These lawyers most certainly were aware they lacked the evidence to win this lawsuit. And yet they filed it anyway because it advanced an affirmative disinformation campaign designed to convince the public that the election had been stolen. As Parker wrote, “This case was never about fraud—it was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”

Filing a lawsuit without any factual basis sounds a lot like the strategy that a book by two Washington Post reporters said another Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, articulated on election night in November: “Just say we won.”

Trump himself apparently repeated a version of this mantra in a December phone conversation with acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. After Rosen rebuffed Trump’s requests to investigate election fraud, The Washington Post reported, he pressured him to “just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me.” In fact, according to Gordon Sondland, the former ambassador to the European Union, Trump used a similar tactic with the president of Ukraine. In exchange for military aid and a White House meeting, Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not actually have to conduct an investigation of Biden, Sondland testified — he just had to announce one.