Mark Meadows is the latest high-ranking White House official to refuse to denounce QAnon, claim ignorance about a group the FBI considers a terror threat and show no interest in learning more about it.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday today, Meadows claimed to know nothing about QAnon – even as he also said he had previously done a Google search about it.
Near the end of the interview, host Chris Wallace asked Meadows about Donald Trump’s embrace of the group, apparently because the group likes him.
WALLACE: You can end this controversy right now. Does the president disavow, does he condemn QAnon?
MEADOWS: Well, listen, we -- we don't even know what it is. I can tell you you've spent more time talking on it, Chris, than we have in the White House. I find it appalling that the media, when we have all of the important things that are going on, a list of top 20, that the first question at a press briefing would be about QAnon that I had to actually Google to figure out what it is.
It's not a central part of what the president is talking about. I don't even know anything about it. I don't even know if it's credible.
Anyone truly looking out for the country would have expressed an interest in learning more about a terror group he supposedly knew nothing about.
But not Meadows! He changed the subject to attack Wallace and the Russia investigation and later, Antifa.
WALLACE: It's not my first question. It's my last question.
MEADOWS: But it is your question, that you're bringing it up and it's ridiculous. If we want to talk about conspiracy, let's get back to talking about how the FBI and others within the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. I'll be glad to speak about that.
[…]
WALLACE: The point is, it's a hate group. It's a group that has -- is called by the FBI a domestic --
[...]
WALLACE: -- the FBI, domestic terror threat. Why --
MEADOWS: If it's a hate group, I can tell you that this president is not for hate. So, I can tell you that if it's a hate group, it's there, let's look at domestic terrorism and look at Antifa and a number of other areas, and quit spending time on something that 81 percent of Republicans don't even know what you're talking about.
Mike Pence used quite similar tactics on Friday, which I wrote about for Crooks and Liars. He similarly played dumb, refused to denounce QAnon, showed no interest in learning more about a terror group he supposedly knew nothing about, then changed the subject to attack Democrats.
You can watch Meadows demonstrate he cares more about protecting Trump than protecting America below, from the August 23, 2020 Fox News Sunday.
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Meadows is fully aware of who and what Qanon is, and he’s fine with the fact that an increasing number of angry Right Wingers think that Qanon is a great idea. He’s fine with the fact that more and more GOP candidates are openly joining Qanon. And he’s fine with having hate groups like Qanon, Proud Boys, the Europa group and the Boogaloo group raining terror around the United States. He’s also happy to blame the hate crimes on antifa, when in fact antifa has been DEFENDING communities from the vicious bigots Meadows supports.
And Meadows really couldn’t resist getting in that quick shot at the Mueller Probe, presumably to try to dismiss the devastating materials that came out last week, showing conclusively that Manafort was significantly and knowingly in contact with foreign agents. (In that respect, Meadows is in competition with Oliver Stone, who embarassed himself on Bill Maher’s show last week doing the same thing…)
We must not forget that Meadows also inflicted a particularly brutal series of lies in regards to the House passing an emergency funding measure for the Postal Service in light of the exposure of the Pence White House’s attempts to kneecap it. Meadows openly gloated about making sure the funding measure went nowhere and then began fabricating about the stimulus negotiations that he ruined. Meadows had previously made sure that no stimulus bill could be passed, thus allowing Pence’s childish spokesman to fraudulently claim HE was going to fix everything. Meadows had refused to negotiate in anything approaching good faith, choosing instead to yell at Nancy Pelosi and pound his hand on the table before stomping out of the room. Having succeeded in destroying the negotiations, he then gave himself a 2 week luxury vacation while insisting he was somehow “available” to talk. Then when he saw the House was trying to do something to save the USPS, he frantically ran back to the Capitol to interrupt the House vote and demand that Pelosi talk to him about an insulting proposal where the GOP would offer only half of the inadequate proposal he’d previously tried to force her to take. When that predictably failed, he scurried over to Fox News to make appearances like this one.
Mark Meadows has absolutely zero credibility in any of these matters. In that respect, he’s probably a good representative of the Pence White House and it’s childish spokesman.
Of course, though, lies slide by their teeth more fluently than the truth.