The 2020 Fake Elector Scheme: New Light Shone on the Plot With More Details Against Trump

MI & WI charged fake electors – AZ investigating

(Other state actions seen here) 

The 2020 “fake elector” scheme updated here from MSNBC with this article headline:

“Newly revealed memo details fake elector plot to overturn Trump's 2020 election loss”

·  A previously unreported secret memo in late 2020 detailed a plan to reverse Trump's election loss to Joe Biden was just posted by the NY Times here and also at the end of this post.

·  A December 2020 memo obtained and published by the NY Times laid out the use of fake slates of pro-Trump electors to create a controversy that could advance efforts to challenge the election results.

·  Trump has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to illegally overturn the 2020 election results.

A previously unreported memo written by a Wisconsin lawyer in late 2020 offered the first detailed description of a plan to use fake slates of pro-Trump electors to reverse his loss to now President Joe Biden.

The six-page memo published by The New York Times on Tuesday evening (August 8) was referred to as the “Fraudulent Elector Memo” in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump last week in Washington, DC which charged Trump with conspiring to illegally overturn the 2020 election results. 

Trump pleaded not guilty.

The December 6, 2020, memo was authored by Kenneth Chesebro, a pro-Trump attorney identified by news outlets as one of six unnamed co-conspirators in Trump's latest indictment.

The memo was marked “privileged and confidential,” and it was addressed to James Troupis, who was working as a Trump campaign lawyer in late 2020 and challenging Wisconsin vote counts. 

CNBC has not independently confirmed the memo, but it resembles a similar memo that Chesebro sent to Troupis a month earlier, which argued that Trump could overturn Biden's victory right up until January 6, 2021. 

That December 6 Chesebro memo proposed: “That groups of electors in six key states (later revised to 7 states noted above) that Biden won should meet and cast fake votes for Trump.”

(Also, refer to my previous post here).

Those “fake voters” would then be packaged up to resemble the real official certified electoral voters and forwarded to Washington as the “real list” – which it was not. 

Then according to Chesebro's plan, then-VP Mike Pence would count them as Trump votes instead of the real electoral votes cast for Biden scheduled for the joint session of Congress to certify the final EC vote count on January 6.

Chesebro wrote: “I'm not necessarily advising this course of action. The U.S. Supreme Court would likely end up ruling that it was up to Congress, not Pence, to certify the election results. Letting matters play out this way would guarantee that public attention would be riveted on the evidence of electoral abuses by the Democrats, and would also buy more time for the Trump campaign to win litigation depriving Biden of electoral votes and by adding them to Trump's column.”

NOTE: Chesebro did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on this NY Times' report (Article is linked below).

The strategy to get Pence to use his ceremonial role overseeing Congress' certification of the election in order to derail the proceedings is key to special counsel Jack Smith's indictment. 

Noteworthy is the fact that Pence refused to reject legitimate electoral votes for Biden while resisting pressure from Trump and his allies. 

The January 6 proceedings devolved into a violent riot after the pro-Trump mob spurred on by his continued false claims of widespread election fraud and speech that day stormed the National Capitol as the world watched it live on TV.

Read the full New York Times report here.

My 2 Cents: The central and overriding question in my mind is simple: How does S/C Jack Smith tie Trump directly in the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol? 

Thus, in long run ensuring that Trump could never hold any elected office ever gain IAW with the provisions of Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that states precisely:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Short analysis of that from Bloomberg news:

NOTE: It’s worth noticing that the 14th Amendment does not use the word “sedition,” which is often employed to describe verbal acts that organize or plan an insurrection. That absence could be used by Trump or his lawyers to argue that even if the march on the Capitol was an insurrection, and even if Trump verbally helped bring it about, he was not himself “engaged in insurrection for purposes of the 14th Amendment ban on holding office.”

The counterargument would be that insurrection necessarily requires a level of verbal encouragement and planning — and that inciting a crowd to engage in insurrection is every bit as insurrectionary as rebelling oneself. 

If that is right, then the question becomes whether Trump actually incited insurrection.  Answering this question in a constitutional way will not be simple.

If this were a criminal prosecution, the First Amendment would apply, and the relevant test would be the one drawn from the landmark 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio.

That case says that the government can’t punish speech advocating force unless the speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action.”

Trump’s January 6 speech is close to that line.

On the one hand, circumstances could be read to interpret his words as encouraging the crowd to enter the Capitol forcefully, which was a crime.

On the other hand, Trump chose his words very carefully. His direct speech did not call for criminal action in any explicit way. And it would be difficult to prove that he intended the crowd to breach the Capitol.

Thus it’s possible that Trump’s words might not meet the Brandenburg standard, if it requires explicit words or proof of intent — and it may well require both.

Further analysis on this topic is also here – check it out, too.

Lawyers from both sides now come into play bigtime don’t they?

Either way, this is going to get very, very nasty and very ugly. Stay tuned for sure, which I’m sure you will.

Thanks for stopping by.