“Yeah, but … we’re just not likely at this point to pick up any of these contested states. I don’t see that we can. I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

With disgust, Trump got off the phone with Oczkowski and then angrily threw it back to the people in the room. “Get them to stop counting. That’s what you have to do. Get them to stop counting these illegal votes.”

This immediately devolved into an attack on his own lawyers, with an evocation of Roy Cohn, the long-dead fixer who had become in his mind the ultimate protector, and bitter comments about the lack of fight among the lawyers who now worked for him.

Kushner and Meadows, treading water, outlined some possible further legal steps and offered an initial report from the campaign lawyers.

In Trump fashion, this meeting, in some ways quite a categorical reckoning, rolled into and overlapped with the next meeting—“like an Allman Brothers concert,” in one aide’s description, “people just show up and start playing”—in which the world of possibility and fight and the promise of reversal yet existed.

Matt Morgan and Rudy Giuliani were now sniping at each other in front of the president. This was ostensibly over hiring local lawyers for the Pennsylvania lawsuit the campaign had filed—Porter Wright, a national firm with a large Pittsburgh office, had agreed to handle it.

With considerable frustration, Morgan was trying to weigh resources against possible rewards. They could not, after all, fight every battle. Even if Rudy had reports of fraud, if that wasn’t, in any event, going to be enough to win them a disputed state, then why bother? They needed to focus on where they had a chance to win and where a win in court would give them electoral votes—a very small target.

A heated Rudy rejected this as defeatist. “If–you–just–put–me–in–charge,” said Rudy, slashing his hand through the air on each word, he would go to battle. They would go to the mattresses.

Giuliani told the president that they already had eighty sworn affidavits attesting to specific incidents of voter fraud that they were immediately in a position to act on, which both surprised and impressed Morgan.

Giuliani kept repeating, “Eighty! Eighty!”

Morgan began almost to doubt himself. Maybe Giuliani’s team had found evidence of a great, unseen, election fraud.

When Morgan got back to the campaign office, he called the lawyers at Porter Wright to tell them to make sure they had reviewed the Giuliani affidavits. Those lawyers then called the Giuliani team, which shortly sent someone over to collect the affidavits from Morgan. In other words, a furious Morgan now understood, most of the affidavits Giuliani was referencing were not his at all, but just the collection of unverified reports and allegations piling up in the campaign’s office. It was just more Rudy bullshit.