From the New York Times, I'm Michael Blubaro. This is the Daily.

Today, the online planning and on the ground failures that contributed to the storming of the Capitol building.

I spoke to my colleagues, Shira Frankl, and Zohran Kano Youngs.

It's Friday, January 8.

Shira, what do we know about how this mob that stormed the Capitol came to be? And to what extent it was organized from the start? What are you learning in your reporting?

It was extremely well organized. The day after the election, a group immediately pops up on Facebook called Stop the Steel.

It initially builds on this base of kind of tea party activists and QAnon supporters, and otherwise long-term members of MAGA, the Make America Great, again, a term that Trump likes to use.

And they come together and they start collecting what they see as evidence of voter fraud.

People are coming here to vote for Donald Trump, and those votes are all getting indolent.

Now, we've got firsthand evidence from our poll watchers, Republican poll watchers that witnessed them changing ballots.

Also know the jaw can't win shit, so you've got a cheat, so you can't.

And they're dropping in links and videos and photographs. A lot of them very obviously photoshopped, but nonetheless building this narrative that voting officials did everything from smuggling ballots and suitcases,

allow people to vote in the names of their dead loved ones.

What did you just tell me?

My dog voted in the 2020 election.

Allow people to vote in the name of their pets.

And how did you find this out?

I got an email that now she has her microchip number as her social security.

And they are immediately popular in really just an unprecedented way.

They are gaining 100 new members every 10 seconds, and they gather hundreds of thousands of people behind this banner that there was voter fraud,

and that they are the ones that will uphold a democratic process and make sure that Trump serves another term in office.

Watching it all happen in real time, I had this sense of kind of collective mob delusion where someone would post something that to my eyes looked very clearly photoshopped.

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