4 Pressure

DECEMBER

Trump celebrated Thanksgiving at the White House, nervily calling it the first of his “second term.” On the second to last day of November, he tweeted, “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION!”

In his first lengthy interview since losing, Trump telephoned Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo. It was a chummy conversation. Bartiromo was less a journalist than a coconspirator. Clearly excited to have him on her show, she allowed the president to ramble through nearly all the contentions in his Blunderbuss Strategy, interrupting frequently, not to question him but to voice agreement.

“The whole world is watching, and nobody can believe what they’re seeing,” Trump said. “You start with these machines that have been suspect—not allowed to be used in Texas. The Dominion machines, where tremendous reports have been put out. We have affidavits from many people.… They had ‘glitches.’ A glitch is supposed to be when a machine breaks down. Well, no, we had ‘glitches’ where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account. And these are ‘glitches.’ So they’re not glitches. They’re theft. They’re fraud, absolute fraud.”

He once more lamented the evaporation of his election night lead as mail ballots were counted, blaming “These massive dumps of votes” for Biden in the swing states.

As for Philadelphia, “They cheat and they cheat like crazy.” Dead people voting. People casting multiple mail votes. He suggested that the FBI and Department of Justice might have been “involved.” He then smeared Hunter Biden, the president-elect’s son. He said the press was suppressing facts. He claimed there were fraudulent ballots with Biden votes. “Tremendous numbers of ballots like that.” Backdated ballots. He had tons of proof: “Hundreds and hundreds of affidavits,” he said and referred to the Gettysburg hearing he had phoned in to the previous week. Stuffed ballot boxes. COVID was used as an excuse to stuff the boxes. “Everybody knows that.”

Bartiromo added her own, referring to “impossible statistics.”

“Biden magic,” she called it, echoing the president’s disdain. She raised the question of whether computers like Dominion’s were capable of circumventing election controls. (Months later, she would be named with a swarm of other air talent at Fox in a $1.6 billion lawsuit by Dominion for spreading demonstrably false claims about the company. Dominion also filed suits against Newsmax, and other Trumpist platforms.)

“This country cannot have fake elections like we have fake news,” Trump said.

Neither he nor Bartiromo paused to actually drill down on a specific claim. Nor did Giuliani or other high-profile Trumpists. Proof was of secondary importance. It was quantity that mattered. So many. It was why they seized on every pretense, no matter how minor, speculative, contradictory, or preposterous. If you strongly believed the election had been stolen, then it mattered little whether you could prove this one or that one. They had cumulative force. The idea was to buttress a preformed conviction, which is why Trump so often repeated, everybody knows.

Despite its failures in court, where evidence actually mattered, The Steal movement gathered steam through the holidays. Many of Trump’s faithful chorus of TV boosters clung to a safer ledge, insisting not that his claims were true, only that they deserved to be investigated. But there was no such hedging in street protests and on the internet. Here, the self-styled patriots wanted election officials locked up or summarily executed. They were traitors. It wasn’t just Trump whom they had betrayed; it was America.

GEORGIA

On December 1, state election officials Jordan Fuchs and Gabriel Sterling ate lunch at Manny’s, a spot in downtown Atlanta. As Sterling worked his way through a hamburger, tater tots, and Coke Zero, someone forwarded him a tweet that ruined his appetite. A Trumpist had named a twenty-something-year-old Dominion counting machine technician, claiming he had been “caught committing treason” by doing his job.

He showed the post to Fuchs, who pushed aside her falafel. The tweet included a short video of a noose slowly swinging in the wind.

Fuchs had expected something like this and viewed it with detachment. But her lunch partner was less stoic. She looked up to find the skin on Sterling’s neck had turned red, then his face.

“I’ve got to do something,” he said. “I’ve got to do something.”

They called Raffensperger and told him Sterling wanted to speak out against conspiracy theories and violent threats, and their boss gave his blessing.

So they summoned the press corps and made their way to the capitol steps. Sterling strode purposefully up to the lectern, whipped off his mask, and sighed. Fuchs watched from the wings.

“I am going to do my best to keep it together,” he said and took a long pause, then drew out each word slowly, “because—it—has—all—gone—too—far. All of it!”

Trembling with anger, he cited Joe diGenova, a former federal prosecutor and a member of Giuliani’s legal team, who had just called for the torture and execution of Chris Krebs, the recently fired cybersecurity czar. DiGenova wanted Krebs, who had been fired by Trump after saying there had been no widespread fraud in the election, “drawn and quartered, taken out in the morning and shot.” The violence of the rhetoric appalled Sterling. He called Krebs “a patriot.” He spoke about the young election worker who had just been accused of treason and threatened with a noose and whose family had also been threatened.

Then he addressed Trump directly.

“Mr. President,” said Sterling, “you have not condemned these actions or this language.”

His voice shook.

“Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. THIS—HAS—TO—STOP! We need you to step up and if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some!

“My boss, Secretary Raffensperger, his address is out there. They have people doing caravans in front of their house. They’ve had people come onto their property. Tricia, his wife of forty years, is getting sexualized threats through her cell phone. IT—HAS—TO—STOP!

“This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy. And all of you who have not said a DAMN WORD are”—Fuchs had advised him to use a word, and now he did—“complicit in this. It’s too much. Yes, fight for every legal vote, go through your due process. We encourage you. Use your First Amendment. That’s fine. Death threats, physical threats, intimidation, it’s too much. It’s not right.…”

“I don’t have all the best words to do this,” he said, although his rang in the capitol atrium. Then he addressed the president again directly, in words that would prove prophetic.

“Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We’re investigating. There’s always a possibility, I get it, and you have the rights to go through the courts. What you don’t have the ability to do, and you need to step up and say this, is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.… If you want to run for reelection in four years, fine. Do it. But everything we’re seeing right now, there’s not a path. Be the bigger man here.… Step in. Tell your supporters, don’t be violent. Don’t intimidate. All that is wrong. It’s un-American.”

After the press conference, Raffensperger called.

“Well, you didn’t tell me you were going to say that.”

Trump came down to Georgia.

He came not to heed Sterling’s plea but to double down on the dangerous rhetoric; he came to boost the two senators the angry election official had called out. Kelly Loeffler’s and David Perdue’s runoff election against Democratic challengers would be held January 5, 2021. Hoping to rally Trump voters, both had joined the president in denigrating their own state’s electoral process. Now, at a December 5 rally in Valdosta, the defeated president was going to repay the favor.

That evening, one of the best-connected political operatives in Georgia, Brian Robinson, settled in after dinner to watch the rally on television. His wife and daughter had had enough politics, so he watched alone from the recliner in his living room, where his TV hangs above the fireplace.

Robinson contracts as a crisis consultant, and for weeks he had advised Republicans to stop vilifying election officials. “If we tell our voters their votes don’t count, that’s a terrible turnout strategy,” he said.

With Trump’s presidential loss increasingly apparent, the close Senate contests offered, as Robinson saw it, a “perfect message for the middle.” The two Republican senators were the last chance for conservative Americans to prevent total Democratic control in Washington. With Biden in the White House and Democrats in the saddle in Congress, who was going to stop the left’s progressive socialist agenda? Here was a message tailored for centrist voters, ambivalent about party. And in a pair of races with razor blade margins, those voters would be key.

Robinson watched with rising dismay as Trump, on stage in Valdosta, did the opposite. Instead of lifting the senators, commending the electoral process, and embracing the middle, he spewed his usual list of grievances, trashed valuable Republican election officials, and reiterated—over and over and over—that the vote had been a sham.

Then at last, in the rally’s second hour, the two senators stood to speak for just a few seconds each. They were the rally’s ostensible honorees, but instead, the crowd jeered them.

They’re getting booed, Robinson thought, startled. There’s something going on here.

It felt like a political, and maybe historical, inflection point. This audience had no affection for either candidate or the Republican Party. They tended to one man alone.

As Loeffler spoke, a chant arose.

“Stop. The. Steal!”

Loeffler quickly handed off the mic to Perdue, and the chanting swelled until it drowned him out. He realized his only hope was to shame the chanters for disrespecting Trump, so the longtime business titan and current US senator, made a savvy—if pitiful—move to cloak himself with Trump.

“Hey, guys, I want to take literally just one second. I want to say something personal to President Trump.”

He was drowned out.

“Fight. For. Trump!”

But he kept at it.

“Hey, guys, I want to say something for President Trump, personally,” fighting against the chant. “I want to say something personal for President Trump.”

As Perdue struggled, Trump beamed. He couldn’t have cared less about the candidates’ humiliation. He pumped a fist and pointed at the crowd.

“Fight. For. Trump!”

Surrendering, Perdue blurted, “God bless you. We love you, Mr. President.”

He handed over the mic, defeated. The chant grew louder still, and Trump let it carry on for a half minute, an eternity of adulation at a public podium. During the chant, he turned toward Perdue and Loeffler, grinned and pointed. The message was clear. This is not about you. It’s about me.

Watching at home, Robinson felt sorry for them. They had done everything Trump had asked, had even echoed his ugliest talking points. But the crowd wasn’t interested in electing them; it was only interested in overturning the election for its hero.

As the senators ducked off the stage, Trump made things still worse. He turned to the real subject of his rally: his grievance against the state of Georgia, the futility of voting, and the specific criminality of certain election workers at the State Farm Arena. Sterling’s sharp message about danger for election workers had clearly missed its mark.

“We’re all deeply disturbed and upset by the lying, cheating, robbing, stealing that’s gone on with our elections,” Trump said. “We know the Democrats will have dead people voting and you gotta watch it, dead people. You wouldn’t believe how many illegal aliens from out of the state and they’ll be filing out and filling out ballots for people who don’t even exist. They put up names, they have people signing their own name over and over. They have people signing names with the same pen, with the same signature. They don’t even change because they know once they get it in it’ll never be looked at, it’ll never be looked at again because of people like your secretary of state and your governor.”

Then Trump did something remarkable. After giving just over a minute and a half of stage time to Senators Loeffler and Perdue, he directed the audience’s attention to a “very, very powerful and very expensive screen” and stood aside for six and a half minutes for a video that centered on Rick Barron, the leaky urinal, and the “crime” that had been committed by Georgia’s election workers like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.

After the Valdosta rally, still more threats rained down on these state employees like verbal munitions. The messages and voice mails for Barron himself came in so thick that he eventually stopped listening.

