Jared Kushner was ‘desperate’ for Fox News to retract Arizona call as he threw together Trump’s legal team

President’s son-in-law searches for a James Baker and gets stuck with Rudy Giuliani while battling the electoral process

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser has spent the last several days leading a behind-the-scenes effort to throw together a last-minute legal team in states like Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to reports.

After Fox News called the crucial battleground state of Arizona for former Vice President Joe Biden, the 39-year-old adviser was on the phone with the conservative network’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, the New York Times reported, to discuss the surprise announcement.

The Trump Team had hoped it would lead the narrative on Tuesday, according to the newspaper, securing a victory in Arizona and the Sun Belt states early on and allowing the president to deliver a celebratory speech by nighttime.

But Mr Biden had a strong showing early on in the vote count across Arizona, leading networks to call the state for the former vice president, including Fox News, where Arnon Mishkin, a paid consultant for the network, projected the victory ahead of the Associated Press and several other outlets.

What followed was an apparent full court press by the Trump team to get Fox News to reverse the call, with some outlets describing Mr Kushner as “desperate” in his lobbying efforts, along with several other officials from the campaign who spoke out against the decision both privately and in public statements.

The move was described as an “outlier” by the president’s political adviser Jason Miller, who reportedly called Fox News about the call for Arizona and also tweeted: “We pushed our people to vote on Election Day, but now Fox News is trying to invalidate their votes!”

Mr Mishkin was put on air later that night and defended the network’s decision to call the state, which preceded projections from AP and a variety of other outlets that said Mr Biden had won Arizona against Mr Trump.

“What I think we’ve heard from the White House is that … they need just to get 61% of the outstanding vote, and there are 870,000 outstanding votes, and they’ll be getting that,” he said in an interview aired on Fox News, adding: “That’s not true.”

Mr Kushner was then forced to put together a collective of legal minds who could counter the ongoing vote counts in states where the president appeared to be losing ground as mail-in votes were still being processed.

The New York Times said Mr Kushner was looking for someone he described as a “James Baker-like” figure — referring to former President George W Bush’s election recount challenge in 2000 — to oversee Mr Trump’s court battles.

Instead, it appeared by Wednesday the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, would be serving as a face of the efforts alongside Mr Trump’s children. The former New York City mayor held a contentious press conference vowing a wave of lawsuits against the electoral process.