It was Nov. 7, 2020, four days after Election Day, when media outlets, including NBC News, projected Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential race. It was the very next day, Nov. 8, that a Wisconsin lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro first proposed a scenario in which President Donald Trump could overturn the results in his state and others. It was the beginning of what has come to be called the “fake elector” plot, and, as newly released emails show, the effort to keep Trump in office by any means possible was off and running almost as soon as it was clear that he’d lost.
While Chesebro was always measured in his belief that the plans would succeed, the emails released Monday as part of a settlement in a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin show that he was convinced they could succeed. And, more importantly, it was apparent that he believed they should succeed, even if it meant exploiting any and every loophole possible to get around the fact that Trump had gotten fewer votes than Biden.
It was apparent that he believed they should succeed, even if it meant exploiting any and every loophole possible to get around the fact that Trump had gotten fewer votes than Biden.
Wisconsin was one of several key swing states, including Michigan and Georgia, where Trump’s allegations of fraud quickly ran into the reality of the courtroom. But, as he would hash out in his messages with former judge Jim Troupis, Chesebro found it better to think of the lawsuits challenging Biden’s win as a convenient pretext for a more novel, underhanded strategy. Ongoing litigation would leave the election’s outcome in question when the Electoral College was required to meet on Dec. 8, 2020; Republican electors in several states where Trump lost would also cast their votes that day — a supposed precaution should the campaign’s lawsuits eventually win out. But, as Chesebro suggested early on, those fraudulent votes would allow Republican-controlled state legislatures to demand Congress count the “alternate slates,” rather than those cast for Biden.
Chesebro’s memos outlining his proposals would work their way through Troupis into the Trump campaign and eventually yield a meeting in the Oval Office with the president himself. His plan would allow Trump’s campaign to “pursue a shot at having two bites at the apple — litigate, hoping to ultimately win by January 6, but also use delay in litigation to try to win in the state legislature on December 8,” he wrote in a Nov. 19, 2020, email to Troupis riffing on his latest memo. He also recognized that, rather than recounts of votes cast, “the most plausible path to Trump being reelected is for Trump, through court decisions, and/or legislative intervention, in enough contested states, to end up with, by January 6, with a majority of electoral votes from the States in which there is only one slate of electors recognized as valid by either the courts or the state legislature,” as he wrote in a Nov. 25, 2020, email (emphasis his).
It’s fair to say though that not everyone involved in the Wisconsin courtroom efforts was on the same page as Chesebro and Troupis. “On a broader note, I think you need to decide whether the primary purpose of this petition is for its PR value or is instead for the purpose of obtaining relief based on a meritorious legal claim,” Wisconsin Republican Party lawyer Daniel Kelly wrote in an email, expressing his concerns about a proposed petition to the state Supreme Court. Troupis assured Kelly in a reply that “this is no PR stunt. These are deadly serious issues that have evaded court review for far too long.”
Troupis was right on one count: What was taking shape as the fake electors plot was never a PR stunt. As I argued in 2022, when the scope of the scheme was first coming into focus, it’s “only a ‘stunt’ if you know it’s not going to work. A ‘stunt’ is meant for show. It seems, though, that the Trump campaign was hoping its plan would be consequential; in other words, it lacked the presumption of failure.” And given both the secrecy that Chesebro insisted surround their real intents, even while encouraging in his memos that the fake electors’ actions be presented as merely routine, it was clear that he was taking the attempt far more seriously than a “stunt” would require. It’s remarkable — and worrisome — though, that despite how much we’ve learned in the last three years, there are still so many unsettling details left to uncover about the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Even once the Supreme Court made it clear that it wouldn’t step in to save Trump’s doomed legal challenges, it wasn’t the end of Chesebro’s scheme. Instead, it simply merged with that of lawyer John Eastman, who argued in his own set of memos that Vice President Mike Pence should use the alternate slates that Chesebro had fostered to either throw the election for Trump or kick the matter back to GOP-controlled state legislatures. The pressure campaign to have Pence stick to the newly drafted, highly unconstitutional script eventually culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Chesebro has already pleaded guilty to his role in the fake elector plot in Georgia, where he was indicted along with Trump and 17 other defendants last year. It’s remarkable — and worrisome — though, that despite how much we’ve learned in the last three years, there are still so many unsettling details left to uncover about the effort to overturn the 2020 election. The scheme was unfolding before our very eyes over the course of months. We have similarly ample reporting about Trump’s plans for a second term in office should he manage to win in November — and I can’t help but wonder what we’re missing this time around.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
