Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who wrote a series of memos instructing President Donald Trump and his GOP cronies how they could overturn the 2020 Presidential Election by sending “false slates of presidential electors to Congress,” pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case in October 2023.
Chesebro pleaded to one felony count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents.
“Prosecutors recommended he serve five years of probation, pay restitution and complete community service, along with testifying at trial,” National Public Radio reported.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207417000/kenneth-chesebro-guilty-plea-georgia
Ken Chesebro was indicted in August with 18 other people, including Trump, in what prosecutors called a conspiracy to overturn the election results of the 2020 Presidential Election in Georgia.
Chesebro had already lost the respect of those who once knew him.
What happened?
Trump happened.
Chesebro once had a good life. He went to Harvard Law School with Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin, and Ron Klain, President Joe Biden’s first chief of staff. He worked for the eminent Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe for 20 years.
Chesebro was considered intelligent, low key, competent, well-regarded, and hard-working.
And then he got connected with Donald Trump who – despite no evidence, none – complained that he won the 2020 Presidential Election because, you, know the story.
Trump’s impact on people is not unlike bat guano.
One day psychologists will call this “Trump-shit crazy.”
Perhaps Chesebro spent too much time in the Trump cave. Perhaps he just wanted to show his Harvard friends that he was as smart as they were. But he wasn’t.
Chesebro told Tribe he had become a bincoin millionaire and perhaps this changed his politics. His politics moved decidedly to the far right – so far to the right that he began working with John Eastman, another Trump attorney who has been indicted.
Once on the road to ruin, there are no exit ramps.
Chesebo has been characterized as “the architect” of the scheme to send fake electors to Congress from states Trump had lost.
Tribe told the London Guardian newspaper that Chesebro’s work for him was that of a capable legal scholar.
“He’s smart enough to know full well that the scheme he helped to cook up – a conspiracy for fake electors to gather and sign phony pro-Trump ballots – was manifestly criminal,” Tribe said.
Chesebo, Tribe said, took his mentor’s words and manipulated them to justify his cooked-electors scheme.
“As a result of this misrepresentation, Chesebro put me in the (outlandish) camp of those suggesting that the Electoral Count Act can be disregarded,” Tribe said.
Chesebro could have listened to Tribe, perhaps the great constitutional theorist of our time, or he could’ve listened to John Eastman.
Perhaps he can claim mental incompetence and claim the untested psychological theory of “Trump-shit crazy.”
