“whoever is the cause of someone becoming powerful is ruined “
– Machiavelli, The Prince
Three Republicans who cast Electoral College votes for Donald Trump after the 2020 presidential election were acting as federal officers and doing what the law allowed, defense lawyers told a federal judge on Wednesday.
The Trump electors — former Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, state Sen. Shawn Still and former Coffee County GOP Chairwoman Cathy Latham — are charged in Fulton County with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election. They are seeking to get their cases removed from Fulton Superior Court to U.S. District Court in Atlanta….
Attorneys for the defendants argued their clients were “contingent” electors under the federal Electoral Count Act. Among other things, the law requires states to resolve legal disputes about the outcome of elections six days before presidential electors cast their ballots — the so-called “safe harbor” deadline.
When presidential electors met on Dec. 14, 2020, Trump’s lawsuit challenging the election in Georgia was still pending. That meant Gov. Brian Kemp’s certification of Democrat Joe Biden was no longer valid, argued Shafer’s attorney, Craig Gillen….
Cross called Gillen’s arguments “novel,” “nonsense” and “fantasy.” She noted that, after correcting deficiencies, Trump refiled his lawsuit the day before the safe harbor deadline. Under the electors’ argument, that gave the court one day to resolve the dispute.
Cross said the electors had presented no case law supporting the idea “that you can file a procedurally and substantively deficient challenge and, suddenly, everything’s up in the air.” She said the Republicans did not become federal officers simply by claiming to be official presidential electors.
“They were fake electors,” Cross said. “They were impersonating electors. They were not electors at all.”
https://people.com/donald-trump-18-allies-mugshots-georgia-election-interference-case-7644240
[Excerpt:]Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who allegedly crafted the “fake electors scheme” to try and change the Electoral College tally in the 2020 presidential election, faces seven felony counts for the role he played in attempting to stop Joe Biden from becoming president. He surrendered to authorities on Aug. 23.
Chesebro is charged with violating the Georgia RICO Act, conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer, two counts of conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree, two counts of conspiracy to commit false statements and writings, and conspiracy to commit filing false documents.
Fury at Michigan officials charged in 2020 false electors scheme: ‘This isn’t who we are’
State Republican lawmakers who allegedly signed on as Trump’s false electors in 2020 face anger, prosecution and recall
Architect of Fake Electors Scheme Appeared to Be Outside Capitol on Jan. 6
It remains unclear why the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, seemed to be with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones outside the Capitol or how he came to be with Mr. Jones and his entourage.
Alan Feuer and
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/kenneth-chesebro-jan-6-trump
Photographs and videos reviewed by The New York Times suggest that Kenneth Chesebro, one of the legal architects of former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was in the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and spent part of that day closely following the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped lead a mob toward the building.
Mr. Chesebro did not appear to have illegally entered the Capitol, as did hundreds of other rioters, or commit any violence.
But the photographs and videos appearing to show him marching with Mr. Jones, the proprietor of Infowars, and members of his entourage — including Ali Alexander, a prominent “Stop the Steal” organizer — were the first time that one of the many aides and lawyers who helped the former president try to subvert the democratic process with controversial legal theories was also found to have had a connection to pro-Trump activists who were on the ground during the Capitol attack.
Mr. Chesebro’s presence at the Capitol was reported earlier by CNN. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
It remains unclear why Mr. Chesebro was with Mr. Jones’s group outside the Capitol or how he came to be with them. A lawyer for Mr. Jones said that Mr. Jones was unaware that Mr. Chesebro had been following his entourage that day.
Mr. Chesebro was charged this week as one of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in a sprawling racketeering indictment brought by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga. That indictment accused him of taking part in a sweeping plot to create slates of so-called fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in several key swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won.
Mr. Chesebro also appeared as an unnamed co-conspirator in a similar federal indictment brought against Mr. Trump in Washington this month by prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Chesebro wrote three memos in November and December 2020, which prosecutors used to trace the evolution of the fake elector plan and an attempt to use it as part of a broader effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election to Mr. Trump during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Wearing a red MAGA hat, Mr. Chesebro can be seen joining Mr. Jones’s group outside the Capitol shortly before 2 p.m. that day, according to the photographs and video reviewed by The Times. The visual evidence shows he stayed with Mr. Jones, Mr. Alexander and others — including Owen Shroyer, one of Mr. Jones’s top aides — for about an hour and a half, often filming Mr. Jones on his cellphone as the group walked around the Capitol and went partly up the stairs outside the east front of the building.
Mr. Jones and Mr. Alexander were among the first “Stop the Steal” activists to draw attention from federal prosecutors investigating the Capitol riot. As early as April 2022, Mr. Jones reached out to the Justice Department in an unsuccessful effort to secure an immunity deal in exchange for information. Mr. Alexander was subpoenaed by — and ultimately testified to — a grand jury in Washington that was looking into various aspects of the attack.
As for Mr. Shroyer, he pleaded guilty in June to a single count of illegally entering and remaining on the Capitol’s restricted grounds.
It was a remarkable turn of events that Mr. Chesebro, an obscure lawyer versed in the complexities of election law, appeared to be seen on video marching on Jan. 6 with two of the main “Stop the Steal” activists who helped lead the mob to the Capitol from Mr. Trump’s speech near the White House that day. The convergence of someone who took part in the legal attempts to keep Mr. Trump in power with those who were central to bringing the force of a crowd to bear as Congress was certifying the election results was a powerful reminder of how many mysteries remain where Jan. 6 is concerned.
Until now, there appeared to be different tentacles of the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power that had not overlapped. But Mr. Chesebro hinted at those connections in an email exchange with John Eastman, another lawyer who was instrumental in the plan to pressure Mr. Pence with the fake elector scheme.
