“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost

by Michael C. Bender

  But when Trump’s Georgia Legal Team No. 1 sent this information along, Trump’s Legal Team No. 2 undermined them. Trump was told the first team wasn’t working hard. They had been fooled by the Republican governor in Georgia. They cared more about winning the Senate runoffs than the presidential race.

  Perdue, who had led the charge to bring a Trump rally to the state a few weeks earlier, mounted another attempt to talk sense into the president. Internal Republican data showed that Trump’s constant attacks on mail voting ahead of the 2020 election had hurt their turnout efforts in Georgia. Now the president’s constant attacks on the integrity of the Georgia election officials was depressing the Republican vote.

  Perdue’s chances of winning rested almost exclusively with Trump. He tried calling Trump. He asked other Republicans in the state to help. When none of them could reason with Trump, they appealed to Jared.

  Jared didn’t have good news for them either.

  “Once Donald put Rudy in charge, it guaranteed this was going to be a clown show,” Jared said. “I can’t help you.”

  As Trump continued to move personnel inside the administration, one change he couldn’t make was to install John Ratcliffe, his director of national intelligence, as attorney general.

  Trump had offered Ratcliffe the job in mid-November, just as the chaos was underway in Georgia.

  “I want you to be the attorney general,” Trump said. “But only if you want to.”

  Ratcliffe asked for time to consider the offer but knew he couldn’t accept.

  As a former U.S. attorney who had been law partners with former Attorney General John Ashcroft, running the Justice Department was a dream job for Ratcliffe. He’d been a finalist for the nomination when Trump chose Barr, and the president gauged Ratcliffe’s interest in replacing Barr nearly every time they spoke in 2020. It was an open secret inside the administration that Ratcliffe would replace Barr at the start of a second term.

  But this wasn’t the job they’d discussed before the election. Trump had become consumed by fighting ghosts in voting machines. He’d repeatedly asked Ratcliffe to seize voting machines that he thought foreign countries had corrupted. But Ratcliffe told Trump there was no intelligence to even suggest that might be true. Plus, his agency had no authority to seize voting machines from state election officials.

  Trump was also furious that Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray weren’t doing more to help him overturn the election results. Trump told Ratcliffe that he wanted him to replace Barr, then fire Wray.

  Trump’s offer meant that he wanted Ratcliffe to move over to the Justice Department and, as attorney general, validate the election fraud claims that would refute the very intelligence Ratcliffe had provided the president as national intelligence director.

  Ratcliffe declined the job.

  He told Trump he’d rather stay at DNI, where he was pushing to focus his agency on national security threats from China. He also told the president it would take months just to learn the agency.

  “It will take me a week to find the bathroom,” Ratcliffe said.

  Ratcliffe stayed at DNI, but he couldn’t avoid Trump’s election fraud fetish. On almost a daily basis—and sometimes multiple times per day—Trump asked Ratcliffe to chase down the latest theory he’d heard from Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor with a history of propagating debunked QAnon conspiracies who had started advising Trump in mid-November.

  Powell had convinced Trump he had been cheated out of votes by a computer bug buried deep inside Dominion Voting Systems machines. She repeatedly told Trump that DNI could seize the voting machines. Ratcliffe repeatedly told Trump that she was wrong.

  “Remember, we’ve talked about this,” Ratcliffe would remind Trump.

  Trump dialed up administration officials to help him track down Powell’s claims about a secret supercomputer changing votes. He repeatedly asked about another theory that China, Russia, and Iran had been working together to coordinate election fraud.

  Trump’s reluctance to believe his own spies vexed the intelligence community, particularly since the president had seen how wired they were into Iran when, in January, they’d pinpointed the location of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military leader, for a fatal missile strike. But now he repeatedly asked intelligence officials to double check Powell’s accusation about Tehran’s involvement.

  While Ratcliffe worried about what Trump might have asked of him at the Justice Department, the irony was the president hadn’t spoken to the actual attorney general for weeks after the election. Trump’s relationship with Barr had been falling apart for months. The attorney general had blocked Trump’s efforts to use troops to disrupt protests across the country. Meadows was constantly seeking information on an investigation into the origins of the FBI’s 2016 Russia probe, and Trump was furious there hadn’t been more prosecutions of his political enemies before the election.

  Trump repeatedly made clear that he wanted the probe, led by federal prosecutor John Durham, to target both Obama and Biden and result in indictments for a set of former Obama Administration officials: FBI director James Comey, CIA director John Brennan, and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

  “Don’t talk to me about that!” Barr would yell. “You can’t talk to me about that!”

  Oddly, Barr’s approach worked. It had been months since Trump had reached out to Barr with any frequency. Instead, Trump complained to everyone else about the attorney general—including to Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on November 29.

  It was his first in-depth interview since the election and Trump ticked through a list of unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud, while seeming to create new ones in the moment—including an accusation that the FBI and Justice Department might have had a hand in rigging the election against him.

  “This is total fraud,” Trump said. “The FBI and Department of Justice, I don’t know, maybe they’re involved. But how are people allowed to get away with this stuff? It’s unbelievable.”

