Some of the most radical legal theories which animated Donald Trump’s 2020 coup attempt filtered in from a once-obscure Wisconsin attorney. 

Ken Chesebro, an appellate lawyer and former acolyte of Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe, wound up as an ideas man for the Trump campaign’s last, most desperate grasps at power in late 2020 and early 2021, a trove of documents obtained by TPM shows. 

He was the architect of the fake electors plan and, emails, texts, and memos reveal, played a critical role in developing the idea that Mike Pence had the power to gum up Congress on Jan. 6. That, Chesebro claimed, would start a chain reaction that could somehow lead to Trump’s re-inauguration on Jan. 20. 

This article shows how some of the most radical ideas now associated with Jan. 6 filtered into the Trump campaign through three people who have been identified as unindicted co-conspirators listed in Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 indictment. They are Chesebro, law professor John Eastman, and a third figure: Boris Epshteyn, a longtime Trump surrogate, attorney, and political consultant who reportedly sent emails matching those sent by a figure described as co-conspirator 6 in the Smith indictment. 

The trove of documents obtained by TPM reveals the division of labor between the three. Chesebro was an ideas man. Many of those ideas were divorced from the prior 150 years of practice. But Chesebro outlined a vision of Pence’s role — and of stalemate in Congress — which gave the Trump campaign what it was looking for, with academic laurels to boot: a shot at delaying the formalization of Biden’s win for as long as possible. Epshteyn emerges in this picture as a coordinator, tasking Chesebro with preparing legal memos and connecting him with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Per the emails, Eastman largely begins to propose ideas after the fake elector scheme had been implemented, and complements Chesebro’s ideas while editing them and taking them to Trump’s inner circle. 

TPM obtained the trove of documents after Michigan prosecutors received records from Ken Chesebro as part of their investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Chesebro supplied the documents, which include emails, texts, and legal memos, to prosecutors. It’s one tranche of evidence in a coup attempt that was much broader — it spanned months and involved hundreds of people — and was provided as Chesebro sought to avoid prosecution in Michigan. 

The documents provide a look at the anatomy of the portion of the coup attempt which proceeded not through mobs at the Capitol or via angry tirades, but in staid legal briefs and hidebound argumentation, and which cast Vice President Mike Pence in a leading role. 

Epshteyn, a prominent Trump surrogate since the 2016 campaign, has largely managed to maintain a lower profile than the other co-conspirators with respect to his involvement in the legal portion of the coup attempt. He wasn’t available for comment for this series. But the records show that he played a leading role in pulling together the legal theories that cast Jan. 6 as a critical date, asking Chesebro on Dec. 12 for “a memo on VP’s powers during Joint Session,” and, after receiving the now-infamous Eastman memo, asking about “steps that have to be taken BEFORE the 6th on this front?”

Chesebro also emerges from the emails and texts as a far more influential figure than previously understood. The records show that he provided substantial edits to the “Eastman memo,” which pushed the idea that Pence could unilaterally reject electoral votes on Jan. 6, and, in the three days before Jan. 6, peppered Epshteyn and Eastman with law review articles about the vice president’s ability to review and count electoral votes.

On a normal Jan. 6, according to the Electoral Count Act, the vice president opens the electoral votes submitted by the states. Before a 2022 reform went into effect, one senator and one representative objecting to a particular state’s results would lead to time-limited debate. 

Chesebro volunteered the idea that Pence could throw a wrench in this process by declining to open Biden votes from swing states, instead using the fake electoral slates that Chesebro convened as a reason to not open any votes from those states. He brought this idea to an eager Trump campaign weeks ahead of the climactic series of meetings before Jan. 6 where Eastman and Trump sought to pressure Pence into stoking as much chaos as possible. The possibility that Pence might decline to open Biden votes at all was an option that Chesebro described as a “fairly boss move.” 

The documents, combined with a 4.5 hour interview that Chesebro gave to Michigan prosecutors last year reviewed by TPM, also reveal for the first time that the group received an early “no” from Pence’s camp. Chesebro told prosecutors that he walked away from a call with a legal adviser to Pence one month before Jan. 6 with the distinct impression that Pence would not diverge from a single letter of the Electoral Count Act.

Despite that early demurral from Greg Jacob, Pence’s legal counsel, Chesebro spent the following weeks pushing for various ways that Pence could step beyond his authority to refuse to review electoral votes. 

‘Horatius at the Bridge’

Chesebro had entered the Trump campaign’s post-election legal maneuvering in November via a lawsuit challenging the count in his home state of Wisconsin, an effort he worked on alongside an old friend of his, a former judge named Jim Troupis. 

