A 'trove' of newly obtained docs detail Trump lawyers’ scheme to keep him in the White House: report

13 February 2024

As he moves closer and closer to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump continues to face four criminal prosecutions and a variety of civil lawsuits. Two of the criminal prosecutions — one by special counsel Jack Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the other by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis for the State of Georgia — involve Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

In Willis' case, some of the co-defendants are attorneys who joined him in falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him — including Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.

In an article published on February 12, Talking Points Memo's Josh Kovensky reports that newly uncovered documents illustrate the role that attorneys played in Trump's plan to stay in the White House despite losing the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden.

"In late 2020, a group of conservative movement attorneys set out to build a legal pathway by which Donald Trump could stay in power, having lost the election," Kovensky explains. "We've known about the outcome of their work for three years now: how it led to the violence of January 6, and fed the dream of Trump's supporters that he might continue to serve after January 20, 2021. But TPM can now reveal the ways in which their theorizing, in early stages, went even further than previously known, imagining a January 6 that lasted for not hours but days, an intervention by Supreme Court justices that they presumed to be loyal to President Trump, and a vice president who upended his constitutional duties, allowing the U.S. to descend into chaos."

A "trove of documents" that TPM has obtained, according to Kovensky, "details many of the conversations among Trump campaign lawyers, and, in particular, the theories offered by Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who worked with the campaign in the months leading up to January 6."

Chesebro, like Ellis and Powell, has flipped on Trump and agreed to fully cooperate with the Fulton County DA's Office in order to avoid prison. But in 2020, he was determined to help keep Trump in the White House.

"Chesebro, an appellate lawyer, provided a legal framework in which, he contended, Trump could still win — or at least cause enough confusion and chaos that the conservative Supreme Court would have to get involved in picking the president," Kovensky reports. "His plan envisioned several gambits which have now become familiar building blocks of the legal portion of the coup attempt, and the basis for criminal charges across the country: creating slates of fake electors, having Mike Pence refuse to count Biden's electoral votes on January 6, and ultimately tossing the whole issue to the High Court."

Kovensky notes that "TPM obtained the trove of documents after Ken Chesebro supplied e-mails, texts, and memos from his time with the Trump campaign to Michigan prosecutors in Attorney General Dana Nessel (D)’s office, which has been investigating the fake electors scheme."

The reporter adds, however, that "the thousands of e-mails, memos and texts only represent what Chesebro experienced directly and what he chose to share."

In other words, Trump lawyers' efforts to overturn the election results went way beyond the documents TPM has obtained.

"The records are not comprehensive of the Trump campaign's entire effort to reverse the President’s loss," Kovensky points out. "They reflect what Chesebro provided as he sought to avoid further prosecution, and what reached TPM."

Read the full Talking Points Memo report at this link.

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