Mark Meadows

Mark Meadows was Trump’s Chief of Staff from March 31, 2020, through the end of Trump’s term. He held that role through the January 6, 2021 insurrection, promoting election lies and conspiring with Trump to overturn the election’s results. In a series of text messages obtained by the January 6 Select Committee, Meadows assured Trump allies that he would stop at nothing to challenge the 2020 election results. “We will fight until there is no fight left” Meadows wrote to Ginni Thomas, who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Despite privately acknowledging to some associates that Trump had lost the 2020 election, Meadows actively participated in the campaign to undermine the results. He facilitated a backdoor pressure campaign against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. He also entertained extreme proposals from Trump loyalists and co-conspirators, including Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, who suggested declaring martial law and seizing voting machines. According to testimony from Meadows’s former aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows sought to distance himself from these meetings, allegedly telling her, “I’m not going to lose my job because of these guys.”

On January 6 itself, as rioters stormed the Capitol, Meadows’s actions have come under intense scrutiny. Despite receiving urgent pleas from lawmakers to have Trump condemn the violence, Meadows offered vague assurances that he was “working on it” while reportedly spending much of the afternoon on his office couch, staring at his phone. This apparent inaction led former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to seemingly to try shift the blame from Trump: “[y]ou’ve got to wonder how much of what happened on Jan. 6 is related to Mark being afraid to tell the president the truth.”

Meadows’s legal troubles have since mounted, with the House voting to hold him in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the Select Committee’s investigation. The matter was referred to the Department of Justice, which declined to prosecute him. Meadows is facing serious charges in Georgia, where he has been indicted along with Trump and 16 others for allegedly participating in a RICO conspiracy to overturn the state’s election results. Despite his unsuccessful attempts to move the case to federal court, arguing that his actions were those of a federal official, Meadows was forced to surrender in Atlanta and was released on a $100,000 bond. Meadows was also indicted by an Arizona grand jury for his alleged participation in efforts to undermine the election results in that state too.

Despite the legal and political fallout from his actions, Meadows has managed to maintain influence in right-wing circles. He is a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a Trumpist group that helps put MAGA loyalists in congressional offices and that reportedly pays Meadows an annual salary of $847,000. CPI has become a hub for Trump allies and aspiring MAGA operatives, with Meadows helping to raise funds for emerging right-wing political leaders. CPI is a Project 2025 Advisory Board member, as is CPI spin-off called Personnel Policy Operations, that was launched in 2022 to help provide a legal defense for Meadows and other Trump administration alums facing prosecution.

The Georgia RICO indictment, which charges Meadows with violating the state’s racketeering law and soliciting a public official to violate their oath, provides a detailed account of his alleged involvement in the plot to overturn the election results in the state. The indictment accuses Meadows of taking part in a series of meetings and phone calls with Trump and others between November 20, 2020, and January 2, 2021, including the infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump squeezed Raffensperger to find him the “uh, 11,780” votes he needed to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

Meadows’s testimony in his effort to move the Georgia case to federal court has been met with skepticism by legal experts and commentators. His claim that his actions regarding the 2020 election fell within the scope of his job as a federal official has been widely criticized as a misrepresentation of the role of a White House chief of staff. Additionally, as Jack Watson, Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff, pointed out, “Anyone who goes into the orbit of the former president is virtually doomed. Because saying no to Trump is like spitting into a raging headwind. It was not just Mission Impossible; it was Mission Self-Destruction.”

Meadows’s unwavering loyalty to Trump, even in the face of the president’s most controversial actions and statements, was a defining feature of his tenure as chief of staff. Besides indulging Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, Meadows also worked to undermine public health experts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before joining the Trump administration, Meadows was one of Congress’ most right-wing members, helping to found the “House Freedom Caucus,” the group that was instrumental in the unprecedented ouster of Speaker John Boehner in 2015 and Kevin McCarthy in 2023. Meadows also played a key role in the 2013 federal government shutdown in an attempt to tank the Affordable Care Act (ACA) through an open letter he wrote that was signed by 79 of other members. Those who failed to sign the letter were targeted by Heritage Action, the sister organization of the architect group of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, even though the ACA was modeled on the Heritage Foundation’s alternative to Medicare for All and had been backed by Mitt Romney before the Obama administration embraced it; it was then demonized.

Meadows also has ties to young-Earth creationism, the anti-science assertion that the Earth was created just a few thousand years ago. In 2014, he sold one-hundred-and-thirty-four acre tract of land in Colorado that is a rich site for finding dinosaur bone, to a creationist group for $200,000, a transaction he did not list in his Congressional disclosures as required. He also appeared several times in a 2002 creationist “documentary” that claimed, seemingly falsely, that religious home-schooling families had found a rare dinosaur skeleton during a dig, which could help turn the tide “in the battle over origins.”

Meadows was fined $40,000 by the House Ethics Committee in 2018 for failing to adequately address accusation of sexual harassment against his deputy chief of staff.

Despite widely condemning supposed widespread voter fraud, in 2020, Meadows himself and his wife registered to vote at a North Carolina address where Debbie Meadows reportedly “spent only one or two nights” as a guest and Mark spent none, though the Republican Attorney General of North Carolina claimed not to have found sufficient evidence of voter fraud in its investigation.

Before becoming a U.S. Congressman, Meadows was a real estate developer and local Republican Party politician.