In America’s depleted field of journalism, a handful of websites have emerged in recent weeks with names that suggest a focus on news close to home: DC Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. .

In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, intended to mimic real news organizations to boost Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it with a sometimes strange mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.

While Russia has long sought ways to influence public debate in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five so far — represent a technological leap forward in their efforts to find new platforms to deceive unsuspecting American readers. The researchers and officials said the sites could form the basis of an online network poised to expose disinformation ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.

Patrick Warren, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed covert Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools “have made this even easier and the content they has made doing even more purposeful. .”

The Miami Chronicle website first appeared on February 26. The slogan falsely claims it has produced “the Florida News since 1937.”

Amid some real-life reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs, discussing a shift in US support for the beleaguered Russian opposition after the death of the Russian dissident. Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a gross forgery, according to government officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.

The campaign, according to experts and officials, appears to involve remnants of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a former aide to President Vladimir V. Putin whose troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, meddled in the presidential election of 2016 between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Prigozhin died in a plane crash outside Moscow in August after leading a brief military uprising against the Russian army, but the continuation of his operations underlines the importance the Kremlin attaches to its information battle around the world. It is not clear who exactly took over.

“Putin would be a complete idiot if he let the network fall apart,” said Darren Linvill, Mr. Warren’s partner at Clemson. “He needs the Prigozhin network more than ever.”

Clemson investigators disclosed the Russian connections behind the DC Weekly website in a report in December. After the revelation, Russian stories began appearing on another site created in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new outlets have appeared.

The websites of the Chicago Chronicle and the New York News Daily, whose names are clearly intended to evoke the city’s legendary Daily News tabloid, were both created on January 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, that controls domains.

All outlets use the same WordPress software to build the sites and therefore have similar designs.

The media has logos and names reminiscent of a bygone era of American journalism, an attempt to create an appearance of authenticity. A Chicago Chronicle operated from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that would be all too familiar to today’s struggling newspapers: it was unprofitable.

They are also regularly updated with important news, giving the impression of current affairs at first glance. An article about the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s eligibility to remain on the primary ballot in Colorado appeared on the Miami Chronicle’s website within hours of the decision.

In other respects the websites are poorly constructed, even incomplete in parts. For example, the Miami Chronicle’s “about” page is filled with Lorem ipsum, the Latin-based dummy text. Some images on the site have file names from the original Russian. (None of the sites post working contact information.)

The goal isn’t to trick a discerning reader into delving deeper into the website, let alone subscribing, Mr. Linvill said. The goal instead is to give an aura of credibility to social media posts spreading the misinformation.

The effort follows a pattern the Kremlin has used before: whitewashing claims that first appear online through smaller news organizations. These reports are once again spreading online and appearing in even more news organizations, including Russia’s state news agencies and television networks.

“The page is just there to look realistic enough to make a casual reader think they are reading a genuine US branded article,” Mr Linvill said.

According to Clemson’s research, DC Weekly published a number of Kremlin stories starting in August. One included a false claim that the wife of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had purchased more than $1.1 million worth of jewelry from the Cartier store in New York during his visit to the United Nations in September.

The site claims to have seventeen journalists, but these appear to be made up. The biography of the author of that story, named Jessica Devlin, used as her profile photo a photo of Judy Batalion, the author of a best-selling book about Jewish women who fought the Nazis. Ms. Batalion said she had never heard of the site or its author until fact-checkers contacted her.

Other articles appearing on the sites appear to come from real news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from the English-language news agencies of Russian state media, such as RT. Some stories casually included instructions or responses from one of OpenAI’s chatbots, Mr. Linvill and Mr. Warren wrote in the study.

The New York News Daily recently published a story about alleged American plans to interfere in this month’s Russian elections, the winner of which, Mr. Putin, is a foregone conclusion. It was spread on social media by people with long ties to the Kremlin’s state media apparatus.

Another article last week appeared to come from a fictional character on The user on X was named Brian Wilson and was described as an associate producer at Paramount Pictures.

The account has only posted 85 times to A week later, the user suddenly announced a deal to produce a biopic of Mr. Zelensky – “The Price of Victory” – in a series of posts. These were followed last week by two more featuring real videos of actors Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren, manipulated to wish him luck with the film.

