Trump Lawyer Ken Chesebro Is Singing Like A Bird...With Amnesia

For someone who invented the fake electors scheme, Ken Chesebro sure seems to be responsible for putting a lot of them in jail.

Watch out, Michigan GOP! The Michigan Attorney just subpoenaed Twitter and Google for accounts associated with Trumpland lawyer Ken Chesebro, the brains behind the 2020 fake electors plot. Turns out, Chesebro just plum forgot to mention that he had a social media account where he discussed strategies to thwart the certification of Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Whoopsie doodle!

So if that guy wasn’t cooperating before, he sure is now!

Four years ago, Chesebro was a mild-mannered lawyer living in New York. Okay, he’d recently divorced his wife of thirty-odd years, taken up with a woman barely old enough to buy beer, and moved to a penthouse apartment. But it was a normal midlife crisis, the kind you’d expect from a nebbishy genius who hit it big in crypto in his late 50s. There was no indication that he was about to become the mastermind of a plot to overthrow the government, before diming out all of his MAGA compatriots to save his own nerdy bacon.

Chesebro was always a weirdo, spending much of his career holed up in the Harvard Law Library crafting appellate briefs. But after finding himself in another tax bracket, he seems to have decided that reactionary politics and regressive tax policy were good actually. And so, in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election he volunteered his services to the Trump campaign in his ancestral homeland of Wisconsin.

By November 13, 2020, Chesebro had already concocted a memo outlining the plot to “swear in” slates of swing state Trump electors in hopes of getting them blessed by state legislatures or courts, so they could be swapped out for the real ones. John Eastman seems to have been happy to take credit for having birthed this scheme, but in reality it was Chesebro who provided the intellectual heft, devoting his prodigious research skills to retconning a constitutional basis to disregard the Electoral Count Act. He also championed the brilliant plan for Mike Pence to simply refuse to open the envelopes from swing states, deploying a heretofore undiscovered power for the vice president to unilaterally decide elections.

Chesebro’s efforts earned him a cameo in Trump’s election interference indictment, wherein Special Counsel Jack Smith dubbed him “Un-indicted Co-Conspirator 5 …. an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”

But in Georgia, he wasn’t so lucky. Chesebro was charged with seven felonies, including conspiracy and forgery. He and Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell played a game of chicken with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office, demanding their right to a speedy trial in hopes that the prosecutors would blink and drop the charges, rather than try the case twice. But in October, when it became apparent that he’d bet wrong, Chesebro became the first Trump defendant to flip. He pled guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents, accepted five years of probation and agreed to testify at trial.

But Chesebro’s flipping had just begun. As part of his continuing plan stay out of jail, Chesebro had several lovely chats with prosecutors in Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada. And it worked! (So far.)

In July of 2023, Michigan AG Dana Nessel indicted the fake electors in her state. followed by Nevada AG Aaron Ford, who filed charges in November. Then last week, Arizona AG Kris Mayes charged eleven fake electors and seven Trumpworld henchmen, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Trump lackeys Boris Epshteyn and Christina Bobb.

As we discussed with Arizona litigator Tom Ryan on the most recent episode of the the Law and Chaos podcast, Chesebro’s loose lips are all over this indictment, which describes him as “Unindicted Coconspirator 4, an attorney for the Trump Campaign who drafted memos that encouraged having the fake Republican electors vote on December 14, 2020.” (Dammit, can’t even re-use the same jersey number!)

Chesebro not only provided the legal justification, but he also drafted the false electoral certificates and voting instructions for the fake electors once the campaign washed its hands of the exercise, leaving it in the hands of Giuliani, Epshteyn, and Chesebro. And yet Chesebro, whose alias appears 48 times in the document, remained uncharged.

But while the lawyer appears to have been highly forthcoming with investigators in multiple states, he did leave out one or two little details. Seems he omitted to mention that he maintained a Twitter account in 2020 and early 2021 under the handle BadgerPundit where he flogged election conspiracies and legal theories. And he claimed that the only messaging app he used was iMessage.

