77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election
How a Lie Stoked the Assault on the Capitol
[What the Times reporters, Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt write here is true, all of it, every word, it is timely, and obviously it is of extraordinary importance.. In addition, this article is being published now in an attempt to sway senators to convict Trump in the trial next week.]
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Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president...
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...privately the president was chafing at Mr. Barr’s resistance to his more authoritarian impulses...
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For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.
As traditional Republican donors withdrew, a new class of Trump-era benefactors rose to finance data analysts and sleuths to come up with fodder for the stolen-election narrative...the founder of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, and the former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne...
...a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.
As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and... extremists and conspiracy theorists...— including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.
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In the days before Nov. 3, polls strongly indicated that election night would show Mr. Trump in the lead...
But the polls also indicated that the president’s apparent lead would diminish or disappear overnight, as more mail-in ballots, favored by Biden voters, were added to the official counts.
[Republican state legislatures are now working to cancel laws enacted to expand the vote.]
...for months [Trump] had also been preparing an argument to dispute a possible loss: that it could only be due to a vast conspiracy of fraud.
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Gathered in the East Room of the White House on election night, Mr. Trump and his entourage fell into enraged disbelief as his lead inexorably dissipated, even in formerly red states like Arizona, which Fox called for Mr. Biden at 11:20 in what the president took as a stinging betrayal...
...in a brief televised address shortly before 2:30 a.m., Mr. Trump furiously laid down his postelection lie.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election — frankly, we did win this election,” the president declared. “We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
Leading Republicans quickly fell in line.
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...the disinformation floodgates opened...a social media wildfire, drawing intense interest from accounts that regularly circulate and decode QAnon-related content.
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The senator who mattered most, whose words would have the greatest bearing on Mr. Trump’s odds-against campaign, was the majority leader, Mr. McConnell of Kentucky.
Mr. McConnell was playing a long game.
The leader and the president had been in regular contact in the days since the election... But the publicly bellicose president rarely confronted Mr. McConnell in one-on-one calls and avoided making any specific demands. He did not threaten retribution should Mr. McConnell follow tradition and congratulate Mr. Biden.
But Mr. McConnell knew that by doing so, he would endanger his own overriding political goal — winning the two runoffs in Georgia and maintaining Republican control of the Senate, which would allow him to keep his power as majority leader. If he provoked Mr. Trump’s anger, he would almost certainly lose the president’s full support in Georgia.
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The senator was also under a false impression that the president was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.
...Mr. McConnell said, “President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” He added, “A few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic.”
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The attorney general, Mr. Barr, arrived at the White House on the afternoon of Dec. 1 to find the president in a fury.
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Now, with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results...The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”
Mr. Trump paused, thought about it and said, “Maybe.”
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..the theory went [:]hose states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.
If the theory was short on legal or factual merit, it was rich in the sort of sensational claims...that would...give his millions of voters hope that he could...perhaps even foment enough chaos to somehow bring about an undemocratic reversal in his favor.
Before Thanksgiving, a team of lawyers with close ties to the Trump campaign began planning a sweeping new lawsuit to carry that argument.
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According to lawyers involved in the conversations, the group determined that the fast-approaching Electoral College vote did not leave time for a series of lawsuits to work their way through the courts. They would need to go directly to the Supreme Court, where, they believed, the conservative majority would be sympathetic to the president, who had appointed three of its members. The team quickly began working on a draft complaint.
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One of them, Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state, had been a central player in some of the harshest recent moves to restrict voting... [Their aim going forward in 2022 and beyond is just that: to disenfranchise millions of voters.]
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The obvious choice to bring the suit was Ken Paxton of Texas...
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The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.
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One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”
Even the Republican attorney general of Georgia, Chris Carr, said it was “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.”
That prompted a call from the president, who warned Mr. Carr not to interfere, an aide to the attorney general confirmed. The pressure campaign was on.
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Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted.
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But the brief was gaining momentum, closing in on support from two-thirds of the Republican attorneys general, 18 in all.
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At Mr. Trump’s urging, the Republican Attorneys General Association made one final play, asking Mr. Barr to back the suit. He refused.
On Dec. 11, the court declined to hear the case, ruling that Texas had no right to challenge other states’ votes.
If the highest court in the land couldn’t do it, there had to be some other way.