In late December 2020, the two lawyers discussed how to get a case before the Supreme Court. Mr. Chesebro told Mr. Eastman as they discussed filing a legal action that in terms of the highest court, the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
The ‘brains’ behind fake Trump electors was once a liberal Democrat
Kenneth Chesebro, a Harvard-trained lawyer, may be the least well known of the main players in Trump’s federal and Georgia indictments
Chesebro was among 19 people charged Monday in Georgia with a raft of crimes related to alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A 98-page indictment secured by Atlanta-area prosecutors portrays Chesebro as central not just to the convening of sham electors but also to the “strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.” He faces seven felony charges, including conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to file false documents, as well as violation of an anti-racketeering act originally aimed at dismantling organized crime groups.
In the separate federal case brought against Trump this month, Chesebro has not been charged. Prosecutors described him only as “Co-Conspirator 5,” saying he was behind “a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”
Trump, allies charged with racketeering scheme over bid to subvert election in Georgia
The former president and 18 allies were indicted for what prosecutors described as a wide-ranging criminal enterprise.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/14/fulton-county-trump-indictment-00111211
[Excerpt:]A grand jury in Georgia has indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 allies on racketeering charges for a sweeping attempt to corrupt the 2020 election by subverting Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis leveled the charges Monday night after a two-year investigation that also tagged Trump with allegations that he conspired to derail the Electoral College process, marshaled the Justice Department to bolster his scheme, pressured Georgia officials to undo the election results and repeatedly lied about fraud allegations to ratchet up pressure.
In addition to Trump, Willis charged former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeff Clark, Ken Chesebro and Jenna Ellis, key figures in Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
The 98-page indictment tracks several well-known aspects of Trump’s conduct in the chaotic weeks that followed his defeat in the Nov. 3, 2020, election, many of which were aired by the House Jan. 6 select committee and, more recently, in a federal indictment obtained by special counsel Jack Smith.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
August 9, 2023
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
[Excerpt:]New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage, and Luke Broadwater yesterday reported that in a memo dated December 6, 2020, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro laid out a plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that he acknowledged was “a bold, controversial strategy” that he believed the Supreme Court would “likely” reject.
Still, he presented the plan—while apparently trying to distance himself from it by writing “I’m not necessarily advising this course of action”—because he thought it “would guarantee that public attention would be riveted on the evidence of electoral abuses by the Democrats, and would also buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”
The plan was essentially what the Trump campaign ultimately tried to pursue. It called for Trump-Pence electors in six swing states Biden had won to meet and vote for Trump, and then to make sure that in each of those states there was a lawsuit underway that “might plausibly” call into question Biden’s victory there. Then, Vice President Mike Pence would take the position that he had the power not simply to open the votes but also to count them, and that the 1887 Electoral Count Act that clarified those procedures was unconstitutional.
Key to selling this strategy, Chesebro wrote, was messaging that constructing two slates of electors was “routine,” and he laid out a strategy of taking events and statements out of context to suggest support for that messaging.
This was, of course, a plan to deprive American voters of their right to have their votes counted, as the federal grand jury’s recent indictment of former president Trump charged, but Chesebro concluded: “it seems advisable for the campaign to seriously consider this course of action and, if adopted, to carefully plan related messaging.”
Three days later, Chesebro wrote specific instructions to create those fraudulent electors, and they were off to the races.
Chesebro is identified as Co-Conspirator 5 in the grand jury’s recent indictment of Trump.
It is an astonishing thing to read this memo today.
‘Co-Conspirator 5’: Ken Chesebro and the evolution of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 strategy
Read the documents that formed the rough draft of Trump’s scheme to stay in power.
The memos and emails reveal the underpinnings of a desperate strategy to assemble slates of fraudulent electors.
By KYLE CHENEY
08/09/2023
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/09/ken-chesebro-memos-trump-coconspirator
Attorney John Eastman is often credited as the architect of Donald Trump’s last-ditch attempt to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election.
But the work of lesser-known attorney Kenneth Chesebro — identified as “Co-Conspirator 5” in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment — may have been more instrumental in stoking the chaos that ultimately unfolded.
The House Jan. 6 select committee helped unearth several key documents drafted or contributed to by Chesebro that would become Trump’s strategy at crucial moments in the weeks following his loss to Joe Biden. The special counsel team unearthed another — an internal campaign memo referenced in the 45-page indictment last week and first revealed publicly Tuesday by The New York Times.
The memos and emails reveal the underpinnings of a desperate strategy to assemble slates of fraudulent electors, first to preserve legal options and later to foment a conflict on Jan. 6, 2021, that might lead to Trump retaining the presidency. Along the way, Chesebro concocted methods for avoiding unfavorable court rulings, enlisting friendly allies in Congress to grease the skids and ultimately counting on Mike Pence to take “bold” steps to derail the impending Biden presidency. (Chesebro, through his lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Here’s a chronology of Chesebro’s key documents and proposals, which show how his thinking evolved from philosophical discussions to operational plans — and at times veered into outright fantasy.
NOV. 18, 2020 MEMO: Chesebro’s initial foray into Trump world’s upper echelons came as states prepared to certify their election results. Chesebro was advising Wisconsin-based Trump attorney Jim Troupis about a legal strategy for challenging the results there in court.
Here, Chesebro first emphasized that Jan. 6, 2021 was the real “hard deadline” for courts to rule on Trump’s election challenges. But he stressed that in order to sustain legal challenges to Wisconsin’s results, a slate of pro-Trump electors must convene on Dec. 14, 2020 and cast ballots as though they were legitimately elected.
