Former President Donald Trump faces two parallel attempts to hold him accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election results. By choosing to indict Trump alone, and none of his unnamed co-conspirators, special counsel Jack Smith and his team have taken a top-down approach to the scheme. In contrast, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia opted to charge Trump alongside 18 other defendants and has been racking up plea deals as some former accomplices agree to become witnesses for the prosecution.
Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who helped initiate the “fake electors” plot, is one of those former allies who has been cooperating not just in Georgia but in other states as well. A recent report from CNN on his attempts to prevent further charges reminds us that there are still more ongoing attempts in several states to bring the election plotters to justice. And as those cases work their way through the system, Trump will find himself in more and more of a bind as the already ample evidence against him only grows.
As those cases work their way through the system, Trump will find himself in more and more of a bind as the already ample evidence against him only grows.
It was Chesebro who first kicked off a central component to the plot to keep Trump in office. A Wisconsin lawyer who the Trump campaign tapped during its legal challenges to the election results, Chesebro argued in a series of memos that the pro-Trump slate of electors in states he lost should cast their votes anyway and send them to Congress. In doing so, those slates would provide “the opportunity to debate the election irregularities in Congress, and to keep alive the possibility that the votes could be flipped to Trump,” as he put it in an email obtained by the Jan. 6 Committee.
Even after it was clear that the legal efforts to reverse the votes had failed, Chesebro and others still encouraged Trump to keep hope alive until Jan. 6. According to audio that CNN obtained, Chesebro told investigators in Michigan that in a Dec. 16, 2020, Oval Office meeting, he was one of several Wisconsin lawyers who had gathered for a photo-op with the president now that the challenge in the state was dead. But when the conversation turned to Arizona, another state Trump lost, Cheseboro went off-script:
“I ended up explaining that Arizona was still hypothetically possible — because the alternate electors had voted,” Chesebro told Michigan state investigators, later adding that this made it “clear (to Trump) in a way that maybe it hadn’t been before, that we had until January 6 to win.”
Trump latched onto that false hope, according to Chesebro, angering the other attendees and sending the president down a path that would lead to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He also named names to the Michigan investigators, fingering former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others as the ones who turned his theories into reality. (An attorney for Chesebro confirmed to NBC News that he was present in Detroit for a meeting with Michigan state prosecutors last week and said that there was no reason to question the authenticity of the recordings.)
It’s no surprise that Chesebro is now singing like a bird; he’s right to worry about facing charges in other states. Among his co-defendants in Georgia are three of the state’s fake electors. Most of the others managed to take immunity deals with Willis, but other states’ investigations into fake electors are ongoing. Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel in July filed charges against the 16 Republicans who went along with the fake elector plot. (Charges against one of the fake electors were subsequently dropped after he agreed to cooperate fully with the investigation.) Last week, a grand jury in Nevada indicted another six fake electors. Somewhat ironically, in Wisconsin, the subject of Chesebro’s original memo, the 10 fake electors recently settled a civil suit by affirming that Joe Biden had won in 2020 and agreeing not to serve as electors in any election where Trump is on the ballot.
It’s no surprise that Chesebro is now singing like a bird; he’s right to worry about facing charges in other states.
Chesebro is reportedly now cooperating in all of those probes as well as Arizona's, where an investigation was launched in July. It’s not clear whether Chesebro is also sharing information with Smith for the federal case, in which Chesebro is an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator. But even if he isn’t, it seems likely that Smith will benefit from the details that Chesebro is providing state-level prosecutors.
The trial in the federal election interference case is set to go before the Fulton County trial, though there are now some questions about the timing. The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether to intervene and rule on the constitutional questions surrounding the prosecution, but Smith is still hoping for a March trial date. Willis, meanwhile, is still aiming to begin her trial next August.
Willis and Smith haven’t been directly collaborating, as Willis made abundantly clear before announcing her sprawling indictment. But given the overlap between the two, it’s likely that they’ve spoken to many of the same people. And the more information that is publicly available, the better it is for Smith’s case — and the worse it is for Trump. The overall effect, then, is that as Smith continues his assault from the front, the myriad of other cases that are still ongoing are squeezing Trump even further, leaving him less and less wiggle room to avoid the consequences of his plot.
That isn’t to say that Trump won’t once again find some way to dodge justice. But never before has he faced so many legal threats on so many fronts in so short a time frame. Even as he’s attempted to use that time crunch to his advantage, desperately hoping that a win next November will shield him once more, he has already taken more Ls in the courts than the political system has been willing to dole out to him. The odds have never been worse for Trump, especially with the number of former friends he has out there looking to save their own skins.
CORRECTION (Dec. 15, 2023, 3:30 p.m. ET): A previous version on this article misspelled the last name of the attorney who spoke with Michigan prosecutors. His name is Kenneth Chesebro, not Cheseboro.
