During his four years in office, former President Donald Trump went through a parade of White House chiefs of staff. By the time former South Carolina congress member Mark Meadows was tapped for the gig, Trump had decided that the quality he wanted most wasn’t Reince Priebus’ experience running the Republican Party or retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly’s adherence to protocol. He wanted someone who would say yes to whatever he ordered.
Enter Meadows, who leaned in to that role with zeal, especially in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic and during the aftermath of the 2020 election. But his sycophancy at times clashed with his own self-serving (and self-aggrandizing) view of himself as a canny political operator. That friction has now led to Justice Department prosecutors possessing some of the most damning evidence against Trump across multiple investigations.
His sycophancy at times clashed with his own self-serving (and self-aggrandizing) view of himself as a canny political operator.
Since the FBI first searched his Mar-a-Lago property last year and seized documents marked classified, Trump has insisted publicly that at some point he had declassified all documents in his possession after he left the White House. But the Justice Department has an audio recording in which Trump admitted to possessing a document that was still classified, CNN first reported on Wednesday. That tape has already been played as part of testimony provided to the grand jury empaneled as part of the investigation, according to a source who spoke to NBC News. (Trump has denied that he’s done anything wrong in possessing the documents and has falsely claimed that other recent presidents have handled their presidential papers similarly.)
That such a tape exists at all seems on its face extraordinary, given that Trump famously hates it when his aides take notes during conversations with him. But the recording was made in July 2021 during a meeting with several people helping to…
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