This morning attorney Kenneth Chesebro pled guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents in Fulton County Superior Court. It was a months-long staring contest with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and in the end, the onetime appellate lawyer blinked.
Chesebro, the intellectual architect of the plot to substitute fake Trump electors for real Biden ones was indicted in August along with 18 other defendants in the sprawling election interference RICO case. Only he and fellow MAGA lawyer Sidney Powell asserted their right to a speedy trial, and the two were set to begin jury selection this morning. But yesterday, Powell agreed to plead to six felonies and testify for the prosecution, leaving Chesebro on his own.
On top of that, the court rejected his motion to dismiss on the basis of the Supremacy Clause and/or the First Amendment, as well as his motion to exclude much of the evidence based on attorney-client privilege.
“The State having met its low burden of showing that the charges have ‘some foundation in fact, the undersigned concludes that the communications fall within the crime-fraud exception and are neither protected work product nor privileged,” Judge McAfee wrote earlier this week. This was a screaming klaxon that nothing was going to put a stop to this prosecution, which could easily have landed the mild-mannered lawyer in the county jail. And so a plea which Chesebro rejected last month became significantly more attractive.
According to ABC, prosecutors offered substantially the same deal to Chesebro in September, including one felony count, no custodial sentence, a few years probation, and a low fine. But facing the possibility of having to face the jury, Chesebro took the off-ramp. He made the proffer, wrote the letter of apology, and breathed a giant sigh of relief that he’ll be able to get the hell out of Georgia and go back to his young wife in Puerto Rico next week.
Chesebro is likely to be quite a good witness for prosecutors. He played a central role in the fake electors scheme and ran his mouth on several email chains with central figures in the Trump campaign, including John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Boris Epshteyn. Along with the succession of legal memos Cheseboro fought to keep out, those messages show that what may have started as an earnest attempt to assemble contingent slates of electors in case some court or legislature overturned the official tally quickly morphed into a plot to disrupt the January 6 certification by any means necessary.
The New York Times reported earlier this week on a December 24, 2020 email Chesebro sent to John Eastman, in which he appeared to concede that litigation filed after December 14 was simply pretextual — “Just getting this on file means that on Jan. 6, the court will either have ruled on the merits or, vastly more likely, will have appeared to dodge again.” — but that the “relevant analysis” was “political,” not legal.
“I particularly agree that getting this on file gives more ammo to the justices fighting for the court to intervene,” he went on. “I think the odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
But on the courthouse steps today, Chesebro’s lawyer Scot Grubman downplayed his client’s value to prosecutors, insisting that he “didn’t snitch against anyone,” but rather “went in there” and “accepted responsibility.” This would appear to be contradicted by Chesebro’s proffer, made just hours earlier, and his commitment to testify against his co-defendants.
“The plea agreement says that if he’s called, he’ll testify, and he’s a man of his word,” Grubman admitted, according to The Messenger. “That doesn’t mean that they’re going to call him and I don’t think that’s anywhere near certainty. And in fact, quite frankly, I would be somewhat surprised if they did [call him].”
Well … a boy can dream.
In the meantime, DA Willis avoids having to preview her entire case this year just to bag a couple of peripheral weirdos. She can save her resources for next year when she brings the case against the wider group, which includes Trump himself. Not a bad way to end the week.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.