The Jan. 6 hearings are closing in on Mark Meadows

At a 2016 rally in Winston-Salem for presidential candidate Donald Trump, then-North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows prompted the crowd to take up the familiar GOP chant: “Lock her up.”

By Meadows’ reckoning, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton needed to be put behind bars because she sometimes used a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state, supposedly putting state secrets at risk.

Meadows, by contrast, has accumulated a bewilderingly long list of alleged misconduct that makes it a wonder that he has not yet received the treatment he wanted for Clinton.

After he left Congress in March of 2020 to become President Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff, Meadows dismissed efforts to slow the spread of COVID, fed Trump’s big lie about a stolen election, pressured the Department of Justice to pursue baseless claims of election fraud, allowed conspiracy theorist like Sidney Powell access to the president, helped Trump push Georgia election officials to ”find” votes to reverse his defeat there and failed to get Trump to end the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

For good Measure, North Carolina’s former representative from the 11th District is being investigated for his own voting fraud, was the subject of a House vote that he be held in criminal contempt of Congress and is accused of burning documents in his office fireplace.

But lock her up!

Day 2 of the Jan. 6 committee hearings on Monday featured members of Trump’s inner circle describing how they tried to dissuade Trump from claiming the election was stolen. Meadows was not among them.

Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me that Meadows trampled ethics rules that are expected to guide senior public servants, but he hasn’t yet paid a price

Bookbinder said, “Meadows and Trump were masters at blowing past rules that kept other people in check.”

As the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings head toward their third session on Thursday, Meadows’ murky role in aiding and abetting Trump’s actions will likely become clearer. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin said Meadows did behind the scenes leading up to the Jan 6 attack may be the hearings’ “most intriguing question.” As she framed it: “If White House chief of staff Mark Meadows knew claims of fraud were bogus (‘no there there,’ as he put it), what was he doing as the plot built momentum?”

Susan Glasser, who with her husband, Peter Baker of The New York Times, is writing a book on the Trump White House, seemed to answer Rubin’s question in a recent New Yorker article headlined: “Without Mark Meadows, January 6 may never have happened.”

Glasser described Meadows this way: “A sixty-year-old onetime real-estate developer from North Carolina who had spent the previous seven years in Congress, he was beefy and tall, with a winning smile and an easygoing manner. But his affable demeanor disguised a ruthless ambition, and, once he quit Congress and took over Trump’s perpetually fractious team, his new colleagues found him to be a cutthroat infighter determined to consolidate power.”

Meadows assured Republicans worried about Trump’s pursuit of the big lie that the president would settle down and accept defeat. Then he turned around and encouraged those who proposed ways to overturn the election’s result.

Glasser concludes: “[T]he evidence is now much clearer that Meadows’s actions in the White House at this crucial moment not only mattered but might well have been decisive.”

The fault for Meadows is not his alone. The guided missile of ambition, disruption and sycophancy North Carolina sent to Washington might not have been launched but for the extreme gerrymandering imposed by Republican state lawmakers.

Meadows’ predecessor in the 11th District was the conservative Democrat Heath Schuler. He retired after the district lines were drawn against him. Drawing the western North Carolina district a deeper red by removing much of Democratic Asheville cleared the way the Tea Party candidate who would become the disruptive leader of the House Freedom Caucus, congressional cheerleader for Trump and then the pivotal chief of staff when the president sought to overturn an election.

State Republicans took an extreme approach to redistricting and got an extreme result. We might be about to find out just how extreme it was.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512.