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Tag: fake electors
With Chesebro Plea After Powell, Fani Willis Is On A Roll

With Chesebro Plea After Powell, Fani Willis Is On A Roll

Now we know what Fani Willis and her team of prosecutors were doing while newspapers and cable TV chryons were headlining that Sidney Powell’s co-defendant, Kenneth Chesebro, had not copped a plea deal with prosecutors. Willis and her team were videotaping Chesebro’s proffer of written, electronic, and oral information he could provide to prosecutors in return for a sentence of three to six years of probation, community service, and a fine for pleading guilty to a single felony charge in Georgia. Chesebro had faced seven counts involving his participation in a scheme to organize fake electors to file falsified electoral ballots for Donald Trump with the National Archives and the President of the Senate in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election on January 6, when the Congress met to certify electoral ballots and declare Joe Biden winner of the 2020 election.

Willis has faced criticism ever since she empaneled an investigatory grand jury to look into what laws were broken by Trump and his compatriots in Georgia as they attempted to overturn the results of the state’s presidential election, won by Joe Biden. Willis was foundering, critics said, taking too much time on witnesses who refused subpoenas and had to be sued to get their testimony.

Then in August, when Willis finally brought her indictment against Trump and 18 co-defendants, critics said it was all just too much. How does she expect to get 19 defendants into one courtroom and run a prosecution against them? It was too unwieldly, many said, an overreach by a publicity-hungry local prosecutor trying to burnish her reputation by going after the former president, who was already facing indictment by the Special Counsel for committing many of the same crimes.

Then the Kraken cracked, and 24 hours later, so did the heretofore loyal Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro.

Reading the 98 pages of the indictment of Trump and his 18 co-defendants, it’s hard to keep up with Chesebro, he was so busy sending emails, calling co-conspirators, and meeting with John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani and members of the Trump reelection team. After Trump lost more than 60 of his legal challenges to results of the election in battleground states, something had to be done.

And then came John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro to the rescue with their Hail Mary scheme to put together slates of fake presidential electors for Trump in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia and use them to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College ballots in Congress on January 6, 2021. The fake electoral ballots had to be signed in the states by December 14, when the real electors met and cast their ballots for Biden. Then the fake electoral ballots had to be filed with the National Archives, and transmitted to the President of the Senate -- Vice President Mike Pence -- in time for the meeting of the Congress.

Busy, busy, busy were Ken and Rudy and John and Donald. From the Fulton County indictment:

Act 39: “A memorandum was written by KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO to James R. Troupis, an attorney associated with the Trump Campaign, and advocates for the position that Trump presidential elector nominees in Wisconsin should meet and cast electoral votes for DONALD JOHN TRUMP on December 14, 2020, despite the fact that DONALD JOHN TRUMP lost the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Wisconsin.”

Act 47: “KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO stated in the e-mail that certain individuals associated with the Trump Campaign asked him ‘to help coordinate with the other contested States, to help with logistics of the electors in other States hopefully joining in casting their votes on Monday.’”

Act 49: “On or about the 10th day of December 2020, KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO sent an email with attached documents to Arizona Republican Party Executive Director Greg Safsten and others. The documents were 'to be used by Trump presidential elector nominees in Arizona for the purpose of casting electoral votes for DONALD JOHN TRUMP on December 14, 2020, despite the fact that DONALD JOHN TRUMP lost the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Arizona. This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

Act 50: “KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO sent an e-mail to Republican Party of Wisconsin Chairman Brian Schimming with proposed language for documents to be used by Trump presidential elector nominees in Wisconsin for the purpose of casting electoral votes for DONALD JOHN TRUMP on December 14, 2020, despite the fact that DONALD JOHN TRUMP lost the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Wisconsin.”

In Acts 51 through 53, Chesebro sent emails with proposed fake elector documents to officials in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia furthering the fake elector scheme.

Act 58: “KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO sent an e-mail to Jim DeGraffenreid and stated that ‘the purpose of having the electoral votes sent in to Congress is to provide the opportunity to debate the election irregularities in Congress, and to keep alive the possibility that the votes could be flipped to Trump.’”

In Acts 59, 60, and 61, Chesebro sent more fake elector documents to members of the Trump campaign to be used by fake electors in Georgia and other states.