And so they came the next day, by the thousands, to a long-planned rally in Washington, filling Freedom Plaza with red MAGA caps and Trump and QAnon flags, vowing to carry on.
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The rally had been planned by Women for America First, which was quietly becoming the closest thing Mr. Trump had to a political organizing force, gathering his aggrieved supporters behind the lie of a stolen election.
The group’s founder [was] Amy Kremer...
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There were early warning signs of the explosion to come.
In Tennessee, a church that was to host a rally canceled after threats of violence. An evangelical pastor, Greg Locke, who had gained national attention for calling Covid-19 a “fake pandemic,” offered them his church and joined the tour as a speaker.
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...Mr. Lindell...had sponsored the bus tour so that he could share the findings of investigations he was financing — he was spending $1 million in all — to produce evidence of voter fraud, including for Ms. Powell’s Dominion lawsuits.
“Donald Trump got so many votes that they didn’t expect, it broke the algorithms in the machines,” he told the crowd in Des Moines. “What they had to do was backfill the votes.” Ms. Powell, he said, had “the proof, 100 percent the proof.”
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The day after the Electoral College certified the votes as expected, Mitch McConnell moved to bring the curtain down. He called the president’s chief of staff, Mr. Meadows, to say that he would be acknowledging Mr. Biden as president-elect that afternoon on the Senate floor.
Mr. McConnell had been holding off in part because of the earlier assurances from Mr. Meadows and Mr. Kushner, and he had been inclined to believe them when Mr. Trump finally freed the General Services Administration to begin the transition. Yet even now, the president was refusing to concede. “This fake election can no longer stand,” he wrote on Twitter. “Get moving Republicans.”
Perhaps most important in Mr. McConnell’s evolving calculus, internal polls were showing that the Republicans’ strongest argument in the Georgia runoffs was that a Republican-led Senate would be a necessary check on a new — and inevitable — Democratic administration.
Mr. McConnell did not call the president until after his speech congratulating Mr. Biden. It was a perfunctory conversation, with the president expressing his displeasure. The men have not spoken since.
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Mr. Trump agreed, at least for the moment, to focus on a different goal: blocking congressional certification of the results on Jan. 6.
Mr. Meadows had connected the president to Mr. Martin, the former North Carolina justice, who had a radical interpretation of the Constitution: Vice President Mike Pence, he argued, had the power to stop the certification and throw out any results he deemed fraudulent.
In fact, under the Constitution and the law, the vice president’s role is strictly ministerial: He “shall” open envelopes from each state, read the vote count and ask if there are objections. Nothing more.
But that process, at the very least, gave Mr. Trump and his congressional allies an opening to stir up trouble — and a cause to energize the base.
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The cavalry “is coming, Mr. President,” Kylie Kremer tweeted to Mr. Trump on Dec. 19.
This tour took on an edgier tone. Before heading out, the Kremers, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton visited the Tactical Response marksman training center in Nashville. Its owner, James Yeager, had had his gun permit suspended in 2013 after posting a video in which he threatened to “start killing people” if the Obama administration banned assault rifles.
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Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.
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“We need our president to be confirmed through the states on the 6th,” said Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump. “And right after that, we’re going to have to declare martial law.”
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Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.
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The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.
For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office.
That Saturday, Mr. Trump had called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and pressed him, unsuccessfully, to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to win the state.
Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.
That left the congressional certification as the main event.
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The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording...
Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.
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Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”
As the rally wound down in a cold drizzle, groups of young men wearing Kevlar vests and helmets began appearing toward the back of the plaza. Some carried bats and clubs, others knives. Some were Proud Boys, but more sported the insignia of the Three Percenters.
One of the men, with a line of stitches running through his ear, told a reporter: “We’re not backing down any more. This is our country.” Another, holding a bat, cut the conversation short. “We know what to do with people like you,” he said.
Mr. Trump took the stage at the Ellipse the next day shortly before 1 p.m., calling on the tens of thousands before him to carry his message to Republicans in the Capitol: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
As he spoke, some protesters, with Proud Boys helping take the lead, were already breaching the outer security perimeter around the Capitol.
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On Jan. 15, Mr. Trump acquiesced to an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Lindell, who arrived with two sets of documents. One, provided by a lawyer he would not name, included a series of steps Mr. Trump could take, including “martial law if necessary.”
