On Friday, we learned some deeply funny news about former Trump administration chief of staff Mark Meadows. Publishing company All Seasons Press paid Meadows a $350,000 advance to write his smarmy supposed tell-all book about his time in Donald Trump’s White House. Now they’re suing him for that money back and a whole lot more.
After Meadows got limited immunity in order to compel his testimony to a grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to nullify his 2020 presidential election loss, Meadows testified under oath that there was no evidence of “fraud” that would have put the election’s results in doubt, that he repeatedly told Trump that the claims were baseless, and that Trump was “dishonest” when he claimed to have won the election.
The problem for All Seasons Press is that all of this directly conflicts with what Meadows claimed in his book had happened. In other words, Meadows lied his ass off when writing the book. From The Hill:
“Meadows’ reported statements to the Special Prosecutor and/or his staff and his reported grand jury testimony squarely contradict the statements in his Book, one central theme of which is that President Trump was the true winner of the 2020 Presidential Election and that election was ‘stolen’ and ‘rigged’ with the help from ‘allies in the liberal media,’ who ignored ‘actual evidence of fraud,’” the company writes in the filing. …
The suit notes that the opening sentence to one chapter in Meadows’s book was, “I KNEW HE DIDN’T LOSE.”
When you pay a habitual liar $350,000 to write a book, you can hardly act surprised when it turns out to be riddled with lies. It should be noted that All Seasons Press is an imprint premised on giving conservative bullshitters money to write conservative bullshit; highlighted on their site at present is a book exploring what it means to be Tucker Carlson, and another subtitled “The Woke Mob Took My Job But Gave Me My Voice,” which you just know is going to be a barn-burner. (Spoiler alert: It does not appear a “woke mob” was responsible for taking her job.)
The problem for All Seasons is that they were attempting to sell Meadows’ book on the basis of Meadows’ MAGA-pleasing claims that he “KNEW HE DIDN’T LOSE,” but when Meadows sat down in front of a grand jury and swore under oath that the exact opposite was true, it turned his already vapid fan fiction tell-all into nothing but a doorstop. It was fine when he was lying but nobody could prove it; having him testify that his book was full of made-up bullshit makes all the other criticism irrelevant.
The company is asking for the $350,000 it paid Meadows as an advance for the book, $600,000 in out-of-pocket damages, and at least $1 million each for reputational damage suffered by the company and loss of expected profits for the book, which they argue plummeted given Meadows’s involvement in numerous investigations regarding Jan. 6.
Again, this is an imprint dedicated to publishing far-right grievance fests from authors like Peter Navarro, books that call pandemic safety measures the mark of “New Authoritarians,” and books with pictures of Tucker Carlson staring into your soul like you’ve just purchased a low-budget haunted mirror. Good on them for trying, but I’m not sure they’re going to pull nearly $3 million out from a man who already had a national reputation as a craven opportunist and liar long before they signed him to a contract to tell the “truth,” wink-wink, about an attempt to topple the government.
But Meadows did apparently sign a contract claiming that “all statements contained in the Work are true,” so there you go. They’ll probably get his $350,000 back, but they’re still stuck with 140,000 copies of what was a 200,000 first printing, so good luck with that. Maybe if you shred them all, you could make enough fake snow for a passable indoor ski run.
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