“It may seem odd that electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count,” Chesebro wrote. “However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”
Chesebro noted that if courts ruled in Trump’s favor, Congress may only be able to count electoral votes cast by the legally prescribed deadline of Dec. 14. In other words, it was a contingency plan while lawsuits were pending.
DEC. 6, 2020 MEMO: By early December, Chesebro’s thinking had shifted radically. A memo first described in the special counsel’s indictment, and publicly revealed Tuesday by The New York Times, showed that Chesebro began to view the pro-Trump electors as part of a strategy to derail the transfer of power altogether — not simply as a backup plan for the courts.
The memo, also directed to Troupis, suggested that the Trump campaign assemble alternate slates of electors in six states where legal challenges were pending.
“I’ve mulled over how January might play out, and it seems feasible that the Trump campaign can prevent Biden from amassing 270 electoral votes on January 6, and force the Members of Congress, the media, and the American people to focus on the substantive evidence of illegal election and counting activities in the six contested states,” Chesebro wrote.
He described three essential criteria: 1) Meetings of the pro-Trump elector slates on Dec. 14 in all six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (a seventh, New Mexico, would be added later); 2) The existence of pending litigation in those states that could conceivably reverse the outcome; 3) A declaration by Pence that only he could decide which electoral votes to count on Jan. 6, 2021, when he presided over the joint session of Congress to certify the election.
“I’m not necessarily advising this course of action,” he added, describing it as a “bold, controversial strategy.”
Chesebro also used the memo to suggest that Trump’s elector slates meet secretly to avoid protest. At the same time, he wrote, the campaign should be prepared to characterize the meetings as “routine” contingency planning for potential legal victories.
DEC. 9, 2020 MEMO: Days after advising the campaign to convene its false elector slates, Chesebro provided a plan to operationalize the strategy. In a third memo to Troupis, Chesebro outlined the federal and state laws governing the meetings of the electors and how the Trump campaign could attempt to comply with those requirements in order to keep alive the chance that they would be counted by the courts or Congress.
Chesebro notes that no state legislatures had certified these alternate slates — Trump and his allies were still leaning on GOP legislators to take that step — but that the pro-Trump electors should meet anyway to cast contingent ballots. However, in some states, valid electors were required to meet in specific venues or under the guidance of specific state officials like the governor or secretary of state.
He noted the rules could make assembling alternate slates “very problematic” in Nevada and “somewhat dicey” in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
DEC. 13, 2020 NOTES TO RUDY GIULIANI: On the eve of the elector meetings, Chesebro typed up notes to Rudy Giuliani, a substitute for a memo he said he lost due to a “reboot on the hotel computer.” This document, which he forwarded to Eastman on Jan. 2, 2021, was publicly revealed last year, after a federal judge determined it constituted evidence of a likely crime.
In this memo, Chesebro laid out what he called the “President of the Senate” strategy — a reference to Pence’s role on Jan. 6, 2021. He strongly advocated that Pence take the position that he had ultimate authority to determine which electoral votes to count or ignore. Even if it couldn’t prevent Biden’s election, Chesebro reasoned, Pence’s declaration could help obtain leverage that might be used to broker some alternative outcome.
Most notably, Chesebro’s memo laid out a pre-Jan. 6 timeline that would help facilitate the plan. It began with a Jan. 3-5 plan for friendly GOP lawmakers to hold hearings highlighting the ambiguities of the Electoral Count Act — the law that has governed the transfer of power since 1887 — and the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes. The goal was to feature testimony from allied legal scholars to “buttress the substantive basis for the President of the Senate later refusing to count votes from those states, absent more needed scrutiny.”
On Jan. 6, Chesebro said, Pence would announce his recusal from presiding over the joint session of Congress, citing the unconstitutionality of the Electoral Count Act as well as a conflict of interest because of his candidacy for reelection. This, Chesebro contended, would “insulate” Pence from charges of making a self-serving decision and leave the matter ostensibly in the hands of a senior Republican senator. Then, after beginning to count electoral votes from an alphabetical list of states, that senator would refuse to count the votes from Arizona, citing the competing slates of electors. If Arizona wants to be counted, this senator would say, it would either have to “rerun” its election or allow for more judicial review of the outcome.
Chesebro predicted controversy and conflict would ensue from this step — and noted Biden could still emerge victorious if the conflict made its way to the Supreme Court. But he said the Supreme Court might refuse to step in, avoiding the clash between the political branches. In that scenario, he said, with the White House and Congress at loggerheads, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi might become acting president on Jan. 20. But another outcome, he said — one that appears even more far-fetched in hindsight — might play out: Trump could quit the race in exchange for a negotiated deal to make Pence president.
“In this situation,” Chesebro wrote, “which would be messy and unpalatable to many … it doesn’t seem fanciful to think Trump and Pence would end up winning the vote after some legislatures appoint electors, or else that there might be a negotiated solution in which the Senate elects Pence vice president and Trump agrees to drop his bid … so that Biden and Harris are defeated, even though Trump isn’t re-elected.”
DEC. 23, 2020 EASTMAN EMAIL TO BORIS EPSHTEYN: Eastman distilled his own analyses and Chesebro’s advice into a pair of memos he brought to Trump and Pence. On Dec. 23, Eastman shared a draft of one of those memos with Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, cc’ing Chesebro on the message. Eastman signaled to Epshteyn that Chesebro had edited the memo. He also noted that he and Chesebro agreed that congressional hearings to bolster their case were no longer advisable because they could “invite counter views that we do not believe should constrain Pence (or Grassley).”
“Better for them to just act boldly and be challenged,” Eastman wrote.
This step, Eastman noted, would likely result in the Supreme Court refusing to take up the case “on nonjusticiable political question grounds” — in other words, a win for Trump by default.
