Mark Meadows and his skeletons

By Matt Young
Allosaurus skeleton
Allosaurus skeleton. ''Allosaurus fragilis'' skeleton mounted in the lobby of the San Diego Natural History Museum. Wikimedia. Photograph by user Sheep81. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Allosaurus_SDNHM.jpg.

I think we have not been paying enough attention to Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff. We noted recently that

Mr. Meadows may or may not be a creationist, but he is certainly a fellow traveler: At one time [2002], he purchased a piece of property on which an Allosaurus specimen had been discovered (supposedly by some home-schooled children). He then [2014] sold the property to Answers in Genesis, arguably in order to keep the fossils under the control of young-earth creationists.

That was a bit anodyne. In fact, according to an article In Salon, it was Mr. Meadows’s daughter Haley who supposedly discovered the dinosaur on the last day of the dig. In fact, according to the Salon article, the fossil had been discovered two years earlier by the person, Dana Forbes, who had sold the property to Mr. Meadows. It was identified in 2001 by paleontologist Joe Taylor. That skeleton, as we reported, was eventually donated to the Creation “Museum” by

the Elizabeth Streb Peroutka Foundation. The foundation’s leader Michael Peroutka until recently was also a board member of the League of the South, a white supremacist, neo-Confederate and pro-secessionist organization that has been named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center[,]

according to a press release from paleontologist Daniel Phelps.

According to the Salon article, besides involving his 9-year-old daughter in some kind of apparent fraud, Mr. Meadows

had since at least 2018 apparently failed to disclose a loan and monthly income of $11,000 related to the sale of a deed to a Colorado fossil park dedicated to promoting the creationist fiction that humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

In addition, Salon reports that Mr. Meadows was sanctioned in 2018 for misusing taxpayer money and may have done so again in 2020. Finally, Salon reporting has apparently inspired a watchdog group to file a complaint against Mr. Meadows with the Federal Election Commission.