Donald Trump’s Arizona allies didn’t just take notes on an alleged criminal conspiracy – they videotaped themselves engaged in one and straight up posted it on social media, boasting of their scheme to have Republican partisans pose as legitimate electors in order to rob President Joe Biden of his 2020 victory in the state.
They were pompous about it, too. The video, posted by the Arizona Republican Party on December 14, 2020, is titled, “The Signing,” and shows former state party chair Kelli Ward declaring, falsely, that she and others in the video are the “duly elected and qualified electors” and that the winner of Arizona, lo and behold, was the man who received 10,000 fewer votes.
On Wednesday, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said she had enough. “I will not allow American democracy to be undermined, it’s too important,” Mayes, a Democrat elected in 2022, said in a video announcing that she had indicted Ward and others involved in the conspiracy to keep the loser of the 2020 election in power. Among the 18 individuals charged with felonies include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Christina Bobb, John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, who are accused of helping to orchestrate the fraud, which aimed – through forged documents falsely claiming election deniers were legitimate electors – to provide Republicans at the federal level just enough cover to reject the 2020 results and engage in a congressional coup d'état.
“Defendants deceived the citizens of Arizona by falsely claiming that those votes were contingent only on a legal challenge that would change the outcome of the election,” the indictment states. “In reality, Defendants intended that their false votes for Trump-Pence would encourage Pence to reject the Biden-Harris votes on January 6, 2021, regardless of the outcome of the legal challenge.”
Left unindicted, but clearly identifiable as a co-conspirator in the 58-page charging document, is the former president who stood to gain from the conspiracy (is it still only “alleged” when you can see it on Twitter?). But he’s not the only big name missing but nonetheless clearly present in the indictment.
“It reeks of Ken Chesebro,” MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin commented after the indictment was unveiled. The document cites multiple emails involving Chesebro, a lawyer who worked for the 2020 Trump campaign and helped organize fake-elector plots in battleground states, including one that spells out that the fake electors would be useful even in the absence of litigation; that is, the electors were never a real backstop, only to be invoked if a court threw out the 2020 results, but a fig leaf.
Chesebro was charged in the Georgia election interference case, pleading guilty in October 2023 to a felony county of conspiring to file false documents. He has since sat down for interviews with investigators in other states and, while his honesty has been called into question, legal experts say he appears to have been useful to the attorney general and her case.
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Joyce Vance, who served as a U.S. attorney under President Barack Obama, said the indictment suggests “Chesebro may be cooperating with prosecutors.” And that, she wrote Wednesday, could make it easier to convict others – including other Trump attorneys – who were charged. Indeed, it could even break the case wide open, for if “that cooperation is fulsome, it could lead to a situation where people he is able to testify against become highly motivated to cooperate as well.”
Chesebro has already impacted the scope of the Arizona case. As The Washington Post reported, the Arizona attorney general had zeroed in on “local conservatives” until late last year, when Chesebro sat down with investigators and “provided Mayes’s team with records — some that had been previously unseen — that revealed more information about those involved in the Arizona effort,” the Post reported, citing two sources familiar with the investigation.
If Chesebro’s apparent cooperation leads others to cooperate, that could spell trouble for a far better known but similarly unindicted co-conspirator, currently standing trial in lower Manhattan.
“It’s not simply that they are in great peril, they of course imperil Trump because they are people who could cooperate and really don’t have that many options or that much money,” Harry Litman, a former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general, told MSNBC. Particularly vulnerable are the seven Arizona Republicans who were indicted for posing as electors, he said, arguing that they are far more likely to seek plea deals and cooperate with investigators, potentially sharing damning information on not just Trump’s inner circle, but the man himself.
“They are people who presumably want futures in their individual states,” Litman said of the local fake electors, “and therefore they are not going to fall on their swords for Trump.”
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