This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Today, the anatomy of the big lie.
In November of 2020, a group of people gathered on a former slave plantation in South Carolina.
It's a pretty spectacular piece of property.
It's roughly 2,000 acres.
The plantation belonged to Trump lawyer and QAnon conspiracy theorist Lin Wood was sort.
Of described as like a place that you could survive the apocalypse.
In joining Wood, there was a coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts, and ex military intelligence officers.
This was days after the 2020 presidential election.
Biden had been declared the winner, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Trump was not willing to concede.
So this team of people, they came up with a plan.
So a lot of these people just started congregating there and it became a headquarters of sorts for collecting research to try and prove the idea that the election had been stolen.
Doug Bock Clark reported on this for ProPublica.
It's the inside story of what started as a few little lies to try to prove the election was stolen.
How that snowballed to become Trump's big lie and the people who helped make it possible.
I asked Doug to start by telling us who exactly was part of this group that assembled that weekend on the plantation, what he calls the coalition.
So there are a number of people, some of them were very well known Republic people like Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, or Sidney Powell was on the legal team for the Trump campaign challenging the election.
A major financier, you know, someone who was paying for flights, hotel rooms was a man named Patrick Byrne, who's the former CEO of Overstock.com.
you know, all of these people would be very well known deniers of the legitimacy of the election.