Jan. 6, and the larger plan to overturn the election

“Yes. Have a team on it,” Mark Meadows texted.

The date was shortly after last November’s presidential election. Mr. Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, was replying to a member of Congress who had asked whether the White House was urging GOP state lawmakers to send alternate pro-Trump electors to Washington.

In other words, would President Trump and his allies try to simply reverse the results in key states, no matter what the voters had actually decided? Mr. Meadows received a number of texts and emails from Republicans urging just such an action, though one admitted it would be “highly controversial.”

“I love it,” Mr. Meadows texted in response to one of these missives.

Nearly one year after a mob smashed its way into the U.S. Capitol, new revelations have made clear that Jan. 6 may have been only one attention-getting part of a much broader, deeper story.

In recent days, a series of revelations – including the release of texts offering a window into Mr. Meadows’ actions from November 2020 through January 2021 – have filled in gaps and provided startling new details about the relentless effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

That effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory now seems more deliberate and intentional, says Robert Lieberman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. In essence, President Trump and his allies went from door to door, pushing and rattling knobs to see if any would open and provide a path to remaining in office.

The former president and his team may be preparing the ground for a similar effort in 2024 if necessary, say some experts. In a number of key swing states, they’ve ousted recalcitrant election officials and tightened voting laws, while pushing allies to run for key positions.

Voters should understand that what’s at issue is not just whether their political “team” is going to win or lose, says Professor Lieberman.

“The most important thing for American citizens to begin to understand is that what’s at stake is democracy itself,” he says.

Contempt of Congress

On Tuesday evening, the House of Representatives voted to hold Mr. Meadows in contempt of Congress for his refusal to testify about his interactions with President Trump and others on Jan. 6 and about his larger role as a key player in the attempt to reverse the 2020 results. The Department of Justice must now decide whether to indict Mr. Meadows and prosecute him on the charge, which carries a penalty of fines and up to a year in prison.

Before ending cooperation with the Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, however, Mr. Meadows provided the panel with 9,000 pages of records, some of which offer glimpses into what he was doing behind the scenes as President Biden’s inauguration drew closer, day by day.

The texts between Mr. Meadows and members of Congress about state electors were among documents shedding light on the Trump strategy. The White House chief of staff also asked national lawmakers how to put the president directly in touch with state legislators, and discussed whether Vice President Mike Pence had the power to simply reject electors from certain states when overseeing counting of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.

President Trump “thinks the legislators have the power, but the VP has power too,” Mr. Meadows texted one U.S. senator, according to a committee resolution recommending contempt charges.

So far, the Jan. 6 panel has withheld the names of legislators who communicated with Mr. Meadows. That anonymity is unlikely to last.

“We will identify the authors of the text messages that we presented last night, and we will probably share some more information,” says Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman. “But we are not in a rush to do hearings.”

Overall, the Meadows documentary material lays out the step-by-step Trump post-election plan, say those who have seen it. First, rattle the door of state election officials to see if they’ll throw out votes. Second, engage higher state officials to see if they’ll pull rank. Third, call for more “audits” in key states. Fourth, push the Justice Department to launch fraud investigations, however thin the evidence – Mr. Meadows at one point sent Justice officials spurious allegations about bizarre foreign fraud plots.

Fifth, engage Congress, and encourage new elector slates. Then delay, whether by a Pence declaration that some state results were invalid, or some other means.

There’s no direct evidence the White House knew violence would erupt from the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally. But among the most startling texts in Mr. Meadows’ documents were pleas from Donald Trump Jr., Fox News hosts, and others that he push the president to tell the rioters at the Capitol to stop.

“We need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand,” texted the president’s eldest son.

The texts don’t say anything about the president starting the riot. But their assumption is that he perhaps had the power to stop it.

“The White House was not simply a bystander in the activities at the Capitol building. They were central in coordinating and fomenting it,” says Cornell Clayton, a professor of government at Washington State University and director of the Thomas Foley Institute of Public Policy.

No hard evidence of fraud

Republican voters overwhelmingly say they believe the 2020 election was rife with fraud. A November poll, for instance, found that 65% of GOP-leaning respondents were not confident votes were counted accurately.

Their allegations range from the simple – that mail-in ballots weren’t correctly counted, or some people voted twice – to the grandiose and conspiratorial. Among the material Mr. Meadows submitted to the Jan. 6 panel was a 36-page PowerPoint slide deck that alleged that China has systematically gained control over the U.S. voting system and all electronic voting machines were compromised in 2020 – via an effort that included, among other things, a server in Frankfurt, Germany, and something called QSnatch that “grabs all Counties’ credentials.”

Mr. Meadows said he’d simply received the PowerPoint material in an email and done nothing with it. According to The Washington Post, a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron had a hand in its creation. Mr. Waldron worked with Mr. Trump’s outside lawyers, and briefed Mr. Meadows and some lawmakers in Congress on the allegations, he told the Post.

The problem is there isn’t any hard evidence that fraud existed on anything like the scale needed to overturn an actual election.

Mr. Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits on the subject following the election. His own attorney general said there were no signs of widespread fraud. His chief cybersecurity officer called them the most secure elections ever held. State and local officials of both parties declared the vote free and fair.

After reviewing every potential fraud charge in the six states disputed by the Trump campaign, The Associated Press found fewer than 475 allegations (some of which involve potentially fraudulent votes for Mr. Trump). Most were caught by officials and not counted, and the total number would not have changed the outcome.

Meanwhile, Trump allies are moving to perhaps make states more receptive to their fraud allegations in 2022 and 2024. They are doing everything from pushing supporters to fill low-level spots like election judges, to changing laws about how election results are handled.

In Arizona, Republican legislators passed a law that takes authority over election lawsuits away from the secretary of state, who’s currently a Democrat, and hands it to the governor, who’s a Republican. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers have weakened the powers of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who refused Mr. Trump’s entreaties to change his state’s results. A candidate endorsed by the former president is running to replace Mr. Raffensperger in 2022.

Voters should understand that all these things are coming together in a confluence that makes this a dangerous time for democracy in America, says Professor Lieberman of Johns Hopkins University.

“If people can think about what’s going on in terms of whether or not democracy is going to survive, or whether this move or that proposal advances democracy or sets democracy back, I think that would be a [positive] step,” he says.