  Trump said the Justice Department had been “missing in action” on voter fraud issues and suggested the agency was purposefully stalling the Durham investigation.

  Barr was furious. He’d been considering opportunities to speak out about election fraud, and now he had his chance. Barr had heard Trump cranking about supposed election fraud for the entire year, and, contrary to Trump’s accusations, he had pushed the department to look into allegations. But there hadn’t been anything substantial.

  Two days after Trump’s Fox News interview, Barr went to lunch with Associated Press reporter Michael Balsamo and told him just that. The nation’s top cop went on the record to say that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

  “We have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said.

  Barr wondered if he’d last the day without being fired.

  After lunch he went to the White House, where he had a previously scheduled meeting with Meadows and Cipollone in the chief of staff’s office. Their meeting wrapped up and Barr had just walked into the counsel’s office when a White House aide came in and said both Barr and Cipollone had been summoned to the Oval Office. The two attorneys briefly discussed whether Barr should make a run for it, and Cipollone would cover for him with the president. Instead, he went to meet his fate.

  Trump was waiting in his private dining room off the Oval, and he erupted when Barr walked in. Trump sat at a rectangular table next to Meadows, who crossed his arms and scowled to signal exactly whose side he was on. On the other side of the table stood Barr and Will Levi, Barr’s highly regarded chief of staff. Internally, Levi was viewed as one of the department’s voices of restraint and reason, and had been agitating for weeks to get the department on the record contradicting the president’s specious claims of a stolen election. The reward for the two Justice Department attorneys was a withering attack from Trump.

  Barr pushed back, as he usu
ally did, but Trump’s volcanic eruption stunned the room, which included Cipollone and Herschmann. Trump ripped through a greatest hits reel of debunked claims of fraud—including a food truck that allegedly hauled thousands of ballots into Detroit in the middle of the night that had been dismissed just weeks earlier in court, and a video of Georgia poll workers stuffing ballots into suitcases, which turned out to be standard boxes used by local officials to transport and store ballots.

  There had been so much obvious fraud, Trump said, that the only conclusion to draw from the AP story was proof that Barr hated him.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’ve been leaving you alone,” Trump said, a wicked suggestion that he’d been punishing Barr by withholding his attention. “You know we haven’t spoken in months.”

  Barr told Trump his fraud allegations were “bullshit” and that the president didn’t have a legal team—he had a “clown show.”

  Trump shifted away from the catalog of baseless claims to a more historical inventory of grievances with Barr. The Durham report should have been finished months ago. Barr should be embarrassed he’d never pinned criminal charges on Comey. Barr was protecting Hunter Biden and giving him far more consideration than any of Trump’s children ever would have received.

  “I can’t believe you haven’t done anything!” Trump shouted.

  Barr had been certain that morning that there was a very likely chance he’d be fired before the end of the day. But he had withstood Trump’s fury, and both men were still standing. Trump hadn’t been able to pull the trigger. The president hated firing people and almost always outsourced the job to someone else—his chief of staff, sometimes his bodyguard, and once he had even tried to send a junior staffer over to the Justice Department to fire his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

  But Trump hesitated. Perhaps it was the remaining good will from how Barr had scored for him on the media rollout of the Mueller report, which had limited the political fallout of the investigation. Perhaps it was his sense that Barr was among the few remaining adult voices in the administration.

  But Barr wasn’t going to prostrate himself before the president, either. It was true that the two men hadn’t met one-on-one for months. But Barr viewed that more as a blessing than a penance.

  Standing in the dining room—a massive television on the wall to his right and the strange painting of Trump and his fellow Republicans on the wall directly facing him—Barr made clear that he wasn’t going to subject himself or his agency to repeated insults and accusations from the president. Barr’s harangue panicked White House officials that the attorney general was about to quit. Trump had just offered Barr’s job to Ratcliffe two weeks earlier, but it was always a better look for Trump to push someone out than have them walk away.

  Barr’s car was about to pull out of the White House parking lot when Cipollone suddenly appeared and banged his hand on the window to stop the black sedan. The White House attorney climbed into the car, tried to calm Barr down, and urged his friend not to make any rash decisions. Barr agreed. No one wanted any definitive decision to be made that night. But Barr was shaken and unsure about what would happen next.

  But the next morning, he was surprised by an early call from Meadows. The White House chief of staff asked Barr to stay until the end of the term. Barr agreed, and immediately regretted it. He’d been caught off guard by the unexpected call and even afterward didn’t understand exactly why Trump wanted him to stay. But as Trump continued to amplify his increasingly outlandish claims of election fraud, Barr soon decided it was time to leave, and that he wanted to be finished before Christmas. Concerned that Trump might fire him before he could resign, Barr penned an obsequious and over-the-top resignation letter that he hoped would give Trump pause before firing him. It worked.