The videos appear to come from Cameo, the celebrity greeting app that was part of a previous Russian campaign that Microsoft announced in December.

A spokeswoman for Paramount Pictures, Brooke Robertson, said no one named Brian Wilson worked at the studio. A spokesperson for Cameo said on Monday that the company was not aware of the videos, but added: “As a general rule, when posts abusing Cameo content are brought to our attention, we request their removal respective platform.” Later that day, the two videos were blocked on the X account for intellectual property infringement. X later suspended the account.

Reports about the film spread widely on Telegram. Many users cited the actual New York Daily News as a source, saying it underscored the misuse of Western financial aid in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The story was also amplified by media outlets previously linked to Russian intelligence services, including NewsFront and Politnavigator, said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

The articles typically receive hundreds of posts on various platforms including X, Facebook and Telegram, as well as Reddit, Gab and Truth Social, although it is difficult to measure the exact reach. All told, they could theoretically reach thousands of readers, even millions.

“This is absolutely a prelude to the kind of interference we will see in the election cycle,” Mr Linvill said. “It is cheap, highly targeted and clearly effective.”

Jeanne Noonan DelMundo reporting contributed.

In America’s depleted field of journalism, a handful of websites have emerged in recent weeks with names that suggest a focus on news close to home: DC Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. .

In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, intended to mimic real news organizations to boost Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it with a sometimes strange mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.

While Russia has long sought ways to influence public debate in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five so far — represent a technological leap forward in their efforts to find new platforms to deceive unsuspecting American readers. The researchers and officials said the sites could form the basis of an online network poised to expose disinformation ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.

Patrick Warren, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed covert Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools “have made this even easier and the content they has made doing even more purposeful. .”

The Miami Chronicle website first appeared on February 26. The slogan falsely claims it has produced “the Florida News since 1937.”

Amid some real-life reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs, discussing a shift in US support for the beleaguered Russian opposition after the death of the Russian dissident. Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a gross forgery, according to government officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.

The campaign, according to experts and officials, appears to involve remnants of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a former aide to President Vladimir V. Putin whose troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, meddled in the presidential election of 2016 between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Prigozhin died in a plane crash outside Moscow in August after leading a brief military uprising against the Russian army, but the continuation of his operations underlines the importance the Kremlin attaches to its information battle around the world. It is not clear who exactly took over.

“Putin would be a complete idiot if he let the network fall apart,” said Darren Linvill, Mr. Warren’s partner at Clemson. “He needs the Prigozhin network more than ever.”

Clemson investigators disclosed the Russian connections behind the DC Weekly website in a report in December. After the revelation, Russian stories began appearing on another site created in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new outlets have appeared.

The websites of the Chicago Chronicle and the New York News Daily, whose names are clearly intended to evoke the city’s legendary Daily News tabloid, were both created on January 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, that controls domains.

All outlets use the same WordPress software to build the sites and therefore have similar designs.

The media has logos and names reminiscent of a bygone era of American journalism, an attempt to create an appearance of authenticity. A Chicago Chronicle operated from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that would be all too familiar to today’s struggling newspapers: it was unprofitable.

They are also regularly updated with important news, giving the impression of current affairs at first glance. An article about the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s eligibility to remain on the primary ballot in Colorado appeared on the Miami Chronicle’s website within hours of the decision.

In other respects the websites are poorly constructed, even incomplete in parts. For example, the Miami Chronicle’s “about” page is filled with Lorem ipsum, the Latin-based dummy text. Some images on the site have file names from the original Russian. (None of the sites post working contact information.)

The goal isn’t to trick a discerning reader into delving deeper into the website, let alone subscribing, Mr. Linvill said. The goal instead is to give an aura of credibility to social media posts spreading the misinformation.

The effort follows a pattern the Kremlin has used before: whitewashing claims that first appear online through smaller news organizations. These reports are once again spreading online and appearing in even more news organizations, including Russia’s state news agencies and television networks.

“The page is just there to look realistic enough to make a casual reader think they are reading a genuine US branded article,” Mr Linvill said.

According to Clemson’s research, DC Weekly published a number of Kremlin stories starting in August. One included a false claim that the wife of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had purchased more than $1.1 million worth of jewelry from the Cartier store in New York during his visit to the United Nations in September.