DEC. 31 2020 EMAIL FROM CHESEBRO TO EASTMAN AND OTHER TRUMP LAWYERS: Chesebro was also involved in the campaign’s broader legal strategy to try to get a friendly judge to give judicial imprimatur to the notion that the election results were in doubt — especially in Georgia. While Trump worked, via Justice Department official Jeff Clark, to get the department to similarly use its institutional power to cast doubt on the results, Chesebro suggested targeting efforts at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas is the so-called “circuit justice” for Georgia and neighboring states, meaning he performs the initial review of emergency appeals arising from that part of the country.
“The point is to have the court say that probably the election was void, which should be enough to prevent the Senate from counting the Biden electoral votes from Georgia, right?” Chesebro said in an email to Eastman and a larger group of lawyers working on Trump’s post-election legal efforts.
“Possibly Thomas would end up being the key here — circuit justice, right? We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Chesebro wrote. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”
Eastman, a former Thomas clerk who had at times been in touch with his wife Ginni during the post-election period, replied: “I think I agree with this. If the court were to give us ‘likely,’ that may be enough to kick the Georgia Legislature into gear, because I’ve been getting a lot of calls from them indicating to me they’re leaning that way.”
JAN. 1, 2021 NOTES TO EPSHTEYN AND EASTMAN: Chesebro’s last known message ahead of Jan. 6 was a set of 14 talking points for congressional Republicans to challenge the limits imposed on them by the Electoral Count Act. It was his most specific and granular advice yet regarding the minutiae of Congress’ procedures.
In particular, Chesebro advocated for friendly GOP lawmakers to resist the law’s limit of just five minutes of debate per lawmaker — with a maximum aggregate debate time of two hours — during formal challenges to a state’s electors.
Chesebro reasoned that Pence could side with the objecting lawmakers and agree that debate could not constitutionally be limited without a cloture vote of 60 senators.
“It might be politically painful for a Republican to vote to cut off debate,” Chesebro contended, adding, “It could take hours of debate on each state before a filibuster is overcome.”
But Chesebro noted one huge, little-understood hurdle: Every four years — for decades — Congress has affirmatively bound itself to the strict limits of the Electoral Count Act by adopting a “concurrent resolution” agreeing to abide by the terms of the 136-year-old law. If that resolution were passed on Jan. 3, 2021, he noted, it would remove any possible challenge to the constitutionality of the procedures.
As a result, Chesebro advocated for a lawmaker — like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — to attempt to block the concurrent resolution, forcing a debate and vote. Chesebro said this plan would be useful to determine the whip count among Senate Republicans for challenges to the election results.
Chesebro also sought to reconcile his call for lengthy debates with his larger argument that Pence — not Congress — got to determine which electors to count. He said Pence could simply allow the debates to proceed without conceding their legitimacy, buying time for the Supreme Court or state legislatures to act.
Ultimately, no lawmaker objected to the concurrent resolution, which was adopted unanimously on Jan. 3, 2021.
Who Is Kenneth Chesebro? The Lesser-Known Trump Attorney Behind 2020 Electors Plot
Aug 9, 2023,04:06pm EDT
TOPLINE
As President Donald Trump faces a federal indictment over his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a newly surfaced memo from Trump’s legal team the New York Times published Wednesday found one of his lesser-known attorneys, Kenneth Chesebro, not only helped craft the so-called fake electors scheme central to alleged efforts to overturn the election results, but doubted it would work.
KEY FACTS
In the memo, dated December 6, 2020, Chesebro laid down his brazen fake electors scheme, calling on GOP electors in six swing states to cast new ballots for Trump and send them to Washington for a January 6 congressional certification as though Trump had been elected.
According to the strategy, Trump would “force” lawmakers, the media and the public to “focus on the substantive evidence of illegal election and counting activities in the six contested states,” Chesebro wrote, while former Vice President Mike Pence would then either delay the vote count or block the confirmation of the election—which Pence refused to do.
Chesebro, however, admitted he was “not necessarily advising” that the strategy be implemented, and that “there are many reasons” why it might not work.
Chesebro, who is believed to be co-conspirator 5 in the Department of Justice’s indictment of Trump, has faced criticism over his role in the fake electors plot, though he hasn’t been charged and hasn’t faced the same fate as former Trump attorney John Eastman, the former legal scholar and so-called mastermind behind the dubious fake electors legal theory who is facing disbarment and is reportedly concerned about being criminally charged in the Department of Justice’s case against Trump.
Last March, Chesebro was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee in its investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
Chesebro was also one of five Trump aides and lawyers to receive a criminal referral last December from the committee, following its 18-month investigation—along with Eastman, Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jeffrey Clark, as well as Trump himself.
KEY BACKGROUND
Chesebro’s memo shows how his fake electors scheme developed quickly in the months after the 2020 election. That memo was dated one month after a previous memo to Jim Troupis—a Wisconsin attorney who challenged the results of President Joe Biden’s win in the state—in which Chesebro laid out the fake electors plan as an effort to protect Trump’s rights if he won a future court battle and was declared the winner in that state, using the fake electors’ ballots as evidence. One month later, however, Chesebro reportedly had made the scheme a central tenet of his plan to overturn the election nationally, writing in the December 6, 2020 memo obtained by the Times that “it seems feasible that the Trump campaign can prevent Biden from amassing 270 electoral votes” needed to win the presidential election during a congressional proceeding to confirm the results of the election.
