Kenneth Chesebro

He asserted that January 6 was the only deadline that mattered for settling a state's electoral votes and used the 1960 Hawaii election as an example of a competing slate of electors.

Kenneth John Chesebro (born June 5, 1961) is an American attorney known as the architect of the Trump fake electors plot that conspired to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

On August 14, 2023, Chesebro was indicted along with eighteen others in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution.

On October 20, 2023, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents.

As part of his plea bargain, Chesebro accepted five years of probation, $5,000 in restitution, 100 hours of community service, and agreed to testify against Donald Trump and the remaining defendants.

Kenneth Chesebro was born in 1961 and raised in Wisconsin Rapids, about 100 miles north of Madison, Wisconsin.

His father was a music teacher and his mother was a speech therapist.

Chesebro earned a Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University in 1983.

He earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in the class of 1986 that included Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and Jeffrey Toobin.

During law school, Chesebro, Kagan, and Ron Klain were research assistants for Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe.

After law school, Chesebro clerked for Judge Gerhard Gesell in Washington, D.C. Gesell was known as a liberal jurist who presided over high-profile cases including the Nixon administration's case involving the Pentagon papers, where he ruled in favor of the Washington Post.

In 1987, Chesebro opened his own law firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For at least the next 13 years he continued to do occasional work with Laurence Tribe, including working on Bush v. Gore in support of Vice President Gore.

In 2023, Tribe said that Chesebro was "obviously bright and seemingly decent."

Tribe also stated that "even though we used to be friends, I really think he should never again be allowed to practice law."

Later in the 1990s, he donated to Bill Clinton.

Chesebro skewered the "Reagan Administration ideologues and their colleagues in Congress" in a 1993 article in the American University Law Review.

In 2000 Chesebro donated to John Kerry's senate campaign.

In 2004, he was an enthusiastic fan of Barack Obama, after Obama's convention speech that year.

He also donated to Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold.

Starting in 2016, Chesebro's legal work began to support conservative causes and prominent Republicans.

That year, along with John Eastman, he filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in a case involving citizenship of residents of American Samoa.

Until 2016, Chesebro was a registered Democrat.

He changed his registration in Massachusetts to unaffiliated.

A few years later he moved to New York where he also registered as unaffiliated.

In 2016, Chesebro began supporting Republicans, with contributions to J. D. Vance, Ron Johnson, and others.

Senator Johnson had arrived in the Senate after defeating Feingold in Chesebro's native state of Wisconsin.

In 2018, he represented Republican politicians, including Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, in a Utah voting rights case.

In 2020, Chesebro donated $2,800 to the Trump campaign.

Chesebro has donated more than $50,000 to Republicans.

Working as an outside advisor, Chesebro wrote three memos to James Troupis, a former Wisconsin judge and a lawyer with the Trump campaign.

The first memo is dated November 18, the second is dated December 6, and the third is dated December 9, 2020.

The three memos outlined a plan to give the 2020 election to Donald Trump.

Focused on challenging the Wisconsin vote, Chesebro argued in the November 18 memo that "the Presidential election timetable affords ample time for judicial proceedings."

The New York Times first revealed the November 18 and December 9, 2020, memos on February 2, 2022.

The December 6, 2020, memo was not made public until Trump's federal indictment in the 2020 election interference case on August 1, 2023.

The Times called the December 6 memo "a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy" to overturn the election.

The strategy was to have Trump-Pence electors in six allegedly contested states submit alternate slates of electors in hopes that Pence would count them.

The December 6 memo, expanded Chesebro's scope beyond Wisconsin into a national strategy.

In it Chesebro said he believed the strategy was "constitutionally defensible" but acknowledged that the Supreme Court might rule against it and said he was "not necessarily advising" it.