A lawyer allied with President Donald Trump first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election in a previously unknown internal campaign memo that prosecutors are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy. The...
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The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Biden’s victory. In mid-December, the false Trump electors could go through the motions of voting as if they had the authority to do so. Then, on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally count those slates of votes, rather than the official and certified ones for Joe Biden.
“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,” 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, 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,” 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.”
The false electors scheme was perhaps the most sprawling of Trump’s various efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It involved lawyers working on his campaign’s behalf across seven states, dozens of electors willing to claim that Trump — not Biden — had won their states, and open resistance from some of those potential electors that the plan could be illegal or even “appear treasonous.” In the end, it became the cornerstone of the indictment against Trump.
While another lawyer — John Eastman, described as Co-Conspirator 2 in the indictment — became a key figure who championed the plan and worked more directly with Trump on it, Chesebro was an architect of it. He was first enlisted by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin to help with a legal challenge to the results there
But he did not attach his Dec. 6 memo to those messages, which laid out a more audacious idea: having 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 Trump even if Biden remained the certified winner of their states.
The indictment also accuses Trump and his unindicted co-conspirators of acting with deception in recruiting some of the fraudulent electors. That included telling some of them that their votes for Trump would be used only if a court ruling handed victory in their state to Trump.
The Dec. 6 memo dovetails with that approach. Chesebro wrote that Pence could count purported Trump electors from a state as long as there was a lawsuit pending challenging Biden’s declared victory there. But he also proposed telling the public that the Trump electors were meeting Dec. 14 merely as a precaution in case “the courts (or state legislatures) were to later conclude that Trump actually won the state.”