Trump pleaded not guilty last week to four felony counts following the DOJ’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden—one of three indictments of the former president has faced since he launched his reelection bid late last year (Trump was also indicted over his alleged mishandling of classified White House documents after he left the Oval Office and for alleged hush money payments to three people in the run-up to the 2016 election). The charges levied against Trump last week by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith included conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy against rights and obstruction of an official proceeding—which all carry potential prison sentences if Trump is convicted. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and slammed prosecutors for waiting until the 2024 election cycle was well underway to bring charges against him, while his legal team has argued his claims of widespread voter fraud were protected by his First Amendment right to free speech.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
Washington, D.C. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya scheduled Trump’s next hearing in the case for August 28 before federal District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will reportedly set a trial date at that hearing.
CONTRA
Trump’s legal team has had significant turnover over the past three years as the former president faces a slew of legal battles. Nearly a dozen of Trump’s attorneys have departed, including Jim Trusty, who abruptly withdrew from Trump’s criminal defense team in the DOJ’s classified documents investigation in June, following the likes of John Rowley, Tim Parlatore, Rudy Giuliani, Cleta Mitchell, Sidney Powell, Bryan Hughes, Linda Kerns and John Scott.
BIG NUMBER
37 percentage points. That’s the size of Trump’s early lead in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted late last month of likely GOP voters, with 54% of respondents saying they support Trump, over 17% for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and 3% for Pence, as well as former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.).
FURTHER READING
Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election
August 8, 2023
Previously Secret Memo Laid Out Strategy for Trump to Overturn Biden’s Win
The House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation did not uncover the memo, whose existence first came to light in last week’s indictment.
A scheme to use false electors to keep Donald J. Trump in power was perhaps the most sprawling of the various efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
By Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage
and Luke Broadwater
Aug. 8, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/us/politics/trump-indictment-fake-electors-memo.html
A lawyer allied with President Donald J. Trump first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election in a previously unknown internal campaign memo that prosecutors are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy.
The existence of the Dec. 6, 2020, memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Mr. Trump, though its details remained unclear. But a copy obtained by The New York Times shows for the first time that the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the start that he was proposing “a bold, controversial strategy” that the Supreme Court “likely” would reject in the end.
But even if the plan did not ultimately pass legal muster at the highest level, Mr. Chesebro argued that it would achieve two goals. It would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”
The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. In mid-December, the false Trump electors could go through the motions of voting as if they had the authority to do so. Then, on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally count those slates of votes, rather than the official and certified ones for Mr. Biden.
While that basic plan itself was already known, the document, described by prosecutors as the “fraudulent elector memo,” provides new details about how it originated and was discussed behind the scenes. Among those details is Mr. Chesebro’s proposed “messaging” strategy to explain why pro-Trump electors were meeting in states where Mr. Biden was declared the winner. The campaign would present that step as “a routine measure that is necessary to ensure” that the correct electoral slate could be counted by Congress if courts or legislatures later concluded that Mr. Trump had actually won the states.
FRAUDULENT ELECTORS
Read the previously unreported memo from Dec. 6, 2020.
It was not the first time Mr. Chesebro had raised the notion of creating alternate electors. In November, he had suggested doing so in Wisconsin, although for a different reason: to safeguard Mr. Trump’s rights in case he later won a court battle and was declared that state’s certified winner by Jan. 6, as had happened with Hawaii in 1960.
But the indictment portrayed the Dec. 6 memo as a “sharp departure” from that proposal, becoming what prosecutors say was a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect.”
“I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on Jan. 6,” Mr. Chesebro wrote. “But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on Dec. 14.”
Three days later, Mr. Chesebro drew up specific instructions to create fraudulent electors in multiple states — in another memo whose existence, along with the one in November, was first reported by The Times last year. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot also cited them in its December report, but it apparently did not learn of the Dec. 6 memo.
“I believe that what can be achieved on Jan. 6 is not simply to keep Biden below 270 electoral votes,” Mr. Chesebro wrote in the newly disclosed memo. “It seems feasible that the vote count can be conducted so that at no point will Trump be behind in the electoral vote count unless and until Biden can obtain a favorable decision from the Supreme Court upholding the Electoral Count Act as constitutional, or otherwise recognizing the power of Congress (and not the president of the Senate) to count the votes.”
Mr. Chesebro and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. A Trump spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The false electors scheme was perhaps the most sprawling of Mr. Trump’s various efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It involved lawyers working on his campaign’s behalf across seven states, dozens of electors willing to claim that Mr. Trump — not Mr. Biden — had won their states, and open resistance from some of those potential electors that the plan could be illegal or even “appear treasonous.” In the end, it became the cornerstone of the indictment against Mr. Trump.
While another lawyer — John Eastman, described as Co-Conspirator 2 in the indictment — became a key figure who championed the plan and worked more directly with Mr. Trump on it, Mr. Chesebro was an architect of it. He was first enlisted by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin to help with a legal challenge to the results there.
The ‘fake electors’ and their role in the 2020 election, explained
Pro-Trump electors are central to several of the investigations into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss.
By Amber Phillips
August 1, 2023
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How to Ensure Accountability for the Legal Foot Soldiers of Jan. 6
Trump-tied attorney who helped craft fake electors strategy resists grand jury subpoena
Kenneth Chesebro said he had been instructed to maintain privileges with the Trump campaign, which employed him. It’s not entirely clear if that’s true.
While former President Donald Trump has had a number of formal and semi-formal lawyers working on his behalf at various times, it’s unclear if Kenneth Chesebro ever served in an official capacity.
By KYLE CHENEY
08/25/2022
An attorney who helped develop former President Donald Trump’s last-ditch strategy to subvert the 2020 election moved Thursday to block a subpoena for his testimony to an Atlanta-area grand jury investigating potential crimes connected to the effort.
Kenneth Chesebro, who helped craft a plan to use false presidential electors to undermine the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, contended that he had an attorney-client relationship with the Trump campaign, which prevented him from appearing for an Aug. 30 interview.
