According to Vox, the judge who listened to Meadows’ argument on Monday “appeared skeptical.” There are many problems with the case, but part of the gist is that White House employees are prohibited by law from attempting to influence the outcome of elections, and Meadows can be shown to have known that. As such, one of the things the former chief of staff argued in court on Monday was that he didn’t realize his late 2020 activities were related to partisan campaign efforts to overturn the election—i.e., that he didn’t understand the connection between President Donald Trump’s interest in vote-counting procedures in Georgia (and Michigan) and candidate Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to reverse the results of voting in those states. From the Washington Post:

On several occasions, Mark Meadows claimed to have no knowledge of the Trump campaign’s efforts to contest the election results. On Donald Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, on Jan. 2, 2021, which Meadows participated in, he said he did not know that three lawyers on the call—Cleta Mitchell, Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufman—had participated in a campaign lawsuit against Raffensperger.

(Meadows said he didn’t remember how Mitchell, a prominent voter-fraud conspiracy theorist with whom he’d previously been in contact, had ended up on the Georgia call.)

In addition, when questioned about an Oval Office meeting he attended with Trump and Michigan state lawmakers, Meadows said he didn’t know that the campaign was contesting the results in that state.

According to Meadows’ testimony, he believed at the time that he was advancing the executive branch’s interest in “accurate and fair elections” and helping resolve Trump’s concerns about voter fraud in order to eliminate a “roadblock” to the “transfer of power”—in other words, that he did not understand, in January 2021, that Donald Trump was involved in election litigation for selfish reasons. (A recent New York Times piece that documents Meadows’ history of vacantly telling whomever he was talking to exactly what they wanted to hear suggests, troublingly, that this might actually be true.)