The site claims to have seventeen journalists, but these appear to be made up. The biography of the author of that story, named Jessica Devlin, used as her profile photo a photo of Judy Batalion, the author of a best-selling book about Jewish women who fought the Nazis. Ms. Batalion said she had never heard of the site or its author until fact-checkers contacted her.

Other articles appearing on the sites appear to come from real news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from the English-language news agencies of Russian state media, such as RT. Some stories casually included instructions or responses from one of OpenAI’s chatbots, Mr. Linvill and Mr. Warren wrote in the study.

The New York News Daily recently published a story about alleged American plans to interfere in this month’s Russian elections, the winner of which, Mr. Putin, is a foregone conclusion. It was spread on social media by people with long ties to the Kremlin’s state media apparatus.

Another article last week appeared to come from a fictional character on The user on X was named Brian Wilson and was described as an associate producer at Paramount Pictures.

The account has only posted 85 times to A week later, the user suddenly announced a deal to produce a biopic of Mr. Zelensky – “The Price of Victory” – in a series of posts. These were followed last week by two more featuring real videos of actors Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren, manipulated to wish him luck with the film.

The videos appear to come from Cameo, the celebrity greeting app that was part of a previous Russian campaign that Microsoft announced in December.

A spokeswoman for Paramount Pictures, Brooke Robertson, said no one named Brian Wilson worked at the studio. A spokesperson for Cameo said on Monday that the company was not aware of the videos, but added: “As a general rule, when posts abusing Cameo content are brought to our attention, we request their removal respective platform.” Later that day, the two videos were blocked on the X account for intellectual property infringement. X later suspended the account.

Reports about the film spread widely on Telegram. Many users cited the actual New York Daily News as a source, saying it underscored the misuse of Western financial aid in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The story was also amplified by media outlets previously linked to Russian intelligence services, including NewsFront and Politnavigator, said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

The articles typically receive hundreds of posts on various platforms including X, Facebook and Telegram, as well as Reddit, Gab and Truth Social, although it is difficult to measure the exact reach. All told, they could theoretically reach thousands of readers, even millions.

“This is absolutely a prelude to the kind of interference we will see in the election cycle,” Mr Linvill said. “It is cheap, highly targeted and clearly effective.”

Jeanne Noonan DelMundo reporting contributed.

Kati Marton, a Hungarian-born American writer, thought she was talking to a friend of General Wesley Clark, former NATO commander in Europe. The man, who had sent her a CV describing himself as a “results-oriented wealth and investment manager” living in Switzerland, said he was exploring green energy opportunities in Eastern Europe.

Ms. Marton didn’t mind when he steered the conversation to Hungary, something she knew about, having written three books about the country, including “Enemies of the People,” an account of her parents’ capture in 1955 and the subsequent flight from Budapest.

Today, more than six months after what she thought would be a private Zoom call, Ms. Marton thinks she has figured out what was really going on: an elaborate dirty tricks operation aimed at entrapping and vilifying critics from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor. Orban.

On January 31, excerpts from a surreptitiously recorded video of Ms. Marton’s conversation with the alleged investor surfaced on the social media platform X, on an account called MagaBabe.

The account, which also posted secret recordings of General Clark and others duped by the operation, says it is operated by “A good Christian girl from the south looking for a good Christian man.” MagaBabe’s post, which primarily posts material cheering on former President Donald J. Trump, was quickly trumpeted by Mr. Trump’s media machine. Orban in Hungary.

Just hours after the video clips emerged, Mandiner, a news site owned by a media foundation controlled by Mr. Orban loyalists, cited them as evidence that Ms. Marton and other people it labeled as “black belt” agents of the Hungarian-born financier. George Soros conspired to overthrow the Hungarian government.

“MagaBabe dropped an atomic bomb,” Mandiner said of the recordings, a jumble of disjointed fragments.

In some clips, the alleged investor — whose voice has been electronically distorted to prevent identification — can be heard prompting Ms. Marton and General Clark to say that Mr. Soros is funding opponents of Mr. Orban. “Yes. Don’t even say that,” Ms. Marton says in one clip. In another video, when General Clark speaks about Mr. Soros’s work in Ukraine instead of Hungary, the video pauses and resumes, with the investor urges him to talk about Americans giving money to support the Hungarian opposition. “No one like George,” says the general.

Origo, another channel owned by the same foundation, claimed the videos had “blown away the opposition’s lies” and exposed its ties to foreign money.

“It’s completely Kremlin-esque. We are back in the 1950s,” said Ms. Marton, chairman of the New York-based advisory board Action for democracy, which supports activists in Hungary and elsewhere. “They put me in the same role as my parents, as an enemy of the people.”

The MagaBabe account that posted the videos “is not authentic at all,” said Brian Liston, an analyst at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity firm. A after which claimed to be a photo of the user behind it, he said, actually was a picture from a Swedish model.

The first point of contact for the person who fooled Mrs. Marton was General Clark. They exchanged emails starting in April last year and then met for dinners in Prague and Amsterdam to talk about Eastern Europe. MagaBabe posted a partial recording of what General Clark said.

“He was very, very subtle,” the general recalled. “He seemed sincere.”

A telephone number in Switzerland and an email address the alleged investor used are no longer active.

Excerpts from the conversations with Ms. Marton and General Clark released on the and Central Europe.

Hungary has also supported conservative causes abroad, such as sponsoring an annual meeting in Budapest of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, a U.S. political group linked to Trump’s MAGA movement. Mr Orban is flying to the United States this week to visit Mr Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

But in the stories of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a government-funded Hungarian group that sponsors Hungary’s CPAC events, MagaBabe’s videos proved that “the stated goal of the American left is to overthrow the Hungarian national government and Viktor Orban throw.” The center’s director declined to be interviewed.

Also quickly jumping on the scene was a new Hungarian state agency called the Office for the Defense of Sovereignty. The agency was established under recently passed legislation aimed at punishing interactions between foreigners and Hungarians deemed subversive. The That is what the executive branch of the European Union says the legislation violates democratic values ​​and fundamental rights such as freedom of association.

Tamas Lanczi, the head of the agency, told Mandiner that the videos pointed to possible crimes that needed to be investigated. Mr Lanczi declined to be interviewed.

“We are not in Russia yet. We are not falling out of the window,” says Lukacs Csaba, director of Magyar Hang, a conservative weekly critical of Mr. Orban and citing mysterious accidents that have befallen critics of President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia. “But we are getting closer step by step.”

Agoston Mraz, director of the Nezopont Institute, a group that conducts opinion polls for Orbán’s government, scoffed at such complaints.

“Hungarians do not live in a dictatorship,” Mr. Mraz said.

He noted that the government is still dealing with media scrutiny, which in February forced the resignation of Hungary’s president, an ally of Mr. Orbán, after revelations that it had pardoned a man convicted of covering up of pedophilia in a state children’s home.

The Hungarian government’s International Communications Office did not respond to a request for comment.

Ms Marton said the operation against her and others involved in Action for Democracy, such as General Clark, who is also on the advisory board, bore the hallmarks of Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence firm that the networking platform LinkedIn says has its services used. to trap Hungarian activists.

LinkedIn said it has removed a number of accounts linked to the company that have been misused to attack activists in Hungary.

Microsoft, The owner of LinkedIn, says Black Cube had used “honeypot profiles, fake jobs, and fake companies to engage in reconnaissance or human intelligence” operations against “targets with access to organizations of interest and/or concern” to its clients.

A researcher for LinkedIn, Mona Damian, said in November that these targets included people selected “as part of a campaign to discredit NGOs in Hungary.”

Black Cube did not respond to a request for comment.

Eric Koch, an American communications consultant, said he was contacted on LinkedIn last summer by a man claiming to be seeking advice for Polish law firms.

After an all-expenses-paid trip to the Netherlands in August to discuss possible collaborations, Mr. Koch met the man in a conference room at an Amsterdam hotel and was then taken to dinner and sipped wine.

Mr Koch said the man “slandered” him for information about Action for Democracy’s funding. Mr. Koch worked for the group in New York for a few weeks in 2022 but said he knew nothing about its finances.

After returning home, he left the meeting behind him — until MagaBabe posted heavily edited clips of a video secretly recorded in Amsterdam in which, after repeated prodding, he speculated that Mr. Soros was funding the organization.

“Action for Democracy has admitted that George Soros is its main supporter,” a spokesperson claimed head a few days later in Magyar Nemzeta pro-government Hungarian outlet.

A spokesperson for Mr Soros’ organization said: “Action for Democracy is not and has never been a beneficiary of the Open Society Foundations, nor do the Open Society Foundations fund political parties in Hungary.”

The main purpose of the operation against Mr Koch appears to have been to add substance to a conspiracy theory outlined in an article. released November 2022 report on foreign interference by Hungary’s National Information Center, a branch of its intelligence apparatus.

The report details an alleged web of subversive intrigue involving Mr Soros, Action for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy – described as the CIA’s “soft power arm abroad” – and a host of other, mainly American, actors , including General Clark and Mrs. Marton.

David Pressman, the US ambassador to Hungary, said: “We have been paying attention to Hungary’s use of an element of its intelligence services to target US citizens,” adding that he “couldn’t comment on its origins.” of the recent videos. The MagaBabe shootings, he said, represented “the first time we have seen this kind of activity taking place on American soil” in relation to Hungary’s “perceived adversaries.”

In the summer of 2021, Jeney Orsolya, the former head of Amnesty International’s Budapest office, was contacted via LinkedIn by a woman claiming to be recruiting for a leadership position in Budapest at a new organization.

But there was no job and no new group, Ms Orsolya realized months later, when, shortly before the Hungarian elections in April 2022, she Magyar Nemzet posted an edited video of her ‘job interviews’ and misrepresented what she had said under the headline “Former Director of Amnesty: The human rights organization acts as part of the opposition.”

“This is not just about me being fooled, but about a carefully planned operation to frame me and other people for government propaganda against non-governmental organizations and civil society,” Ms Orsolya said.

It was just a taste of what was to come with MagaBabe.

The main target of that operation appears to have been David Koranyi, a dual Hungarian and American citizen New York executive director of Action for Democracy.

He said a man contacted him last year claiming to be an investor named George Koufis, the same name used by the person who ensnared General Clark and Mrs. Marton.

“I had a bad feeling about this man,” Mr. Koranyi recalled in a telephone interview. But he agreed to a Zoom call and offered an innocuous account of Action for Democracy’s U.S. status as a legally registered charity not required to release the names of donors.

Their call took place on August 28, but short video clips, edited to appear to suggest he was hiding funding from Mr Soros, only appeared on MagaBabe’s sovereignty began its work.

“The timing is no coincidence. They wanted to wait until it was operational because they wanted to investigate something,” Mr Koranyi said.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Just five days after Election Day in 2020, a conservative attorney named Kenneth Chesebro emailed a former judge who worked for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, James R. Troupis, with an idea on how to overturn the results.

Through lawsuits, Mr. Chesebro said, the Trump campaign could allege “several systemic abuses” and, with ongoing legal proceedings underway, encourage the Legislature to appoint “alternative” pro-Trump electors who can be certified in place of the Biden electors chosen by voters.

“With such a cloud of confusion, at the very least, no votes from WI (and perhaps MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House of Representatives,” Mr Chesebro wrote to Mr Troupis, referring to the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Mr. Troupis quickly added Mr. Chesebro to Trump’s legal team, tasking him with laying out the plans in a series of memos that are now at the center of the indictment against Mr. Trump and a month later — with the help by Reince Priebus, the former White Chief of Staff of the House of Representatives – arranged a meeting with Mr Trump at the White House.

The email is the earliest known evidence of Mr. Chesebro’s involvement in what would become known as the bogus electoral plot. It was released Monday, along with a trove of more than 1,400 pages of text messages and emails belonging to Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro when they settled a lawsuit filed against them in Wisconsin.

Taken together, the documents show in new detail how the Trump campaign’s litigation strategy was not designed to win in court so much as to provide cover for their political efforts. And they underline the central role that Mr Troupis – previously a little-known figure in the effort to overturn the election – played in advancing the plans.

The messages also describe how Mr. Chesebro worked to get the fake election documents into the hands of members of Congress, and how Mr. Chesebro — who has since pleaded guilty in Georgia to a conspiracy charge in connection with the scheme — led the mob fourth. who gathered in Washington on January 6, 2021, before a violent mob stormed the Capitol.

“Enjoy the history you made possible today,” Mr. Troupis wrote in a text message to Mr. Chesebro at 11:04 a.m. that day.

