Guess which constitutional sage is being cited as the academic godfather of the conspiracy being laid to President Trump. Hint: It’s not the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers, or the Federalist Society. No, it’s that most liberal of legal lions, Harvard’s own Laurence Tribe. 

Among Mr. Tribe’s protégés are President Obama and a bevy of lawyers of the left.  From the class of 1986, it appeared he trusted not only two students named Elena Kagan and Jeffrey Toobin, but also one of their classmates, a Northwestern graduate named Kenneth Chesebro. Another student, Ronald Klain, graduated the next year. 

All four toiled as Mr. Tribe’s research assistants, and are thanked in the acknowledgements of his epochal textbook, familiar to generations of first year law students across America. Ms. Kagan is now a Supreme Court justice and Mr. Klain was chief of staff to President Biden.

Mr. Chesebro, too, has risen to prominence from his student days in Mr. Tribe’s lecture hall. He was once part of the octogenarian’s inner circle. In the professor’s telling, Mr. Chesebro was “privy to all the key conversations” of Bush v. Gore, argued by Mr. Tribe. Mr. Chesebro is now allegedly a co-conspirator of the 45th president in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

A memorandum by Mr. Chesebro, written when he was an adviser to President Trump, was mentioned in the indictment of Mr. Trump. It outlines a plan to challenge President Biden’s victory and cites an authority none other than Professor Tribe.

The citation of Mr. Tribe  suggests that Mr. Chesebro was after Ivy-clad legitimacy even as he advocated for what he called a “bold, controversial strategy” to ensure Mr. Trump stayed president. Yet Mr. Tribe, who taught constitutional law at Harvard for more than 50 years, is now a fierce critic of Mr. Trump. He has argued before the Supreme Court dozens of times, but lost his biggest case before the Nine, Bush v. Gore.

The memorandum, disclosed by the New York Times, underscores why Mr. Chesebro is believed to be Co-Conspirator 5 in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. That document alleges that the attorney “assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.” 

Mr. Chesebro drafted the proposal, now a source of legal jeopardy, on December 6, 2020. It followed on the heels of one circulated on November 18, concerning alternative electors in Wisconsin. The December update, six pages in length, is captured in its title — “Important That All Trump-Pence Electors Vote on December 14.” The indictment relates that one staffer found it a “wild/fun” proposal.  

In pages marked “privileged and confidential,” Mr. Chesebro argues that unless Mr. Trump planned to concede, the “Trump-Pence electors all should meet in their respective States, and cast their votes and send them to Washington, so that the votes will be physically present at the joint session of Congress on January 6.”

One month before January 6, Mr. Chesebro notes that he has “mulled over how January might play out” and that while “not necessarily advising this course of action,” he believes that it is “important that the alternate slates of electors meet and vote on December 14 if we are to create a scenario under which Biden can be prevented from reaching 270 electoral votes.” Those electors, sworn to Mr. Trump but sourced from states won by Mr. Biden, are now at the center of Mr. Smith’s case. 

Mr. Chesebro allows that the plan could be nixed by the Supreme Court, but notes that “letting matters play out this way would guarantee that public attention would be riveted on the evidence of electoral abuses by the Democrats, and would also buy the Trump campaign more time to win.” The scheme was nurtured further by another attorney, John Eastman, who Mr. Smith alleges was Co-Conspirator 2.

Mr. Chesebro believed that “what can be achieved on January 6 is not simply to keep Biden below 270 electoral votes. It seems feasible that the vote count can be conducted so that at no point will Trump be behind in the electoral vote count.” He added that “there are many reasons” why this approach “might not end up being executed on January 6.”

Mr. Tribe comes into the picture in Section 2 of the memo, “Messaging about the December 14 Vote as Routine,” as Mr. Chesebro writes, “Professor Tribe, a key Biden supporter and fervent Trump critic,” has noted that the “only real deadline for a State’s electoral votes to be finalized is before Congress starts to count the votes on January 6.” 

Mr. Chesebro sources that position to “Erog .V Hsub and its Disguises: Freeing Bush V. Gore from its Hall of Mirrors,” a 2001 article in the Harvard Law Review by Mr. Tribe. The article aimed to proffer a “balanced account of the Supreme Court’s role in the presidential election of 2000.” Mr. Chesebro assisted Mr. Tribe in arguing Vice President Gore’s case before the Supreme Court. The professor acknowledges that Mr. Chesebro “worked with me on these very matters.”

After the memorandum’s release, though, Mr. Tribe published at Just Security, an online legal forum that has advocated for Mr. Trump’s prosecution, an “Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Election.” It is a rebuttal of  his former student’s citation of his work to support the alternative elector scheme. 

“I can say with confidence,” Mr. Tribe writes, “that the proposition that Chesebro misattributes to me is one I have never embraced.” He also accuses Mr. Chesebro of having “completely misused part of the latest edition of my constitutional law treatise,” the second edition of which he helped compile. 

Mr. Tribe adds his “recollection that Chesebro gave me every indication of agreeing with my views of all these issues, although of course we now have good reason to doubt that Chesebro was ever principled enough to say what he really thought as opposed to what he thought it would help him to have others believe he thought.”

The famed professor accuses his erstwhile student of “misusing the very parts of my treatise that Chesebro had helped me with as a research assistant” to “falsely” cast his mentor as a “supporter of a ludicrous reading of the Constitution that Chesebro and Eastman both apparently sought to normalize.”

The legal eminence has hardly been content with repudiating his former pupil in the abstruse arena of constitutional theory. He put his name on an ethics complaint to the New York Bar Association accusing Mr. Chesebro of working to “devise and attempt to implement a fraudulent scheme relying on fake electors in order to overturn Joseph R. Biden’s irrefutable victory in the 2020 presidential election.” 

The complaint, filed in October by a group called Lawyers Defending Democracy, fingers Mr. Chesebro as the “mastermind behind key aspects of the fake elector ploy.” The complaint demands that he be “subject to scrutiny comparable to his better known collaborators,” like Mr. Eastman and Mayor Giuliani, for his role in devising a “complete and detailed road map to overturn the election results.” 

The complaint argues that Mr. Chesebro’s “special responsibility” impairs his “fitness as a lawyer” and that he should face sanction for acting with “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or reckless or intentional misrepresentation.” It does not explicitly call for his disbarment, the professional punishment that now looms over Messrs. Giuliani and Eastman.    

A former appellate judge, Michael Luttig, who advised Vice President Pence to rebuff a version of the plan first formulated by Mr. Chesebro, tweeted that Mr. Tribe’s response in Just Security “should be required reading for every court in the land, every member of the legal profession, and every law student and aspiring lawyer.”