Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo has been running an interesting series about the origins and operations of the white-shoe side of the January 6, 2021 coup. Most of the information comes from documents in the files of Kenneth Chesebro, the president*'s campaign attorney and one of the Brainiacs behind the administration*'s nefarious plans to become a metastasis in our common history.
Within weeks of Trump denouncing the election itself and claiming that he had won, Chesebro and Trump campaign attorneys around him began to explore more exotic legal theories in which endless chaos in Congress would prove that the legislature could not certify a winner. That stalemate, they theorized, would force the Supreme Court to act.
Chief Justice John Roberts must be so proud.
Chesebro, an appellate lawyer, provided a legal framework in which, he contended, Trump could still win — or at least cause enough confusion and chaos that the conservative Supreme Court would have to get involved in picking the president. His plan envisioned several gambits which have now become familiar building blocks of the legal portion of the coup attempt, and the basis for criminal charges across the country: creating slates of fake electors, having Mike Pence refuse to count Biden’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, and ultimately tossing the whole issue to the high court.
(Again, we remind the assembled not to confuse this vandal with Baseball Hall of Famer "Happy Jack" Chesbro, the pride of North Adams, Massachusetts, who pitched the first game for the American League franchise now known in infamy as the New York Yankees.)
The documents detailed the complex web of plans and schemes and wishful thinking that lay behind the non-bear-spray side of the plot.
The trove provides a definitive account of how a small group of attorneys, dedicated to Trump, designed and tried to implement the portion of the coup attempt which unfolded via legal arguments. They burnished the former president’s efforts with a veneer of respectability that at times masked their radicalism...Rather, the attorneys involved all had extensive experience in the practice of law. Chesebro is a Harvard Law graduate who spent much of his early career working on appellate cases with liberal commentator and Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe. John Eastman was a longtime conservative movement attorney who had been dean of Chapman University Law School. Others, like Pennsylvania attorney Bruce Marks, had built careers out of an extensive civil practice.
As the documents indicate, even the violence of January 6 was underpinned by the work of these lawyers. They worked the possibility of violence into their calculations of how to extend the electoral counting by any means necessary in the hopes that the Supreme Court or Mike Pence would step in and end it the right way.
On a normal Jan. 6, the Vice President opens the electoral votes submitted by the states. Before a 2022 reform to the Electoral Count Act went into effect, one senator and one representative objecting to a particular state’s results would lead to time-limited debate. By discarding the Electoral Count Act, Trump campaign lawyers suggested, Republicans in Congress could halt the certification and bring forth endless claims of election fraud in swing states, a process that, according to the documents, Chesebro hoped would create a spectacle, revealing the GOP-friendly Supreme Court as the only rational, functioning actor left standing.
It was a Rube Goldberg device of a plan, and one that sought to use chaos as the invisible force drawing the high court — and whoever else the Trump campaign attorneys believed could resolve the election — into the mess. The hours of violence that ultimately emerged on Jan. 6 as Congress met to certify Biden’s win offer a glimpse of the potential consequences that might have accompanied weeks of delay in formalizing a winner. But for a Trump campaign desperate for a win, extending Jan. 6 to Jan. 20 would allow the high court to serve as a kind of deus ex machina as Congress — and the country — remained mired in strife over the failure to complete the legal formalities around Joe Biden’s election.
Again, John Roberts must be so proud.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
