New emails detail Trump lawyer’s 'underhanded strategy' to steal 2020 election: analysis

06 March 2024

Attorney Kenneth Chesebro, a co-defendant in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' election interference/RICO case against former President Donald Trump, dodged a possible prison sentence when he reached a plea agreement with her office.

As part of the plea deal, Chesebro must fully cooperate with Willis' team — and that includes being forthcoming about his role in the fake electors scheme and efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's victory in Georgia.

But Georgia wasn't the only state where Chesebro wanted Trump to receive electoral votes that Biden won.

On March 5, the Associated Press reported that as part of a civil lawsuit settlement in Wisconsin, Chesebro and former judge Jim Troupis "turned over more than 1400 pages of documents, e-mails and text messages, along with photos and video, offering a detailed account of the scheme's origins in Wisconsin."

In an opinion column published the following day, MSNBC's Hayes Brown points to this settlement as a troubling illustration of how dangerous the fake electors scheme was.

"Wisconsin was one of several key swing states, including Michigan and Georgia, where Trump's allegations of fraud quickly ran into the reality of the courtroom," Brown explains. "But, as he would hash out in his messages with former judge Jim Troupis, Chesebro found it better to think of the lawsuits challenging Biden's win as a convenient pretext for a more novel, underhanded strategy."

Brown continues, "Ongoing litigation would leave the election’s outcome in question when the Electoral College was required to meet on December 8, 2020; Republican electors in several states where Trump lost would also cast their votes that day — a supposed precaution should the campaign's lawsuits eventually win out. But, as Chesebro suggested early on, those fraudulent votes would allow Republican-controlled state legislatures to demand Congress count the 'alternate slates,' rather than those cast for Biden."

The MSNBC journalist stresses that Chesebro's actions went way beyond being a mere political "stunt."

"A 'stunt' is meant for show," Brown writes. "It seems, though, that the Trump campaign was hoping its plan would be consequential; in other words, it lacked the presumption of failure…. Even once the Supreme Court made it clear that it wouldn't step in to save Trump's doomed legal challenges, it wasn't the end of Chesebro's scheme."

Brown continues, "Instead, it simply merged with that of lawyer John Eastman, who argued in his own set of memos that Vice President Mike Pence should use the alternate slates that Chesebro had fostered to either throw the election for Trump or kick the matter back to GOP-controlled state legislatures."

Read Hayes Brown's full MSNBC op-ed at this link.

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