  Barr hand-delivered the letter in the Oval Office on December 14, and Trump accepted it. That same day the Electoral College met to cast their votes, confirm Biden’s victory, and ratify the election results in direct repudiation of Trump’s refusal to concede. The total, 306 to 232, was the same margin Trump had won by four years earlier, when he bragged that he’d cleaned up in a landslide.

  Barr had advised Trump to elevate Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general, into the acting attorney general role for the final month.

  When Barr walked out of the Oval Office, Trump called Richard Donoghue, who had been the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and offered him the job. Trump didn’t think Rosen was pliant enough for his liking. Donoghue declined, but agreed to be Rosen’s acting deputy. Trump hung up and called Rosen.

  “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” Trump said to Rosen.

  Before mid-November, Trump had never spoken publicly about Dominion Voting Systems. But in the final two weeks of November, he tweeted about the company two dozen times.

  Trump had always sought opinions from a wide array of people. Even as a businessman in New York, he’d put the questions about big decisions to his top advisers—and then ask the waiter that night at dinner, giving each opinion equal weight. Suddenly inside the White House, Sidney Powell had as much credibility with Trump as the attorney general. Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the campaign with relatively little experience practicing law, had the same weight as the White House counsel.

  Trump brought in Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive, for briefings on voter fraud. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his foreign contacts, also wandered in and out of the Oval Office and pushed Trump to impose martial law.

  A turning point for others came after Giuliani’s wild news conference on November 19 at RNC headquarters with Ellis and Powell, in which they continued to allege widespread voter fraud—arguments based on falsehoods and conspiracy theories and devoid of any evidence. Powell’s arguments implicated billionaire George Soros and Venezuelan communists.

  “President Trump won by a landslide, and we are going to prove it,” Powell said.

  After the election, Dominion filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against Powell, who defended herself by claiming that her allegations were too ridiculous to be believed.

  “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” Powell’s attorneys told the federal judge presiding over the case.

  Pence laughed out loud when he read the court filing.

  Trump, meanwhile, cycled through all the feelings from his home in Palm Beach.

  “I was very surprised at her statement. But that’s Sidney Powell—she wants to get out. Maybe they’re settling with her?” Trump told me during our second postelection interview at Mar-a-Lago. “All she had to say was ‘upon information and belief.’ I was shocked at her statement. Maybe it was a legal statement? I don’t know. But I was very surprised. I was disappointed in her statement. I mean, I don’t know. It can’t be possible that she even made that statement. Maybe that’s a legal statement that has to be made? I don’t know. But I thought her statement was a very embarrassing one for her. You know, she doesn’t represent me, by the way. You know that she never represented me? Do you know that?”

  Giuliani said his claims were based on detailed allegations from specific individuals he said he couldn’t reveal out of concern for their safety. By the end of the ninety-minute news conference, dark brown beads of sweat were dripping down the side of Giuliani’s face. Inside the White House, Trump watched the news conference and asked aides if it was hair dye, or black mascara he’d used to touch up gray spots. Either way, it looked awful.

  “This Giuliani strategy is not going to work,” Herschmann told Trump afterward.

  Ronna watched the news conference with alarm, too. She had been in and out of the White House after the election as she secured Trump’s endorsement for a third term as RNC chairwoman. She warned allies that Trump had surrounded himself with people willing to tell him that he should keep fighting. But she thought at the time that
Trump was processing the loss, that he would find a way to begrudgingly concede, and perhaps even use the fraud accusations to announce a 2024 reelection campaign before he left office. But she had new doubts after the news conference. RNC attorneys contacted her to raise their concerns about the party’s legal liability if Giuliani and his team continued to use their building to spread dangerous and false accusations. She also started to push back on Trump.

  Giuliani had been making several claims about voting fraud and irregularities in Michigan, and Trump asked for her help in her home state. Ronna agreed to check the allegations and made a round of calls. The attorneys dismissed them, and fellow Republicans in the state were even more pointed.

  “This is fucking nuts,” one top Republican in the Michigan House of Representatives told her.

  Trump called Ronna for an update. The president put her on speaker with Pence in the room, and Ronna told the two men that the allegations were wrong.

  “This is crazy, and I’m not doing it,” Ronna said. “It’s not true.”

  “Well, I think it is,” Trump said.

  “Nothing is going to happen with this—it’s not going anywhere,” Ronna said. “The RNC is not going to push this out.”

  Pence, as usual, kept his thoughts to himself.

  The night the Electoral College met, four people were stabbed in Washington and more than thirty arrested as Proud Boys and other Trump supporters clashed with counter protesters.

  “These Proud Boys are avowed white nationalists and have been called to stand up against a fair and legal election,” D.C. mayor Muriel E. Bowser said in the aftermath of the violence. “This is a symptom of the hateful rhetoric, anti-science noise, and people who refuse to accept the result of a fair American election.”

  Most of Trump World thought the Electoral College vote casting would be when Trump moved on from the fraud allegations. But inside the Justice Department, officials said that Meadows had helped introduce Trump to DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark, who was putting together a secret plan to oust Rosen, the acting attorney general, and force Georgia to overturn its results. Meadows disputed he had played any role.