An early outline for “how leverage might be exerted in January” to force Congress to delay Biden’s certification in favor of examining claims of voter fraud came via a previously unreported Dec. 8 email to Troupis.

It contained a rough sketch of the pressure campaign that came to pass: the Electoral Count Act, which specified Pence’s role and time limits for debate, was unconstitutional and non-binding on Congress, Chesebro argued. It meant, he theorized, that if Republican senators and Pence cooperated, the Jan. 6 election certification vote could be extended for days, perhaps until Jan. 20, at which point the Senate could “resolve the impasse” by electing Pence vice president.

“By contrast, if he has the will to do it, Pence could stand as Horatius at the Bridge, and help ensure adequate time for debate,” Chesebro wrote in the Dec. 8 email, likening the vice president to an ancient Roman soldier who defended a bridge into Rome during a battle, becoming wounded but saving the city in so doing. 

But what might induce Pence to bring Roman virtue into Trumpworld? Chesebro wrote that Pence could find justification for his bold move in fake slates of electors that the Trump campaign could convene from swing states. These electors would create the pretext of disputed victories, allowing Pence to refuse to open the Biden electors and thereby buy Trump, potentially, days — or weeks — of time. 

The fake electors “would make Pence’s exercise of his power to set the pace of the count look much more reasonable,” Chesebro wrote. 

A quick call with Pence’s lawyer

Chesebro did not wait long to see how his theory would fare in reality. 

One day after Chesebro’s email to Troupis, Dec. 9, Epshteyn asked Troupis if he would be willing to prepare sample fake elector ballots for Wisconsin and, if he agreed, to do the same for six other states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. 

Troupis said yes, and forwarded Epshteyn’s email to Chesebro: could he or another Wisconsin attorney “do this for the other states?” 

“Oh, absolutely!!!” Chesebro replied. 

Chesebro, believing, as he put it in a Dec. 9 email to Troupis, that Pence was President of the Senate in 2016, arranged a call with Greg Jacob, Pence’s legal adviser. 

Three years later, Chesebro recounted the conversation to Michigan prosecutors during a proffer interview. 

“My immediate reaction was, well, I need to see the electoral votes that were cast in 2016. Thinking, well, the President of the Senate — that’s Pence! I’ll reach out to his staff and they’ll have copies,” Chesebro recalled in December 2023. “So I reached out, and eventually Greg Jacob, who’s the key lawyer for Pence, who ended up being in the meetings with Eastman, he and I had a nice discussion, and he explained that actually, the President of the Senate in 2016 was Biden, and they were in his papers, so we don’t have them, and it turned out they were online in the archive.”

Chesebro added that, after that flub, he “gently suggested” that Pence might decline to open the envelopes. Or, Chesebro recalled, that Pence might “skip the states in dispute,” and then “lump” them together at the end of the count to “create a critical mass of states that need to be considered separately, even though that would violate” the Electoral Count Act. 

“I detected no enthusiasm,” Chesebro told prosecutors of Jacob’s response. 

By that time, emails show, others on the original Wisconsin team had found the certificates Chesebro was searching for on the National Archives website. Three years later in an interview with Michigan prosecutors, Chesebro made his view of Pence clear: “Pence wouldn’t do anything anyway, because his lawyer wouldn’t even take a state out of order.”

Enter Boris

The next day, on Dec. 10, Troupis sent an email directing Chesebro to work with two Trump campaign attorneys: Justin Clark, a deputy campaign manager and attorney, and Boris Epshteyn, an attorney for the President. 

Throughout, Epshteyn took on a coordinating role for Chesebro. He introduced Chesebro to Rudy Giuliani, and helped facilitate the fake electors effort. Emails and texts from the days before Dec. 14 — the day the fake electors convened — show Epshteyn coordinating with Chesebro and a coterie of other Trumpworld figures including Mike Roman. 

The former mayor and Chesebro spoke on the phone on Dec. 10, the emails indicate. 

Epshteyn also began to ask Chesebro to prepare legal arguments about Pence’s role. 

In a Dec. 12 text exchange between Epshteyn, Chesebro, and Trump operative Mike Roman, Epshteyn asked Chesebro whether Pence had the “ultimate authority on which slate of electors should be chosen.” 

Chesebro, forever lawyerly, cited the election of George Washington, “numerous examples from the 1850s,” and an October 2020 column from John Yoo to give a qualified answer: yes. 

Hours later, Epshteyn told Chesebro that he had briefed Giuliani. He then said “a memo on VP’s powers during Joint Session would be vital to have,” reminding him in a separate thread about the memo and peppering Chesebro with questions once it came through.