In Act 64, Chesebro conspired with Giuliani and a member of the Trump campaign to ensure that the media was not notified of a meeting of Trump fake electors in Wisconsin.

In Act 69, Chesebro sent the same package of suggested electoral ballot documents to co-defendant Michael Roman with the proviso that the documents were to be used in the Nevada fake elector scheme.

Act 70: “KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO sent an e-mail to RUDOLPH WILLIAM LOUIS GIULIANI with the subject ‘PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL Brief notes on President of the Senate strategy.’ In the email, KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO outlined multiple strategies for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, the day prescribed by law for counting votes cast by the duly elected and qualified presidential electors from Georgia and the other states. In the email, KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO stated that the strategies outlined by him were ‘preferable to allowing the Electoral Count Act to operate by its own terms.’” (Its “own terms” being following the law and living up to the full meaning of how elections are certified in the Constitution.)

In Acts 71 and 72, Chesebro conspired with Giuliani and Roman to further the fake elector scheme in Georgia.

In Act 94, Chesebro was the recipient of an email from John Eastman laying out a strategy to avoid having the fake elector scheme considered in a hearing by the judiciary committee on the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act. They were afraid a hearing might raise issues the Trump campaign did not want to bring up about their scheme to interfere with the Electoral College, especially if their scheme ended up before the Supreme Court.

Act 109: “On or about the lst day of January 2021, KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO sent an email to JOHN CHARLES EASTMAN and unindicted co-conspirator Individual 3, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury. In the e-mail, KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO outlined strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, the day prescribed by law for counting votes cast by the duly elected and qualified presidential electors from Georgia and the other states.”

Act 124: Another memo from Chesebro to Giuliani and Eastman on Jan. 4, 2021, outlining “multiple strategies for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”

Listening as Chesebro’s plea deal was read aloud in Fulton County court on Friday morning, all the names outlined above in the indictment rang out loudly: TRUMP, GIULIANI, EASTMAN, ROMAN. The criminality of the fake elector scheme was mentioned multiple times. Chesebro was asked again and again if he understood the charges against him and the criminal count to which he was pleading guilty. Of course he did. Chesebro, bless his black little conspiratorial Republican heart, is a graduate of Harvard Law School.

After prosecutors outlined the plea deal and Chesebro pled guilty, his lawyer, Scott Grubman, tried to suggest that because his client had pleaded guilty to only one count, somehow that proved he wasn’t a key player in the fake elector scheme. The plea deal “proves that he was not and never was the architect of any sort of fake elector plan or anything like that,” Grubman told reporters. This was after Grubman and his client had spent the last two months trying to come up with a strategy to defend against the “Acts” in the indictment I’ve outlined above. The strategy they ended up with was pleading guilty and agreeing to testify against any and all co-defendants, up to and including Donald John Trump.

The Washington Post reported today that Grubman said he would be surprised if Chesebro were to be called as a witness in cases against his co-defendants because, “He [Chesebro] didn’t snitch on anyone. He simply decided it was time for him to put this behind him and go on with his life.” And maybe, just maybe, Chesebro knew he did the crime and didn’t want to do the time.

With prosecutors and judges in other cases against Trump facing doxing, harassment of their spouses and families by Trump himself, and death threats from Trump followers, you have to wonder how Chesebro thought that pleading guilty to crimes he committed on behalf of Trump and offering to testify against the former president and others is going to allow him to “go on with his life” as if nothing happened.

Chesebro is applying to the court to allow him to serve out the time of his probation in Puerto Rico, where he has taken up residence. I guess he thinks that putting 1,038 miles of ocean between himself and Mar a Lago will keep the boogeyman and his minions away.

Ha!

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

The Many Crimes For Which Trump Hasn't Been Indicted -- Yet

The Many Crimes For Which Trump Hasn't Been Indicted -- Yet

How quickly we forget some of the outrageous acts Donald Trump was accused of committing while president. Let us review:

We begin with Trump’s incitement of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and his multi-pronged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election by illegal means. There was his attempt to strong-arm the Georgia secretary of state into “finding” enough votes that Trump would be declared victor in that state. Trump also called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and urged him to call a special session of the legislature at which the election results would be thrown out and a new slate of electors appointed. He called the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House and attempted to strong-arm him into doing the same thing with the Pennsylvania legislature.

