Wisconsin AG Charges Trump Advisor Kenneth Chesebro With 10 More Felonies: Onetime Protege of Lawrence Tribe Has Come Full Circle

The charging of lawyer Kenneth Chesebro in Wisconsin with 10 felony charges of forgery — he already faced one handed up in the spring — in connection to President Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election in that state underscores the dramatic transformation of a onetime liberal legal prodigy into an attorney committed to Trump’s politics. Wisconsin’s liberal attorney general, Josh Kaul, a Democrat, filed the additional 10 charges against Mr. Chesebro, Judge Jim Troupis, and an erstwhile Trump aide, Mike Roman, who has also been indicted in Georgia and Arizona. He reached a proffer agreement with Special Counsel Jack Smith. All three men were of service to Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Mr. Chesebro was once a teaching fellow for the constitutional sage Laurence Tribe, a lion of the legal left. Now, Mr. Chesebro faces deepening legal peril for his effort to lend legal ballast to President-elect Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. He is now charged with a total of 11 forgery counts in Wisconsin, his home state, each carrying a possible punishment of six years in prison. Trump’s victory over Vice President Harris last month means that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s effort to convict him for election interference is at an end — the Department of Justice has pronounced a “categorical” ban on prosecuting a sitting president. The district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, charged both Trump and Mr. Chesebro in her sprawling racketeering case. Mr. Chesebro, author of a series of memoranda exploring the possibility of replacing presidential electors pledged to President Biden with “alternative” slates, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit filing of false documents, punishable only by probation. He was the second defendant to admit guilt, after fellow attorney Sidney Powell. She had promised to “release the Kraken” to ensure that Trump stayed at the White House. Earlier this month, though, Mr. Chesebro moved to withdraw his guilty plea. That came after a ruling in September by Judge Scott McAfee that three of the seven charges handed up against Mr. Chesebro — including the one to which he pleaded guilty — were unconstitutional and “beyond this state’s jurisdiction” under the Supremacy Clause, which ordains that when federal law conflicts with state law, federal law prevails. In asking for the plea to be withdrawn, Mr. Chesebro’s attorney, Manny Arora, wrote: “A failure to grant the requested relief would violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment … nowhere in this country can any man be condemned for a nonexistent crime.”Now, though, Mr. Chesebro faces new forgery charges in Wisconsin. In October, Mr. Chesebro, who is also Unindicted Co-Conspirator 5 in Mr. Smith’s federal indictment, was barred from practicing law in New York. He is also Unindicted Co-Conspirator 4 in Arizona’s prosecution of alternate electors, which has ensnared Mayor Giuliani.One of those who joined an ethics complaint to the New York Bar Association urging it to ban Mr. Chesebro was a professor emeritus at Harvard who taught constitutional law there for more than a half century, Mr. Tribe. He also wrote an article in Just Security titled, “Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Effort To Overturn the 2020 Election.” Mr. Tribe’s turn against Mr. Chesebro is one that, as the Sun has reported, is tinged with irony and embittered by betrayal. The professor, who was a mentor to President Obama, hired Mr. Chesebro as a research assistant to toil on his “American Constitutional Law,” a textbook of more than 1,300 pages that went through its seventh edition in 2023. Mr. Chesebro’s fellow research assistants were a future high court justice, Elena Kagan, a future presidential chief of staff, Ron Klain, and a legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin. Mr. Toobin wrote in Air Mail last year that Mr. Chesebro’s nickname at Harvard Law School was “the Cheese” and that he was a “shy, awkward nerd among nerds” who was a member in good standing of what was known as “Tribe World.” An article Mr. Tribe published in the Harvard Law Review in 1989, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics,” acknowledges, in a footnote, the help of Messrs. Chesebro and Obama.Mr. Chesebro was so close to Mr. Tribe, who now boasts more than a million followers on X, that the professor asserts that the younger man was “privy to all the key conversations” of Bush v. Gore, which Mr. Tribe argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the 45th vice president. Mr. Toobin ventures that Mr. Chesebro’s politics could have shifted after he made “millions” of dollars in cryptocurrency a decade ago. Even after Mr. Cheseboro threw in his lot with the 45th president, Mr. Tribe continued to inform his legal reasoning in the fateful memoranda he wrote in November and December 2020 arguing that alternative electors were “constitutionally defensible.” Mr. Chesebro, though, asserted that “Professor Tribe, a key Biden supporter and fervent Trump critic …, has likewise 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.’” That position was rejected by Vice President Pence — and by Mr. Tribe.

Wisconsin AG Charges Trump Advisor Kenneth Chesebro With 10 More Felonies: Onetime Protege of Lawrence Tribe Has Come Full Circle

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