“It’s not true,” said Ellis.

Miller reminded Giuliani that even he had recently called Powell crazy—at which point, the six-foot Powell showed up wearing a leopard-print cardigan and a leather jacket that made her look like something out of the Michael Jackson 1984 Victory Tour.

The group shortly filed out of the cold conference room and into the small room reserved for the press conference, with fifty or sixty people and the heat up high and no ventilation. Giuliani introduced what, in Ellis’s characterization of the new Trump lawyers, was being called “an elite strikeforce team”: him, Powell, Ellis, diGenova, Toensing, and Epshteyn, each vastly more familiar with a television studio than a courtroom.

In fact, Giuliani’s presentation, departing from his often more manic turns, was mostly procedural and straightforward—he was getting good at ticking off the long, long list of minor and massive state-by-state fraud claims. He stood beside a poster board with a U.S. map and the legend “Multiple Pathways to Victory.” Six states were highlighted in red: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Giuliani seemed to make an effort this time to stay focused and buttoned up … but for the heat.

Three minutes into his presentation, sweat started to bead on his forehead. Over the next fifteen minutes it sprouted on his cheeks, then on his chin. He had to take his glasses off because they were slipping. Then, thirty-two minutes in, a rivulet of black hair dye started to run down his face. Then the rivulet grew wider, tributaries of black and deathly gray. Curiously, you could not immediately see it from the in-person seats. But you could see it on television, and in seconds, Twitter lit up in wonder and incredulity. Everybody in the audience in person, agog, was pointing at their phones and then looking up and pointing at the mayor.

“No,” said Miller in the back of the room to Sean Spicer, the president’s former press secretary, now covering the press conference for Newsmax, “this isn’t happening.”

And it happened for a long time, with Giuliani, deep in his dirge of abuses—they were becoming singsong-like—unaware that his sweat was washing away his hair dye.

And then it got much worse: Powell came on and let it all out, uttering virtually not a single word that had any basis in reality or even possibility: