CNN:

In the weeks after he lost the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump had a plan to stay in office — and he wanted Mitch McConnell to know about it.

If Trump could successfully pressure Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to de-certify Biden’s narrow win in Georgia, that would lead to a domino effect: Officials in Pennsylvania and Michigan would follow suit and overturn Biden’s electoral victory, Trump believed, a stunning reversal that could keep him in the White House for a second term.

And Trump was certain he could subvert the election outcome, telling McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, and other top Republicans that he had personally been on the phone with officials in Pennsylvania and Michigan — and they told him they would move to keep him in power, despite the results showing Biden had won their states.

“I’ve been calling folks in those states and they’re with us,” Trump is reported to have told the Senate GOP leaders in a private December 2020 phone call, according to a soon-to-be-released book by New York Times political reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, both CNN political analysts.

The book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” offers insight into the former President’s mindset in the weeks after the election, a topic of high interest to House investigators now probing the roots of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. While Trump’s plan was never successful, the private pressure campaign showcases the length he was willing to go to stay in office, even as election officials in both parties certified Biden’s victory and courts across the country turned away dozens of Trump-inspired lawsuits.

An excerpt of the book, provided to CNN, also underscores the difficult political spot in which Trump’s conspiracies left McConnell, who was hoping to shift the focus away from the 2020 election and instead put the weight of the party behind the races for two Senate seats in Georgia, both of which were headed to January 2021 runoffs and would determine the next Senate majority. McConnell maintained a strategic silence over Trump’s lies in an attempt to prevent him from sabotaging the GOP’s chances ahead of the runoffs, the book said.