The mildest of them said, “When I’m done with you, you’ll be in prison.”

Others called for Barron’s execution in a variety of styles. One predicted, “There will be a riot, I think.”

MICHIGAN

In December, an unfamiliar feeling bloomed in Michigan state senator Ed McBroom: doubt.

McBroom lived by faith. He was a thirty-nine-year-old dairy farmer, church music leader, and Republican state senator from the rural Upper Peninsula. When he first heard allegations of fraud in his state, he took them as questions in good faith: Were computers flipping votes from red to blue? Were there more ballots coming in than were mailed out? And why did election workers cover up the windows in Detroit?

People in the Upper Peninsula regarded McBroom as a man who kept his word. Years ago, he and his brother had married two sisters, and they lived in two homes on the family farm. When McBroom’s brother, Carl, died in a terrible auto accident in 2018, McBroom could have cashed out the farm and cast himself into his promising political career full-time. But he didn’t. He kept the farm and cared for his brother’s family, which meant raising a combined thirteen children. He stayed faithful. And to McBroom’s thinking, faith—whether in family, an ideology, or God—required a “strong commitment to what’s true, no matter what.”

So he resolved to find the truth about the election. The best way to check his dairy herd for disease was to roll up the sleeves on his arms and investigate their mouths, their eyes, their udders. And as chair of the senate oversight committee, he resolved to do the same for election fraud.

But during hearings on December 1, as McBroom listened to hours of testimony from witnesses, doubt began to spread in his mind. His fellow Republicans could have brought proof of wrongdoing but instead described contradictory conspiracy theories or insignificant slights by harried election workers. Some did bring pieces of information worth more investigation, but others were plain silly. A temporary local contractor for Dominion, Mellissa Carone, described her particular indignation. “They told me that I would be parking in a parking lot, and I would be shuttled in? Through a shuttle?” Carone told the senators. “I called my mother, and I told my mother about this, and my mom said, ‘No, absolutely not. You’re not doing that.’ ”

McBroom drew Trump’s ire by not allowing Rudy Giuliani to testify. He was not interested in another reiteration of every cockamamie claim. The hearing was for “folks with first-hand knowledge,” he said. So during the proceedings, Trump tweeted to his eighty-eight million followers, “Michigan voter fraud hearing going on now!”

Those supporters, in turn, gathered outside the hearing room’s windows and chanted “Four more years” and “Do your job” so loudly that McBroom stopped the proceedings.

He kept his voice level but leaned toward a mic to speak through his mask. “If there is somebody here who has some credibility with the crowd and has the opportunity to share with them that their disorder is only disrupting what they’re trying to accomplish, I’d appreciate you taking time to do that,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ll have to be forced to adjourn the meeting.”

Several voices in the hearing room shouted in response. McBroom hammered with his gavel. “If the audience inside also needs that same assistance, we can adjourn the meeting for that reason, too. I have worked hard to put this together, and I would appreciate the opportunity to continue the work and listen.”

The crowd, inside and outside, quieted.

The day after the senate’s hearing, the house oversight committee held one of its own and did not show the restraint that McBroom had. The committee chair not only allowed Giuliani to testify but ceded the floor to him, allowing Trump’s legal champion to question witnesses instead of congress members. Mellissa Carone, who had complained about the shuttle to McBroom, now returned as a star witness. Giuliani positioned her as a Dominion company insider, with technical insight. But in reality she was, according to Dominion attorneys, “hired through a staffing agency for one day to clean glass on machines and complete other menial tasks.”

Carone slurred as she spoke to the house committee, berating even Republican representatives. Her testimony drew laughter from the audience, to the degree that Giuliani reached to touch her arm and shushed her.

“Melissa is great!” Trump tweeted, misspelling her name.

To McBroom, it sounded like what he calls “blatherskite,” an old Scottish word for nonsense.

He planned to get to the bottom of it.

The call came December 4, a Friday evening. The weekend had started, but Sheryl Guy answered her phone anyway.

On the other end of the line she found sixty-year-old Bill Bailey, an Antrim County real estate agent and fellow Republican.

“We’ve got an order from the judge, Sheryl,” he told her. “We need access to the machines.”

What? she thought.

She knew Bailey had sued the county after Election Day but never expected anything to come of it. Now, sure enough, he had a decision from Circuit Court judge Kevin Elsenheimer that Bailey faced “irreparable harm” as a voter.

“Specifically, in the recent election, the Village of Central Lake included a proposed initiated ordinance to authorize one marihuana retailer establishment within the village,” the judge wrote, using the spelling for marijuana common in Michigan officialdom.

On Election Day, residents in small Central Lake village had voted for both president of the United States and whether to let a pot shop open downtown, across from the post office. The marijuana vote tied at 262–262, which meant it didn’t pass. After the election, during the rescan of Antrim County’s ballots, the Dominion machines wouldn’t accept three ballots, like a vending machine rejecting a crinkled dollar bill. So two election workers, one Republican and one Democrat, transferred the marks on two of them to fresh ballots. They scanned fine. But the third unscannable ballot was peculiar—it didn’t show any mark for or against the marijuana shop and shouldn’t have been counted in the first place. It was the statistical oddball inevitable in any election. So the two workers didn’t count it as a vote for or against the pot store.

The new total, 262–261, meant that the proposal passed.

The judge wrote, “Plaintiff argues that failure to include the damaged ballots in the retabulation resulted in the marihuana proposal passing and violated his constitutional right to have his vote counted. The temporary, let alone total, loss of a constitutional right constitutes irreparable harm which cannot be adequately remedied by an action at law.”

So Bailey and his lawyer, the judge ordered, could access and photograph the county’s central computer, Dominion machines, thumb drives, memory cards. And they needed access right away, Bailey said. A team was coming in … get this … by private jet.

“Sheryl, this isn’t about you, ya know,” he told her. The private jet was a clue that it wasn’t really about the pot shop either.

Two hours later, Rudy Giuliani tweeted:

BIG WIN FOR HONEST ELECTIONS.

Antrim County Judge in Michigan orders forensic examination of 22 Dominion voting machines.

This is where the untrustworthy Dominion machine flipped 6000 votes from Trump to Biden.

Spiking of votes by Dominion happenned (sic) all over the state.

Some powerful people had been snooping around on Bailey’s behalf. For instance, the lawyer Katherine Friess, a member of Trump’s legal team, had called Guy at her office.

“We want to clear your name,” Friess told her, according to Guy. She wanted access to Antrim County’s equipment. “You want to show that this isn’t you.”

But Guy knew it was her. Her mistake.

“I think she tried to woo me,” Guy said. Friess contacted election workers in the townships, too, Guy said, and tried to impress them with tales of recent dinners with Trump and Giuliani.

On Sunday, December 6, Trump’s attorney Jenna Ellis removed any doubt about who was behind the push in Antrim. She told Fox News, “Our team is going to be able to go in there this morning and we’ll be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination.”

Within hours, the team—ostensibly working to bring down a local pot shop—arrived at Sheryl Guy’s office from all over the country, led by Dallas-based Allied Security Operations Group, or ASOG. Its operatives arrived and took pictures of the machines, the memory cards, the red canvas zipper pouches in which election workers carried them. Sheryl Guy stood watching from a corner as they moved through her office.

This was a pivotal moment, not just in Antrim County but across Michigan and perhaps the country. If the pro-Trump team could show Dominion machines were vulnerable in some way, they could cast doubt on the election as a whole. Biden won Michigan by an untouchable margin of 154,000-plus votes. But the Trump team planned to stir up enough doubt about the votes that the Republican-led state legislature could step in and simply hand the victory to Trump.

A week after its visit to Guy’s office, ASOG released a report about Antrim County that might have had a profound influence elsewhere in the country. More than any other document, it outlined the narrative of a stolen election and, ultimately, undermined Americans’ faith in the vote.

It began by succinctly stating the conspiracy theory that would grip Trump and his supporters: “We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

The report warned of potential “advanced persistent threats and outside attacks” from hackers and denied Sheryl Guy’s admission of her own mistake: “The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors.”

Then the report delivered the sentence the Trump campaign hoped for most: “Because the same machines and software are used in 48 other counties in Michigan, this casts doubt on the integrity of the entire election in the state of Michigan.”

Shortly after the report’s release, Trump tweeted, “WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!”

Immediately after that, Trump directed aide Molly Michael to email the report to the Department of Justice with the subject line, “From POTUS.” It included a set of “Antrim County Talking Points” for Jeff Rosen, soon to be acting attorney general.

The talking points were breathtaking and included “This is the evidence that Dominion Voting machines can and are being manipulated.”

And “This is not human error as we have proven.”

And “This is a Cover-up of voting crimes.”

This strategy required that Sheryl Guy not be a mildly bumbling county clerk but a techno-criminal mastermind. People believed it. She received a deluge of voicemail, letters, and sideways glances on the street from neighbors she’d known her whole life. They took the word of interstate political operatives motivated by enormous power and wealth, rather than her, the local clerk who had certified their births and marriages. People called her a liar, a fake Republican, and a whole dictionary of vulgar names. She was “stupid” and “should be put in front of a military firing squad.” They called her, in the only way she could bear to tell it, “an f’ing c.” They called for her death and for her disgrace, not because she had draped herself in glory but because she had admitted her own mistake—because she had told the truth.

Bill Bailey disagreed, of course. But did he truly believe Sheryl Guy, the Republican grandmother who struggles with her smartphone, perpetrated a sophisticated digital crime?

“I got a different view of Sheryl that I didn’t have at the beginning because I’ve always thought she’s just a sweet woman,” he said. “She’s very emboldened now. A different girl than I knew, I can tell you that.”

But did she pull off an electoral heist?

He hesitated. “I got a feeling that there was some pretty nefarious stuff that happened across the country, including here in Antrim County,” he said. Then he added, “I personally don’t think the clerks know about it.”

After Bailey’s team descended on Guy’s office but before their inflammatory report, the local newspaper, the Record-Eagle, found a scoop. The judge had made a mistake: Bailey didn’t actually live in Central Lake Village, site of the proposed marijuana shop. The “marihuana” question had not been on his ballot, so he couldn’t have voted for or against it. He suffered no “irreparable harm.”

The partisan ASOG report would face its own reckoning, soon. But the damage to Sheryl Guy had been done.

