It’s a doozy
The December 6 “Fraudulent Elector Memo” written by attorney Kenneth Chesebro (Co-Conspirator 5) first appears in Para. 54 of the Jan. 6 indictment of Donald Trump. But the outline for the fraudulent electors scheme was not available for reading until The New York Times obtained and released it Tuesday evening.
It’s a doozy, and one the Jan. 6 Committee did not uncover:
“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.
No kidding?
As Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe notes, “Judge David Carter called the 2020 election interference scheme ‘a coup in search of a legal theory.’”
Lawyer John Eastman (Co-Conspirator 2) has received more press coverage than Chesebro. Eastman spoke at the Stop the Steal rally just before Trump supporters breached, overran and ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But Chesebro now appears as the brains behind the fake electors plot.
Prosecutors are still hearing evidence related to the investigation, even after charges were leveled against Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The House committee last year released emails its investigators obtained showing that Mr. Chesebro had sent copies of the two previously reported memos, one from Nov. 18 and another from Dec. 9, to allies in the states working on the fake electors plan.
But he did not attach his Dec. 6 memo to those messages, which laid out a more audacious idea: having Mr. Pence take “the position that it is his constitutional power and duty, alone, as president of the Senate, to both open and count the votes.” That is, he could resolve the dispute over which slate was valid by counting the alternate electors for Mr. Trump even if Mr. Biden remained the certified winner of their states.
Chesebro suggests quoting statements by liberals — including what Tribe calls “a gross misrepresentation” of his work — as part of a messaging strategy for defending the plot. Given their statements, Chesebro claims “it would be the height of hypocrisy for Democrats to resist Jan. 6 as the real deadline, or to suggest that Trump and Pence would be doing anything particularly controversial …”
He suggests that fake electors in six contested states meet (preferably in private), vote, and transmit their documents on the same day (Dec. 14) and in parallel with the legitimate electors. Team Trump must then ensure that there are “on January 6, in each of the six States, at least one lawsuit, in either federal or state court, which might plausibly, if allowed to proceed to completion” award the state to Trump or deny it to Joe Biden. Thus would the plotters provide a pretext for denying Biden 270 electoral votes on Jan. 6 and have alternate slates at the ready.
The “Fraudulent Elector Memo” is stunning and only six pages. Read the whole thing.
Tribe’s rebuttal is here.