Trump met in the White House with members of the Michigan legislature and urged them to take similar steps in their state. He also made numerous phone calls to state officials and legislators in other battleground states, trying to pressure them to throw out the results of the elections in their states and submit slates of fake electors to the Congress. These calls resulted in the appointment of fake slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump’s phone calls and meetings about submitting fake slates of electors would appear to be an overt act in furtherance of an attempt to interfere with a legitimate function of the government, i.e., the certification of electoral ballots on January 6.

Trump was behind attempts in several states to get law enforcement agencies to seize voting machines and turn them over to the Trump legal team. Voting machines were seized by officials or Trump-backers in Georgia and Colorado and voting machine data was copied by people working on Trump’s behalf in Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona. Tampering with voting data is illegal in every state in the Union, as is conspiracy to tamper with such data. Trump was in direct contact with his lawyer, Sidney Powell, who filed numerous lawsuits in battleground states on his behalf and was behind attempts to seize voting machines in Michigan and tampering with voting machine data in Nevada and Colorado.

Trump met with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn in the Oval Office where they discussed suspending the Constitution, imposing martial law, and “re-running” the election using the U.S. military. Discussing such illegal schemes amounts to a conspiracy to overthrow the legitimate functions of the federal government, and the conspiracy need not bear fruit, i.e., be carried out, in order for an indictment for engaging in the conspiracy to be brought. The plot to impose martial law went far enough and was taken seriously enough that on December 18, Army Chief of Staff General James McConville and Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy issued a joint statement telling all active-duty Army forces that "There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

And then of course there is the matter of Trump’s theft of government documents from the White House and his refusal over a period of 18 months to return them to the federal government, specifically to the National Archives, where they belonged. He is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for having violated no less than three federal statutes involving obstruction of justice (he defied a subpoena and appears to have attempted to silence certain witnesses), mishandling of national security information (over 100 highly classified documents seized by the FBI from his office and residence at Mar a Lago) and the theft of the documents themselves.

There are unresolved allegations by the Mueller Report that Trump engaged in multiple acts of obstruction of justice and obstruction of a congressional committee. Mueller held that a sitting president could not be indicted and so dropped the matter. Trump isn’t president anymore. He’s indictable on every count of obstruction established by Mueller’s investigation. In case you forgot or haven’t checked lately, the Mueller investigation lasted nearly two years, from May of 2017 to March of 2019. The Mueller report itself survives, as does all the evidence his team of investigators painstakingly amassed, currently held by the National Archives.

The New York Times reported today that six countries spent more than $750,000 at the Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. while their officials were attempting to influence the Trump administration on behalf of their governments. The House Oversight Committee previously estimated that the Trump Hotel received as much as $3.7 million from foreign governments between 2017 and 2020. Trump refused to put his assets in a blind trust during his time in the presidency, instead turning over the running of his many businesses to his sons Eric and Donald Jr. and his daughter Ivanka. All the proceeds of Trump’s businesses go directly to Donald Trump as the sole owner of more than 500 separate companies under the umbrella of the Trump Organization.

The Trump Hotel, which was located in the Old Post Office building in Washington D.C. while Trump was president, is one of his companies, thus all profits derived from the hotel would accrue to his benefit. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause states: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. An emolument has been defined as anything of value including money. Trump’s profiting from monies spent at his hotel in Washington would appear to violate the U.S. Constitution, which is the Supreme Law of the Land.

And now we arrive at another late-breaking Trump crime. The New York Times also reported today that John Kelly, Trump’s second and longest-serving chief of staff, revealed to the paper that Trump had, on multiple occasions, attempted to have the IRS conduct audits of his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe. On other occasions, Trump discussed with Kelly having the Department of Justice and the IRS investigate Hillary Clinton, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who also owns The Washington Post), Peter Strzok, the lead FBI agent working on the Mueller investigation team, and Lisa Page, another FBI agent with whom Strzok was having an affair, and with whom he exchanged text messages critical of Trump.

No audits were conducted by the IRS on the incomes of either Comey or McCabe during the time Kelly was White House chief of staff. However, after Kelly left that position and Mark Meadows was appointed in his place, the IRS audited both Comey and McCabe, conducting a type of extensive audit described by experts as “an autopsy without being dead.”It is a violation of federal law for any federal official, including the president, “to request, directly or indirectly” that the IRS audit or conduct any kind of investigation of specific American taxpayers. Trump’s conversations with Kelly appear to fit the definition of that crime.