For a long time afterward, she cried often at home. Her husband, Alan, encouraged her to resign. Four decades of public service was enough. And Antrim County was changing underneath her anyway. Even the farm stands were polarized now; Republicans bought their cherries from Friske’s, not King’s, because Friske’s defied the pandemic mask mandate. And there were the right-wing militias. Just weeks before Election Day, the FBI arrested fourteen men for allegedly plotting to kidnap the governor at her house in Antrim County.

At first, Antrim County had seemed so unlikely as the setting of a major attack on an American election. But the qualities that made it seem that way—its rural remove, its small population, its Luddite clerk and drowsy judge—in reality made it ideal as a political target.

Guy retreated from society. “You feel like you can’t get air, you’re just …” her voice faded. “I drank a little more, I ate a little more.”

Drank?

“I drank a lot of Mike’s Hard Lemonade,” she said. “I was drinking the Mike’s Hard and then I started diluting it with Crystal Light and ice, so I wasn’t drinking as much.”

As she talked, a couple walked into the clerk’s office and approached the counter. They were both twenty-four years old and nervous. They needed a marriage license, please.

“That’ll be $20,” Guy said. They seemed so young. Babies to her. She pulled out her old mechanical embossing stamp and made it official. They beamed, then exited, leaving her alone in the office once more.

She doesn’t plan on running for county clerk again.

WISCONSIN

Dean Knudson’s moment of truth came on December 11. The former chairman of the state’s elections commission, he had angered Trumpists leading up to Election Day by failing to condemn voting by mail.

Now he had been asked to testify before a joint legislative committee at a hearing that afternoon in Madison to “examine” the election. The political front of Trump’s strategy hoped to convince legislators in Republican-controlled swing states to refuse the election results. Unable to get anyone to hold official hearings on the matter, Giuliani had prevailed on pliable state legislators to convene unofficial ones like the show in Gettysburg. As with that one, this was billed as an inquiry into charges of election irregularities but was in fact an effort to drum up enthusiasm for The Steal, to make the case plausible enough to move forward.

With only a fig leaf of bipartisanship—a few Democratic lawmakers would have their say—the bulk of the proceedings, the whole point, was not to examine the election but to vilify it. Knudson, until recently chairman of the state’s elections commission and a loyal Republican, was on the agenda, and he knew exactly what the committee wanted to hear.

The cause was losing ground. Nine days earlier, the president had filed a lawsuit in federal court—Donald J. Trump v. the Wisconsin Elections Commission—arguing that the influx of absentee ballots in the state had “cast doubt” on its outcome and asking the court to allow the state’s largely Republican state legislature, not its voters, to appoint presidential electors. The judge promptly rejected it with what appeared to be measured shock and historical alarm.

“This is an extraordinary case,” wrote US District Court judge Brett H. Ludwig, who had been appointed by Trump. “Plaintiff Donald J. Trump is the current president of the United States, having narrowly won the state of Wisconsin’s electoral votes four years ago … with a margin of just over 22,700 votes. In this lawsuit, he seeks to set aside the results of the November 3, 2020, popular vote in Wisconsin, an election in which the recently certified results show he was defeated by a similarly narrow margin of just over 20,600 votes.” Ludwig explained that Trump was “hoping to secure federal court help in undoing his defeat,” because the state elections commission issued three pieces of guidance—all related to the pandemic and mail voting—which, the judge noted, “it is specifically authorized to do.… A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked the federal court for help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration.”

Ludwig wrote that the claims “fail as a matter of law and fact.” With magisterial scorn, Ludwig concluded, “Plaintiff ‘asks that the Rule of Law be followed.’ It has been.” An appeal to the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court were summarily denied.

Having whiffed in court, Trumpists in Madison were now bent on ginning up public support for what amounted to a legislative coup d′état. Republican officials statewide were feeling pressure to get on board.

The show started with a skeptical statement by Campaigns and Elections Committee cochair Ron Tusler, a Republican assemblyman from Appleton, who proclaimed the state deserved “a 100 percent transparent election system where no one is asked to trust without the ability to verify” but then concluded, “Sadly, many in Wisconsin may have reasonable doubts.” There was artful fuzziness here, focused not on evidence but “doubts,” which voters did not necessarily have but “may have.” Without any real evidence of fraud, Tusler was trying to keep up momentum for The Steal. He pointed to a thick stack of complaints his office had received and estimated that the legislature as a whole had received “over a half million contacts from voters who do not trust the outcome of this election.” Again, quantity, not content, was the argument.

He then turned the mic over to Dan O’Donnell, a cocky, conservative talk show host. There would be no fuzziness in his remarks. A pale man with thick black hair, speaking with stentorian umbrage, jerking his head emphatically, he was a compelling speaker. He was even dressed dramatically, in a dark suit with a gray shirt and black tie. He aimed scarcely contained outrage at the elections commission, which had decided months earlier, because so many were self-isolating due to COVID, to ease the rules for declaring “indefinite confinement status,” which entitled people to vote by mail. In this seemingly benign act, which the judge had noted the commission was authorized to make, O’Donnell saw “the systematic erosion of the rule of law.” The rule change, like those in so many states, had prompted a flood of mail ballots. O’Donnell saw it as nothing less than an existential crisis. The “disturbing truth” he had come to deliver was that Wisconsin’s election had thereby been “perverted by fraud allowed to run so rampant by the very people we trust to administer our elections that the most vulnerable among us are having their most sacred right, the right to vote, stolen from them.”

Livestreamed from a finance committee hearing room, this fiery speech was a performance few of the lawmakers present could hope to match. Certainly not Knudson. He was a bland, if respected, fixture at hearings like these. He knew well the faces around the room, even though many were masked, from his years as an assemblyman. A former mayor of Hudson with years of experience on the elections commission—he had stepped down as chairman shortly before the 2020 vote but was still on it—he bore responsibility for the rule change O’Donnell had attacked.

Studiously noncontroversial, Knudson had nevertheless annoyed Trumpists before Election Day by urging all voters who applied for mail ballots to send them in early. And even though he had promoted in-person voting as perfectly safe, he hadn’t expressed antipathy for mail voting. He had treated the two voting methods as equivalent.

A storm of criticism had followed. Today’s hearing, in the eyes of some, offered Knudson, an otherwise obscure regional official, a highly visible platform for redemption.

Many of those testifying would do so remotely, but Knudson had come in person. He knew O’Donnell’s rhetoric was just wind. He wasn’t going to debate the man. In his own temperate way, he planned to tell the panel and the home audience what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear.

Knudson was a veterinarian. He had grown up on a farm in North Dakota with horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry and had been inspired by watching a horse vet at work. There was no way to console or reason with an ailing animal. You could only assess the problem carefully and apply what you knew. He’d founded his own practice and with his wife, Joy, had raised two children. Knudson was a strict conservative. He admired the articles he read in the right-wing National Review and considered editorials in the Wall Street Journal, regarded by many as strident, as wishy-washy. Conservative convictions had motivated him to get into politics and guided him still.

His elections commission work capped almost three decades of involvement in the electoral process. He had seen it from every angle, as a volunteer, a candidate, and a supervisor. The commission was annoyingly bipartisan (three Republicans, three Democrats). On matters of controversy, neither side could win, so compromise was obligatory. But the work was rarely controversial and made headlines even more rarely. It usually concerned picayune matters like whether mail ballots arriving via FedEx or UPS and not the authorized envelopes could be counted, or how to handle ballots with mistakes. Tinkering with the mechanics of voting appealed to Knudson’s pragmatism and appetite for detail. He was not a man to be swept up by the passions of the moment. His expertise outweighed that of anyone in the Madison hearing room, or watching, for that matter. No one was going to challenge him.

On the YouTube livestream of the hearing, remote viewers left comments to the side of the screen as the hearing progressed: “leaders of Wisconsin, America is watching you” read one. Another from a user with the handle Hex Scoop wrote, “And my dead grandmother voted from Mars.”

After a brief scrap over rules, Tusler said, “All right, moving on, let’s hear from Dean Knudson.”

Knudson took a deep breath and removed his mask. He was a few sentences into his remarks when he noticed a murmur in the room. He’d forgotten to turn on his mic. He flipped the switch and started over.

Firm but nervous, the picture of conventional conservatism—glasses, charcoal suit, short gray hair, powder-blue shirt, red tie—he began by explaining that Wisconsin, of all states, was one of the least likely, if not the least, to be victimized by fraud. With a voting system so decentralized—there were 1,850 local election clerks—it would be virtually impossible to coordinate malfeasance on a large scale. He acknowledged that “voter fraud happens in elections despite all our safeguards,” but, he explained, “the fraudulent ballots we discover are typically numbered in the dozens to the hundreds,” far fewer than enough to sway a statewide canvass. “These tend to be scattered and unorganized violations most often committed by individuals who fraudulently double vote, [or] illegally vote despite a felony conviction.” An audit of Dominion voting machines under the commission’s purview had found just one problem with folds in ballots and no evidence of the trickery widely alleged. The number of ballots cast matched the number in the voter rolls. Without the slightest modulation of voice, Knudson said, “I have not seen credible evidence of large-scale voter fraud in Wisconsin during the November election.”

On-screen, it was clear some in the audience felt this fellow Knudson had not gotten the memo. He was grossly out of tune, quite literally beside the point. The comments on the screen sped up:

“THE TRUMP TRAIN IS BEING DERAILED BY FRAUDULENT DEMS”

“TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP”

“FAKE HEARING”

“Rigged election Money talks … 3rd world country.”

To Knudson directly:

“YOU ARE TALKING TOO MUCH, YOU ARE LYING. I smell China.”

And then the occasional startled Democrat:

“WHY IS HE TELLING THE TRUTH? HE IS SUPPOSED TO PRETEND THERE IS FRAUD!”

Knudson droned on. “I speak to you today sincerely and directly about Wisconsin only; in Wisconsin there were no dumps of ballots during the night. None. There is no evidence of any fraud related to Dominion voting machines in Wisconsin. None.” Knudson acknowledged that he found certain of the changes prior to the election troubling and agreed that looser rules for claiming to be “indefinitely confined,” O’Donnell’s bugaboo, ought to be carefully considered, but these were not things that meaningfully altered the count.

“I’D LOVE TO PLAY POKER WITH THIS GUY! ANYBODY CAN TELL HE IS LYING!”

