Donald Trump's lawyers drafted the long-shot election suit from GOP attorneys general: NYTimes

In an extensive report with seven authors and over 8,000 words, the New York Times revealed the 77-day campaign of former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election.

Among the findings from the report, top Republican leaders were concerned about Trump's problems with reality after losing the election.

Citing sources close to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, The Times said, "As he sought the president's help in Georgia runoffs that could cost him his own grip on power, Mr.McConnell heeded misplaced assurances from White House aides like Jared Kushner that Mr. Trump would eventually accede to reality."

At one point, when the search for voter fraud failed to yield hundreds of thousands of lost Trump votes, former Attorney General William Barr was side-stepped for someone willing to lie about Trump's options.

"[W]hen [Bill] Barr informed Mr. Trump in a tense Oval Office session that the Justice Department's fraud investigations had run dry, the president dismissed the department as derelict before finding other officials there who would view things his way," the report said.

One revelation was that the lawsuit from the Republican attorneys general across the country wasn't actually drafted by Texas AG Ken Paxton. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow wondered, in her exploration of Paxton's motivations, if the AG was fishing for a pardon for at least two major legal issues. Regardless of Paxton's efforts, however, he wasn't given a pardon. The Times report said that the legal filings came not from Paxton or other AGs, but from lawyers close to Trump.

"For every lawyer on Mr. Trump's team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason," the report continued. "That included not only Mr. [Rudy] Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found."

The Supreme Court refused to hear the case to throw votes out.

Read the full report from the New York Times.