In his exchange with Epshteyn and Roman, Chesebro also mentioned that days before, on Dec. 9, he held a phone call with Jacob, Pence’s counsel. Chesebro was sparse on details in the texts to Epshteyn and Roman. 

Three years later, Chesebro would tell prosecutors that he tailored his legal advice based on what Jacob told him: that Pence was not likely to do anything that Chesebro was proposing. 

Editing Eastman

It’s not clear whether Chesebro’s Dec. 12 Pence memo, ordered by Epshteyn, went anywhere. The idea that Pence should do anything other than count the votes does not surface again in the documents shared with prosecutors until Dec. 23, when law professor John Eastman begins to work on the idea with Chesebro in his now-infamous Eastman memo. 

Drafts in the trove show that Chesebro added chunks of text to the document highlighting Pence’s role, including a line citing “very solid legal authority” for the idea that Pence could both count and resolve “disputed electoral votes,” while “all the Members of Congress can do is watch.” 

“Do we need to add any steps that have to be taken BEFORE the 6th on this front?” Epshteyn asked in a Dec. 23 response. 

Chesebro, in a lengthy email 13 minutes later, replied that the Senate could hold hearings ahead of Jan. 6 on election fraud and the invalidity of the Electoral Count Act, but Eastman shot that idea down, writing: “Better for them just to act boldly and be challenged.” 

Three years later, Chesebro would tell Michigan prosecutors that he knew at least some of their work made it to Trump’s inner circle via Epshteyn, who he described as “funneling” it out to GOP senators. 

Chesebro spoke dismissively of Eastman in the interview with prosecutors, calling some of his legal ideas “ridiculous” and complaining that he had to send Eastman “basic law review articles on the Electoral Count Act and the 12th Amendment that he apparently had never looked at,” and that he was trying to “educate” Eastman about “stuff he was talking to the Vice President about.” 

As Jan. 6 approached, Chesebro showered Eastman and Epshteyn with law review articles, including one where, Chesebro wrote, the author “sketched how Republicans in a setting like the one we now have could plausibly rely on the view that the President of the Senate counts the votes, to totally gum up the count.”

He also forwarded Eastman the Dec. 13 memo on Pence’s powers which Epshteyn had told him to write, and sent both Eastman and Epshteyn a Twitter thread featuring law professor Jed Shugerman, which, he said, “features a good summary of the other side. Jed is a rare honest liberal scholar.”  

It’s not clear from the emails why Chesebro was sending these, though he told prosecutors in the interview three years later that Eastman had asked him to do so. Eastman met with Pence and Greg Jacob on Jan. 5, where he failed to persuade them to adopt the plan. 

Nearly all of the law review articles were focused on the critical question: does the vice president count? For them, it was abstract. For the rest of the world, it was very real. 

Donald Trump’s months-long effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election culminated on a single, now-infamous day: Jan. 6.

But there was an alternate scenario gamed out by Trump’s lawyers — one that would have expanded the hours of indecision caused by the Trump campaign’s efforts and stretched out the process for weeks, all the way until Jan. 20, 2021, the Constitution’s ironclad deadline for the transfer of power. If their scheme succeeded, these lawyers hoped, Joe Biden would never take office.

The details of this scheme are being revealed here for the first time. They are drawn from a trove of documents provided to Michigan prosecutors by Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, including thousands of pages of emails among Trump’s lawyers, some containing information that has never before been published.

The plan would have seen the Trump campaign pushing Republican lawmakers to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win not just on Jan. 6, but for days afterwards. GOP legislators would have feigned confusion over competing slates of electors, paralyzing Congress as the Trump campaign brought increasing pressure on the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the election in their favor. 

To do this, Chesebro formulated various ways to invalidate the Electoral Count Act, the law laying out the procedures for Congress to certify the election on Jan. 6. Critically, the law places tight limits on how long individual lawmakers can debate disputed electoral votes — nullifying or inflating those limits, capped at five minutes per member and two hours total, could make Jan. 6 go on indefinitely. 

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. 

TPM obtained the trove of documents after Michigan prosecutors with Attorney General Dana Nessel’s (D) office sent attorneys a tranche of records provided by Chesebro as part of his cooperation with their investigation into the fake electors. Chesebro supplied the documents, which include emails, texts, a 4.5 hour interview, and legal memos, to prosecutors. The records do not provide a comprehensive accounting of the Trump campaign’s entire effort to reverse the President’s loss; they reflect what Chesebro provided as he sought to avoid further prosecution. 

On a normal Jan. 6, the Vice President opens the electoral votes submitted by the states. Before a 2022 reform to the Electoral Count Act went into effect, one senator and one representative objecting to a particular state’s results would lead to time-limited debate. 