“LISTEN TO THE QUIVER IN HIS VOICE. LIAR”

“So scared.”

“FRAUD APOLOGIZER”

“Jail these crooks.”

“Send this liar a Facebook message.”

“Get him tf outta here”

“Liar”

“Fake News”

Knudson was wrapping up now, outlining technical voting reforms that he would support, not to address fraud, which had not been a problem, but to address a crisis in “voter confidence.” Tusler stopped him when his twenty minutes of allotted time were up. Knudson puckered his lips, frowned, took a sip of water, packed up his notes, and left.

One of the few supportive comments on screen popped up at the end.

“Republicans are running a Tokyo Rose propaganda campaign. Mr. Knudson is making sense.”

Another wrote, simply, “Sure pal.”

NEVADA

The coordinated assault on Clark County had three prongs. On the popular front, activists sent protesters daily to Joe Gloria’s offices in North Las Vegas, beefing up the ranks with recruitment in hopes of sparking genuine grassroots support. The political front lobbied friendly state lawmakers to help thwart the popular vote. The legal front looked to short-circuit the whole process in court, trying to stop the count, discredit it, and ultimately upend it completely.

Commanding the legal front in Nevada was an Alexandria, Virginia, lawyer named Jesse Binnall, a curious, jug-eared, often disheveled fellow who had an odd way of over-enunciating that lent emphasis to his every remark. He had entered Trump’s orbit four years earlier in the lead-up to the Cleveland convention. He worked then to ensure that GOP convention delegates from around the country were Trump supporters, a key job. That work had netted him an invitation to an inaugural ball and a White House tour but not an appointment in Trump’s administration.

Binnall was a lifelong contrarian, which is what you had to be back in 1996 to work as a youth organizer for Bob Dole. It was a time when relatively few teens identified as conservative Republicans or with the former Republican majority leader. Binnall had gone on to work on the Arizona staff of former vice president Dan Quayle in 2000 in his memorably unsuccessful run for president. Quayle, too, was an odd choice for a budding political activist. As George H. W. Bush’s running mate, he was known more for bloopers than anything else. Binnall next emerged as a libertarian, a critic of big government, and a campaign staffer for Senator Rand Paul’s failed 2016 presidential run. When Paul’s campaign faltered, Binnall climbed on the Trump train, at a time when very few people gave the Manhattan real estate heir a breath of a chance at the White House. After Trump was surprisingly swept into office, Binnall landed in a small law firm in northern Virginia. He had no government job, but now he did have high connections. During Trump’s tenure, he was appointed to the legal team headed by Sidney Powell representing Michael Flynn, the former general and national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the Robert Mueller probe.

On his active Facebook account, Binnall steered clear of politics generally, presenting himself as a single man, Dodger fan, dog owner, Anglophile, legal nerd, pilot, and avid scuba diver, posting videos shot on boats and underwater in sunny resort destinations worldwide. But on his Twitter feed, he was an unabashed “MAGA lawyer,” warning (using the acronym for Republicans in Name Only) “RINOs beware!”

In the months leading up to the election, Binnall had filed a lawsuit in Nevada on behalf of the Trump campaign, alleging that the machines used to scan mail ballots inadequately verified the signatures of registered voters and that the use of these machines and pandemic precautions meant that election watchers would not be close enough to allow “meaningful observation.” Both arguments failed.

These two strikes hadn’t dampened Binnall’s enthusiasm or resolve, nor did they dissuade Mike Roman, director of Trump’s election day ops, from tapping him to lead the assault on Nevada’s election. On the Friday before Election Day, he took a call from Roman in his Alexandria office early in the evening.

“Can you go to Nevada for me?” Roman asked.

“Yes, sir,” said Binnall. “I’ll go wherever you need me. When do you need me there?”

“I was thinking tomorrow morning,” said Roman. “Don’t worry. You’ll only be out there for five days.”

Binnall left with clothing for just a few days and wound up spending eight weeks in Las Vegas, living out of a succession of casino hotels and looking increasingly rumpled and helpless. The look was particularly noticeable working alongside his very put-together media director, Amanda Milius, and equally glam lawyer Heather Flick. They worked out of office space borrowed from Trump backers—there were plenty of empty ones available during the pandemic.

A big part of their task was herding all the complaints being solicited by campaign workers, collecting statements from those who claimed to have seen or experienced fraud firsthand. They had phone banks of women handling these calls—one of them was Binnall’s mother. In the midst of assembling this wall of evidence into a convincing case, they were dismayed when Judge James T. Russell refused to cooperate. He intended to spare himself the Blunderbuss Strategy. Talking to Binnall on speakerphone early in the week after Election Day, with Flick and others listening in, scribbling on legal pads, Russell said he would allow the team only fifteen of their hundreds of witnesses and gave them a strict filing deadline. He also insisted that the fifteen testify by deposition, not live. Binnall, who believed the large number of the stories they were collecting added up to proof of substantial fraud and that it was important that the judge meet witnesses in person to gauge their credibility, did his best to wheedle for more without success. He thought Russell had made up his mind against their case already.

Flick scanned those around the room listening to the call and saw looks of incredulity. It felt like state and county officials were treating Binnall’s crew as carpetbaggers out to usurp Nevada’s sovereign authority to conduct elections. Servers delivering summons to official witnesses were being turned away from government buildings. The clock was ticking on the team’s effort, so when Joe Gloria himself managed to dodge service for a full weekend, it was maddening. Their hands were tied behind their backs!

Milius led a contingent to the North Las Vegas elections center to demand “forensic access” to the counting machines. Gloria and his staff would allow them only to observe the machines from a distance—per the ruling in Binnall’s early lawsuit over access. Also, any access to the county’s voting machines by a partisan group would taint them for future use; it was precisely the scenario that allowed for tampering. The refusal was taken by Binnall’s team as further evidence of conspiracy.

Binnall had clashed with Gloria during his earlier failed lawsuit and found the burly elections director defensive and uncooperative. He had questioned him under oath and believed Gloria had not just avoided telling the truth but had lied. To the Trump lawyer, it seemed as though Gloria was more interested in finding an answer that would keep him out of trouble than in testifying forthrightly. Gloria told him, for instance, that he had no reason to think that any election watchers had seen any irregularities in the primary earlier that year because none had filed a complaint. Binnall pointed out that observers had been forced to agree beforehand that they would not challenge any votes. The question Gloria had answered concerned “complaints,” not voting challenges, but Binnall felt he’d caught him in a lie. Gloria was not charged with lying under oath, but Binnall remained convinced he had. In his eyes, this was just one more instance of official resistance to transparency and the truth.

On November 17, ten days after the count in Clark County gave Biden a commanding lead in Nevada, Binnall was part of the team that filed a lawsuit seeking to annul the results, claiming it had assembled enough evidence of equipment malfunction, improprieties, outright fraud, and “questionable votes” to “bridge” Biden’s winning 33,596-vote margin. One of its more striking claims was that more than forty-two thousand people voted twice. That alone gave them enough votes to overtake Biden’s lead. The number came from a statistical analysis of voters by Jesse Kamzol, a Republican campaign worker. Overall, the lawsuit zeroed in on changes Clark County had adopted to account for the huge influx of mail ballots, an argument resting again on the baseless assumption that mail ballots were inherently vulnerable to fraud.

The boyish Binnall proudly announced his filing at a press conference before the courthouse.

“Donald Trump won the state of Nevada, after you account for the fraud and irregularities that occurred in the election.”

Ten days later, just before presenting his case, Binnall brimmed with confidence. Interviewed on Newsmax, the Trump-friendly network, he said, “I never know exactly what a court is going to do.… I can only say what evidence that we are going to present, and the evidence we are going to present will be compelling. Will be extremely strong, showing that the result of Nevada was wrong … because, in fact, Donald Trump is the one who won Nevada. And so that is what we can do. We can go in and put that evidence forward, and we are very confident that it will be very compelling for any court that hears this evidence.”

Trump tweeted a link to the interview on his account, a special thrill for his admirers. Milius, no doubt alarmed by how shabby her boss was beginning to look, took him shopping that day. The two spent some of their rare downtime losing money together at Caesars Palace and together took a few roulette and craps lessons—Binnall won $100. The shopping trip took a while. Back at the office, Flick kept calling to ask them to return, but Milius was a serious shopper and Binnall was distracted by his phone, which blew up with congratulatory texts and calls from friends after Trump’s tweet. It was a heady day.

Binnall’s confidence in Nevada must have come as a balm to Trump in a losing season.

One of his first thoughts, after the election results showed Biden winning, was that the US Supreme Court would set things right for him. “U.S. Supreme Court should decide!” he had tweeted on November 6, the day before the networks called the race for Biden. After all, he had appointed three of the nine justices, giving the court a clear conservative majority. The way he saw it, the court owed him.

The first of his appeals reached the justices in early December, a case that concerned Pennsylvania’s 2019 law allowing universal mail voting. It had been enacted with strong Republican backing. Several of the claimants in this federal appeal, state lawmakers, had themselves urged for mail ballots. Their about-face had been rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

“Now, let’s see whether or not somebody has the courage … whether it’s a justice of the Supreme Court, or a number of justices of the Supreme Court—let’s see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right,” Trump told reporters on December 8.

That same day, the court denied the appeal in a one-sentence statement.

“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”

Days later, the court rejected an ambitious attempt by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to amalgamate all the claims of fraud into one final Hail Mary. Paxton wanted to nullify the election results in four swing states over allegations of fraud—one of those it featured was Greg Stenstrom’s theory of fake Biden ballots in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. The justices, including the three appointed by Trump, declined to hear it, ruling that Texas had no legal standing to contest elections in other states.

Trump vented on Twitter: “The Supreme Court really let us down. No Wisdom, No Courage!”

But perhaps the most stinging blow had been Attorney General Barr’s betrayal. Barr had spent years ignoring the traditional wall between his office and the presidency, a division meant to ensure that federal criminal prosecution was free of political influence. Trump thought the nation’s top law enforcement officials should act more as his personal lawyer. Barr had mostly obliged him and had been roundly criticized for it. Weeks earlier, his order for federal prosecutors to look into allegations of voter fraud had generated useful headlines. But a month into Trump’s campaign to make people believe he had been robbed, Barr was done pretending. He told a reporter that there was nothing to it. The Justice Department saw no evidence of widespread fraud. The president was furious.

