Shortly after the Thanksgiving weekend, amid all the other constant new and unlikely strategies, a different, even more farfetched-sounding one was shared by Boris Epshteyn, the more or less self-appointed go-between among the West Wing, the campaign, and the Giuliani people. The new gambit coming from the Giuliani camp posited that the vice president, due on January 6 to formally certify the Electoral College results in a ceremony of no consequence, could, in this sudden new telling, reject electors. Epshteyn related this idea without clear provenance in have-you-heard-the-theory fashion.

One Oval Office advisor brought it up with Marc Short, the VP’s chief of staff, hoping its silliness was not also an indication of its seriousness.

“We’re hearing this, too,” said Short. “But no one has approached us yet.”

Well, here was yet another bullet the vice president and his people needed to be on the lookout to avoid.

On December 1, Attorney General Bill Barr quite formally checked out of the Trump circle, announcing that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread election fraud.

A thematic pillar of the Trump White House was that the Justice Department worked for the president and that its independence was both Democratic malarkey and a slap in the face to Trump. Bending the DOJ was a fight he kept waging—firing FBI head James Comey in the early months of his administration, firing his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in 2018, stonewalling the Mueller investigation, and, finally, in Bill Barr, getting an easy soft touch. And yet total dominance over the sprawling DOJ bureaucracy eluded him, its pockets of resistance a personal affront. It was a special Trump tic: fury over lawyers who wouldn’t do what he wanted.

Bypassing the attorney general—he really couldn’t help himself from getting on the phone to cajole and wheedle and demand—Trump had been personally calling around to various U.S. attorneys in swing state districts, among them his appointee William McSwain in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, trying to get them to open investigations into election fraud. It seemed both inconceivable to him that they didn’t see the crime here and as inconceivable that they wouldn’t do what he wanted. He blamed their resistance—defiance!—on Barr.

By late November he had expanded his rant against the attorney general to aides: “Why won’t Barr investigate the fraud … and the machines? Where is Barr?… Why doesn’t he ever do anything?… When are we going to see something?… Was Jeff Sessions even this slow?”

Given Barr’s past kowtowing, the president’s disdain and rage were perhaps understandable. “If I had won,” the president said, perhaps, aides hoped, inching closer to acknowledging that he hadn’t won—“Barr would have licked the floor if I asked him to. What a phony!” (Hardly an unwarranted insight into his attorney general.)