By discarding the Electoral Count Act, Trump campaign lawyers suggested, Republicans in Congress could halt the certification and bring forth endless claims of election fraud in swing states, a process that, according to the documents, Chesebro hoped would create a spectacle, revealing the GOP-friendly Supreme Court as the only rational, functioning actor left standing. 

It was a Rube Goldberg device of a plan, 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. 

Delaying certification of the President for that long may have led to some strange consequences, from the standpoint of the Trump diehards who pushed it: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi becoming “acting president” if the election could not be certified, or the Senate electing Mike Pence in Trump’s stead. 

“Through delay or chaos they were setting up a constitutional crisis,” said David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now works on election security with local officials at the Center for Election Innovation and Research. 

Reacting to the prospect that delay could throw the presidency to Nancy Pelosi, Becker added that “although this was incredibly dangerous and sparked violence, it was also a Keystone Cops operation.”

The nature of exactly what kind of chaos lay at the heart of Chesebro’s plan remains unclear to this day, including whether he envisioned protests or endless procedural delays — or if he had thought through that element of the plan at all. And in the end, Pence did not cooperate, and congressional Republicans only went so far as to object to state electoral slates — not move to overthrow the legal structure underpinning how Congress certified the election. 

In a wide-ranging interview with TPM in June 2022 — the only time Chesebro has spoken with the press on the record about his role in the Trump legal strategy — Chesebro disavowed the violence of Jan. 6, saying that it was “the worst possible thing that could have happened” for “lawyers that had serious concerns about the election in several states.” He cast his involvement as “what lawyers do.” 

Attorneys for Chesebro downplayed his involvement to TPM, casting him as a lover of legal theory who lacked both the influence and understanding to impact the Trump campaign’s plans. “If you meet him and ask one straightforward question you’ll get 12 different ways it could be,” Chesebro attorney Manny Arora said. 

All we need is a little more time to investigate 

Chesebro, emails show, sought to take the myth of fraud that Trump had created to its logical conclusion: a stalemate in Congress over the result, and a country without a president-elect. If Congress couldn’t act, the theory went, the Supreme Court would have no choice but to decide the election. 

During that critical Jan. 6 to Jan. 20 period, Chesebro envisioned the Trump campaign presenting supposed evidence of voter fraud over and over again, capitalizing on the chaos to make its case while proving that Congress was “unable to act.” 

That meant ensuring that the Jan. 6 certification session in Congress essentially never ended. As Chesebro put it to another attorney, “Jan 6 is the real deadline” for certifying the election result. By extension, Chesebro suggested, the Trump campaign could keep the election result up in the air if Congress kept debating the 2020 election result on Jan. 6 without certifying it. 

The Electoral Count Act and its time limits were the main obstacle to that. It capped debate at two hours per state, and with seven swing states having submitted fake electors per Chesebro’s plan, that left a relatively measly legal maximum of 14 hours of debate — enough to get the campaign, potentially, into the early hours of Jan. 7, but not enough to reach the acme of a pressure campaign which might take the country to the brink of Jan. 20. 

Chesebro argued in a previously unreported Dec. 8, 2020 email to Jim Troupis, a former Wisconsin judge and Trump attorney who had brought Chesebro in to work for Trump, that the Electoral Count Act was a “weapon” for Democrats because it would deny Trump and Pence “the opportunity for the presentation of any evidence (for example, live testimony) regarding the fraud in the election — only limited debate would be allowed.” 

“Of course, preventing any sustained public inquiry into the election is key for the Democrats,” he added. 

After weeks of failure, Chesebro suggested in early December, the Trump campaign would need an extra potential 14 days in early January to “force serious review in Congress of election fraud in various states.” 

Sure, Chesebro conceded in the email, people would complain (“Any effort to extend scrutiny of the election returns past January 6 would be met with the objection that the process of electing the President might not be complete before January 20”), but there was no need to worry: if the “dispute dragged on, on January 20, Nancy Pelosi (upon resigning as Speaker) would become the Acting President — unless, of course, the Senate decided to resolve the impasse by electing Pence as Vice President, so that on January 20 he would become Acting President.” 

Troupis replied in the morning that he had mentioned the “Pence angle” to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) to “take his temperature,” and praised the email as an “excellent summary of the end game.” 

Destroying the ECA

So, how to turn the Jan. 6 joint session from one day into 14? 

