In a memo the January 6th committee’s investigation did not uncover but came to light in Special Counsel Jack Smith indictment, “a lawyer allied with TFG first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election.” Prosecutors plan to use the memo as a crucial link on how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy. The New York Times obtained a copy of the memo that shows for “the first time that the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the start that he was proposing ‘a bold, controversial strategy’ that the Supreme Court ‘likely’ would reject in the end.”
But even if the plan did not ultimately pass legal muster at the highest level, Mr. Chesebro argued that it would achieve two goals. It would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”
The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Mr. 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 Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Read more from the link above and the memo below.
Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe describes how Ken Chesebro perpetrated a “fraud” by selecting snippets of Tribe’s writings that “made no sense at all” to bolster a memo that “no reasonable lawyer could possibly believe.”
