But Kerik found only Rudy at one socially distanced end of a conference table talking to the campaign’s general counsel, Matt Morgan, at the other end. To Kerik, Morgan was taking notes with quite some evident lack of interest as the mayor spoke.

“Are there other lawyers coming?” Giuliani pushed.

“Well, yeah. I’m going to try to get some others to help,” said an unmoved Morgan. “I hope.”

For Kerik and Giuliani, the conspiracy to steal the election was not just a Democratic effort, but one aided by the Trump inner circle.

Morgan shortly received an email from Giuliani’s girlfriend, Maria Ryan, now acting as his aide-de-camp. Ryan said Giuliani’s fee for the election challenge would be twenty thousand dollars a day. Morgan, unclear about what his authority was here, and believing he would be on the hook for either authorizing or not authorizing the payment, copied the email to many in the campaign and West Wing hierarchy, guaranteeing, he knew, that it would immediately leak—which it promptly did, to Giuliani’s fury and flat denial. Anyone who had said he wanted that kind of money was a “liar,” Giuliani declared, causing Morgan to ask Ryan how it felt to be called a liar in the New York Times by her boyfriend.

The president harshly clarified the situation: Rudy would get paid only for a win. He was a contingency lawyer.

Early on the afternoon of November 11, Stepien, Miller, Clark, and Herschmann joined Pence and Short, the VP’s chief of staff, in the Oval Office for what was supposed to be a briefing for the vice president about the outreach to state legislatures, because Pence had a relationship with so many of them.

With the aggrieved president behind the desk, the meeting turned into both a recapitulation of Giuliani’s growing case for nationwide election fraud and an excited discussion of his plan to import delegations from the legislatures in contested states to Washington, where the evidence could be presented to them (and where they could all get a visit with the president). They would not be able to ignore the evidence, all of it now overflowing from Giuliani’s briefcase.

One of Giuliani’s titles since leaving City Hall was “security consultant,” implying a set of police and military and technology skills he did not have. Now he had enlisted Kerik, the former police commissioner, in this effort. They had set up a national election fraud hotline. The reports of what someone had seen, or might have seen, or knew that someone else had seen, came tumbling in: dead voters, double names, machine malfunctions, and far deeper conspiracies. (Lots more came tumbling in: thousands of dick pics, animal porn, and virulent screeds, with nearly everybody who was manning the phones begging for other duties.)