In a nine-page filing in Fulton County Superior Court, Chesebro contended that the Trump campaign itself had “instructed” him to “maintain all applicable privileges and confidentiality.”
“Any testimony from Mr. Chesebro would necessarily relate to Mr. Chesebro’s representation of a former client — the Trump campaign,” he argued via his attorney, Scott Grubman.
While Trump has had a number of formal and semi-formal lawyers working on his behalf at various times, it’s unclear if Chesebro ever served in an official capacity. Two senior Trump campaign officials said they could neither recall nor remember his involvement, leaving unaddressed the idea that he had been advised by the campaign to assert privilege.
According to FEC filings, Chesebro has never received any payment from any of Trump’s political committees either during the 2020 election or in the years since.
Grubman declined to answer questions about Chesebro’s formal relationship with the campaign.
“Lawyers take on clients in many different circumstances,” he said in a statement. “What is consistent in all circumstances are the professional and ethical duties lawyers owe to those clients, primarily to represent them zealously and to always maintain their confidences.”
Similar questions about representation emerged during litigation between the Jan. 6 select committee and John Eastman, another architect of Trump’s post-2020 strategy to stay in power. When a judge pressed Eastman to prove his attorney-client relationship to Trump, he filed an unsigned retainer agreement that raised additional questions.
Chesebro is asking the judge overseeing the matter to call a hearing at which District Attorney Fani Willis, the lead investigator, would “be required to identify their planned areas of inquiry so that the parties can litigate this issue before Mr. Chesebro’s grand jury appearance.”
The grand jury subpoenaed Chesebro for his testimony on July 12, at the same time it also sought appearances from several other figures in Trump’s orbit during the chaotic post-2020 election period. Those figures include Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Cleta Mitchell and Eastman, who worked closely with Chesebro to develop the elector strategy.
The probe — one of several advancing investigations into Trump — has emerged as an acute threat to the former president, focusing on his efforts to pressure state election officials to “find” enough votes to put him ahead in Georgia. Giuliani testified to the grand jury earlier this month, but it’s unclear if he asserted any privileges during the closed door session. Giuliani was recently informed by Willis that he has become a target of her probe.
In fact, it was a memo drafted by Chesebro and sent to Giuliani, describing a day-to-day plan to attempt to disrupt the transition of power to Biden during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, that a federal judge in California ruled was evidence of a likely conspiracy between Eastman and Trump.
Chesebro revealed in the filing that he had waived any challenge to the subpoena in New York, where a judge ordered him on July 25 to appear before the grand jury. He contended that as a New York-based lawyer, he is also required to maintain a duty of “confidentiality” that extends beyond attorney-client privilege.
Meridith McGraw and Caitlin Oprysko contributed to this report.
Exclusive: Trump Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro Talks About His Role In The Runup To Jan. 6
June 16, 2022
The attorney who reportedly suggested that “‘wild’ chaos” would prompt Supreme Court justices to be more likely to intervene in the 2020 election has spoken exclusively with TPM about his representation of the Trump campaign during its efforts to overturn the election.
Kenneth Chesebro fielded extensive questions from TPM about his representation of the Trump campaign, about how he went from a liberal cause lawyer and protégé of Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe to a Trump attorney, and about his views on the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
On several of the key questions that have emerged about his legal work for Trump, Chesebro was lawyerly, careful, and tightlipped in his responses. He was more forthcoming about his own background, how he came to be involved with the Trump campaign, and the criticisms that have come his way since he emerged as an early proponent of some of the Trump campaign’s most controversial strategies to overturn the 2020 election.
What emerges from hours of sitdown interviews is a picture of a man who was deeply involved at a high level in coordinating the Trump campaign’s strategy to overturn the election, who regrets the violence at the Capitol as self-defeating, and who wishes that more attention had been paid to the issues he raised.
“There was good reason to argue that under Article II, that Biden had not legitimately won the electoral votes,” Chesebro told TPM. “I’m not saying that Trump deserved to win in each state, I’m saying it was legitimate to argue under Article II that there was a problem.”
Chesebro said that he abhorred the violence of January 6, that it was “primarily a human disaster,” and that “it was the worst possible thing that could have happened in terms of lawyers that had serious concerns about the election in several states, that were never really addressed on the merits.”
Despite how well known the events between Election Day and Jan. 6 have become, Chesebro has flown largely under the radar, emerging only this year in a pair of New York Times stories as an important figure in the Trump campaign’s efforts. He plays second fiddle in the coverage to Trump lawyer John Eastman, but they knew each other before 2020, had worked together on an earlier case, and would reunite in the aftermath of Election Day. It was Chesebro who appears to have first advocated for alternate slates of electors with an eye on Jan. 6 as the make-or-break date for Trump.
While Eastman has become a national figure, Chesebro has remained in the shadows. Until now.
From Tribe Disciple to Trump Lawyer
While a student at Harvard Law School, Chesebro received a prestigious position as a research assistant to liberal lion Larry Tribe. Chesebro worked in that role alongside future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and a young Jeffrey Toobin, the prominent legal journalist.
I spotted the Tribe connection on Chesebro’s Linkedin profile a few weeks ago. When I reached out to Tribe to inquire about their relationship, Tribe said he had only learned this year that his former mentee had worked for Trump after reading a series of memos published in February by the New York Times.
“I was stunned to see that Ken Chesebro had wound up as part of Team Trump,” Tribe said in a phone interview earlier this month.
Chesebro is the earliest known example of the Trump campaign considering Jan. 6 as a target for its post-election legal efforts on paper. According to another memo obtained by the Jan. 6 Committee, he laid out in detail what Vice President Mike Pence should do to subvert the election in messages to Rudy Giuliani and Trump legal advisor John Eastman.
