Well, the final paragraph explains a lot:

Rudy’s strategy (if there is one) seems to be a long march through the courts. Taking cases to the states and appellate levels. Imagining he was going to win just by running the tables through the court system. But that was not going to work, as the courts are ponderous anywhere, especially disinclined to get involved in election matters, and were already setting court dates out past January 20. Yet Rudy just kept plodding along, with an occasional hearing, a daily podcast. It did not seem to make any sense.

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One activity that began bearing fruit was our investigations into foreign involvement in the election. This will be the subject of a piece of its own.

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Mike, Sidney, myself, and others developed a solution-in-a-can. It was the same solution we had started within in mid-November, and ran like this: Under various orders signed previously by both Obama and by Trump, if an election had foreign entanglement, the President had quite a rather broad spectrum of powers. There was indisputable evidence of foreign involvement on countless fronts, but we were asking that only a narrow set of his powers be invoked: based on the information that had been turned up, the President should use his powers under the requisite Executive Orders simply to send US Marshalls and the National Guard into the five problematic counties, open up the paper ballot backups, and recount them right there, on livestreamed TV. If there were no big discrepancies, Trump would concede. If there were big discrepancies, such as half-a-million vote discrepancies that we suspected might fall out, then more aggressive courses of action could be countenanced, such as re-rerunning the election in those counties or states. The recount of the five counties could be easily done in under a week, and if it justified further action, the entire resolution could still be done on a Constitutional timeline.

It was either that, or an election whose integrity was doubted by 47% of the electorate had to be choked down.

General Flynn drafted a beautiful operational plan for such a mission. One signature from the President, and the whole thing would be set in motion. The right teams created from the right military and National Guard Units, the precise directives to each… The most expansive version of the plan had the first wave of recounting to be conducted in 17 counties around the nation, Democrat and Republican, so no one could claim that results were cherry-picked. That most expansive version of the plan envisioned paper ballot recounting, plus imaging of hard drives of these voting machines for further forensic analysis (but not “seizing” the machines: they were to be left in place, and just have their hard drives imaged). However, in a pinch, we could hit just five counties and recount the boxes of paper ballots and have a preliminary answer in 2-3 days, thus ending a great deal of national drama. Mike and Sidney had the legal research, the draft finding, the general’s Execution Checklist that would, upon Presidential signature, make everything run like a Swiss watch.

And yet, things slid and slid. Rudy went off to organize a hearing in a hotel room and needing one of our people there to speak…. Days spent waiting for warrants that never came…. Absolutely no sense that there was anyone with a plan, executing it. We saw the Constitutional deadlines beginning to loom…

The days turned into weeks. December came, then mid-December. Yes we had matters spinning in various states, yes we had cyber-teams inspecting packet traffic and finding foreign influences, yes we were finding smart thermostats that had been breached from overseas, yes we were learning why voting rolls were kept live overseas….. But Mike and I had a sense that our side was chasing its tail. That the other side was just running out the clock. And Rudy’s approach would surely allow that.

At one point I learned how the President was staying involved. Periodically, Rudy Giuliani and the Mediocrity were going over to the White House to brief him. Really, no kidding: the person who was so bad my colleagues had declared they would quit rather than work another moment with that person, and the 76 year old guy who had trouble sending an email and was spending his days sloshed, were the ones explaining to the President what was going on and what his options were. At first I thought it was some kind of sick joke, but I confirmed it. The Mediocrity and the Mayor were the ultimate point-people on the mission of stopping this world-historic task.