After loss, Trump launched 77-day fight to subvert vote
Insurrection came after campaign of falsehoods overwhelmed the GOP
By Thursday, Nov. 12, President Donald Trump’s election lawyers were concluding that the reality he faced was the inverse of the narrative he was promoting in his comments and on Twitter. There was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough “irregularities” to reverse the outcome in the courts.
Trump did not win the election — not by “a lot” or even a little. His presidency would soon be over.
Allegations of Democratic malfeasance had disintegrated. A supposed suitcase of illegal ballots in Detroit proved to be a box of camera equipment. “Dead voters” were turning up alive in television and newspaper interviews.
The week was coming to a particularly demoralizing close: In Arizona, the Trump lawyers were preparing to withdraw their main lawsuit as the state tally showed Joe Biden leading by more than 10,000 votes, against the 191 ballots they had identified for challenge.
As he met with colleagues to discuss strategy, the president’s deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, was urgently summoned to the Oval Office. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was on speakerphone, pressing the president to file a federal suit in Georgia and sharing a conspiracy theory gaining traction in conservative media — that Dominion Systems voting machines had transformed thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes.
Clark warned that the suit Giuliani had in mind would be dismissed on procedural grounds. And a state audit was barreling toward a conclusion that the Dominion machines had operated without interference or foul play.
Giuliani called Clark a liar, according to people with direct knowledge of the exchange. Clark called Giuliani something much worse. And with that, the election-law experts were sidelined in favor of the former New York City mayor, the man who once again was telling the president what he wanted to hear.
Thursday the 12th was the day Trump’s long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.
Starting Tuesday, Trump is set to stand trial in the Senate on an impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection.”
A New York Times examination of the 77 days between election and inauguration shows how a lie that Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the right-wing media.
Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.
In the Senate, he got early room to maneuver from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
As he sought the president’s help in Georgia Senate runoffs, McConnell heeded assurances from White House aides such as Jared Kushner that Trump would eventually accede to reality, people close to the senator told the Times.
Finding friendly officials
During the campaign, Attorney General William Barr had echoed some of Trump’s complaints of voter fraud. But privately the president was chafing at Barr’s resistance to his more authoritarian impulses — including his idea to end birthright citizenship in a legally dubious pre-election executive order. And when Barr informed Trump that the Justice Department’s fraud investigations had run dry, the president dismissed the department as derelict before finding other officials there who would view things his way.
For every lawyer on Trump’s team who pulled back, there was
one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Giuliani and lawyers such as Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas, whose Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, the Times found.
As traditional Republican donors withdrew, a new class of Trump-era benefactors rose to finance data analysts and sleuths to come up with fodder for the stolen-election narrative. Their ranks included the founder of MyPillow, Mike Lindell.
As Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a campaign called Women for America First — with ties to Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons such as Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn — stepped into play.
As it crossed the country, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists — including white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
As lawsuits failed in court after court across the country, Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory.
Their lawsuit claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional election-law changes, helping create the conditions for mass fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted allegations, it asked the Supreme Court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.
On Dec. 11, the court declined to hear the case.
And so Trump’s supporters came the next day, by the thousands, to a long-planned rally in Washington, vowing to carry on.
Taking the fight to Congress
Meanwhile, Trump and his allies agreed to focus on blocking congressional certification of the results on Jan. 6.
If one senator and one House member object to a state’s results, the two chambers must convene separately to debate, then reconvene to vote. Rejection of the results requires majority votes in both chambers.
Now, Women for America First had a purpose, too. Kylie Kremer, the group’s co-founder, tweeted a promotional video for a Jan. 6 rally, along with a message: “BE A
PART OF HISTORY.”
Trump shared her post and wrote: “I’ll be there! Historic day.”
It was coming down to a contest of wills within the Republican Party, and tens of thousands of Trump supporters were converging on Washington to send a message to those who might defy the president.
Trump took the stage at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 shortly before 1 p.m., calling on the tens of thousands before him to carry his message to Republicans in the Capitol: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
As he spoke, some protesters, with Proud Boys helping take the lead, were already breaching the outer security perimeter around the Capitol. Inside, when Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., stood to raise the first objection, to results in his home state, several Republican lawmakers gave him a standing ovation.
Less than an hour later, the lawmakers would flee to a secure location as the mob streamed into the building.
On Jan. 15, Trump agreed to an Oval Office meeting with Lindell, who arrived with two sets of documents. One included a series of steps Trump could take, including “martial law if necessary.” The other was computer code that Lindell claimed showed China and other state actors had altered the election results.
A couple of minutes later, Lindell was led to White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s office. He told Lindell to come back afterward.
After a perfunctory discussion, aides directed Lindell to the exit. After some resistance, he left when an aide made it clear there would be no Oval Office followup. The president was done.
I recently had a conversation with a younger friend of mine — a Black man in his 30s here in Atlanta — about whether I was going to get the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to me and whether I should.
My answer was clear: Absolutely.