To summarize a scene reported by Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker:

“Bill, did you say this?” Trump asked him when they met that same day in the White House.

“Yeah. I said it.”

“How could you say that?”

Barr said the reporter had asked, and he had told him the truth.

“Why didn’t you just not answer the question?” Trump asked, his voice rising with anger. “There’s no reason for you to have said this! You must hate Trump!”

Binnall’s sanguine expectations in Nevada were similarly dashed. His “compelling” arguments were heard by Judge Russell, a Republican appointee and son of a former Republican Nevada governor. The judge was not compelled. He crushed every point Binnall raised. He found no evidence of higher rates of fraud in the counting of mail ballots. He affirmed the reliability and integrity of the machines. Of Kamzol, the “expert” who came up with the forty-two-thousand multiple-vote figure, the judge concluded that he “had little to no information about or supervision over the origins of his data, the manner in which it had been matched, and what the rate of false positives would be. Additionally, there was little or no verification of his numbers.” The testimony of all of Binnall’s experts, Russell wrote, was “of little or no value.” He found no evidence that Gloria or his workers had acted improperly.

The ruling was upheld by the Nevada Supreme Court, and the state’s electors met over Zoom on December 14 to cast their six votes for Biden.

Binnall and his team packed up and left town. They still had dreams of prevailing but could not find a federal question that would merit consideration by the US Supreme Court. It was humiliating, or ought to have been.

It was strike three for Binnall, but he did not consider himself out.

MICHIGAN

When Ed McBroom began his investigation, he had clashed with Democratic colleagues, who accused him of looking for fraud in the same way Giuliani and company were—hoping to find any means to cast shade on the election. But as it became clear that McBroom sought only the truth, he found himself in conflict with his own party and its leader. Trump began calling him a RINO, and urged the people of Michigan to vote him “the hell out of office!”

“The Senate ‘investigation’ of the election is a cover up,” Trump wrote in a press release.

But McBroom felt determined to do what the president and his supporters would not. He would dig into their claims. Often between chores on his farm, he tackled them one by one. To check out claims of dead people sending in ballots, he and his committee scoured old obituaries. He called citizens, issued subpoenas, listened to hours of testimony. Combed social media posts. Each time McBroom heard a new allegation, he traced it through witnesses to its principal source. And the closer he looked, the more convinced he became that his own party leaders were the ones perpetrating a fraud.

Regarding the allegation of dead voters, for instance, he found two. The first was a man named William Bradley, who shared that name with his dead father; when the son voted, a clerk had accidentally attributed it to the father. In the second case, a ninety-two-year-old woman sent in her vote by mail, then died four days before the election. She was dead, but her vote had been legal. Neither case involved deceit and certainly didn’t add up to massive fraud.

In the midst of McBroom’s investigation, on December 11, Trump attorney Sidney Powell filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court of the United States, claiming “Dominion alone is responsible for the injection, or fabrication, of 289,866 illegal votes in Michigan.” That margin would give Trump the victory and then some.

So McBroom looked into it.

The number, he said, came from a group called the Voter Integrity Project, who had called fifteen hundred residents to ask whether they had received an unsolicited, illegal absentee ballot. The group then extrapolated the number of “yes” answers to match the entire population of Michigan and arrived at more than a quarter million illegally sent ballots. Even if they were right, McBroom knew, illegally sending ballots to voters does not equal “illegal votes.” But beyond that, after McBroom and his committee started calling the voters alleged to have received such ballots, he realized those in question had not grasped the distinction between an application to vote by mail and an actual ballot. Most had received only applications. A couple of others seemed to have forgotten that they had requested absentee ballots.

When ASOG issued its report on Antrim County—the “marihuana” boondoggle that had resulted in a ringing condemnation of Dominion voting machines—McBroom dug into that, too.

The most obvious problem with the ASOG report was that it didn’t bother to note that the Dominion tally tapes reflected a correct total and showed Trump winning Antrim County. The only error had been in the way the numbers had originally been reported. That error belonged to county clerk Sheryl Guy, who had admitted and corrected it.

Bailey’s team spun a tale of remote hacking, wireless chips, algorithms, and espionage. But that was impossible, McBroom said—the Antrim machines had no modems or wireless chips. They had no internet access whatsoever.

On December 17, the Michigan Bureau of Elections and the Antrim County Clerk’s Office, joined by a bipartisan team of clerks from around the state, undertook a hand recount of every presidential vote in Antrim. For six hours, a livestreamed feed showed the workers sorting and counting ballots, and in the end, they confirmed Antrim’s certified count. After recounting more than sixteen thousand paper ballots, Trump netted twelve more. The machines had flipped no votes. No hackers had meddled. Sheryl Guy had hidden nothing.

A few days later, McBroom issued a statement. “The simple answer given by the clerk of Antrim County still stands: human error is the factor that contributed to the unofficial vote count errors.”

McBroom had come to realize the fraud accusations had not all come in good faith. Those making them either did not believe them or had not taken the trouble to ascertain that they were true. Instead, political players were leveraging public credulity to empower and enrich themselves. Trump had lost. His efforts to overturn that truth in Michigan had been stopped by previously anonymous people like Sheryl Guy and Aaron Van Langevelde. But winning or losing was beside the point; a class of political parasites had stirred up outrage to gain populist support and raise cash.

“I’ve taken more time to evaluate some of these things,” McBroom said. “And I recognized several of these big players, nationally, are clearly making a substantial amount of money to litigate these issues.”

It’s nearly impossible to know exactly how much money Trump and his allies spent in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Some of it is public and traceable; for instance, Trump’s political action committees spent about $8 million on legal fees in the first half of 2021 as they fought the election and his impeachment. But Trump also pays associates through limited liability corporations, which makes those payments impossible to track. To an enormous degree, he has allowed other private interests and allies to foot the bill. Entrepreneur Patrick Byrne, for instance, who stepped down as CEO of the shopping site Overstock.com after admitting a romance with a Russian spy, has poured millions of dollars into Trump’s effort to overturn the election. That included funding “a team of hackers and cybersleuths, other people with odd skills” to crack Dominion’s voting machines. Meanwhile, Trump’s believers across the country donated extraordinary sums to fight voter fraud; in just the eight weeks after the election, followers sent in more than a quarter billion dollars. Instead of spending his new crowdsourced fortune to root out fraud, though, Trump shuffled some around to pay off political debts—including part of the nine-figure refund owed donors misled by the WinRed donation platform, for example—and he pocketed the rest, rolling up a war chest of more than $100 million. He can use that money to keep himself relevant by funding—or at least teasing—Republican candidates who support him and possibly funding his own run at reelection.

Bill Bailey, who brought the suit against Antrim County, is quick to note that he made no money from the debacle. As a matter of fact, his real estate business came to an abrupt stop.

Then the question remains, in light of McBroom’s epiphany: Who paid for it? Never mind the private jets and teams of analysts—who paid the fees for his lawyer, Matt DePerno?

“We were able to get funding through patriots across the country, that’s who’s funding this. That’s where the money’s coming from,” Bailey said. “And it’s well over—I bet it’s getting close to $2 million now.”

But, he said of his lawyer, “if I thought he was a conniver, or anything—if I’d have thought he did anything that he shouldn’t be doing—I’d call him out on it because that’s just the way I am.”

As a matter of fact, he said, he supports DePerno’s new political career. He’s running for attorney general of Michigan.

ARIZONA

On December 15, Trump tweeted:

“Tremendous problems being found with voting machines. They are so far off it is ridiculous. Able to take a landslide victory and reduce it to a tight loss. This is not what the USA is all about. Law enforcement shielding machines. DO NOT TAMPER, a crime. Much more to come!”

That day, Arizona’s state senate Republicans, led by Karen Fann, subpoenaed the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors demanding that it share all 2.1 million ballots it had certified and all its election machines. It was the first step on Fann’s long march toward a private, notoriously partisan “audit.”

Conservative Republicans tend to be in a minority on the local level, so when they do find each other, they bond. Bill Gates, the Maricopa supervisor who had invoked his grandfather’s war record on the night he voted to certify the vote, had formed a working friendship with Fann right away. They supported each other’s aims and consulted on local issues like fireworks ordinances or those to ban plastic bags. Gates valued Fann’s opinions. He thought she was reasonable, had a good understanding of urban issues, which was uncommon in the state legislature, where Phoenix and Tucson representatives often found themselves at odds with those from suburban and rural districts. When Gates had moved from vice mayor of Phoenix to the county board, he and Fann had some overlap. They both represented Prescott, where she was from, in Yavapai County to the north, which bleeds into upper Maricopa County. So their existing friendship became in some instances an official partnership, particularly over water issues, critical in a desert state. Gates considered Fann the expert on such matters.

At sixty-six, Fann had earned a reputation for working hard for her constituents. Her company, DG Fenn Construction, which erected offices, gas stations, restaurants, and industrial buildings, also contracted with Arizona to install highway railings. This lent her gravitas in the eyes of many, a woman with one foot in government and the other planted firmly and successfully in the private sector, or the real world. With her sculpted silver blond hair in a neat bob, glasses, round face, and colorful yet prim attire, she looked more like a college dean than a politician but a dean ready at all times to hop on a horse. In public, she emphasized common sense over expertise and liked to offer crisp Sarah Palin-esque quips. The greater part of Fann’s Mohave County constituency resented and was often at odds with what they—and she—sometimes referred to as “The State of Maricopa.” From Gates’s perspective, her region was home to “off the grid” individualism. Mohave’s town of Kingman had nurtured America’s most famous right-wing domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh.

Fann managed the urban-rural divide with, at least in part, the proven strategy of telling each side, in private, what it wanted to hear. To a woman who wrote condemning the recount as fraudulent, she wrote that she had no intention of trying to overturn the results. “Biden won,” she wrote. “45% of all Arizona voters thinks there is a problem with the election system. The audit is to disprove those theories.…” When a Trumpist accused her of insufficiently backing the president, she responded, “I have been in numerous conversations with Rudy Giuliani over the past weeks trying to get this done. I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”

Although Fann would insist later that her call for the independent audit, which would ultimately be carried out by a company with Trump ties called Cyber Ninjas, was not motivated by a desire to sway the outcome, her emails from those weeks leaked out and showed she was coordinating her moves with Trump directly and with Giuliani. Her push for the private recount earned her a flurry of attention from Trump’s media allies, and the president himself sung her praises. The One America News Network began providing her a platform day after day.

