That included not only 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.Īs 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. And when Barr informed Trump in a tense Oval Office session that the Justice Department’s fraud investigations had run dry, the president dismissed the department as derelict before finding other officials there who would view things his way.įor every lawyer on 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. But privately the president was chafing at Barr’s resistance to his more authoritarian impulses - including his idea to end birthright citizenship in a legally dubious preelection executive order. Likewise, during the campaign, Attorney General William Barr had echoed some of Trump’s complaints of voter fraud. McConnell’s later recognition of Biden’s victory would not be enough to dissuade 14 Republican senators from joining the president’s last-ditch bid to nullify millions of Americans’ votes. As he sought the president’s help in Georgia runoffs that could cost him his own grip on power, McConnell heeded misplaced assurances from White House aides like Jared Kushner that Trump would eventually accede to reality, people close to the senator told the Times. In the Senate, he got early room to maneuver from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far. In the aftermath of that broken afternoon at the Capitol, a picture has emerged of entropic forces coming together on Trump’s behalf in an ad hoc, yet calamitous, crash of rage and denial.īut interviews with central players, and documents including previously unreported emails, videos and social media posts scattered across the web, tell a more encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.Īcross those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency. In coming days, a presidential transition like no other will be dissected when he stands trial in the Senate on an impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection.” Yet his lie of an election stolen by corrupt and evil forces lives on in a divided America.Ī New York Times examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media. Weeks later, Trump is the former President Trump. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable. Thursday the 12th was the day Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely - an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. And with that, the election-law experts were sidelined in favor of the former New York City mayor, the man who once again was telling the president what he wanted to hear. Clark called Giuliani something much worse. Giuliani called Clark a liar, according to people with direct knowledge of the exchange.
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