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Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's former White House chief of staff, continues to feel the pressure over the investigations into alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Meadows has been charged, along with Trump and 17 others, in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' election interference probe. His request on Tuesday to delay his surrender to authorities was rejected. Meadows also continues to face allegations he may have testified against the former president under Special Counsel Jack Smith's federal probe into attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
In addition to this, Meadows has recently been described as the "ringleader" of the events leading up to the January 6 attack at the Capitol.
Meadows faces charges of racketeering and solicitation of violating an oath by a public officer as part of Willis' expansive RICO probe. He has been given a deadline of noon on Friday, August 25, to hand himself in for processing in Fulton County. Meadows' legal team has been contacted for comment via email.
The top Trump ally had asked a federal court to delay his arrest in an emergency motion until after Monday, August 28, when a hearing on his other request to have his case moved out the Fulton County to a federal court in Georgia takes place.
Willis rejected Meadows' request for an extension to surrender to authorities, saying her original deadline which was submitted two weeks ago was a "tremendous courtesy" to him and the other co-defendants.
"I am not granting any extensions. I gave two weeks for people to surrender themselves to the court. Your client is no different than any other criminal defendant in this jurisdiction. The two weeks was a tremendous courtesy," Willis wrote in response to Meadows' emergency motion.
Willis indicated that Meadows would be arrested if he did not surrender on time.
"At 12:30 pm on Friday I shall file warrants in the system," she said. "My team has availability to meet to discuss reasonable consent bonds Wednesday and Thursday."
Former federal prosecutor and former elected state attorney Michael McAuliffe said Willis made the right call in rejecting Meadows' request for a deadline extension.
"If DA Willis allows one defendant to ignore what is otherwise a generous time frame for self-surrender, every defendant will seek an extension," McAuliffe told Newsweek.
The Fulton County District Attorney's Office has issued subpoenas for two lawyers linked to Trump—Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufman—to testify in Meadows' August 28 hearing to have his case moved to a federal court.
Hilbert and Kaufman were previously reported to have listened in on Trump's January 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president reportedly asked him to "find" the 11,870 votes needed to beat President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, which triggered Willis' criminal inquiry.
Meadows has long been considered a key figure in Trump's alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Despite being charged in Willis' probe, Meadows wasn't one of the six alleged co-conspirators mentioned in the federal January 6 indictment, raising suspicions that Meadows may have flipped and testified against the former president in Smith's case.
A report in The New York Times recently said that Trump and his advisers and aides had become "deeply suspicious" of what Meadows has been telling federal prosecutors over the past few months.
Their suspicions were reportedly raised further amid reports that Meadows told federal prosecutors in the classified documents probe that he had no knowledge of Trump talking about or planning to declassify sensitive documents before the former president left office in January 2021, delivering a damning blow to one of Trump's key lines of defense in the case.
Elsewhere, Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, described Meadows as a key figure in the events that led up to the Capitol riot in 2021.
"Mark was a ringleader of much of the events that happened around January 6th," Short told CNN on Tuesday.
"He was somebody who the president sought to find additional attorneys who gave advice different than the White House counsel, and it was very central to the events that happened on that day.
"There were a lot of conversations leading up to this, and Mark was central to pulling together many of those who were, I think, whispering falsehoods into the president's ear," Short said.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more