Mark Meadows Is in Trouble

Here’s today’s big headline, as explained in Rolling Stone:

In a text exchange from Dec. 23, 2020, mere days before a riotous mob attempted to sabotage the Electoral College certification of President Joe Biden’s win, conspiracy theorist and former Army colonel Phil Waldron updated Meadows on his efforts to have voting machines in Maricopa County, Arizona, seized and examined.

Complaining that a judge had dismissed a lawsuit brought by MAGA legislators demanding the machines be turned over, Waldron texted Meadows that the decision removed “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,” of rulings in other states. “Pathetic,” Meadows replied.

Waldron was deeply involved in the scheme to seize voting machines in states with close electoral margins. He allegedly drafted an executive order for the White House instructing the seizure of voting machines but the order never came to fruition, as it was very clearly illegal. Waldron additionally communicated to Meadows that he had allegedly reviewed troves of suspect electoral data constituting what he described as a “southern steal.”

That’s kind of a big deal, seems to me. The other phone news is that on January 6 there was a 9-second call from the White House to one of the insurrectionists, a 26-year-old Trump supporter from Brooklyn named Anton Lunyk. Lunyk was in the Capitol building and was sentenced to a few months of home confinement, probation, and a small fine. He appears to be a minor player in that event. This may come to nothing.

Yesterday there were several stories in the right-wing press that claimed FBI SWAT teams with drawn assault weapons had raided the home of a nice Catholic man in Pennsylvania named Mark Houck. Several different accounts (example) claimed he was arrested in front of his seven traumatized children and this is OVERREACH by BIDEN. This article claims “A pro-life leader is calling for a Congressional investigation of a bogus FBI raid that resulted in the arrest of a peaceful pro-life advocate of a minor incident outside an abortion center and a federal charge that could put him in prison for up to 11 years.”

So I looked it up. Houck is a long-time abortion clinic terrorist, one of those thugs who gets off on intimidating and harassing women seeking medical care. In the “minor incident” he twice assaulted a 72-year-old man acting as a patient escort, knocking him to the ground. Houck has been charged with two counts of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which makes it a federal crime to use force with the intent to “injure, intimidate, and interfere with anyone because that person is a provider of reproductive health care.”

The FBI said no SWAT teams were involved in the raid. They did send armed agents to make the arrest, but said “FBI agents knocked on Mr. Houck’s front door, identified themselves as FBI agents and asked him to exit the residence. He did so and was taken into custody without incident pursuant to an indictment.”

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. I hope Houck gets the eleven years, but he probably won’t.