On Saturday afternoon, November fourteenth, Giuliani gathered his team in the campaign office in Rosslyn. The mission was to build a national legal team—in a day. The rush was to get lawsuits out the door in the next twenty-four hours.

The room had not been cleaned since Election Day, eleven days before. Refuse filled the trash cans and overflowed onto the floor. There was a heavy sour or rotting smell—in the trash was a week-old Buffalo chicken sandwich—mixed with Giuliani’s reliable farting.

The sweeping view from the big conference room was over the Potomac and Southwest Washington, taking in the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. Giuliani’s back was to the window. He was holding court and juggling multiple phone calls. There was a whiteboard with seven states highlighted—PA, MI, GA, NC, NV, WI, AZ—with key counties and a list of potential lawyers in each place.

Andrew Giuliani, the former mayor’s son, was there. Giuliani and his son had often been estranged—Rudy had broken up with Andrew’s mother, Donna Hanover, in a famous news conference during the last stage of his mayoral term—but Andrew had gone to work in the Trump White House, and, in the Trump election cause, he had now become his father’s aide-de-camp. Boris Epshteyn, a Trumpworld hanger-on who had briefly held an unspecific position in the West Wing and then had tried, not too successfully, to launch himself as a right-wing television commentator, was back in the fray. Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, husband-and-wife television lawyers, were on hand. Christianné Allen, Giuliani’s twenty-one-year-old personal spokeswoman and another baffling presence, was, as usual, by his side. There was, equally baffling, Mirna Tarraf, a Lebanese twentysomething former real estate agent from Newport Beach, California, often with the former mayor, along with several young women who had been campaign workers but who had been repurposed to Giuliani’s team overnight. And Ellis, who was across the hall in the campaign studio doing a television hit.

“What the fuck is this?” demanded Jason Miller after arriving in the room. He had pulled Boris Epshteyn aside to take alarmed note of what was obviously a potential superspreader event. Everybody was piled in close in the conference room, and no one was wearing a mask.

It was impossible to overstate the unanimity of feelings among the Trump inner circle for this new intruder circle: they looked ridiculous, they sounded ridiculous, they espoused ridiculous theories.

Coming into the building, Miller had taken a call from an upset young staffer whom Ellis had called to inform she was no longer reporting to the old campaign team; she was now reporting to Ellis and the mayor—that or be fired. Coming face-to-face with Ellis outside the conference room, Miller lost it. “You’re threatening to fire my people? What is going on? You can’t treat people like this.”

“You’re being hostile.”

“This is fucking crazy. I mean this is all fucking batshit crazy. You’re fucking crazy,” said Miller, throwing up his hands and leaving the building.