Mark Meadows Caught BURNING Official Documents Before Leaving Office

Former aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the January 6th Committee that her boss, Mark Meadows, was seen multiple times throwing official documents into a fireplace and burning them shortly before the Trump administration left office. This was revealed in transcripts released by the Committee, and it raises serious legal questions about Meadows' behavior. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

According to Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aid to Mark Meadows, who was of course Donald Trump's chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, routinely and repeatedly Hutchinson told the January 6th committee would burn documents in the fireplace in his office. She was specifically asked by the January 6th committee during her testimony, did Mark Meadows ever burn documents to which she replied, the Presidential Records Act only asked that you keep the original copy of a document. So yes. However, I don't know if they were the first or original copies of anything. It's entirely possible that he had put things in his fireplace that he also would've put into a burn bag that there were duplicates of, or that there was an electronic copy of, I wanna say once a week or twice. It's, I can recall specific times that I did maybe a dozen, maybe just over a dozen. But this is over a period December through mid-January two, uh, which is when we started lighting the fireplace.

She went on to say that on two separate occasions, after Mark Meadows met with Republican representative Scott Perry, he then went into his office and burned papers. Now on Wednesday, all over social media, this story was blowing up with people saying, yes, this is obviously a clear violation of the Presidential Records Act. More people calling for Meadows to be prosecuted, investigated for this. And unfortunately, what I have to do right now is go ahead and pump the brakes on all of this. And here's why. A and I don't wanna burst anybody's bubble. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but nothing's going to happen with this story. Do you know why? Because there's no evidence to back any of this up. As Hutchinson herself admitted, she doesn't even know what the papers were, right? She's confident that they were official documents, but they could have been duplicate official documents, which would actually make it perfectly legal for them to be destroyed.

So lacking any kind of record of documents that may be missing, which we know they do keep a record of those kinds of things. But if the National Archives has an identified any records from Mark Meadows that are in fact missing, then there is no story here. There is no wrongdoing. Furthermore, if the National Archives did produce a list of documents from Mark Meadows that were missing, we can't just assume that he burned them and we couldn't even launch an investigation into whether or not he did. Here's why this kind of testimony, and, and this is why I'm, I'm talking about this cuz we gotta be so freaking careful about things like this. This is technically in the eyes, eyes of the law, hearsay. Sure, she's a firsthand witness, but she is a firsthand witness with no corroborating evidence. She didn't take pictures of him putting the documents in the fireplace.

There's no video of it. It's just her saying, oh, I, I saw him do this and I believe her. I have no reason to doubt her. However, our belief in Cassidy Hutchinson is not gonna hold up in court. It's like you can't just call the police and say, Hey, uh, I just saw my neighbor kill his wife. Sure the police are gonna show up, but if there's no body, no weapon, no evidence of any kind of foul play, they can't do anything about it. Even if you go to court and say these things without evidence, there's no conviction. So, sure, it's another sensational story. A story of just how devious, I guess the Trump administration was. Absolutely. But go ahead and put those hopes that we're gonna get Mark Meadows thrown in jail for burning documents on ice. Cuz it ain't gonna happen. There's plenty of other things that Mark Meadows is likely going to be popped for, among them, of course, as voter fraud in North Carolina. So Mark Meadows has his own legal problems violating the Presidential Records Act. Probably isn't one of them unfortunately.