspirators in its final report. One of them was former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“It was pretty obvious that the ex-president was the center of this conspiracy, but he was certainly assisted by many others, including … Mark Meadows and the like,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who served on the committee.
Meadows repeatedly comes up in the committee’s investigation, with evidence showing his involvement on some level in every gambit to overturn the election. Some of the most revelatory evidence came from Meadows himself – in the thousands of text messages he turned over to the committee before ceasing his cooperation with the investigation.
The texts show that beginning on Election Day, Meadows was connecting activists pushing conspiracy theories and strategizing with GOP lawmakers and rally organizers preparing for January 6. Two days after the election, Trump Jr. was texting Meadows with ideas for keeping his father in power that he thought were “the most sophisticated” and “sounded plausible.”
Meadows and Giuliani, Trump’s one-time attorney, were involved in early conversations about putting forward fake slates of electors, according to testimony that former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson gave to the committee.
Transcripts released by the committee also reveal that Hutchinson testified before the committee how Meadows regularly burned documents in his fireplace around a dozen times – about once or twice a week – between December 2020 and mid-January 2021.
After producing the texts to congressional investigators, Meadows changed gears and did not show up for subpoenaed testimony before the House. A lawsuit he filed challenging the subpoena was unsuccessful, but the Justice Department opted not to bring criminal charges for his lack of cooperation.
The committee noted in their report’s summary that criminal prosecutors may have access to materials that lawmakers didn’t have, pointing to Meadows specifically.
“Indeed, both the Department of Justice and the Fulton County District Attorney may now have access to witness testimony and records that have been unavailable to the Committee, including testimony from President Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and others who either asserted privileges or invoked their Fifth Amendment rights,” the summary said.
“When it comes to the President, he committed no crime so there should absolutely be no prosecutions related to him,” said Timothy Parlatore, one of Trump’s attorneys.
Parlatore insisted Trump and his team “were not looking to overturn the will of the people, only to ensure that the will of the people was accurately counted,” adding that Trump was “absolutely opposed” to the violence that took place at the US Capitol.
Meadows’ attorney declined to comment."
CNN’s Casey Gannon, Evan Perez , Holmes Lybrand and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.
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CNN
Two years after US Capitol attack, investigation into Trump and insurrection enters new phase
By Zachary Cohen, Katelyn Polantz, Tierney Sneed, Sara Murray and Paula Reid, CNN
Updated 7:57 AM EST, Fri January 6, 2023
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