As you know Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is facing a world of hurt in court and in more than one jurisdiction. Worse, on of those is Georgia where he’s up on STATE criminal charges so even if Trump were to wind up back in the WH there’s no pardon to be had. Even that assumes Trump would bother to pardon him. The fact that Meadows cooperated even partially with prosecutors means Trump will throw Meadows under the bus in a heartbeat once Meadows is past the point of being able to cover for him by lying in court.
Meadows has, as I’ve said recently been trying to do what Manafort did. Cooperate just barely enough to keep himself out of trouble. As you know, he was overmatched and wound up convicted in federal court. One of the jurors was even a staunch Trump supporter but in the end she simply couldn’t bring herself to ignore Manafort’s guilt and hang the jury. Meadows is playing a dangerous game with his freedom, again because even if he manages to avoid getting convicted by Jack Smith, or if he does Trump decides to pardon him after all he’s got Fani Willis down in Georgia to contend with. The bottom line is that short of completely flipping on Trump to avoid doing time in prison (or at least very much) Meadows is screwed. His trying to play the Manafort game won’t work out any better for him than it did for Manafort.
For all that, as the title indicates Meadows now faces a whole NEW legal problem. Not a criminal one but the impact could affect his ability to pay for the kind of legal assistance he really, really needs these days. Ron Filipkowski has a piece on Meidas Touch Network noting that Meadow’s book publisher is suing him! That’s right, a lawsuit was filed in district court in Sarasota FL by the publisher of “The Chief’s Chief” for the LIES Meadows told in his book:
All Seasons Press is asking for the $350,000 advance they paid to Meadows, $600,000 in additional compensatory damages for expenses, and $1 million in reputational damages suffered by the company for their association with Meadows.
That all adds up to almost 2 million bucks, and by the time you factor in more lawyers fees to deal with the lawsuit Meadows is looking at having to shell out quite a bit more than a couple million over all this. The thing is, the publisher has “receipts” as the saying goes. There’s the stuff Meadows wrote in the book he got them to publish, and then there’s the stuff he’s said to prosecutors “under the pain and penalty of perjury.” It is as I’m sure you know, and Meadows has long known a crime to lie to federal agents/prosecutors in a regular interview, much less in an actual formal legal proceeding. The things he’s said while on the hook for perjury literally trump (pun intended) what he wrote in his loser of a book.
It seems that early on the publisher grew concerned with what they became aware were lies in the book and began withholding installments. Then there’s this:
The company alleges that once news broke that Meadows was cooperating with prosecutors on October 24, sales bottomed out and the book only sold 60,000 copies. The company based the advance it paid to Meadows on anticipated sales of at least 200,000 copies.
The bottom line is that on top of all the very expensive criminal legal problems Meadows is dealing with, he’s now got a civil problem and an expensive one. A problem he likely literally can’t afford. From where I sit there’s no way he can win this lawsuit. Nor shell out two million (plus) dollars. I’ll bet his criminal lawyers are taking a hard look at this new problem he has and wondering if he’ll be able to keep paying them!
It’s too early to say, but Meadows is going to be having a very bad weekend and this might, just might be the thing that causes him to throw in the towel. To forget about staying in Trump’s/MAGA’s good graces and cut himself a deal while there’s still (maybe) a chance to avoid jail time. I think it’s a safe bet that both Jack Smith’s and Fani Willis’ teams are going to be reaching out to his lawyers first thing Monday. If not before then!
Stay tuned folks. This could wind up turning into a big thing next week.
I hope this suit gets tossed on its ass. Here’s a little “behind-the-scenes” information about this “All Seasons Press” publisher courtesy of “The New York Times” (full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/books/all-seasons-press-conservative-book-publishing.html)
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But others from the Trump administration have had a tougher time with mainstream publishers. Those companies have struggled to find a balance between promoting a range of voices — including conservative authors who can sell a lot of copies — and heeding their employees, readers and authors who consider it morally unacceptable to publish them.
Now there is a new publishing company, All Seasons Press, that wants those conservative authors and is pitching itself as an alternative to mainstream houses.
“The company is open to welcoming those authors who are being attacked, bullied, banned from social media, and, in some cases, outright rejected by politically correct publishers,” it said in a news release on Tuesday.
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But All Seasons is staking out territory that some mainstream publishers are wary to venture into, by courting former Trump officials who staunchly supported the president through the bitter end of his administration, including those who echoed the president’s false claims that the election was rigged. The company plans to release a book in the fall by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and another by Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s former trade adviser. Its founding was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
All Seasons is led by Kate Hartson and Louise Burke, both of whom ran conservative imprints at major publishers. Ms. Burke, the publisher of the new company, was previously the publisher of Threshold Editions at Simon & Schuster, where the authors she worked with included Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and former President Donald J. Trump. Ms. Hartson, the editor in chief of All Seasons, spent 10 years at Center Street, a Hachette imprint that published Donald Trump Jr., Senator Rand Paul, Newt Gingrich and Jeanine Pirro. Hachette dismissed Ms. Hartson earlier this year.
Ms. Hartson and Ms. Burke started their company because “we’re appalled to see the escalation of the broad censorship coming from the current administration, the media and big tech,” they said in an email. “People are being fed a false narrative about the history and current state of our great nation, and even being told what words to use and what to think.”
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So, basically, this RIGHT-WING VANITY publisher–which was willing to offer book deals to people with less-than-sterling reputations involving the truth–is now upset that they published a book that contains lies. I mean, it’s obvious the publisher’s founders are blatant right-wing nuts and I wouldn’t find it hard to believe they supported Trump’s whole “stollen [sic] election” nonsense (lies) and there is NO WAY they believed half the nonsense that Meadows put in his book yet they were ready to publish the book of lies as long as they thought were going to make huge bank from MAGAts willing to believe all the crap that Trump and his cabal spewed.
I had to check the legitimacy of this publisher and they proved to be just another right-wing grift publisher (like Regnery) that doesn’t really care about “truth” as much as they do about “making money” and “pushing a political agenda.” There IS a reason the mainstream publishers consider certain authors (maybe that should be “authors”) to be “morally unacceptable” for publication.
But here’s a really choice bit from the article which could really hurt the publisher’s suit: “In a pointed statement in the All Seasons news release, Ms. Burke said: “We established All Seasons Press to be a publishing house that stands by our authors, rain or shine. We aren’t fair-weather friends.”
Yeah. “We aren’t fair-weather friends”–at least until the value of the books we publish for them collapses when “our authors” admit to their lies (in the books we published) in court to keep from spending time in prison.
Sounds to me like “If you come after me, I’ll come after you”. This is Trump World going after Meadows for any testimony against Trump. Do not think it is this conservative publisher deciding to sue Meadows on their own. They are following orders from their Mob Boss
I’m sure you are correct about this publisher. Nevertheless, I welcome anything which may lead to getting Meadows to tell he full truth to Jack Smith. So I am very much looking forward to next week.
This is the Shawshank Redemption come real. Every player in trump’s corrupt empire is getting their comeuppance, in Meadows’ case from both ends, both criminal and civil. He’s in a hellish vice where what he says to relieve the pressure on one side only increases it on the other. Eventually the device will close and Meadows will be a squashed tube of toothpaste sitting in life’s dumpster bin.
Did the publisher believe that the election was “stollen” and Trump really won the election? Why did they even publish the book if they knew Biden fairly won?
The lawsuit should be dropped. Maybe the financial hit will be a deterrent to publishing lies in the future.