Kenneth Chesebro, a former lawyer for Donald Trump’s campaign, pleaded guilty Friday to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia, striking a deal in which he will avoid jail time and agreed to provide evidence that could implicate other defendants, including Trump himself.
The charge relates to Chesebro’s role organizing slates of pro-Trump electors to meet in seven states where Joe Biden had won. According to details of the amended indictment read in open court, prosecutors allege several other co-defendants were a part of that conspiracy: Trump, four other lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, and one campaign operative. Chesebro signed the amended indictment, though it was not clear if he had offered prosecutors evidence related to the alleged role those other defendants played.
November 2021: Jared Kushner advising Trump to 'pursue his legal remedies' to the election.
June 2022: Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.
He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”
Ms. Cheney: “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required.
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Together with Steven Bannon, Peter Navarro developed a plan to block the Electoral College vote count, called the 'Green Bay Sweep' .
Its purpose?
To pressure Vice President Mike Pence to misuse his role as the person officially counting electoral ballots and instead reject them, delaying Congressional certification of Biden’s victory in order to give give Republican-controlled state legislatures time to overturn the election through baseless assertions of voter fraud. Learn More
It only takes one honest lawyer.
Mr. Cipollone was a witness to some of the most significant moments in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election results, including discussions about seizing voting machines, meddling in the Justice Department and sending false letters to state officials about election fraud.
“That’s a terrible idea for the country,” he said of suggestions that the Trump administration seize voting machines, adding, “That’s not how we do things in the United States.”
Mr. Cipollone was also in direct contact with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6 as rioters stormed the Capitol and told the House committee he believed more should have been done to call off the mob.
“I think I was pretty clear there needed to be an immediate and forceful response, statement, public statement, that people need to leave the Capitol now,” Mr. Cipollone testified.
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- 2017: Promoting Trump’s false ‘voting fraud’ narrative: “Well, I won't reveal private conversations with the president, Judy, but I will tell you that what the president is talking about is registration and voter rolls. He knows there are dead people registered, there are illegal people registered, and he wants to get to the bottom of that without an election on the horizon.
- 2021: “Alternative facts”: Conway praised Trump for his response to the U.S. Capitol riots.
- The very next day: President Trump appoints Conway to the board of visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Not content with his highly reported attempts to overturn the results of several 2020 state elections, which supported Biden, Hawley also supported the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, giving an arm-raised fist salute to the somewhat-deluded people who stormed the Capitol in hopes of stopping the certification of state’s election results.
In April 2021, Hawley, a leading Big Lie advocate, said Georgia's controversial new voter suppression law is like his own attempt in January to get millions of votes thrown out of the 2020 presidential election.
After voters in the 2022 midterm elections signaled "thumb-down" to GOP election denier candidates, Hawley played the blame game. He fingered Minority Leader McConnell, who early on signaled consternation over election deniers running as GOP candidates. McConnell was right.
Former Senator Danforth views his prior political support of Josh Hawley as "the worst mistake" of my life".
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Alt-right radio host Jesse Kelly, adoring Trump booster, and frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s former prime-time Fox News show, agreed with a Twitter user's suggestion that “Weimar problems eventually lead to Weimar solutions."
Kelly's tweet?
America “needs a dictator.” Learn More
2016: During the 2016 campaign Coulter wrote a book-length endorsement of her preferred candidate, "In Trump We Trust.”
January 6, 2021: Coulter breaks ranks:
"Who are these people still supporting Trump and this nonsense ‘stop the steal’?
"I don’t understand why. Why are you doing this for Trump when he doesn’t give a crap about you?"
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“President Trump is wrong,” Mr. Pence said at the time. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
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