The investigative reporter sifting through the unbelievable treasure trove of texts that the Jan. 6 committee obtained from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ phone has detailed what he found inside the 2,319 messages.
“There’s just a ton of different people in there,” Hunter Walker, reporter for Talking Points Memo, told host Andy Levy on this week’s episode of political podcast, The New Abnormal.
“Probably the biggest individual group is members of Congress. They’re around 20 percent of the messages total. But we also see Republican activists, local politicians, Republican party officials, and then just people I would call associates, business people.”
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The text log, which encompasses the period from election day through Jan. 20, 2021, Inauguration Day, is not all about the efforts to challenge the election, Hunter says, describing how the texts begin fairly casually but then “very quickly started turning into people spreading conspiracy theories, talking about challenging the vote, and then really engaging in some very active plotting to do so.”
Next up on the podcast, Layshia Clarendon, who is the first openly non-binary player in the WNBA, describes what was going through her mind when she heard that Brittney Griner (BG) was arrested in Russia and taken into custody.
“It was like the ground underneath me just fell,” Clarendon tells podcast co-host Danielle Moodie.
“You see the way America detains people wrongfully all the time and so in that way I was thinking, ‘Oh, and Russia’s even wilder than America in some ways.’
“As a Black woman, we wanted public outcry, but we didn’t want to highlight the fact that BG was a queer woman, because that made it even more dangerous for her over there. It was almost like, ‘Shh, we all know she’s gay, she’s open, she has a wife, but don’t talk about that because that’s going to make her potentially be in a more dangerous situation.’”
They said that when they found our Griner was free, they were overjoyed. “It didn’t feel real in so many ways. My wife and I were laying in bed…and she’s screams at me, ‘She’s coming home, she’s coming home.’ I’m like, ‘I can’t even comprehend that’, like what she’s saying. And I just started bawling, crying.”
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