In the wake of the 2020 election, the president of the far-right network One America News sent a potentially explosive email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings.

The existence of the spreadsheet was recently disclosed by Smartmatic, which is suing OAN for defamation. CNN pieced together who was involved in the email exchanges by examining court records from three separate cases stemming from the 2020 election.

Georgia prosecutors on Tuesday filed an emergency request for a judge's order protecting evidence in the election-racketeering case against Donald Trump and others after several videos leaked to the media detailing evidence provided by former co-defendants who have since pleaded guilty.

The motion from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' office follows reporting from ABC News and the Washington Post on Monday that included videos from the four people who recorded interviews as part of their guilty plea deals.

On Thursday, Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor election interference charges in Fulton County, Georgia, becoming the highest-level figure to admit guilt in the vast conspiracy to try to overturn the 2020 election.

The day after an explosive Oval Office meeting in which a motley crew of outside advisers clashed with White House lawyers over a plan to seize voting machines, then-President Donald Trump turned his focus to riling up his supporters for the Jan. 6 push to stop the counting of electoral votes, according to evidence presented in Tuesday's House committee hearing.

President Trump‘s proposal to appoint conservative attorney Sidney Powell as a special counsel to investigate voting fraud in the 2020 election culminated in a profane screaming match between Trump loyalists and White House advisers who opposed the plan, witnesses told the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday.

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone was shown in video testimony saying he was “vehemently opposed” to having Ms. Powell appointed to any position in the White House.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol played testimony describing a heated argument in which former President Donald Trump’s White House lawyers rejected claims of election fraud by Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other outside advisers.

The testimony came in the committee’s seventh hearing of the year, focusing on potential connections between Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and far-right groups allegedly at the center of the day’s violence.

Weeks after the 2020 election, Donald Trump reviewed a draft executive order that authorized the national guard to seize voting machines and verbally agreed to appoint Sidney Powell, a campaign lawyer and conspiracy theorist, as special counsel to investigate election fraud.

The two previously unreported actions of the former president – which is certain to interest the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack and Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat – came during a contentious White House meeting on 18 December 2020.