According to a second Times story published Wednesday evening, Chesebro told Eastman that “the odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
The effort to appoint pro-Trump electors is now reportedly being examined by federal prosecutors.
Chesebro declined to comment to TPM about whether he had been contacted by federal law enforcement in relation to his activities for the Trump campaign, and declined to comment on whether he complied with a subpoena he received from the Jan. 6 Committee in March.
When asked what kinds of events attorneys could stoke in order to get the attention of the justices after being read the Times “chaos” quote, Chesebro waved off the question, saying that of course any lawyer is concerned about how a case will play in public and with judges.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, it seems like election integrity is another area where politicians will get involved in the messaging. It’s unfortunate that this is such a focus of attention,” Chesebro said. “Hopefully there will be compromises over the next few years and people won’t have to worry about election integrity.”
When asked why he thought election integrity had become such a high-profile issue, Chesebro told TPM, “I don’t know enough about the field to comment.”
Contesting the Election
Chesebro told TPM that his work for Trump began with a request from an old friend of his named Jim Troupis, who contacted him on Nov. 10, 2020: Could he help out on the campaign’s litigation in Wisconsin? Troupis, a former Wisconsin judge whose law firm was hired to draw the state’s radical post-2010 gerrymander, was repping Trump in the state.
Chesebro agreed to help with a lawsuit that sought an extraordinary remedy which has now become familiar: disqualifying hundreds of thousands of ballots in the state’s two most Democratic counties.
He sent Troupis a memo laying out the alternate elector scheme for the first time on Nov. 18, per the New York Times. That memo would set the course for the Trump campaign’s post-court approach, which intensified the following month.
The campaign, Chesebro argued in his memo, did not have to fight for victory by the so-called “safe harbor” date, or by the date when the states certified their electors — Dec. 8, 2020. Jan. 6, 2021 was the real deadline for the Trump campaign, he suggested.
And to get there, the Trump campaign needed to make sure of one thing: that multiple slates of pro-Trump electors in states that the campaign baselessly claimed it had won would be sworn in.
Chesebro’s work for Trump shied away from some of the more outlandish claims that people in Trump’s orbit were latching on to, like Hugo Chavez manipulating the election results from beyond the grave. Instead, he focused on a more staid argument: that election measures taken to run the election in Wisconsin during COVID-19 invalidated Biden’s victory.
It drives at the same result as Sidney Powell and others with more high profile roles were seeking: the election was improperly run, and so Biden’s wins in key states were illegitimate. But it allowed Chesebro to try to bring the patina of elite law to a Trump campaign struggling to find attorneys who would work on its effort to overturn the election result.
Chesebro’s involvement also brought him back in touch with Eastman, a conservative attorney from the right-wing Claremont Institute who Chesebro worked with on a 2016 Supreme Court amicus brief that described birthright citizenship as a “vestige of feudalism.” Chesebro emphasized to TPM that he had no contact with Eastman from the time of that 2016’s case’s resolution until 2020, when he began to represent Trump, and declined to comment on whether he communicated with Eastman while representing Trump.
The Cheese
I first reached out to Chesebro earlier this month. We ended up speaking over the phone multiple times and meeting twice in Manhattan, where he recently bought a penthouse apartment. In a Starbucks, in Central Park and on a call as late as Thursday morning, he defended his work for the Trump campaign.
Chesebro would alternately decline to discuss the content of memos released by the New York Times and Jan. 6 Committee, citing legal privilege concerns, point towards general arguments around the principles of legal advocacy, or make broader cultural points about the importance of free and open debate.
To that last point, Chesebro portrayed his decision to join the Trump campaign’s legal efforts in Wisconsin and then at the Supreme Court to me as partly a reaction to what he saw as something that sounds suspiciously like cancel culture. He was dismayed to see Democrats pressuring companies to drop law firms who agreed to work for the campaign’s post-election efforts.
“Plaintiffs have difficulty getting the best lawyers to push back against top lawyers who work for corporations,” Chesebro told TPM, a point that he said was impressed on him while in law school by Charlie Nesson, the Harvard Law professor. “And, in a way, it was very similar in November 2020 — the Trump campaign had difficulty getting talent to go up against the Biden team.”
Chesebro has the lawyer’s trait of speaking not in phrases or sentences, but in fleshed out paragraphs —- coupled with a flat, focused intonation that drills at his interlocutor.
When I brought up a particularly controversial moment, or pointed out that many people regard arguments in favor of Trump’s efforts to stay in power as a fundamental breach of the will expressed by American voters in 2020, he took a few tacks: one was to cite somewhat similar arguments made by liberals, like a column by Van Jones and Larry Lessig in favor of submitting alternate elector slates in Pennsylvania in case the state took weeks to count.
Chesebro is thorough to the point of obsession —- he followed up many arguments he made during interviews by sending me multiple legal briefs and court records from his archives.
“To the extent that I or any other attorney involved in the 2020 presidential contest, on either side, has come under criticism for identifying possible strategic options that might come into play under various scenarios that could develop, it should be kept in mind that this is what lawyers do,” Chesebro wrote in a supplementary statement he provided to me. “It is the duty of any attorney to leave no stone unturned in examining the legal options that exist in a particular situation.”
It wasn’t only his apparently central importance to how the Trump campaign formulated some of the ideas that led to Jan. 6 that interested me. It was also that he didn’t appear to fit the profile of a Trump lawyer.
While Eastman has his Federalist Society and Claremont Institute credentials, Chesebro was a mentee of Tribe. He continued to work with Tribe on liberal cause litigation after graduation, throughout the 1990s. He lacks political experience, but brings many of the standard elite credentials that were missing from nearly all of the Trump 2020 legal team.
