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The Walls are Closing in Around Jim Jordan After Admitting to Sending Texts to Mark Meadows

Yeah, he's exactly who you always thought he was.

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Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, known for being a loudmouth except when it came to abuse of young athletes he coached in school, is talking again. This time it’s to confirm that he was the sender of a text message uncovered by the House Select Committee investigating the events leading up to the riot at the Capitol.

The message, forwarded by Jordan to former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was originally authored by Joseph Schmitz, the former inspector general at the Pentagon. The intent of the text was to describe a method by which the 2020 election could be overturned by having Vice President Mike Pence simply throw out any state’s electoral votes he found to be “unconstitutional.”

During a panel hearing earlier this week, Rep. Adam Schiff showed a graphic that contained a portion of the message, but inadvertently included punctuation where none had existed in the original. It didn’t change the meaning or context of anything in the message, but Republicans pounced on the error.

The graphic read:

On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.

The original text had no period at the end.

Jordan’s admission comes after an argument about the source of the sentiment contained in the text — whether it had been authored by Jordan himself, or it was a forwarded message. Jordan’s office told news outlets that “Mr Jordan forwarded the text to Mr Meadows, and Mr Meadows certainly knew it was a forward.”

But the original text, viewed by The Independent and others, has nothing in it to indicate that it was a forward nor who the original author of the message was. Unfortunately for Jordan and Meadows, whether it was written by Schmitz is largely irrelevant. If Meadows “knew it was a forward,” then without any indicators in the text that it wasn’t written by Jordan, it would mean that Meadows was already familiar with the message.

Either way, both Jordan and Meadows, high-ranking Republicans at the time, were interested enough in the subject to prove without doubt that they wanted and intended to find a way to overturn the election.

Twitter had some thoughts:

Andrew Simpson
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Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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