The Stupid Coup

Defendant and co-conspirator Kenneth Chesebro had a secret Twitter account, then lied about it to prosecutors. Welp.

Kenneth Chesebro, mug shot courtesy of Fulton County

If you’re going to plot to overturn an election, it’s best not to leave much of a trail. But that’s exactly what attorney and architect of the fake elector scheme, Kenneth “The Cheese” Chesebro, did.

That trail wasn’t just in emails, texts and memos exchanged with his co-conspirators John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn, as we’ve already seen. It was also in a secret Twitter account called “BadgerPundit.”

Pro-tip: Maybe if you’re a coup-plotting attorney from Wisconsin, you shouldn’t use the red and white colors of the University of Wisconsin Badgers in your Twitter alias. This is from his linked YouTube channel:

And maybe you shouldn’t outright LIE to Michigan prosecutors and say you had no alternate IDs for social media. 

And maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t use BadgerPundit to lay out your real plan to disrupt the electoral count and send it back to the states, where false election fraud claims would sow chaos, to be resolved by a GOP-friendly Supreme Court.

Kenneth Chesebro is in a world of trouble now. Today, I’ll walk through why, and what this new and very stupid wrinkle means both for the larger case and for The Cheese himself.

Chesebro was no mere lawyer laying out options

Chesebro has been busy throwing the alternate electors he helped organize under the bus. He’s been talking to prosecutors everywhere from Georgia to Nevada to Michigan, spinning a story that makes himself look like an innocent advisor while his co-defendants were the real nefarious plotters.

Chesebro told investigators, for example, that the alternate elector plan was just a contingency in case Trump won in court, which of course he didn’t. He also told them that under his plan, state legislators would have had no power to override the courts.

But that’s not what he really believed, and that’s not what the plan actually was, at least according to his Twitter alias account, BadgerPundit.

BadgerPundit tweeted that court battles didn’t matter, and that GOP legislatures should choose the electors, throwing the race to Trump. Here’s an example of a reply Chesebro made to a user who alleged that the court battles Trump was threatening were just a way to grift from his followers. Note that it is dated November 7, 2020, the day most outlets called the election for Joe Biden.

You don’t get the big picture. Trump doesn’t have to get courts to declare him the winner of the vote. He just needs to convince Republican legislatures that the election was systematically rigged, but it’s impossible to run it again, so they should appoint electors instead.

Huh. That sure doesn’t sound like Chesebro believes the courts are going to determine this all lawfully and stuff. Instead, it sounds like he wants to go around the courts and straight to the GOP state legislatures, which could be convinced that there was fraud (when there was not) and appoint Trump electors instead.

The story of the real plan and the existence of this alternate account was first reported by Talking Points Memo then later picked up by CNN, which got everyone’s attention.

And as it turns out, a deeper dive into the communications and memos of the coup plotters, undertaken by TPM writer Josh Kovensky based on the documents turned over to Michigan prosecutors by Chesebro, reveals that the plan all along was to create two weeks of chaos following the electoral count in order to prevent Joe Biden from ever taking office.

The “Rube Goldberg device of a plan”

According to the documents TPM reviewed, Chesebro wanted the electoral chaos of January 6 to go on for weeks. To accomplish this, he thought of various ways to invalidate the Electoral Count Act as unconstitutional. He also wanted Congress to exceed the time limits placed on debate, perhaps by using the filibuster or the privileges of a single senator, to keep the debate going not for hours, but for days or weeks. Writes Kovensky,

Chesebro wondered at one point whether “legal giants like [Sen. Ted] Cruz and [Sen. Mike] Lee would back” the effort and speculated that delay would finally “force serious review” in Congress of election fraud allegations; John Eastman suggested in talking points aimed at members of Congress that senators could, as a “fallback,” filibuster the five-minutes-per-member rule, turning the possibility of limited debate over several states into a process that could stretch out for an eternity. 

If the mechanisms to limit debate in Electoral Count Act could be discarded, then endless claims of election fraud could be brought out, creating a spectacle that only the Supreme Court could resolve.

“It was a Rube Goldberg device of a plan,” Kovensky notes, “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.”

Chesebro’s lies to prosecutors

In addition to lying about the fact that he had no alternate IDs on social media, the secret BadgerPundit account undercuts many of the statements Chesebro made to prosecutors. Earlier, I discussed how Chesebro told prosecutors that his plan was to have alternate electors as backup in case the courts ruled Trump’s way. He even told prosecutors it was “ridiculous” that legislatures could step in if Trump lost in court. But BadgerPundit tweeted that courts don’t matter and that legislatures should pick the electors.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison put together by Marshall Cohen of CNN:

Chesebro also told prosecutors that he didn’t believe former Vice President Pence should be involved in announcing alternate slates or picking which ones to recognize. But BadgerPundit believed Pence could declare the election for Trump using the fake GOP electors. That position, by the way, was consistant with the deep dive TPM’s Kovensky made into Chesebro’s documents. Within them was a text message that Chesebro sent to Epshteyn. Writes Kovensky,

Chesebro articulated his view of how Pence could buy time for the Trump campaign post-Jan. 6 in a Dec. 13 text message to Boris Epshteyn, the Trump attorney. 

Pence, per the plan Chesebro proposed, would do what he ultimately refused to do: assert that he had the power to both open and count the votes, and could choose which states not to count — in this case, any state for which the Trump campaign had organized a slate of fake electors. From there, Pence could “force hearings in the States.” (Chesebro did not explain in the documents obtained by TPM how this might work.) With time running out in the days before Jan. 20, “the state legislatures would have to appoint electors if they wanted to be counted and avoid the election being thrown to the House,” Chesebro wrote, adding, “if Nancy then refused to hold a vote, Senate would reelect Pence Vice President, and he would become acting president on Jan 20.” 

CNN’s Marshall Cohen again with the side-by-side:

Finally, Chesebro lied about how much he knew about the fake elector scheme, even long before the election. The Atlantic wrote an article in September of 2020 that previewed the scheme, but in 2023 Chesebro told prosecutors in Michigan that he only saw the article years after the election had taken place. But that pesky BadgerPundit apparently did read it—and posted it—the day it came out.

Cohen again:

Chesebro has made proffers and is cooperating with investigators in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. But lying to them in the course of making those proffers and offering cooperation isn’t just a bad look; it’s a crime. 

As Harvard Law professor and one-time mentor of Chesebro, Laurence Tribe, noted,

When Ken Chesebro surfaced in this mess, at first I felt a bit of pity for the guy. No more. Not only did he plot to overturn the Constitution’s transfer of power to the newly elected president, but he’s been lying to pretty much everyone about his role. More indictments await.

After thinking about it some more, Tribe further observed,

Ken Chesebro’s secret Twitter account could lead to serious felony charges in Michigan and will augment his eventual federal indictment by Jack Smith. The guy is in a huge heap of trouble that his guilty plea in Georgia barely touches.

It looks like this meme from Ghost is going to get a lot of use the deeper we get in to this year of accountability. To you, Kenneth “The Cheese” Chesebro, I say,