In recent accounts of how Donald Trump set out to seize voting machines as part of his coup plot, an unlikely hero emerged. A draft executive order floated around the White House, calling for the secretary of defense to “seize, collect, retain, and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records“ from the 2020 election while Trump ignored the outcome of that election.

Reports on the meeting that generated that order involve an Oval Office meeting with Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell where they came prepared with a scheme to not only grab the voting machines, but conduct a do-over election “under military supervision.” However, even Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani refused to go along. In some of these accounts, Giuliani declared a military takeover of machines “a bridge too far,” turning the man who sweats hair dye into the nation’s most unlikely savior.

Well, don’t worry, everything is back in its proper place. That’s because new reporting from The Washington Post returns Giuliani to the center of the plot. Testimony from officials in Michigan has “Giuliani and several colleagues” making a direct request to local officials to gather up their machines and “pass them to Trump’s team.”

The request to just put the evidence of the 2020 election right into the hands of the man who tried to murder that election came in a telephone call to a Republican prosecutor in Antrim County, Michigan. 

That’s the county that had a very temporary glitch in reporting caused by human error among its 100% Republican election officials. That error was soon corrected, but not before it became the heart of a thousand GOP claims that voting machines in Michigan had tallied thousands or millions of false Biden votes. Both machine and hand recounts in Antrim County showed that their vote count (which Trump won, actually) were accurate. Both machine and hand recounts had taken place weeks before Giuliani called in an effort to get the machines, which were made by Dominion Voting Systems, on Nov. 20.

Giuliani’s effort to grab the machines in that county was an attempt to both leverage that momentary glitch and to put some hardware in the hands of a team that had claimed voting machines were under the control of everything from dead Venezuelan dictators to unknown Italian satellites. However, Giuliani’s bid to get the voting machines was thwarted for the simplest of reasons: The man he was talking to didn’t have them, and didn’t know how to get them.

The Republican prosecutor at the other end of the call, James Rossiter, reacted to Giuliani’s request with one of those little acts of reality that—like the refusal of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the outcome at Trump’s demand—seems both so normal and so surprising. Rossiter informed Giuliani that he didn’t have access to the voting machines and couldn’t just go to election officials and say “give them here” without some kind of probable cause. Giuliani wasn’t giving him anything like probable cause.

County Clerk Sheryl Guy, also a Republican, had a simple explanation for why Trump’s team wanted to grab machines that had already been tested, retested, and verified as accurate. Giuliani and pals wanted to “terrorize the country with doubt” about the electoral process.

“Nobody cares about what really happened, “said Guy. “They are simply using us for their agenda.” 

Republicans are, of course, dealing with this matter by trying to remove people like Rossiter and Guy.