This all surprised and disappointed Bill Gates. After he had looked carefully at the questions raised about the vote, after he had publicly grilled the county’s election directors, he had expected friends and fellow conservatives to stand up for him and his fellow board members.

Instead, Fann undermined their work and their reputations. Her demand for the county’s records came with the threat of imprisonment if he and the other board members failed to comply. As Gates saw it, her request wasn’t just insulting; it was stupid. A Trump-inspired “forensic audit” would just blow more smoke about fraud and would, in the months ahead, turn Arizona into a laughingstock, the last-ditch hope of conspiracy theorists.

WISCONSIN

As the winning Democratic electors met in the governor’s office in Madison on December 14 to formally cast their votes for Biden, Bill Feehan joined a group of defeated electors in protest. Instead of stepping aside for the victors, as was the custom, Republican electors met in another room at the capitol to cast their votes for Trump.

They didn’t mean it as a symbolic gesture. They insisted Trump had won their state.

For Feehan, it was the final step on a monthlong journey away from pragmatism and the Republican mainstream that had begun with a phone call on November 16 from Sidney Powell. Feehan had been starstruck. Here was a lawyer for the president of the United States, calling him! He had seen Powell’s stern visage on TV and read about her in news reports. A national political player! Folks like that rarely appeared, even telephonically, in western Wisconsin, where Feehan was chairman of the Republican Party of the state’s Third Congressional District.

The district follows the wide and winding Mississippi River almost the entire length of the state. Names of many of its small cities and towns—Eau Claire, La Crosse, Osceola, Menomonie—reflect the influence of native tribes and the French fur traders who settled among them. Today, the district is overwhelmingly white and still leans Republican, although only moderately so. With the sprawling Wisconsin suburbs of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, and the cities of Eau Claire and La Crosse, its political character had grown less certain. It had sent Democrat Ron Kind to Congress every election year since 1996 and went for Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama in presidential elections, but in state contests, Feehan’s party was competitive. Trump narrowly carried the district in 2016, and when Feehan had gone to bed on election night, he was confident that the president would repeat with a wider margin.

That’s what he had told everyone at the party that night at Castaway’s, a bar and restaurant with a wide porch that looks out over the Black River. There had been hundreds there, nearly all of whom shared Feehan’s outlook.

So the numbers Feehan woke up to on Wednesday morning were dispiriting. It was the same feeling he’d had two years earlier, when Republican governor Scott Walker, campaigning for reelection, had seen his hopes for victory vanish in the late report of more than one hundred thousand votes from Milwaukee. Trump would take Feehan’s district again in 2020, and it still looked close statewide. But serious Wisconsin politicos like him knew that Milwaukee and Madison were Democratic, late reporting, and usually decisive. It was a pattern that riled him and many Republicans in his rolling green district, where one could drive for miles without seeing a Biden sign.

Feehan is a beefy man, with short-cropped curly reddish hair gone white, small blue eyes, and a broad, pink face. He and his wife run a business that schools beauticians and operates salons, an industry hit hard by COVID. Both of them spent a lot of time caring for a disabled adult daughter and for parents who need assisted care.

Feehan had been bitten by the political bug in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. He saw the country’s first black president as a socialist, a threat to his business and family and to what he saw as the proper American way of life, so he looked for a way to enter the arena. Mostly, he’d been disappointed. He ran for the state senate and lost, then for mayor of La Crosse and lost again. His passion for the political game seemed sidelined, except along the way had learned that leadership positions in the state GOP organization went begging. Here was his ticket in. He put up his name and won. The job paid nothing. He even had to foot his own expenses when he attended the state convention. It wasn’t all he’d wanted, but at least he was in the game. It was a start.

Feehan saw himself as a realist. When the big-city numbers came in and Biden carried the state, he was disheartened but neither surprised nor outraged. He had no reason to believe the results were untrue. It was personally disappointing. He was a Republican elector, and a Trump victory would have sent him to Madison with nine other electors to cast Wisconsin’s ten votes for Trump. For a political junkie, it would have been a memorable moment. But still another Republican win had vanished in the night. It was maddening. At a November 9 meeting of the La Crosse County GOP, Feehan was asked what he was going to do about it.

“I haven’t even thought about it,” he said. He added that he saw nothing to make him doubt Biden’s Wisconsin victory. “I’m a man of reason, so I look to see what evidence is there right now, and essentially, I haven’t seen any evidence that proves that there was massive voter fraud, enough to change 20,000 votes in the state of Wisconsin.”

But Powell’s call started him thinking differently. Here was a lawyer who represented the president himself, the attorney who had defended General Michael Flynn, who was now seen as something of a conservative martyr. When her spotlight and the national stage beckoned, Feehan jumped. He became, overnight, a warrior for the defeated president.

What Feehan did not know was that he was allying himself with someone who was considered, even by Trump’s White House staff, as beyond the pale in her embrace of election conspiracy. Her plot-spinning had gone well past the CIA story she had told on TV weeks earlier. It was now so far-fetched that even Rudy Giuliani, who had been bundling every allegation and suspicion he could find into his blunderbuss, had pronounced her “crazy.” The two lawyers ended up “sulking” in separate rooms in the White House after Giuliani had challenged her. When Trump insisted he wanted her on the team, key members stepped back. As author Michael Wolff put it in his book Landslide:

“She did become the tipping point into utter flapdoodleness. All in Trumpworld with any amount of professional concern and grounding now stepped pointedly aside, became only observers of the circus.”

Feehan knew none of this, of course. To him, Powell was a big-time lawyer representing the president of the United States. He allowed himself to become more convinced that something illicit had happened. Those late votes from urban areas were no longer just an annoying reflection of partisan reality; they were an assault on democracy itself. The stakes were huge. Feehan posted on his Facebook page, “May God help our nation.”

And so it was that Feehan was thrust from the pay-your-own-expenses obscurity of party politics in western Wisconsin into the national arena. This was big. And Feehan was all in. He became the lead plaintiff on a lawsuit filed by Powell in federal court against the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The lawsuit asked the court to order decertification of the recent vote by state electors for Biden and instead direct the governor to send to Congress the state’s ten votes for Trump. The complaint alleged “massive election fraud.”

Feehan told anyone who would listen that he believed that a six-thousand-vote Biden bump in La Crosse could not have happened without “absentee voting and ballot harvesting,” both of which were legal in Wisconsin but which Trumpists had condemned as Democratic trickery. Picking up on the charges O’Donnell had so vehemently proclaimed at the televised state senate hearing—and ignoring Dean Knudson’s measured rebuttal—he characterized the easing of mail vote restrictions as a plot. They had been undertaken in order to secure victory for Joe Biden.

He was not unduly discouraged when US District Court judge Pamela Pepper flatly dismissed the lawsuit, or when his co-plaintiff, losing Republican congressional candidate Derrick Van Orden, bailed, tweeting, “To be clear, I am not involved in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the election in Wisconsin.” A somewhat bewildered Judge Pepper wrote:

“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country. One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so. After a week of sometimes odd and often harried litigation, the court is no closer to answering the ‘why.’ ”

Nor was Feehan deterred when Powell herself was jettisoned by Trump on November 22. Having estranged all the serious legal talent surrounding him, including his White House counsels and the Department of Justice, the president reluctantly decided that her cheerleading for him was hurting more than helping. In a spirited and ugly verbal brawl a few days earlier in the Oval Office, complete with crude insults, his coterie of family and White House lawyers had pushed back hard when Powell suggested that Trump declare a national emergency, seize voting machines, and put her in charge of investigating them. She waved five affidavits that proved her claim that Dominion voting machines had been rigged. On examination, all came from the same source, a self-styled military intelligence expert who never even completed an entry-level course in the subject. They were, like all of Powell’s “evidence,” worthless. Eric Herschmann, Trump’s impeachment lawyer and now senior adviser, pointed out the clear conflicts in the fantastic array of charges she and Giuliani had been making. He asked Powell, “Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules”—which was, in effect, what Giuliani had been arguing all over the country—“or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?” She said it was foreign interference and that Giuliani had failed to grasp it. “All you do is promise, but never deliver,” Herschmann told her. When Giuliani arrived late to the meeting, he laid into Powell, too. Scanning her affidavits, he said, “This is gibberish. Nonsense.”

Trump did not, however, want Powell to stop. Gibberish has its uses. But the clash with the rest of the team had become untenable. Henceforth, the White House announced, she would be “practicing law on her own,” an unofficial combatant.

Such setbacks had the effect in Wisconsin of pushing Feehan to the front. He was now the one carrying the state flag for The Steal.

He appeared on MSNBC as a defeated Trump elector, still defiant. Biden had not yet won the race, he said. “The Electoral College will meet on January 6, a joint session of Congress, and that’s where the vote will take place to determine who the president of the United States is. So that hasn’t happened yet.”

The show’s host, Ari Melber, displayed the comment Feehan had made a month earlier, that he was a “realist” and that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

“Are you of the view that Joe Biden is not the president-elect and didn’t win the election?”

“I’m of the view that there’s still legal cases that are moving forward, and one of those I am plaintiff in that is being appealed to the Supreme Court—”

Feehan tried to enumerate the questions he and others had raised, but Melber cut him short.

“Are you of the view that Joe Biden is the president-elect or not? That’s a yes or no question?”

“No,” said Feehan, with a slight smirk on his wide pink face. He knew that his stance would invite public scorn, particularly from viewers of this partisan liberal TV channel. In fact, privately, he had already accepted that Trump’s cause was doomed when the US Supreme Court had declined to hear the Texas challenge.

But he wasn’t going to admit it, not now that he was a featured player on national TV. He would linger a while longer in the spotlight. He posted on Facebook, “I am fighting to the end. Yes, this election was filled with illegal activities by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Yes it effected (sic) the outcome.” In reply to comments on his post, he wrote: “I urge everyone who loves our country to keep fighting. I am certain that our president will fight to the end.… The Democratic party has proven they will lie, cheat and steal their way to power. We can’t let them prevail.”

GEORGIA

On a cold day in mid-December, John Porter took a stroll in Tumlin Park, near his house. It’s a leafy place with a playground, an open field, and a path Porter liked to follow during his regular walks.