I’m sure I’ve missed something. Trump was a very busy man when it came to lining his own pockets, retaliating against political rivals and enemies, and attempting to either fix the results of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, or in the case of the 2020 election, overturn its results. He seems to have committed enough crimes while in office to make even the second most corrupt president in recent memory, Richard Nixon, swivel in his grave.

It appears likely at this writing that the Department of Justice will seek to indict Trump on multiple counts of interfering with government operations, the mishandling of national security information, and obstruction of justice. The DOJ has seated two grand juries in Washington D.C., where they have presented multiple witnesses over the past year. One grand jury is hearing evidence on Trump’s crimes surrounding January 6 and his attempts to overturn the election of 2020. The other grand jury is hearing evidence concerning his theft and mishandling of government-owned documents after he left office.

Which is precisely what matters today. Donald Trump, who believed he was invulnerable while he was president and so did pretty much anything he decided to do and damn the consequences, is now a civilian. He is, in a word, indictable, whether he makes himself a candidate in the next presidential election or not.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Panicked 'Fake Electors' Ask Judge To Remove Willis From Georgia Probe

Panicked 'Fake Electors' Ask Judge To Remove Willis From Georgia Probe

The ongoing investigation in Georgia into the Former President Trump and his associates’ efforts to influence the state’s general election results has picked up steam in recent weeks, ensnaring seven Trump associates and the fake electors who sought to overturn the electoral college results.

In a recent court filing Tuesday, a group of 11 fake Georgia electors asked a judge to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from her investigation into Trump and his allies’ attempted influence in the state’s election result.

Last month, Willis’ office alerted all 16 fake electors that they were “targets” of the Georgia election investigation and could face charges. The alternate Republican elector group comprised the Georgia GOP Chair David J. Shafer, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor Burt Jones, county-level Republican officials, a former state lawmaker, and local conservative activists.

The judge presiding over the special grand jury aiding Willis’ investigation, Robert McBurney of the Superior Court of Fulton County, previously refused to quash subpoenas for all electors. However, last month, McBurney stopped Willis from investigating Jones because her appearance at a fundraiser for Jones’ Democratic opponent constituted a “conflict of interest.”

The group seeking Willis’ disqualification argued in the court filing that they were "inextricably intertwined" with Jones and beseeched the court to "reconsider its order limiting the scope of the DA and her office's disqualification and instead order that the disqualification applies to the entire investigation and all subsequent proceedings," CNN reported Wednesday.

"Indeed, because Senator Jones has been removed from this investigation, there is arguably an even greater likelihood that the officers of his campaign partners, his running mates, his financial supporters, and his key political allies could be treated even more harshly," the court filing read, according to CNN.

The fake electors asked McBurney to at least curtail Willis’ power to investigate them as he reduced her power to probe Jones if he was unwilling to disqualify her from the case.

The request is the latest development in the controversy surrounding Willis’ fundraiser for Charlie Bailey, the Democratic candidate for Georgia lieutenant governor, which the district attorney’s lawyers argued in previous court filings “provides no basis for disqualification nor amounts to a conflict of interest in overseeing the grand jury,” per CNN.

For months, Atlanta-area prosecutors have presented troves of evidence and witness testimony to the special grand jury in an inquiry that has swept up several top Trump allies, including former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and ex-Trump attorneys Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, both of whom authored memos falsely asserting that former Vice President Mike Pence could overturn electoral college results.

Last month, lawyers for several fake electors decried Willis’ investigation as a “publicity stunt” and promised to plead the Fifth Amendment in their depositions. The electors also labeled the investigation as “political interference” born of “local passion and prejudice.”

The electors aren’t the only Republicans battling to get out of testifying before the special grand jury.

Graham’s request to avoid grand jury testimony on immunity grounds was rejected Monday by a federal judge. On Wednesday, Ellis was ordered by a judge to appear for testimony before the special grand jury in Georgia.

Giuliani — who a judge ordered to testify even if he had to travel by “Greyhound” bus — appeared Wednesday in a grand jury session that lasted several hours and told reporters outside the courthouse that he had “satisfied his obligation.”