Already facing a challenge to her continued chairmanship of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Ronna McDaniel is now caught up in the ongoing investigation of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as the result of a phone call she had with one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump.
According to former Defense Department special counsel and New York University Law Professor Ryan Goodman, the McDaniel-Trump phone call is “devastating” for both and places them in legal jeopardy.
Appearing on CNN, Goodman was asked by host Kate Bolduan about the phone call, which is now part of the public record thanks to the massive 845-page report from the January 6 House Select Committee, “You see this new evidence, and in this you really do see new evidence of criminal liability here for Trump and his chief of staff, at the very least, Mark Meadows. What evidence is most damning?”
Goodman replied:
“I think the most damning comes under the heading of the scheme to set up these false slate of electors, individuals from the GOP who would have been the electors if Trump had won those states, to certify that he had in fact won states that Biden had clearly won. That seems to just be a federal crime that is a very, very active part of the current special counsel’s investigation. New evidence, brand new that we have not seen before that directs it right at Trump and Mark Meadows.”
He then laid out exactly how the evidence incriminates Trump:
“For example, that one smoking gun so far is a call that Trump makes to the head of the RNC. And he hands over the call to John Eastman to say, we want you to organize the false slate of electors. That’s all we had in the past. We now know she calls Donald Trump back soon after the call and says, I accept your request, which means it’s about him, it’s not about Eastman. And their other lawyers for the Trump campaign who say to the committee that it was Donald Trump who put Giuliani in control of this false slate of electors and what Giuliani was doing, as far as they were concerned, was executing what Donald Trump wanted them to do. That’s pretty devastating.”
That led Goodman to conclude:
“Then there is a bunch of other testimony that we hadn’t heard before from Cassidy Hutchinson, saying that Mark Meadows was significantly involved, following it closely, making dozens of calls to try to operationalize the false slate of electors. I think they’re in some pretty deep trouble with both of those.”
