As more ‘fake voters’ are charged, a key witness comes forward

Twenty-four of the so-called fake Trump voters are now facing criminal charges in three different states, and one of the legal architects of the scheme to use them, Kenneth Chesebro, has emerged as a witness in all cases.

Mr. Chesebro, a Harvard-educated lawyer, helped develop the plan to target Republicans in battleground states defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020. were won, to present themselves as Trump voters. The plan was part of an effort to have Congress block or delay Biden’s Electoral College victory on January 6, 2021.

Earlier this week, a Nevada grand jury indicted six former Trump voters, including top Republican Party leaders, on charges of falsifying and filing fraudulent documents.

In August, a grand jury in Atlanta indicted former President Donald J. Trump and 18 allies, including three who were fake voters in Georgia. And in July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed charges against all 16 Republicans who ran as Trump electors in her state. (In October, she dropped the charges against one of them, James Renner, in exchange for his cooperation.)

Interest in Mr. Chesebro increased after he pleaded guilty in October to a single felony count of conspiracy in Georgia and was sentenced to five years’ probation. He was originally charged with seven felonies, including one charge under the state’s racketeering law.

“Everything happened after the plea deal in Georgia,” said Manny Arora, one of Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers in Georgia. “Everyone wants to talk about the memos and who he communicated with.”

The lawyer pointed to memos Mr. Chesebro wrote after the 2020 election that outlined what he called “a bold, controversial strategy” that was likely to be rejected by the Supreme Court. Since his settlement in Georgia, Mr. Arora said, Mr. Chesebro has been interviewed in Detroit by Ms. Nessel’s office and was also listed as a witness this week in the Nevada indictment.

When asked whether Mr. Chesebro had entered into agreements to avoid prosecution in the various jurisdictions, another of his attorneys, Robert Langford, said, “that would be a sensible criminal defense, that’s typically what you do,” adding that he “didn’t want to comment on anything that’s happening in any of the states.

Mr. Chesebro is also expected next week in Arizona, where the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has been conducting her own investigation into the electoral plot for several months, people with knowledge of that probe said. (Mr. Chesebro’s appearances in Michigan and Arizona were CNN reported this earlier And The Washington Post.)

Mr. Chesebro worked for Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount but later came to support Mr. Trump. He and another lawyer, John Eastman, are seen as the main legal architects of the plan to use fake electors in swing states that Trump lost, a development that left some of his old colleagues scratching their heads.

“When the world changed and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him,” Lawrence Tribe, Mr. Gore’s chief legal adviser and Chesebro’s mentor, said recently.

Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers continue to defend his conduct in general, saying he was merely a lawyer providing legal advice during the 2020 election. But Mr. Arora said the legal team in Georgia decided to enter a plea deal because the document signed by the fake voters in Georgia contained no language explaining that what they signed was a contingency plan pending a lawsuit.

“They didn’t do that in Georgia,” he explained. “Because he was involved and that language was not in there, we decided to argue for that count. It wasn’t because the whole thing was fraudulent or that this was a scam.”

The studies of the three state voters have taken very different approaches.

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, has filed a broad racketeering case targeting Mr. Trump and top aides such as Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal attorney, and Mark Meadows, who served as head of the White House. were involved. staff. Ms. Willis reached cooperation agreements with most of the fake voters before charges were filed.

The cases in Michigan and Nevada are about the voters themselves, not those who supported their actions, although Ms. Nessel has said her investigation remains open.

The underlying claims of widespread election fraud that gave rise to the so-called false election manifesto have never been substantiated. New legal filings this week from Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who sued Mr. Trump in his own federal election investigation, underscore the illegality of Mr. made baseless claims about President Barack Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney.

Mr. Trump made similar statements after his 2016 Iowa caucus loss he claimed that Senator Ted Cruz “didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” and after he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, who he says won “if you subtract the millions of people who voted illegally.”