The account was first reported by Talking Points Memo in February, after which CNN picked up the baton, noting that Chesebro’s secret tweets undercut Chesebro’s attempt to downplay his own role in the crafting the radical legal reasoning which got Trump and his team to January 6.

For instance, Chesebro claimed that the Trump campaign “misled [him] into pushing alternate electors for a reason to win more time, to win litigation when there was, there was certainly more to the agenda.” He assured investigators that he always believed that the electoral certificates were contingent on recognition by a court or legislature and “didn’t think Pence should be involved at all.” But he tweeted from the BadgerPundit account that Trump could, “if necessary, rely on Pence to count only electoral votes sent in by the Republican legislatures, or count no disputed electoral votes, and throw the election to the House, which will elect Trump.”

Chesebro told the Michigan AG’s office that he “saw no scenario where Pence could count any vote for any state because there hadn’t been a court or a legislature in any state backing any of the alternate electors.” Meanwhile on Twitter he wrote that “Trump doesn’t have to get courts to declare him the winner of the vote. He just needs to convince Republican legislatures that the election was systemically rigged, but it’s impossible to run it again, so they should appoint electors instead.”

In February, when CNN first discovered the Twitter account, Chesebro’s lawyer Robert Langford attempted to differentiate between Chesebro THE LAWYER and Chesebro THE ONLINE JACKASS.

“When he was doing volunteer work for the campaign, he was very specific and hunkered-down into being the lawyer that he is, and gave specific kinds of legal advice based on things that he thought were legitimate legal challenges, versus BadgerPundit, who is this other guy over there, just being a goof,” Langford told CNN.

Was it the mild-mannered lawyer who showed up to the Capitol with Alex Jones on January 6? Or was it the BadgerPundit guy?

But transcripts kicked loose this week by CNN’s Marshall Cohen suggest that Chesebro’s forgetfulness was motivated in part by profound embarrassment at his online alter ego sliding into the DMs of conservative influencers for some truly cringe fangirling.

Chesebro reached out to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a bonkers MAGA fixture famous for riding in on horseback decked out in meaningless badges and bling; a conservative radio host from Wisconsin named Vicki McKenna; and Jim Hoft, the man behind MAGA trollsite The Gateway Pundit. The pitch was to shape their coverage of the false claims of election fraud, while ginning up support for the march on the Capitol on January 6.

“It would help to publicize that if (then-Vice President Mike) Pence claims the power to resolve disputes about the electoral votes on Jan. 6, he’d simply be doing what (Thomas) Jefferson did,” he messaged Hoft on December 7, 2020.

Encouraged by Hoft’s two word response — “Excellent!! Thanks” — Chesebro got weird, offering to put Hoft up “gratis” in a block of rooms he’d reserved at the Trump Hotel in DC.

“Happy to pay for flights if that would help,” he gushed to McKenna. “It’s really no big deal; I’ve done very, very well financially the last few years. And I would feel great having you able to be at the center of the Trump universe!”

Oddly enough, he got no takers. But he did get his accounts subpoenaed by the Michigan AG.

Not to worry, though, because Manny Arora, another Chesebro lawyer, assured MSNBC that this is NBD, and his client has been “cooperating the whole time.”

“In order to be a good prosecutor, you want to make sure you get the search warrants, to just double check us, to make sure we’ve given them everything,” he promised

Well, good luck with that. And now let us all pull out the world’s tiniest violin for the Harvard-educated lawyer who fell in with a bad crowd and now has to spend all his time with state prosecutors. Plus he blew his crypto fortune on lawyers!

“It’s been a real, a lesson in not working with people that you don’t know and you’re not sure you can trust,” Chesebro complained in Michigan. “I ended up losing. I had a wonderful apartment in New York City I had to sell for a $2 million loss, and lost almost all my net worth because of the attorney bill.”

Of course, that was during the interview sesh where he whined that he’d been led down the garden path by the Trump campaign and never used Twitter for DMs, so YMMV.