MSNBC has obtained video of Trump co-conspirator Roger Stone laying out the plans for the fake elector scheme.
18 November 2020 is the early cited date for the fake elector plot developed by Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman. But a new MSNBC video of Roger Stone is now available showing that the fake elector scheme may have been contrived on 5 November 2020, prior to Election Day.
MSNBC’s Ari Melber on The Beat shows Stone dictating a memo that identifies the elector swap prior to election day 7 November 2020. This is earlier than the Chesebro memo in December. This comes from the documentary filmmaker Christopher Guldbrandsen, who was following Stone and his cohorts during the 2020 election. This time period overlaps with the Willard Hotel ‘command center’ activities.
Kenneth J. Chesebro was among 19 people charged Monday in Georgia with a raft of crimes related to alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A 98-page indictment secured by Atlanta-area prosecutors portrays Chesebro as central not just to the convening of sham electors but also to the “strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.” He faces seven felony charges, including conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to file false documents, as well as violation of an anti-racketeering act originally aimed at dismantling organized crime groups.
In the separate federal case brought against Trump this month, Chesebro has not been charged. Prosecutors described him only as “Co-Conspirator 5,” saying he was behind “a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”
“He was not making good-faith legal arguments for his client,” said Laurence Tribe, who said he has been distressed to see his former mentee emerge as an architect of Trump’s plans to cling to power. “He was inventing legal fiction that paid no attention to the law and creating a pretext for a conspiracy to steal an election.”
The Eastman memos, also known as the “coup memo“, are documents by John Eastman, an American law professor retained by then-President Donald Trump advancing the fringe legal theory that the U.S. Vice President has unilateral authority to reject certified State electors. This would have the effect of nullifying an election in order to produce an outcome desired by the Vice President, such as a result in the Vice President’s own party’s favor.
Trump and Eastman used the memos in an unsuccessful campaign to pressure then vice president Mike Pence into preventing or nullifying the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, and eventually overturning the 2020 United States election of Joe Biden, so that Trump could retain power.
The Trump campaign engaged Eastman with a formal retainer agreement signed December 5 for services in litigating the election outcome. The memos have been described as an instruction manual for a coup d’état.
After the 2020 United States presidential election in which Joe Biden prevailed, then-incumbent Donald Trump, as well as his campaign, his proxies, and many of his supporters, pursued an aggressive and unprecedented effort to deny and overturn the election by means of a legalistic soft coup (or self-coup).