The park felt like a respite from political life, which had become treacherous. A few days earlier, Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan’s teenaged son, Bayler, had tweeted to his handful of followers a sort of family motto—“Doing the right thing will never be the wrong thing!”—and Duncan retweeted it. His wife, Brooke, had been furious, afraid Trump’s supporters would come after their son. And they did. “You’re a boil on humanity’s ass,” one responded. Another said, “Scum.” And one posted a sinister, threatening photo in response. It showed smooth-faced, twenty-year-old Harrison Deal, the boyfriend of Governor Brian Kemp’s daughter, who had died in a car accident a few days earlier. Conspiracy theorists already speculated he had been murdered in a political cover-up. None of it made sense. Politics in Georgia had passed through the looking glass.

Now, as Porter walked through a ring of trees, his phone rang. A call from the lieutenant governor’s office.

“The FBI wants to have a briefing with us,” the person on the other end said. Could Porter join the call?

“Sure,” Porter said, confused. He found a spot to sit down in the park and waited while he was patched into the call. Why would the Feds want to talk with him?

On the call, he found himself with Governor Kemp, his chief of staff, the lieutenant governor, FBI agents, and “some international, foreign affairs guys.”

Holy fucking shit, Porter thought.

“We want you to know, the website that you guys are familiar with,” one of the agents said, “we have traced that back to the Iranians.”

Porter immediately knew which site.

The whole, terrifying thing had started back in November. Ever since Election Day, Trump had offered up wildly untrue, easily disproved theories about voter fraud in Georgia. He had leveled accusations at Secretary of State Raffensperger by name.

The secretary of state had corrected the president’s claims patiently, with deference, but not without a sense of personal hurt. In late November, for instance, he had published a letter in USA Today, noting that despite howling accusations, Georgia’s election had gone smoothly.

“This should be something for Georgians to celebrate, whether their favored presidential candidate won or lost,” he wrote. “For those wondering, mine lost—my family voted for him, donated to him and are now being thrown under the bus by him.”

A few days later, Trump had responded viciously, calling Raffensperger “an enemy of the people.”

The website referenced by the FBI featured a list titled “Enemies of the People.”

Among the Georgians on the list were Raffensperger, Fuchs, and Sterling. It showed their photos in crosshairs, as though seen through a rifle scope. And it listed their home addresses. It posted a cheery holiday message for Trumpists:

“A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all the Patriots who have supported us! … First, we’re not Iranian. We are Americans who, for obvious reasons, need to conceal our whereabouts. The FBI is not loyal to Trump and have worked against him from the start.”

If Iran was behind it, it was a head-spinning revelation, particularly for public servants who rarely attracted attention from their own constituents, much less hostile foreign powers. If the Iranian connection was true, Trump had handed America’s enemies a lever to pry apart the American people. And it was working.

One evening in mid-December, Georgia attorney general Chris Carr came home at dinnertime, bearing a rotisserie chicken he’d picked up at Publix. His wife, Joan Kirchner Carr, was also a powerful figure in Georgia politics—chief of staff to Senator Kelly Loeffler. On this night, though, they planned to set work aside and watch a Christmas movie with Chris’s sixteen-year-old daughter.

They had just picked out a favorite, Elf, when Chris’s phone rang. Senator David Perdue calling.

Trump is mad, Joan remembers Perdue telling Chris. The attorney general in Texas was rallying other Republican attorneys general to join in a lawsuit against several battleground states Trump had lost, including Georgia. Perdue told Carr that the president believed he had been calling fellow Republican AGs and “telling them not to join that lawsuit.”

“No, that’s not what I’m doing,” Chris answered. “Some of them are calling me to find out more information, and I’m answering their questions, but I’m not telling anyone to get on or stay off.”

“Will you tell the president that?”

“Yeah, if he wants to talk to me.”

An hour and a half later, Chris’s phone rang again. A White House scheduler put Trump on. Chris paced the house as he explained his position to Trump: “I’m not trying to encourage people to stay off of the lawsuit, but it’s my duty and the oath I took to defend our state from it, and that’s what we’re doing.”

As Joan and her stepdaughter resumed watching Elf, they could hear the angry president’s voice in the next room.

Wow, she thought, this is where we’re at.

After the call ended, Chris rejoined the family. Then a few minutes later his phone rang again, Joan said. This time Senator Loeffler relayed the news. The president, she said, was still “mad.”

ARIZONA

Lynie Stone, still dubious about the fate of her Trump ballot and spooked by the sinister number “666” she’d found in state spreadsheets, sent letters to congressmen and senators—to everyone.

After doing all she could to cry foul, she had begun to feel ignored. Like dirt swept under the carpet. As far as she was concerned, we the people had been duped. Early voting was all a scam. If only she could get others to pay attention! She felt like she wasn’t big enough for people to notice her.

She begged her friends to care. She told them, “Are you telling me out of the hundreds of thousands of people, nobody looked at the Excel sheet, only me? I’m the only one that added the numbers up? Are you kidding?”

They didn’t see it. They shrugged off her arguments. They didn’t seem to care. She would tell them, “You know, this is your country, right?”

Then, at last, a connection. She found the Amistad Project through the only friend she had who shared her passion for the subject. Stone called their hotline—weeks after Fox News had named Biden the winner.

And Amistad took her seriously. It was a national legal effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory, launched by the right-wing Chicago antiabortion, antigay marriage organization that had helped Leah Hoopes in Pennsylvania, the Thomas More Society. It was named after the Catholic saint who condemned Protestant heretics to be burned at the stake in the sixteenth century and who was himself executed for refusing to renounce papal authority over the church in England. More had become a symbol of standing alone against the enormous power of the state. Amistad was going to formalize the Blunderbuss Strategy by bundling fraud accusations from all over the country into one big federal lawsuit. Among its dizzying array of claims was that the massive donation by Zuckerberg’s charity to buy voting machines and drop boxes had been an effort that “illegally circumvent[s] absentee voting laws to cast tens of thousands of illegal absentee ballots.” This particular claim, like many others bundled in the Amistad suit, had gotten no traction in state courts.

Lawyers for the project didn’t just hear Stone out; they asked her to join. At first, she was intimidated. Would she be brave enough to put her name on the lawsuit, to say, I smell fraud and I’m calling you on it? She sat with the decision for two days, discussing it with her husband. He was wary.

“Do you really want to do that?” he asked. “Do you really want your name on there?”

And finally, she said yes. Because somebody had to; somebody had to say, I’ve had enough, and be brave.

This was how the name Lynie Stone wound up as the first individual plaintiff on the Amistad lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, DC, on December 22 by attorney Erick G. Kaardal of the Thomas More Society. Leah Hoopes was also on the plaintiff list. Stone felt proud. Even though she had been born a Kozlowski, the suit gave her a feeling of distant kinship to Thomas P. Stone, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. She felt connections like that were important. Somehow, through the centuries, the name Stone was again speaking up for liberty.

Kaardal took issue with the election in every swing state, resting his arguments primarily on rule changes regarding mail ballots. There were more specific allegations here and there and some questionable statistical analyses. It would cite Stenstrom’s affidavit from Pennsylvania, and claim, “The 2020 General Election results are so severely flawed that it is impossible to certify the accuracy of the purported results.”

There had still been no satisfactory explanation, as Stone saw it, for the disparities she had found on the Excel sheets, disparities that hinted darkly at the presence of evil. QAnon briefings linked the forces arrayed against Trump with an international pedophile ring. Any decent person would want to ally herself against that.

Above all, she wanted the light of truth. That’s what it was all about to her: truth, love, and light.

These things might have motivated Hoopes, too. Certainly her sense of liberty did. But she and Stenstrom also sought to settle some scores. They had not forgotten the scorn they encountered at The Wharf. On the same day Amistad filed its suit in DC, the two joined with a defeated local candidate to ask Delaware County judge John Capuzzi, the one who had granted the election night request, for access to the “back room.” The new petition asked that Delco’s election officials be held in contempt for failing to fully comply with his order. Hoopes and Stenstrom objected to having been confined to a “pen” at The Wharf, a restriction their lawyer, in a gust of hyperbolic indignation, called “draconian,” a reference to the ancient Greek legal code that decreed death for even minor crimes. Her argument, of course, ignored the state supreme court ruling that had rejected this exact complaint. Hoopes and Stenstrom wanted those who had confined and rebuffed them punished. The lawsuit asked for them to be fined $1,000 and/or imprisoned for up to a year. They also wanted the results of one local congressional election enjoined, demanding, like Karen Fann and the Arizona senate, an “independent forensic examination” of the election results.

The same day both those actions were filed, Clint Hickman, the egg industry scion and chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, got a tip. Stop The Steal protesters were coming to his house.

The Hickmans, Clint and his wife, Jennifer, and their three children, lived in a sprawling five-thousand-square-foot, one-story home in Litchfield Park in the far western suburbs of Phoenix. Its short driveway made a U up to the front door and then back out to the cul-de-sac. The door stood behind four white pillars. The house was in a neighborhood crowded with million-dollar homes claimed from the surrounding desert. The land around it stretched flat, brown, and sunbaked, and the community decorated its lawns not with grass but with scattered palm trees, stones, and succulents.

The tip came from someone allied with The Steal movement who still considered Hickman a friend. He and the other county supervisors had been harassed continually since voting to authorize the election results weeks earlier. There had been so much abuse on Hickman’s Twitter account, with calls for his arrest and execution, that he had finally closed it and then took criticism for doing so by Kelli Ward, the state Republican chair and an ardent Trumpist. She said Hickman was “slapping millions of Arizonans in the face.”

Other political leaders who stood up to the protesters had been “Trump-Trained,” with cars driving past blowing their horns. The group heading toward Hickman planned to leave their cars. The tipster forwarded Hickman online instructions for participants to convene at a nearby Lowe’s parking lot and then “rally to the traitor’s house,” giving the address.

“You live here, don’t you, Clint?” his friend asked. “Isn’t this your house? They are coming tonight.”

He called the sheriff’s office and was promised help. Two patrol cars would monitor the assembly at Lowe’s and then come to his house before the protesters arrived. He contacted his fellow supervisors to warn them that something similar might come their way. Bill Gates had already relocated temporarily with his family, expecting the storm to eventually blow over. The police had suggested that the Hickman family do the same, but they weren’t willing. Hickman felt he was a solid citizen seriously engaged in doing his civic duty; he was not about to be run off for it.

