The Week Ahead
Good morning! I’ve got my eye on a few stories that I hope to dive into deeper this week. They include:
The guilty plea of Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro in the Georgia RICO case (the third plea obtained by District Attorney Fani Willis, who is on a roll);
A big case that came down on Friday out of the D.C. Circuit that will set a few key legal boundaries in Jack Smith’s case against Trump in D.C.; and
The continuing mess in the election of a GOP House Speaker—a position that remains unfilled as our allies are desperate for aid and the clock ticks down on the budget and a looming government shutdown mid-November.
The Cheese Pleads
Kenneth “The Cheese” Chesebro pleaded guilty to a felony and agreed to serve five year’s probation on Friday in exchange for truthful testimony about his co-defendants. This follows attorney Sidney Powell’s guilty plea on Thursday, and it spells trouble for the other defendants including the Big Cheese, Donald Trump.
Chesebro’s plea is in many ways more dangerous to Trump than Powell’s. Having obtained it, District Attorney Fani Willis has supported a key legal claim in the case: illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. That’s the whole enchilada down in Georgia, if proven against the other defendants. If she can nail Chesebro on this and get him to squawk, the other defendants know they are in a heap of trouble.
Chesebro was the architect of the “fake elector” scheme and wrote many memos, both legal and nonlegal in nature, which he has agreed to turn over to prosecutors. Everyone who took part in that scheme is now on notice that the very guy who created and pushed it just agreed it was a criminal conspiracy. Add to that the fact that Chesebro is no kook like Sidney Powell. He is a Harvard-educated lawyer, mild-mannered and credible. It’s a co-defendant’s worst nightmare.
Later this week, barring any superseding big news, I will tease out the many ways this will likely land.
The whole case in D.C. may turn on a single word
In an earlier piece, written last summer, I stressed the importance of how the courts would treat the word “corruptly” when it comes to the act of “corruptly” obstructing Congress in the electoral count.
I also wrote in another more recent piece about how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, facing a question of first impression in the Circuit, was able to shape precedent by bringing many January 6 cases against the insurrectionists and successfully prosecuting them under “corrupt obstruction” and “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct Congress” charges. This, to my mind, paved a legal road for the statute to be used against Trump. Thanks to this painstaking work, the judges in the district, including Judge Tanya Chutkan, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals are now very familiar with the issues and arguments around corrupt obstruction.
Many of us were holding our breath for a key decision on this word, and it came down on Friday. An appellate panel voted 2-1 to uphold a lower court’s definition and use of the word “corruptly.” The question was in the context of the trial and conviction of one of the January 6 insurrectionists, Thomas Robertson, who was arguing that because he honestly believed he was trying to save the Republic when he joined the riot, he could not have been acting “corruptly.” (I hope you see immediately why Trump’s lawyers are watching this case closely.) The D.C. Circuit disagreed, finding that there is no need for there to be a prior finding of “dishonesty”—it was enough that he acted unlawfully.
I expect the defendant will ask the Supreme Court to weigh in. I believe they will punt and affirm without comment, but you never know. Later this week, when there’s a break in the news, I plan to further unpack this decision and explain why it is important to Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump in D.C.
O Speaker, where art thou?
We are now in the middle of the third week without a Speaker in the House of Representatives, and the GOP is now farther from, not closer to, successfully electing one after last week’s debacle with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
Imagine if Trump, DeSantis and Haley all bowed out of the GOP primaries. We’d be left with a scattered bunch of candidates, each holding on to a few percentage points of support. That’s would be a crazy situation, but it is in fact how things look right now in the House GOP.
The candidate with the most name recognition and clout within the list of announced contenders is Tom Emmer (R-MN), who was No. 3 in the House leadership after McCarthy and Scalise. But here’s the thing: Why would hardliners agree to elect Emmer if they already booted McCarthy and Scalise? Emmer represents more or less a continuation of the old guard, and so he has an uphill battle to win over the support of the chaos types. For this reason, it’s also unlikely that other “moderating” voices like Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) will get the nod.
Then there are a couple of extremist MAGA types with their hands raised. There’s Byron Donalds (R-FL), who is a darling of the far right but is basically a less experienced and far less well-known version of Jordan. There’s also a guy named Mike Johnson (R-LA), an evangelical Christian and Jordan ally who was a chief architect of the plan to object to Biden’s election.
And there are a few “less extreme” folks, whom no one outside their districts has heard of before, including Kevin Hern (R-OK), the McDonald’s magnate who hands out free egg McMuffins and nuggets of conservative ideology as chair of the Republican Study Committee. There’s Jodey Arrington (R-TX) on the Appropriations Committee who pushed for all kinds of nasty, across-the-board cuts to the social safety net. There’s Pete Sessions (R-TX), who has been around since 1997 and is best known for helping get rid of Marie Yovanovitch, the ambassador to Ukraine under Trump, because they needed to do some shady things and she was in the way. And there’s Jack Bergman (R-MI), a retired Marine Corp lieutenant general who has promised to steady the ship, but whom we also know voted to overturn the election and is a Jordan supporter.
Not great choices, but that’s the modern GOP. None of these men (and they are all men, and all but one is white) has the ability to fundraise successfully for the party or has the kind of relationships that McCarthy and Scalise have built over the years. My prediction at this time is that no one can reach the magic number of 217 in support—meaning all but four of the GOP votes. That will leave the Republicans with the very unpopular but increasingly inevitable choice of working with Democrats to empower the speaker pro tempore to push legislation through.
“I’ve heard it said in our conference that Jesus can’t get to 217,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).
Thoughts and prayers, fellas.
Have a great rest of your Sunday!
Jay
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"Imagine if Trump, DeSantis and Haley all bowed out of the GOP primaries."
Jay, you're such a tease!
Jesus is too progressive for the GOP.