Prominent religious conservative secretly on team to help Trump fight 2020 election result

New information on Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election was revealed in a bombshell report by The New York Times on Thursday.

"One of the nation's most prominent religious conservative lawyers played a critical behind-the-scenes role in the lawsuit that Republican state attorneys general filed in December in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election of President Biden, documents show," the newspaper reported. "The lawyer, Michael P. Farris, is the chief executive of a group known as Alliance Defending Freedom, which is active in opposing abortion and gay rights."

The report described a "detailed draft" of the lawsuit that would be filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.

The draft by Farris was sent a week before Paxton filed his lawsuit.

Paxton was joined by 17 GOP attorneys general.

During the 2016 campaign, when Farris was chancellor of Patrick Henry College, he wrote an op-ed published by The Washington Post under the headline, "I helped start the Moral Majority. Trump is the opposite of what we wanted."

"I understand completely the desire for a radical change, but up to now, we've fought, and yes, sometimes lost, our political battles from a place of principle. Now, we're being asked to give up our character and just vote Republican. That may be the choice of many voters, but it's not why evangelicals like me got involved in politics," he explained. "I, for one, won't do it. Neither candidate qualifies as the lesser of the two evils."

As The Times noted, Farris came around to support Trump.

"But Mr. Farris and other religious conservatives later told their followers that Mr. Trump had proven them wrong with his appointments of conservative judges, his efforts to block any federal spending on abortions, and his willingness to support efforts by certain business owners to discriminate against homosexuals," the newspaper explained.

But according to emails obtained by the newspaper, Farris worked with Mark D. Martin, the dean at Regent University School of Law, to find a Republican attorney general to file a lawsuit.

"Drafts of the lawsuit were also sent to the Louisiana attorney general, Jeff Landry, a Republican. But the most intensive efforts appear to have targeted South Carolina and Texas, the emails suggest, as conservative activists tried to convince South Carolina's attorney general, Alan Wilson, to serve as the lead plaintiff," the newspaper reported.