“If you’re staying, I’m staying,” Jennifer told him. They found the whole scenario so outrageous that it was surreal.

Hickman texted his neighbors a heads-up and walked around knocking on doors to make sure everyone got the message. It wasn’t the first time protesters had visited. In June, a group had convened to inveigh against the county’s pandemic health protections, which required people to wear masks indoors.

“They’re coming back,” he told neighbors.

One of his friends, angry and more confrontational than most, offered to be out in front of his house to meet them.

“You can’t come out,” Hickman said. “You can’t send your wife out. You can’t.” He said there would be deputy sheriffs present. “I’m fine,” he told his friend. “The family is going to be fine. Don’t come out. Don’t engage.”

He explained that he’d rather not see a brawl livestreamed from his block. He and Jennifer and their teenage boys and daughter planned to ride it out inside. Hickman’s mother had dropped off four dozen eggs from the family farm that morning, and his sons suggested that they target the protesters from their walled backyard, lobbing them over the house.

Hickman nixed that idea.

Wouldn’t it be fitting to egg them? they pleaded. It goes with being the egg guy.

“I don’t want to egg them on,” deadpanned Hickman.

The protesters showed up at dusk, walking from nearby side streets. Police, with their car lights flashing, blocked the cul-de-sac and turned cars away. Hickman’s parents drove in from their farm to be with them but were turned back. The body camera of one deputy captured an encounter with a neighbor, who pulled up to the blockade and lowered the window of her SUV.

“Can we be mean to them?” the woman asked.

“No,” he said and laughed.

“Can we throw some Hickman eggs at them?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Really, I can’t? Are you sure?”

“We don’t want to provoke,” the sheriff said. “We just want you guys to live in peace.”

“Such bullshit,” she said. “I’m glad my twenty-two-year-old is not here. That would be ugly. The Hickmans are really good friends of ours.”

“Nice folks,” the deputy said.

As she pulled away, she spotted a protester standing in her yard. His face was wrapped in a bandanna decorated with a skeleton face.

“Get off my property!” she shouted at him.

“Where’s your property?” he asked.

“Fuck you!” she told him.

The protesters milled in a large group before the house, about a hundred of them, chanting the things Hickman had grown accustomed to hearing.

“Traitor!”

“Lock him up!”

The deputies informed the group that chanting in a private neighborhood was actually against the law in Arizona.

“I’m going to start arresting anyone near me!” one called out.

So the group began singing. It was just days before Christmas.

“You can’t stop us from caroling!” one said.

They tried out some yuletide fare without much success. Too few knew the words. They then attempted “God Bless America,” which also didn’t last. Folks knew only the chorus. When more deputies arrived, the crowd dispersed.

This kind of protest was worrisome but also silly. Hickman had more troubling matters to deal with. He was getting pressure from politicians, colleagues, in his own party, statewide. He stopped picking up calls from state Republican chair Kelli Ward and from any numbers he did not recognize. They could leave voice messages. One of those he got was Rudy Giuliani:

“Hey, call me back,” the lawyer said. “I hear that you are interested in doing an audit. We want to help with that. Call me back.”

Hickman and his fellow board members were already involved in litigation over Fann’s demand for the election material. He could see himself dragged still further into a legal morass. He did not return Giuliani’s call.

Shortly before Christmas, he received a voice message from Ward.

“The president wants to speak to you about an audit and the ballots.”

He did not return that one either.

“Is there a chance that Kelli Ward is actually talking to the president?” Hickman asked a friend.

“There’s no way,” his friend said. “Kelli Ward is not that close. He’s not going to call you.”

But Trump did call. On New Year’s Eve. Hickman and his wife were out to dinner with friends when he got a call from the White House switchboard. He didn’t pick up. The caller left a message.

“The president is expecting a call back.”

Hickman felt torn. He had, in fact, voted for the guy. Trump was still president of the United States. It would be something he could tell his grandkids someday. An honor. The president had called him, and they had spoken. But there was nothing honorable about this.

He did not return the call.

What did Trump expect of him?

What did Trump expect? Time was running out for the president. There only remained a formal, ceremonial acceptance of Electoral College ballots, which was slated to happen on January 6. The votes had been cast, signed by the governors of all fifty states, and stamped with state seals. America waited for the proverbial fat lady to sing.

In the sense that Trump believed true what he wanted to be true, there was room to believe he was sincere in using every crumb of conspiracy he found on the internet to press for audits and investigations. Perhaps he really did believe he had been robbed by Ruby Freeman and Clint Hickman and was struggling for America’s sake. It was the most charitable interpretation of his motives. But a few days before this effort to reach Hickman, in a conversation with Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, Trump made clear this was not true.

Rosen was due to assume the job that William Barr had just left, after angering the president by stating publicly that there was no evidence of fraud. Rosen had received several emails from the White House in recent days. He’d gotten the talking points from Trump about the Antrim County, Michigan, dustup, for instance. The presidential emails pressed claims made in several lawsuits that had been rejected in courts everywhere, including the Dominion voting machine theory and a new wildly speculative one suggesting that an Italian defense contractor had used satellites to hack American voting machines. The president wanted the Justice Department to lend its authority to these conjectures. He called Rosen nearly every day.

Notes of one of these calls show Rosen and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, declining to intervene. They told the president that the Justice Department could not and would not “snap its fingers and change the outcome.”

Trump said he understood, but he wanted the agency to, according to the notes taken by Rosen’s assistant, Donoghue, “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. congressmen.”

Just say the election was corrupt.

The approach was exactly the one taken the year before when Trump’s team pressed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. When Zelensky protested that there was no evidence to warrant investigating them, even asking Trump to provide some, Giuliani told Zelensky’s senior adviser, “all we need from the president is to say” that he was investigating.

In politics, just the announcement of an investigation could be damaging. In both cases, the goal was not the truth but to raise doubts, then about the Bidens’ integrity and now about the integrity of the 2020 election.

Leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.

It was exactly what Bob Bauer, Biden’s general counsel, had meant back in November when he said that all the president’s bluster and legal challenges were not about the law or the truth; they were about misinformation.

Clint Hickman would have particular reason in a few days to be gratified that he’d dodged the president’s call. What did the president expect of him?

Nothing honorable.

NEVADA

Few of those in Trump’s orbit still had illusions. They had failed. The clincher came on December 15 when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly congratulated Biden on his victory. McConnell had also begun telling his colleagues that he wanted no dissent in the chamber when the Electoral College results were certified. For anyone with any sense of the law or the realities of political power, it was game over.

Not for Trump and his obliging attorneys. One was MAGA lawyer and RINO scourge Jesse Binnall. After striking out completely in Nevada, he was undaunted. As he saw it, the truth had simply not prevailed. Despite having had the opportunity to present his case in court and having every one of his assertions flatly rejected, Binnall continued to propound them vigorously.

He did so on December 16, testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He led his presentation with the number of people his statistical expert, Jesse Kamzol, said had voted more than once—over forty-two thousand. It was a great number because it alone, if those voters were disqualified, might erase Biden’s winning margin of 33,596.

“Our experts were able to make this determination by reviewing the list of actual voters and comparing it to other voters with the same name, address, and date of birth,” Binnall said. The list of “actual voters” he referred to were those who had received ballots in the mail.

And so it was that the Nevada number, forty-two thousand, gathered steam on the internet, lending an air of exactitude and science to the “community of knowledge” about The Steal.

But Judge Russell back in Nevada had been right. The number didn’t bear scrutiny. He had rejected Kamzol’s argument after a long evidentiary hearing. Trump’s team had presented a deposition of Kamzol, during which he had been cross-examined. He was, to begin with, less a scientist than a political activist. He was a nine-year employee of the Republican National Committee with a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Michigan. He had no academic credentials as a statistician nor any professional affiliations.

After the trial, Derek T. Muller, a law professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Law, took a hard look at Kamzol’s study and his deposition. He noted that unlike Binnall, Kamzol, to his credit, had hedged at the outset, saying that forty-two thousand was the number of voters who “appear to have voted twice.” He might more accurately have said, “could have voted twice.” As Judge Russell concluded (emphasis added), “The record does not support a finding that any Nevada voter voted twice.”

How did Kamzol come up with forty-two thousand? He did not have access to actual voting records from 2020, so, as the judge noted, he did not know if anyone voted twice. He had reached his conclusion by comparing voter registration files with data from various sources, including Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) records and US Postal Service change of address records, noting “multiple data point matches,” without saying what they were. Muller pointed out that identifying actual duplicates in state data is an extremely difficult undertaking.

“Kamzol’s report offers a beginning for an investigation,” Muller wrote. “It is not the end in itself. And when pressed under cross examination, he could not defend even this conclusion.”

The data sets Kamzol compared could not yield such a finding. There were many legitimate reasons for names and addresses to show up twice in the voter rolls. For instance, the DMV data he used did not disclose name suffixes or date of birth, according to Muller and contrary to Binnall’s assertion. So if ballots had been mailed to John Smith Sr., John Smith Jr., and John Smith III, all at the same address, Kamzol counted all three as one person. By his count, John Smith voted three times. Some duplicate names existed in the various databases because of changes of address. In those cases, ballots may have been mailed to the same person at more than one place. Kamzol counted these as double votes. It was more likely that a ballot mailed to the wrong address was returned as undeliverable or simply failed to reach the recipient. Some women received ballots mailed to both their maiden name and their married name. Kamzol concluded that such women voted twice, although there is no evidence that any of them did. There were people who showed up to vote in person after having already cast their ballot by mail. They were allowed to fill in a new one, and their first was disregarded. The data would show that person voting twice, but only one ballot had been counted. Across the board, Kamzol’s study ignored safeguards in place to prevent double voting. Its central flaw was the assumption that because a voter may have had the opportunity to vote twice, she had.

Kamzol’s report was “minimized and in some cases retracted on cross-examination,” Muller wrote. His claims withered when questioned. But Binnall, the MAGA lawyer, hasn’t backed down an inch, and he’s speaking on stages far more elevated than the deposition room in Nevada. As Muller wrote, “When someone testifies before a committee of Congress about a hard figure like 42,000, that’s what gets picked up.”

The law professor was, of course, just another fact-checker.