Meadows meets with Senate GOP to discuss end-of-year priorities

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows huddled with Senate Republicans on Wednesday to talk end-of-year strategy and field ideas for the remainder of President Trump’s term. 

The meeting with Meadows comes as both the 116th Congress and the administration are nearing a close, though Trump has yet to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden.

“Basically just that we’ve got about 45 days left of the president’s term. He said he wanted to make sure that [if] we had ideas of things that the White House could and should do during that period of time, that we got them to him,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters.

Cornyn, who said it wasn’t a “very substantive message” from the chief of staff, then clarified that Meadows said, “Whether it’s 45 days or four years and 45 days.”

GOP senators said Meadows did not directly acknowledge Biden’s victory in the election, though he talked about the relationship he’s developed with Senate Republicans as the president’s chief of staff. 

Meadows’s message was that “he enjoyed working with us and appreciated the good relationship,” Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) told reporters. “He just said he appreciated the working relationships. Really, that was a big part of it.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said Meadows thanked them for the “access” and that the chief of staff’s message was “sweet” before quipping, “He didn’t apologize for being the founder of the Freedom Caucus, but it was implied.”

When a reporter noted that Meadows’s remarks sounded final and asked if he was anticipating a Biden administration in January, Cramer replied that Meadows “never said that.” 

GOP senators say they did not get specifics on issues such as government funding and did not discuss the firing of Christopher Krebs, a top cyber official, but that they instead used the lunch to pitch Meadows on smaller bills. 

“Really we were talking about other issues that weren’t really in the current discussion,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). 

Meadows declined to discuss his message to GOP senators on his way out of the closed-door lunch.