THIRTY-TWO
Rudy Giuliani, through his assistant, asked the Trump campaign for compensation. In a letter, the assistant wrote he and his team would need $20,000 per day.
Several campaign officials went to Trump and asked, what do you want us to do?
“No, no, no, no,” Trump told them. “Rudy bets on the win,” he said, using language from his days running the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City. He said it was all a contingency exercise. If Trump ended up winning, Rudy gets paid. The campaign told Giuliani it would reimburse him for expenses.
Trump and Graham continued to talk on the phone. Graham was trying to ease Trump toward acceptance of defeat even while voicing understanding for Trump’s legal fight.
On November 18, in an early morning call, Graham told him, “Mr. President, working with Biden helps you, drives the left crazy.
“You’ve expanded the Republican Party,” Graham told him. “You got more minority votes. You’ve got a lot to be proud of, in terms of accomplishments. You’re going to be a force in American politics for a long time. And the best way to maintain that power is to wind this thing down in a fashion that gives you a second act, right?”
Trump resisted the advice. Graham found him angry, disappointed and occasionally nostalgic.
The next day, November 19, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.
Giuliani was sweating and seemed almost like a cartoon caricature. “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny?” he asked reporters, tying a legal reference to the 1992 comedy.
At one point, a dark brown liquid mixed with beads of sweat rolled down his cheek. The headline in Vanity Fair: “Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye melting off his face was the least crazy part of his batshit-crazy press conference.”
Powell, wearing a leopard print cardigan, went even further than Giuliani, insisting the voting machines made by Dominion, a company headquartered in Toronto and Denver, were part of a global communist conspiracy.
“What we are really dealing with here,” Powell said, “and uncovering more by the day, is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference in our elections.”
Over at Fox News, prime-time anchor Tucker Carlson watched Powell.
“If Sidney Powell has that information, if she has that evidence of fraud, we give her the whole week of shows. We’d give her the whole hour,” Carlson told his producers. “That would be the biggest story ever in American politics.” Watergate 2.0. But, he added, let’s first see if she has the goods.
It soon became clear she did not. Carlson texted Powell and she was vague and evasive. Carlson noticed she was directing people to her website, where you could donate money.
“When we kept pressing, she got angry,” Carlson wrote in a post for FoxNews.com, “and told us to stop contacting her.”
Powell’s stumbles did little to calm the fervor. That evening, Graham said the media had a double standard for election challenges. “When Stacey Abrams challenged her election, she was a patriot. Trump’s challenging his, he is a dictator.”
Abrams, the first Black woman to be her party’s nominee for governor in Georgia, refused to concede to Republican Brian Kemp in 2018, accusing him of voter suppression and saying her campaign had “well-documented” evidence. Her refusal irritated Republicans, though she eventually acknowledged Kemp would be certified as the winner.
Still, Graham said, the Rudy and Sidney show was a turning point. “They were just beyond bizarre. And I think it took a lot of the air out of the balloon that the challenges are so unfocused, haphazard and conspiratorial.” The news conference “accelerated the beginning of the end.”
Trump shrugged off calls of concern.
“Yeah,” Trump told advisers, speaking about Giuliani, “he’s crazy. He says crazy shit. I get it. But none of the sane lawyers can represent me because they’ve been pressured. The actual lawyers have been told they cannot represent my campaign.”
Inside the White House press office, inquiries about Powell and Giuliani piled up. A new refrain among junior staffers: Don’t let Rudy in the building. Don’t let Sidney in the building.
But the laughs faded. John McEntee made it clear to many Trump aides that no one should start looking for new jobs. A second term was coming, he vowed. No smile.
McEntee was known as Trump’s favorite enforcer—and had the look. He was tall, fit, and could pass as a Secret Service agent. He had lost his White House job in 2018 for a security reason, which was later found to be concerns over his gambling habit, often betting tens of thousands of dollars at a time.
But when Trump brought back Hicks in February 2020, he brought back McEntee, too. He wanted his core loyalists around.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah grew weary of the charade and McEntee’s pressure. She was happy to sell Trump’s agenda, but the West Wing was hurtling toward a strange new reality. A fantasy.
“I felt like we were lying to the public,” Farah said to an acquaintance. “Good, hardworking, salt of the earth people that supported the president, who don’t have a lot of time or money or energy to invest in politics, are being sold a bill of goods.”
Farah, youthful and conservative, had been Pence’s press secretary and had worked for Esper. She had been friends with Hicks and had been one of Meadows’s first hires as White House chief. Trump was no longer listening.
“You can have all sorts of structures and reporting mechanisms in place,” she said. “But at the end of the day, he’s going to call people up from his dining room. He’s going to bring in who he wants to. Or he’s going to have them at the residence, and you won’t even know until you get alerted by Secret Service.”
It was all too much. She resigned.
Barr took a call from Cipollone on November 23.
