By Nov. 12, former President Donald Trump's team of election lawyers knew he had lost his re-election bid, that despite Trump's tweets and public comments, "there was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough 'irregularities' to reverse the outcome in the courts," The New York Times reports. But their protestations just made Trump turn to allies telling him what he wanted to hear, so Nov. 12 was also the day "Trump's flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable."
Trump's experienced legal team either quietly faded away or was sidelined by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and other lawyers "ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason," the Times reports. That eventually included "the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discard 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House."
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