Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who was involved in developing the idea of assembling purported electoral votes for Trump in states that Biden won, is the subject of a new ethics complaint seeking some form of punishment for his role in trying to undercut the 2020 presidential election outcome.
The complaint, featuring the backing of numerous prominent individuals in the legal profession, originates with a group called Lawyers Defending American Democracy and was filed with the attorney grievance committee at the New York Supreme Court. (That court isn’t the highest court in the state, unlike similarly named courts elsewhere.) The same group filed a complaint targeting Rudy Giuliani, and amid waves of legal concern, his ability to practice law in New York is now suspended. Chesebro “is the apparent mastermind behind key aspects of the fake elector ploy, including the legal theory that the Vice President had the sole authority to determine the outcome of the election,” the new complaint said. The document specifies Chesebro’s alleged behavior violating attorney rules and warranting action as “engaging in fraudulent and deceitful conduct, resulting in serious harm to the public, the legal system, and the profession – indeed, to our democracy.”
The complaint also accuses Chesebro of having known “that the scheme to submit fake elector slates and to propose the Vice President as the sole arbiter of the outcome had no basis in fact or law.” One of the defenses that has been presented for the assembling of so-called alternate electoral votes for Trump in swing states where Biden was the winner is that the moves simply left legal options available for Trump should he have prevailed in his court challenges to the election outcome. A key problem with that contention is that there wasn’t any real-world indication that the result of the election could’ve been legitimately changed. Investigations of the results were already completed, and there were no signs of widespread fraud, making claims of an intention to just allow the process to play out difficult to believe. There were already answers to these supposedly looming questions! The direction evidence actually points is that they were actively trying to undercut the presidential election outcome without regard for the facts.
“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Arizona lawyer Jack Wilenchik told a fellow Trump ally in a December 2020 email of what Chesebro was proposing. Notably, that explanation disposes of the excuse of just waiting for the legal process to unfold. They were already eyeing the Congressional proceedings scheduled for early January. As reported by The New York Times, Chesebro wrote the “earliest known memo” outlining the fake electors strategy. It was dated November 18, 2020 — barely any time after the election. Among other avenues of investigation, Chesebro has also been targeted for testimony in the ongoing criminal probe by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis into election meddling.
There are reforms under consideration in Congress that would tighten up the process of Congress certifying the electoral vote count, with an aim of preventing opportunities for legal chicanery like what Chesebro was doing. Contrary to claims from Trump, proposals to clarify the role of the vice president in the certification process as procedural in nature don’t mean he could’ve personally decided the outcome of the election all along. The goal on that point is clarification rather than a change.