“Bill,” Cipollone said, “it’s getting a little awkward. He’s asking about you. You haven’t shown up.”
Barr went to the White House.
“Mr. President,” he said, “you did a great job there at the end, and it’s too bad it worked out the way it did.”
“Well, we won. We won by a lot. And, you know, it’s fraud. Bill, we can’t let them get away with this. This is stealing the election. I hear that you guys are hanging back. You’re not—somehow you don’t think it’s your role to look at this.”
“No, Mr. President, that’s not correct. You know, it’s not our role to take sides. The Justice Department can’t take sides, as you know, between you and the other candidate. That’s what we have elections to decide.
“But if there’s a crime of sufficient magnitude, of specific and credible information indicating potential fraud on a scale that could affect the outcome, I’m willing to take a look.
“By the way,” Barr said, “a lot of the people at Justice don’t think we should. And I’ve overruled that. And I said on a case-by-case basis, we will.”
In five states where the numbers were close, he had asked the U.S. attorneys to look at the big-ticket items, when someone made an allegation of systematic fraud that could affect the outcome. Those states were Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania. He had directed them not to open a full-fledged investigation but a preliminary analysis or assessment. If there was anything there and sufficient grounds, they should talk to him.
“But the problem is this stuff about the voting machines is just bullshit,” Barr said.
A week earlier, on November 16, Barr said he and FBI director Chris Wray set up a meeting with computer experts at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. They had two meetings, with the experts walking them through the operations of the machines and how microchips and methods made cheating all but impossible.
“It’s all bullshit,” Barr said. “The allegations were not panning out.”
“Did you see what they did in Detroit and in Milwaukee?” Trump asked. “These dumps in the early morning of all these votes.” He then pulled out some charts and other materials he had been accumulating from advisers and friends. “I’m going to give you these charts.”
“Well, okay, Mr. President, I’ll take a look at the charts. But you know that is the normal pattern in those states. I think that happens all the time. But I’ll look at it.”
Barr brought up a version of his message from April, when he had stopped by the Oval Office’s dining room. Trump should focus on what matters.
“Mr. President the best way to protect your legacy is for you to remind the American people of all the great things you’ve accomplished, okay? Be positive. And then go down to Georgia and make sure the Republicans hold the Senate. That’s the way to preserve your legacy.”
Barr soon spoke with Meadows and Kushner.
“How long is this going to go on?” Barr asked. “This is getting out of hand.”
They said Trump was aware and monitoring the situation. They said they thought he was going to start laying the groundwork for a graceful exit and that he realized he could take it too far. And later that day, Trump authorized proceeding with the transition to Biden. It seemed like a sign he might start accepting defeat.
But then Trump started calling Pennsylvania legislators, and state legislative leaders in Michigan and officials in Georgia. There was no sign he was letting up. To Barr, it seemed like an escalation.
Barr next spoke with McConnell, who said, “Bill, you know we have these elections coming up in Georgia. I can’t afford a big frontal attack on the president at this point. I have to be gentle.”
Trump kept going on Fox News saying the election was stolen. The election was rigged. The Justice Department was missing in action.
“These fucking nuts,” Barr said. Giuliani, Powell and the rest of them. “Clown car.”
Vice President-elect Harris called James Clyburn’s cell phone one November weekend when he was on the golf course.
Do me a favor, he asked, talk to my golfing buddies. They kept him up to date on the political gossip in Charleston or over in Holly Hill and Orangeburg.
Clyburn handed over his cell phone to his “barber shop,” as he called them, and Harris happily chatted.
Later, Clyburn successfully encouraged Biden to name South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison, a Black ally, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Harrison had lost his Senate race to Lindsey Graham by 10 points but spent a record $130 million and built a national profile.
On a phone call, Clyburn got into the weeds like an old ward boss. He told Biden to make sure Harrison was not paid less than the prior DNC chairman.
Clyburn said Biden would not want a headline saying the Black chairman was being paid less than outgoing DNC chair, Tom Perez, who is Latino.
“You’re absolutely right,” Biden told Clyburn. “I don’t know what it is, but I promise you, it won’t be less.”
“Look, I’ve been Black a long time, I know what the headline is going to be,” Clyburn explained to others. “Don’t argue with me about things you don’t know. I’ve lived this.”
Harrison’s salary was the same as Perez’s.
Now that he had come so far, Clyburn was not going to ease up. He complained publicly about the lack of Black appointees to cabinet positions. “So far, it’s not good,” Clyburn told The Hill newspaper on November 25.
In the end, Biden picked five Black Americans for top positions or cabinet posts. Retired four-star Army General Lloyd Austin became the first Black secretary of defense.
Clyburn told Biden to think hard about President Harry S Truman, not just FDR. Truman was a better friend of Black Americans, he said. FDR’s New Deal programs had discriminated against Blacks and given preferences to whites, he said, while Truman desegregated the military.
“Now the man from Delaware can be just like the man from Missouri,” Clyburn told Biden.