That doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. You’re treating these as good-faith legal processes, but the evidence shows they were pursued despite being known to be unlawful
But to be a bit more specific in response:
Yes. That's what makes the efforts illegal: Trump et al had been told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that those powers did not exist, but still insisted that they be used anyway in service of allowing him to retain power through illegal means, given the false appearance of legitimacy through deceptive representation. It's not dissimilar in practice to credit card fraud "seeming" to be legitimate purchases by using a real credit card account (ie, someone else's) and therefore a real transfer of money that was illegal for you to use in that way rather than a floating check for an empty account or counterfeit bills.
Your argument here amounts to "they don't legally have that power so therefore it couldn't have been their intent", which is like saying that Caesar can't have crossed the Rubicon because under law he was not allowed to command an army in Italy-proper. You are literally using the fact that the act was illegal to dispute the idea that it occurred at all, and therefore you argue that the acts in question necessarily constitute "legal avenues" rather than observed pattern of trying to subvert and corrupt those legal avenues to give the efforts the superficial appearance of legitimacy.
See again the Eastman Memos, which laid out that Pence should act to make it a fait accompli and then laid out the planned strategy to use to get the resulting lawsuit dismissed through optics and antipathy for the plaintiffs rather than merit.
And I quote: "The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position – that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed."
For goodness sake, the second memo (itself an extrapolation of Cheesbro's) laid out the intention of using Team Trump's own fake electors plot to create a 'heads I win, tails they lose' scenario through brazen : If the fake electors were accepted, then their votes would fraudulently be accepted for Trump to give him the victory. If they were not accepted, then Pence was to acknowledge their existence, falsely claim that that indicated uncertainty about the validity of the actual electors, and use that as a pretext to discount them from the final tallies to give Trump the appearance of a majority to declare the race for Trump.
That is not a good faith attempt to work within the confines of the legal challenge, that is explicitly and unequivocally an effort to subvert them. They were using the appearance of legal mechanisms to justify something they knew wasn’t legal. Hence again why this is regarded as an illegal effort and well beyond the pale.
You’re narrowing the claim and then arguing against that narrower version. The argument isn’t that there was a coordinated plan to physically seize power, but that the rally and resulting disruption functioned as pressure on Congress within a broader effort to overturn the result. Those aren’t the same thing.
Never mind that in law and politics, intent is almost never established through something as clear as a memo stating criminal intent. That's like finding that a CEO kept a personal journal in his desk saying "Dear Diary, today I embezzled $50,000...": very much the exception rather than the rule. Intent is almost always inferred through -patterns of behavior, observed pressure on institutions, what people knew would likely happen, and how they acted once it did happen.
You don’t need a memo ordering violence to argue that Trump et al's actions foreseeably led to it and were part of a broader attempt to stay in power.
To put it directly: There were multiple parallel efforts to overturn the result. These included legal challenges, but they also included illegal efforts such as pressure on state officials, fake elector strategies, pressure on the vice president, pressure to make the DOJ release a false claim of fraud and leave the rest of it to Republican Congressmen, to name but a few examples...And the storming of the Capital on January 6 fits into that as pressure on Congress at the moment of certification. The question is not "Was there a written plan to storm the building?". It is was it foreseeable that directing a large, angry crowd at the Capitol during certification could disrupt the process, and was that anticipated disruption useful to the goal?" And given that the pattern shows that this was intended as a pressure tactic? It very much was.
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