“Ah, The Cheese,” Toobin told me with a chuckle, recalling a law school nickname for Chesebro, a Wisconsin native.
“The people who worked for Larry were by and large ideologically sympatico with Larry, and his politics were well known,” Toobin remarked, saying he recalled running into Chesebro working in the Harvard Law school library in the years after graduation. “That’s why it’s so surprising to see Ken in this role. I just sort of assumed that he was some kind of a Democrat.”
At a hearing in the Wisconsin case, the New York Times reported, one justice remarked that the lawsuit had focused on two counties — the “most nonwhite, urban” areas — while seeking to invalidate votes statewide. Another told Troupis that the case “smacks of racism.”
Chesebro and the team of Trump attorneys ultimately lost that bid to block Biden’s win in the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Dec. 14 in a 4-3 ruling, the end of the line for Chesebro’s efforts to push the alternate elector scheme through the courts.
But another plan was already in place. Five days earlier, the New York Times reported, Chesebro had authored a memo for the Trump campaign laying out the steps that pro-Trump electors in each state that Biden had won would need to take in order to serve as potential alternates on Jan. 6.
When Dec. 14 and Trump’s loss in the state came around, the electors were ready. Wisconsin’s Republican electors met and cast votes for Trump — per Chesebro’s memo, ready for the state to go back and transmit the Trump, and not Biden, electoral votes to Congress.
“If you don’t know for sure the final result by December 14, it can be prudent to have multiple electors cast the ballot,” Chesebro told TPM.
“That kind of — as I would call it, Alice in Wonderland or off-the-wall theory shocked me because of its willingness to trash democracy, but not because of its weirdness,” Tribe told me. “Ken would come up with weird ideas from time to time, quite weird ideas, and seem to lack judgment about whether they were sound or not, and didn’t really care about whether they were legitimate.”
Chesebro maintains that “material deviations from the state statutes’ ‘ in Wisconsin’s 2020 election cast the result into serious doubt. But by that point, courts around the country had thrown out similar arguments. Wisconsin wasn’t going to put Trump ahead.
By that time, Tribe told me, “it was quite clear that claims Trump really had won the election were quite wild and not to be accepted by courts.”
The Aftermath
Federal investigators are now reportedly examining the effort to install pro-Trump electors. The Jan. 6 Committee issued Chesebro a subpoena in March, and has obtained at least some of the memos and emails that he wrote for the campaign.
The arguments were nothing if not creative. One, released in litigation involving Eastman, shows Chesebro telling Rudy Giuliani on Dec. 13 that Pence should recuse himself because he has a “conflict of interest” due to his being on a ticket whose defeat Trump had refused to concede.
From there, he argued that the president of the Senate, acting in Pence’s place, should assert the right to make judgments about what to do in the case of “conflicting votes” as a way to gain “leverage” for further scrutiny of the election.
I asked Chesebro about criticism around these moves — weren’t they going beyond the will of the voters?
“If there is a non-frivolous argument concerning the meaning of the Electoral Count Act or its constitutionality, it’s legitimate to press that and let the courts decide,” Chesebro replied. “We have a system where the courts ultimately resolve these issues, and people can live with how the courts resolve them.”
Chesebro declined to comment on his contacts with Trump himself or members of his inner circle. He told TPM that he had never had any contact with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is under scrutiny for her activism to push the alternate elector scheme.
Tribe and Chesebro are no longer close. Tribe said that the most recent substantial contact the two had had was Chesebro offering to get Tribe involved in Bitcoin investments in 2019.
Before the Bitcoin suggestion, Tribe said, Chesebro had assisted him on Bush v. Gore in 2000.
Tribe characterized Chesebro as something of a legal nihilist — someone with a penchant for helping “the little guy,” but who remained focused on the “gamesmanship” aspect of the law.
“I doubt that he cared whether the arguments were sound or not as long as that goal could be met of helping Trump to win the election,” Tribe said. “That’s probably why I wasn’t too surprised to learn that he became very involved with Bitcoin.”
Given a chance to respond to Tribe’s criticisms, Chesebro told me in a statement, “Lawyers have an ethical obligation to explore every possible argument that might benefit their clients. In my work for the Trump-Pence campaign, I fulfilled that ethical obligation.”
When I mentioned to Chesebro that Tribe had told me about his work on Bush v. Gore, Chesebro jumped on it.
Chesebro provided TPM with a memo he wrote, dated November 2000, for Gore’s legal team, in which he argued that the Electoral Count Act had the potential to put Al Gore in a tricky position on Jan. 6, 2001: If Gore won the Supreme Court case and, as vice president, presided over the tallying of Florida’s electoral votes, certified by then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R), he would find himself “casting the deciding vote, to break a tie.”
“This is the kind of wargaming that attorneys do,” Chesebro told TPM, suggesting that his work for the Trump campaign and for Gore sprung from the same well of zeal and curiosity.
It was a surreal reflection, in Chesebro’s telling, of the Trump campaign’s position pre-Jan. 6, and one that conveniently overlooked the 537-vote margin that Bush won Florida by in 2000, compared to the seven states that Trump was contesting.
“That’s on the face of it, bullshit,” Tribe told me. “Not to parse words too closely, all of that was well before — all of that was prior to the electoral vote. What Ken is doing in the current situation is trying to unsettle the electoral vote counting process.”
I asked Chesebro what he made of arguments that letting a debate about unsound ideas go on in Congress legitimized them.
“I understand the concern,” he replied. “But as a lawyer I have to think, the more debate the better, and that usually the side with the better argument will end up winning, at least over the long term.”
Did the side with the better argument win in 2020?
“Not in Wisconsin.”
Josh Kovensky is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.
“We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”