Former President Donald Trump is having a tough week in the loyalty department, with three significant Trump co-defendants in Georgia — lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro — agreeing to plea deals in exchange for “truthful testimony” in Fani Willis’s sweeping election racketeering case — and then news that Special Counsel Jack Smith granted Trump loyalist and former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows immunity in his testimony in the federal election interference case against Trump.
(NOTE: The immunity, though its details aren’t public, makes Meadows’s effort to have his Fulton County prosecution removed to federal court much more interesting.)
Then Trump sat in court in New York as his former lawyer Michael Cohen — coordinator of the alleged Stormy Daniels hush money payment — testified that he helped Trump fabricate valuations for his properties to inflate the Trump Organization’s value, an alleged business fraud for which New York AG Letitia James says Trump should pay $250 million.
The Georgia flippers came as a surprise, especially as the 19 co-defendants in the case had shown mostly a unified front — broken, perhaps, by a differentiation in the ability to absorb their legal bills. But the news that Meadows has granted immunity by Jack Smith — the Special Counsel who Trump regularly calls “deranged” — enraged Trump and had him asking “Who really knows?” It’s an expression of uncertainty Trump rarely allows himself.
In addressing Meadows’s alleged testimony, Trump imagines that Meadows has been threatened with the loss of his wealth and family and says: “Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation. I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows?“
