Now that Kenneth Chesebro — a key creator and implementor of Trump’s anti-democratic fake elector scheme — is back in the news for blatantly lying to investigators about his key role in the fake elector plot in 2020, it reminded me about an interesting recent 60 Minutes piece I watched on YouTube the other day about the fake electors plot in Wisconsin. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch imho.
In the first part of the piece, Anderson Cooper (not my fave, but he’s pretty good here) interviews Andrew Hitt, one of Trump’s fake electors in Wisconsin. I’m pretty sure Andrew and I wouldn’t agree on much of anything policy-wise, but he seems pretty upfront and honest in the interview so I give him points for that I guess. During the 2020 election, Hitt was the head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin and a vocal and active Trump supporter.
Hitt claims that he and the nine other Republican fake electors were “tricked” by the RNC and Trump attorneys to meet on Dec. 14 to sign fake elector documents claiming that Trump won the state, and said he was told by Chesebro and other attorneys that the documents would only be used if Trump won a legal challenge to throw out about 200,000 absentee ballots in two heavily Democratic counties in the state. Earlier that day the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s legal challenge to the state’s election results, but Trump was going to appeal the decision. So Hitt and the others signed the documents anyway, thinking (so Hitt claims) that the papers would only be used if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 4-3 decision of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Hitt says they knew nothing about Chesebro’s broader and deeper plot to steal the election. You can decide for yourself how much you believe Hitt’s claim that they were unwittingly duped into signing these documents. In one interesting piece of footage in the piece, there’s a photo of Chesebro taking pictures of Wisconsin’s fake electors signing the bogus documents.
What I also found interesting was the next part of the story, where Cooper interviews Alesha Guenther, who in 2020 was a 23-year-old law school student working part time for Wisconsin's Republican Party. She was tasked with flying out Wisconsin’s fake elector documents to DC on January 4 . By this date the Trump campaign was freaking out that the documents had not yet arrived in DC to be handed over to Pence before January 6 — all part of the Chesebro-penned plot to overturn the election results.
Guenther picked up the fake elector papers at the Wisconsin Republican Party HQ and flew to DC on January 5. She showed Cooper an email chain she had with Chesebro and Trump campaign's senior advisor, Mike Roman, in which she was instructed to meet Chesebro in front of the Trump Hotel to hand over the papers to Chesebro, and she was told to only give the papers to Chesebro and nobody else. Guenther also showed Cooper a selfie of Chesebro that he sent to Guenther so that she’d know what he looked like.
Cooper responds to Guenther that “it sounds very secretive,” and Guenther responds, “Yeah, I thought that that email was pretty odd and dramatic.”
So not only was Chesebro the architect of Trump’s plot to overturn a free and fair election, he was actively involved in the day-to-day tasks of trying to get the fake elector documents in to the hands of Pence — literally acting as a go-fer errand boy to pass along the bogus documents — so that Pence could accept the fake electors as the final step in Chesebro’s scheme (the only part of Chesebro’s plan that didn’t work).
In light of all that we’re learning recently about Chesebro’s central role in the plot to overturn our democracy, including his blatant lying to investigators, I hope that any plea deals he’s worked out with prosecutors will be revisited and that he’ll be held accountable in ways that have not yet happened.
You can read the transcript of the 60 Minutes piece here and watch the video here: