On Jan. 6, 2021, just hours before a mob stormed the Capital Building, in a speech at the rally outside the Capitol, New York attorney Rudy Giuliani, counsel to the President, described the 2020 presidential election as “stolen” and said it involved “crooked ballots.” The former mayor told the crowd. “I’m willing to stake my reputation, the president is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there [related to the election process].” “If we’re wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right a lot of them will go to jail,” Giuliani said. “Let’s have trial by combat.”

Two months earlier, before a Pennsylvania court, Giuliani argued that lack of access for GOP observers in democratic-leaning Allegheny and Philadelphia counties should invalidate some 700,000 mail-in ballots. “As far as we’re concerned, those ballots could be from Mickey Mouse,” he said. The Trump campaign also claimed that Pennsylvania election officials had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to cure, or fix, mistakes on their mail-in ballots, while other mostly Republican-leaning counties did not.