Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo has been writing about revelations from texts, emails, legal memos, and other documents obtained from Ken Chesebro from by prosecutors in Michigan investigating the fake electors scheme to steal the election. While there has been much attention paid to the violence of January 6 and the events leading up to it, this is a look at the attempt to mount a legal assault to overturn the election.
While it does not appear that Chesebro and the other people working on this scheme were directly connected with or counting on the violence that saw the Capitol overrun by MAGA followers of Trump to disrupt certifying the election, they were deliberately seeking to sabotage the legal process. To that end they were filing lawsuits challenging the election around the country, spreading disinformation, evolving bizarre legal theories, and counting on Mike Pence to create confusion about which slates of electors to count.
Ultimately they were counting on Pence and enough Republicans in Congress to create so much chaos and uncertainty over days and weeks preventing certification of the election, that the Supreme Court would be compelled to step in and declare the ‘winner’.
The previous write up linking to the previous reports from Kovensky is here. Here’s the start of the latest from the Chesebro Docs. (Apologies if you run up against a paywall. This kind of reporting ain’t free.)
Trump Attorneys Gamed Out Which Supreme Court Justices Might Help Them Steal the Election
Donald Trump’s attorneys in 2020 thought that they had one advantage which nobody — not the Democrats, not lower-court judges, not Congress — could outmatch: the Supreme Court.
At their most feverish, attorneys for Trump believed that the Supreme Court could eventually be bullied into declaring Joe Biden the loser of the 2020 election and Trump the winner. They deployed a series of strategies, detailed in a trove of documents given to Michigan prosecutors by attorney Ken Chesebro, aimed at stoking a chaotic stalemate in Congress, thereby forcing the Court to act.
The same set of real-time emails and texts between Trump campaign officials and attorneys also shows how the group sought to influence individual justices as they filed lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden’s victory in several swing states. In the trove, attorneys game out which justices would view their claims most favorably, and speculate over how certain claims or lawsuits could create pressure to build a majority on the court.
Although they knew it was a Hail Mary play, they nonetheless pursued it as far as they could go. Did they know how heavily Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was involved in trying to overturn the election? It’s not indicated by anything Kovensky has to say in his reporting and would likely not have been important to their efforts other than as just one more actor stirring the pot of chaos around Trump. But, it’s one more element in Republican efforts to engage in lawfare.
This story is worth following for many reasons. The scale of the efforts to use a legal assault to overturn the election of 2020 should be better appreciated. What it says about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is troubling to say the least — especially with the Court poised to rule on critical issues that can affect the 2024 election. The Supremes seen likely to disallow state efforts to apply the clear language of the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot, while sidestepping whether or not the Amendment can or will be applied at all. Chief Justice Roberts has made a career out of trashing the voting rights act, and the Federalist Society has managed to pack the Court with activist conservative judges.
While the Court wishes to avoid the appearance of being the one deciding elections, after Bush v. Gore that ship has sailed. Dobbs has shown the Court’s reluctance to give power to the states is only operative in certain matters, as is the Court’s supposed deference to decades of legal precedents.
What’s more worrisome is that the efforts of Chesebro and his co-conspirators have done much to spread the Big Lie that the election was stolen, that the voting process can’t be trusted, and Republicans are being unfairly victimized. In the runup to the 2024 election, we can expect more of these claims to spread — indeed Trump has chose to double and triple down on the Big Lie. Further, Republicans are making efforts to put in place election officials and voting workers who will play along with efforts like those Chesebro tried to pull off.
It’s the way grievance politics and the Big Lie works: they believe it was done to them, so that gives them legitimacy to rig elections to benefit them in return. Chesebro has identified points to attack. It won’t stop with him.
Here are other installments from TPM on the Chesebro Docs:
The Legal Coup — New Documents Reveal How Trump Lawyers Sought ‘Chaos’ to Force SCOTUS, or Whoever Else, to Anoint Trump
Two Weeks of Chaos — Docs Obtained by TPM Show Trump Lawyers’ Plan To Make Jan. 6 Last For Days On End
The Ideas Man — How Chesebro’s Most Radical Theories Entered Trump Campaign Planning for Pence and Jan. 6
Related — The Meadows Texts