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In July, when Trump was asked if he would accept the election results, he said, “I’ll have to see,” before adding, “I think mail-in voting will rig the election.” A few months later, from the podium in the East Room, Trump declared, “There will be no transfer; frankly, there will be a sequel.” Still, Lidl kept the train on the tracks.
By law, acting White House chief of staff Meadows and interim chairman Kaufman were required to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding.” Big chance, Kaufman thought. But he still sent a draft to the West Wing. “Figured out It is it will never happen,” he said. “This is completely against Trump’s interests. He would I kill people if he finds out it happened.
Yet on September 30, Kaufman’s fax machine suddenly buzzed and returned the memorandum — signed by Meadows. Trump’s chief of staff almost certainly never told his boss. “I have it here as one of my prized possessions,” Kaufman, who kept the note, told me. “I never in a million years thought Meadows would sign it.”
November 3, 2020, election day, seemed remarkable for its lack of drama. Despite the pandemic — and predictions of outside interference, chaos at the polls and confusion with mail-in ballots — the vote was a model of fairness and efficiency. Although the final results were not immediately clear, Biden would win decisively: 306 to 232 in the Electoral College and by a margin of seven million in the popular vote. But Trump, defying his closest advisers, declared himself the victor and the victim of a grand conspiracy. The real drama was yet to come.
Traditionally, the day after the presidential election, the GSA names the clear winner. The act known as establishment not only officially recognizes the winner; it also provides the incoming administration with office space, funding, access to federal agencies, intelligence briefings, and other vital governance infrastructure. But in a startling break with precedent, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, refused to certify Biden’s victory.
This was no idle. “Installation is not a ceremonial process,” explained Mary Gibert. “There are potential life and death implications.” Biden’s team was furious. Between the election and inauguration, they had only 78 days to grow their administration. They had recruited 500 volunteers to visit every federal agency and report who was doing what. Now they sat with folded arms.
Biden’s contingent was prepared for almost any eventuality. “We had 600 lawyers working long, long hours drafting thousands of pages of memos on all kinds of things,” said Bob Bauer, the campaign’s senior legal counsel. “This was a real national security issue: the fact that the president-elect of the United States would be denied access to the tools and resources for an effective transition was literally, directly, every day, damaging to the country — and in the midst of a crisis in public cheers.” Bauer and his team were ready to sue Murphy and the GSA. But after a heated debate, the campaign decided to withdraw.
A few days later, Liddell called his confidants Marcik and Bolten. “Remember that dinner where we talked about the ‘nightmare scenario’?” Liddell asked. “This is what we have.” The nightmare scenario was that Trump lost the election, but not by enough to convince him that he had lost. Marchick explained, “It’s clear that Liddell was in meetings at the White House where Trump said, ‘We’re going to fight this and we’re going to repeal it. “Many times he thought about giving up — and we were like, ‘Hey, you can’t give up.’
Kaufman, Klein and company actually designed an airplane in flight. Banned by Trump from accessing the agencies, they created a “shadow agency” process, drawing up lists of former officials — and drawing on their expertise. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to call the Senate back into session — so they interviewed, vetted and hired staff who didn’t require confirmation. “That was the innovation of the Biden transition,” Marcyk explained. “They lined up thousands to come into government in these unconfirmed positions so they could fill the government on day one. They did 8,000 interviews to land 1,100.”
Finally, on November 23, GSA Administrator Murphy declared Biden the winner. But the drag was costly. Every day that Biden’s team couldn’t access information about Trump’s vaccination program meant a delay in getting shots into people’s hands. Every day, Biden’s team was denied intelligence briefings, which meant less time to prepare for potential external crises. At noon on January 20, all CIA covert operations ordered by Trump will immediately belong to Biden. During previous transitions, major party nominees would receive the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) after their party conventions. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris did not receive their first intelligence briefing until November 30.
Trump, meanwhile, appeared to many observers intent on staging a coup. He had replaced the secretary of defense and reportedly placed apparatchiks in high positions in the CIA. Some worried that he might start a war with Iran as a pretext to stay in power. In response, Liz Cheney, the congresswoman from Wyoming, had every living former secretary of defense, including her father, Dick Cheney, sign a letter urging the military to follow the constitution. And General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was preparing for contingencies. He suspected that Trump might orchestrate a domestic crisis to seize power, a favorite ploy of autocrats who want to stay in office by exploiting voters’ fears. In the event of an illegal presidential order, Milley and other senior Pentagon officials reportedly made a secret pact to resign one after the other.
To avoid the appearance of a power grab, the Biden camp did not speak directly to Milley. Instead, they communicated through an intermediary, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I asked Ted Kaufman if the speaker had briefed the president-elect on Milley’s contingency plans. “Oh sure,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Outwardly, Biden’s team projects composure. As Klein explained, “Our whole thing was basically a legal strategy to shut this down in the courts—and a political strategy based on the idea that we had won, so we were going to act like we had won. We played it out step by step: first get the vote confirmed by the media, build a sense of inevitability around it, to finally get the GSA to certify us.” A Biden transition adviser put it this way: “We don’t have to we send fighter jets to force Air Force One down. Let’s just let Trump off the hook, pursue his legal theories. All will fail and he will run out of fuel and go down for landing.
As far as Chris Liddell knew, January 6, 2021 promised to be a quiet day. Biden’s victory had to be certified by Vice President Mike Pence during a routine recount of electoral votes at the US Capitol. Liddell, doing his best to remain inconspicuous, could hardly wait. “I woke up in the morning in a good mood, thinking: We’re finally going to find some kind of solution,” he said. “The vote is going to happen.” Liddle looked at the president’s schedule and noticed a rally on the Washington Ellipse at noon. But he didn’t think much of it. His focus was on the 14 days between then and inauguration.
Biden’s legal adviser, Bob Bauer, was on edge. The truth was that democracy hung in the balance. Bauer’s team had spent months preparing for this day — and for all the things that could go wrong. Legal scholars agreed that Pence’s role in the certification process was purely ceremonial. But that didn’t mean the vice president couldn’t plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.
One option was for Pence to delay the certification. That was the goal of Trump’s lawyer John Eastman, Giuliani and their co-conspirators. The delayed certification could give states an opportunity to try to replace Biden’s voter lists with new ones promised to Trump. Another option was to declare some of Biden’s ballots invalid, thereby denying him the required minimum: 270 votes. That would throw the whole process into the House or Representatives. Under the law, in the election of the President of the House of Representatives, each state delegation will have one vote. And since 2021 House Republicans were the majority in 26 states, Trump almost certainly would have prevailed.
If Pence tries to implement Trump’s outlaw proposal, Bauer and his team are prepared to file for an injunction. The matter is likely to end up in the Supreme Court, which is now stacked with three justices appointed by Trump. Still, Bauer believed Biden had the upper hand. “If Pence had gone completely rogue, I think we had a very good chance of stopping him,” he told me. “I thought Trump and his legal team, such as he was, would be crazy to imagine that the court would somehow save him under these circumstances.”
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