Emails and texts unearthed in a lawsuit show how key figures intended their plan to create a “cloud of confusion” to help keep Donald Trump in office after his 2020 election loss.
- Share full article
Voting in Wisconsin in 2020. The conservative lawyer Kenneth Chesebro pitched an idea to the Trump campaign that could result in Wisconsin votes not being counted.
Just five days after Election Day in 2020, a conservative lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro emailed a former judge who was working for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, James R. Troupis, pitching an idea for how to overturn the results.
Through litigation, Mr. Chesebro said, the Trump campaign could allege “various systemic abuses” and, with court proceedings pending, encourage legislatures to appoint “alternative” pro-Trump electors that could be certified instead of the Biden electors chosen by the voters.
“At minimum, with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps also MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House,” Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Troupis, referring to the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Troupis quickly brought Mr. Chesebro into the Trump legal team, directed him to lay out the plans in a series of memos now central to the indictment of Mr. Trump and a month later — with the help of Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff — secured a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House.
The email is the earliest known evidence of Mr. Chesebro’s involvement in what would become known as the false elector plot. It was released Monday along with a trove of more than 1,400 pages of text messages and emails belonging to Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro as they settled a lawsuit against them filed in Wisconsin.
Taken together, the documents show in new detail how the Trump campaign’s litigation strategy was not designed to win in court as much as it was designed to give cover for their political efforts. And they underscore the central role that Mr. Troupis — previously a little-known figure in the effort to overturn the election — played in furthering the plans.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Source: nytimes.com
