Texts reveal Trump co-defendant Chesebro’s role in ‘fake electors’ plot

Kenneth Chesebro was eager to help.

It was five days after the 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden was projected to defeat Donald Trump and win Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes. Trump’s campaign was requesting a recount. Chesebro, a little-known Harvard-educated lawyer, believed there were abnormalities in the election and emailed Jim Troupis, a friend and former Wisconsin judge, to offer to help with any of the campaign’s legal efforts.

Chesebro tacked on a thought at the end of his message. If there were still questions about irregularities while Wisconsin’s members of the electoral college cast their votes for Joe Biden, Congress might not have to accept the result of the election.

“If these various systemic abuses can be proven, and found to be pivotal in a court decision and/or detailed legislative findings, I don’t see why electoral votes certified by Evers (at least if court proceedings are still pending on the ‘safe harbor’ days) should be counted over an alternative slate sent in by the legislature, whose decisions should have primacy,” he wrote in an email on 8 November 2020. “At minimum, with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps also MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House.”

The short email, released Monday as part of a civil suit settlement, was the earliest seed of what would come to be known as the “fake electors” scheme – a national effort led by Chesebro to get Congress to reject legitimate slates of electors in favor of pro-Trump slates. It was a critical piece of Trump’s anti-democratic effort to overturn the 2020 election and now lies at the center of two criminal cases against the former president.

Chesebro has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to