The new details come from the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the progressive law firm Law Forward and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center against Mr. Chesebro, Mr. Troupis and so-called fake voters in Wisconsin.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of legitimate presidential electors and voters in Wisconsin.

The alleged voters have already dealt with their part of the caseconceding that President Biden won the 2020 election.

Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro agreed not to do similar work in the future, including not participating in a scheme to turn out fake voters.

The settlement also included a payment to the plaintiffs of an undisclosed amount.

“As these documents show, the fraudulent electoral plot originated in Wisconsin, with Trump campaign attorney James Troupis and legal counsel Ken Chesebro concocting the scheme that ultimately produced the false narrative used by the rioters to justify the attack on the Capitol ” said Mary McCord. , the director of Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

Mr. Chesebro’s memos were at the center of the federal indictment against Mr. Trump on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election. They are being presented as evidence of how the Trump campaign’s plans shifted from legal challenges to what prosecutors describe as a criminal plot to “engineer a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect.”

The memos also became the basis for a strategy by conservative lawyers John Eastman and Trump, which a federal judge called a “coup in search of a legal theory.”

In a Nov. 19, 2020, email to Mr. Troupis, Mr. Chesebro wrote that the Trump lawyers should “take a stab at taking two bites at the apple — tie off, hoping to ultimately win on January 6, but also had to delay tying the apple.” lawsuit to try to win in the state Legislature on Dec. 8.

Several documents refer to a Dec. 15, 2020, meeting between Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

“Pretty clearly national people realize that this wouldn’t happen if you, Reince and others hadn’t pushed for it!” Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Troupis two days before the White House visit.

They were told to keep the meeting secret and not to bring anything with them for Trump to sign, according to the messages.

“Reince was very explicit in his admonition that nothing about our meeting with the president should be shared with anyone,” Mr. Troupis wrote to Mr. Chesebro afterward.

Mr. Chesebro gave his account of the meeting to prosecutors in Michigan investigating the bogus electoral plot. He said Mr. Priebus had told the men not to get Trump’s hopes up about his chances of victory, but Mr. Chesebro acknowledged he had not listened to that advice.

“We had until January 6 to win,” Mr. Chesebro recalled saying to Mr. Trump at the meeting: according to audio obtained by CNNand added: “That really got me in trouble after that.”

A lawyer for Mr. Troupis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Chesebro did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Preibus declined to comment. A person familiar with his actions said he had recommended Mr. Troupis as a lawyer in Wisconsin, his home state, to the Trump campaign, but that he was not involved in the day-to-day legal efforts.

The person said he had arranged a “photo op” for the men only at Mr. Troupis’ request and that he had not met Mr. Chesebro or knew who he was until that day. The person gave a similar account of the meeting to Mr Chesebro, who said Mr Preibus did not want them to encourage the president to challenge the election results.

Still, both Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro seemed to feel after the meeting that they had special knowledge of Mr. Trump’s plans.

After Mr Trump posted on Twitter that he would hold a rally in Washington on January 6: “Be there, it will be wild!” exhorting his followers in a message that served as a crucial call to action for far-right groups – Mr Chesebro wrote to Mr Troupis: “Wow. Based on three days ago, I think we have a unique understanding of this.”

Although the plans originated in Wisconsin, reports indicate that the men saw Georgia as the key to achieving their goals.

“If Georgia is to appear before the Supreme Court on January 6, it would be a rather bossy move if, when Pence arrives in Georgia, he simply refuses to open any of the Georgian envelopes,” Mr. Chesebro wrote on December 26, 2020. He referred to Vice President Mike Pence’s ceremonial role in Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results.

On the morning of January 6, Mr. Chesebro said he had worked with Michael Roman, the Trump campaign’s director of Election Day operations, and that a day earlier he had given documents for the false voter slates to an aide to Representative Mike Kelly, Republican. of Pennsylvania. That aide took them to the Senate parliamentarian, he said.

“Excellent,” Mr. Troupis replied. “Tomorrow, let’s talk about the SCOTUS strategy for the future. Enjoy the history you made possible today.”

Mr Chesebro later sent a photo of himself with the crowd on January 6 at 12:26 p.m.

Mr. Troupis responded with an emoji of clapping hands.