So was his: Absolutely not. At least not yet, not until he was able to see over a longer period of time how others responded to it. In fact, he was somewhat astonished that I was eager to be vaccinated, treating it as a gullibility or naiveté on my part.
It wasn’t necessarily that he didn’t trust vaccines; it was that he didn’t trust the government that was pushing it. This mistrust, I believe, is an underappreciated part of vaccine hesitancy, particularly among younger Black people.
It is now a well-established fact that Black people are getting the vaccine less than their white counterparts and also express more doubt about it. But those numbers are more complicated than the top-line takeaways might suggest.
A survey released Thursday by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases found some interesting age variations. As CNN reported: “The survey, which was conducted in December 2020, also revealed that older Black adults and men are more willing to get the COVID-19 vaccine. For example, 68 percent of adults age 60 and older said they planned to get the vaccine while only 38 percent of Black adults age 18-44 planned to get it. Many of the younger respondents expressed distrust in the health care system, saying it treats people unfairly based on race and ethnic background, according to the survey findings.”
The “distrust in the health care system” is real in the Black community. I have written about the effect of the full history of the United States’ failures and abuses in the medical field, relative to Black people.
Perhaps most notably, at least in the last century, was the Tuskegee experiments in which hundreds of Black men were told they were being treated for syphilis when in fact they were not. They were being observed to see how the disease would progress. Those men suffered under this experiment for 40 years. The Associated Press exposed the program in 1972.
But the Black people in the age group most resistant to the vaccine today were not alive when that experiment was conducted. Indeed, older men, those who might have been alive during that time — those whose peers were targeted by the Tuskegee experiment — are more likely to want the vaccine.
It occurs to me that something bigger might be contributing to those numbers: an overall mistrust of a government that has repeatedly disappointed, disrespected and dehumanized Black people. This is a phenomenon that may be most acutely felt by young people.
These young people have come of age in an era in which mass incarceration has sucked whole neighborhoods dry of brothers and cousins, fathers and uncles.
They have come of age where the rapacious war on drugs ground up Black bodies and wasted human capital.
They have come of age in an age of a rash of killings of unarmed Black people by the police, and those officers and the systems that animated them have rarely been held accountable.
They have come of age watching the government cover up poor treatment of Black people. They’ve watched the government allow — indeed cause — the Flint water crisis in Michigan, and drag its feet as the people of New Orleans suffered after Hurricane Katrina and the people of Puerto Rico suffered after Hurricane Maria.
From the perspective of Black people, particularly many young ones, the government has demonstrated by deed that it is not to be trusted.
I went back and forth with my 30-something friend, arguing the science of the vaccine, discussing the disproportionate impact the virus was having on the Black community and how it was imperative that as many Black people get vaccinated as possible.
But I could see in his eyes that his vision was clouded by the darkness of distrust. How could the same government that destroys so many Black lives be trusted in its intentions to save his?
To him, the vaccine wasn’t simply a product of medical research and science; it was also part of a governmental campaign and an imposition of the system. In an America where Black people have too often seen tools used as weapons, hesitancy will be a high hurdle.
Q: I bought my home in 1997, and the title to the home described me as “an unmarried person.” I have since married, and I would like to change the ownership so that the home is owned jointly with my husband. How do I get that done?
A: You can give an undivided one-half interest in the home to your husband by signing a gift deed. That deed would need to be recorded in the county deed records. Each of you would then own half of the home as your separate property.
In another document, the two of you could then change the ownership so that the home is owned as community property.
This form is called an “Agreement to Convert Separate Property to Community Property.”
You should hire an attorney to prepare the deed and agreement for you.
It is very important for you to understand that as the sole owner of the home, you would never lose it in a divorce. The home would not be awarded to your husband because it is your separate property. However, if you give him half of the home, he would likely be awarded half of it should your marriage end in divorce.
Plus, as the owner of half, he could give his interest in the home to someone other than you upon his death. You would still have the right to live there for as long as you want, but you would have one or more co-owners looking over your shoulder, presumably wishing for the day when you finally move out or die.
You would also only be able to leave half of the house to the persons of your choosing.
Q: In October 2019, my late wife had emergency surgery to repair her hip. Medicare Advantage paid for everything. However, the doctor who interpreted the X-ray filed the insurance claim incorrectly. Eventually, the $1,350 bill was turned over to a collection service. I have responded in writing to the collection service, stating my position. We signed forms at the time of my wife’s admission to the hospital that we would guarantee charges that were not covered by insurance. That is fine. But should we also be held accountable for the mistakes of others?
A: Just about everyone who has health insurance has probably faced a similar problem where they are billed for something that arguably (or definitely) should have been covered by insurance.
The answer to your question is that you should not have to pay the bill. But it is probably going to take a lot of phone calls and emails until you are finally able to resolve the matter.
The information in this column is intended to provide a general understanding of the law, not legal advice. Readers with legal problems, including those whose questions are addressed here, should consult attorneys for advice on their particular circumstances. Ronald Lipman of the Houston law firm Lipman & Associates is board-certified in estate planning and probate law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. Email questions to stateyourcase@lipmanpc.com