In emails and texts to several members of the Trump campaign, Chesebro proposed multiple options for how to bulldoze the ECA and achieve the goal of an extra 14 days without a certified President: 

• Mike Pence could decline to open Biden electoral votes — it would be a “fairly boss move,” as Chesebro put it in one email — likely delaying the certification of Biden’s win while posing a core challenge to the ECA.
• A “test case” could be filed before SCOTUS aimed at invalidating the law. It would be filed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) acting in Pence’s place as President of the Senate.
• The Senate filibuster could be used as a blunt instrument to block the ECA from either being followed or being implemented on Jan. 6. 

Each option involved extending Jan. 6 which, Chesebro argued, would allow Republican senators to present evidence of fraud. 

The point of the delay and the fraud discussions, he argued, was not just to draw attention to the Trump campaign’s voter fraud claims, but also to make “clear” to the Supreme Court “that Congress will be unable to act unless either the Court or the state legislature addresses claims re the state,” as he wrote to another attorney in a Jan. 1, 2021 email. 

The Pence play

The Pence option was the most straightforward of the three, and the one which Trump, eventually, pursued: Mike Pence would decline to open the votes of states where the fake electors had convened. 

Chesebro, Eastman, and Trump’s understanding of the plans for Pence all appear to differ somewhat. But 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.” 

Epshteyn did not immediately reply to the lengthy text from Chesebro that laid out the plan. Hours later, Chesebro followed up to say that he had accidentally deleted a memo further explaining the idea on his hotel computer. 

When Chesebro finally sent the memo later that evening, Epshteyn was initially confused: he had received nothing. It then became clear: Chesebro had accidentally sent the memo to Rudy Giuliani, and not Epshteyn. 

“Oh…so sorry. My mistake; I mislabeled your texts as his!” Chesebro wrote. “Which is why I addressed email to him; I mistakenly thought he was asking!!” 

Epshteyn wasn’t available for comment. 

Bringing in Grassley 

Failing Pence, Chesebro had another plan to get the ECA invalidated: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). As president pro tempore, the duty of presiding over the Senate would have fallen to Grassley in Pence’s absence.

Chesebro argued that Pence should recuse because of a conflict of interest — he was involved in the election. 

In a separate, Dec. 12 text exchange with Epshteyn and Trump operative Mike Roman, Chesebro argued that Grassley should do exactly what he wanted Pence to do, but then be “ready to file a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the Act as soon as Dems assert the House and Senate do the counting.”

“At minimum lawsuit would buy time and rivet attention,” he added. “I’d love to know if legal giants like [Sen. Ted] Cruz and [Sen. Mike] Lee would back that.”

That option would tee up a Supreme Court “test case,” as Chesebro put it elsewhere in the exchange, forcing the court to rule whether the ECA was constitutional. 

In the meantime, congressional Republicans would benefit from the attention that the spectacle attracted via further examinations of supposed fraud in the 2020 election.

Chesebro prepared the memo, sending it to the person he thought was Epshteyn but was, in fact, Giuliani. It’s not clear how far the idea went after that. John Eastman, when asked during his disbarment proceeding whether there were discussions about having Grassley step in for Pence on Jan. 6, cited attorney-client privilege in declining to respond. 

Filibustering as the last resort

The last option was the filibuster. Renowned for its ability to gum up the works of the Senate, emails from the trove show that Chesebro and Eastman advocated using it at different points to create mammoth delay. 

Chesebro regarded it, according to the document trove, as a means to bulldoze the ECA and get to the legal gray zone of endless delay after Jan. 6. He proposed another aggressive strategy: a senator would withhold unanimous consent to the Concurrent Resolution adopted by the Senate on Jan. 3, which includes the ECA. 

He laid out the argument in a Jan. 1 email with “KEY: Critical that a senator object to the concurrent resolution on Jan. 3” as the subject line sent to Epshteyn and Eastman. 

“After all, the main REASON to oppose adoption of the Concurrent Resolution, limiting debate to just 2 hours on each state, is that THERE IS SO MUCH TO DEBATE!” Chesebro wrote. “And the way to make that case is to lay out evidence of all the problems in these various states.”

He argued that removing the ECA would then clear the way for indefinite filibusters on Jan. 6, or free up Pence to follow their other instructions. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Cruz, Lee, and others could, Chesebro theorized, lead an open-ended debate highlighting the Trump campaign’s claims of fraud. 

After Epshteyn asked for the argument in a “short, bullet point format,” Eastman followed up with his own synthesis of what Chesebro had written. That omitted Chesebro’s Jan. 3 Concurrent Resolution spitballing, but included the filibuster proposal: that senators should take opportunities to filibuster during the count itself “as a much less enviable fallback.” 

‘Sort of unauthorized’

It’s not clear from the trove how far the Trump campaign went in entertaining these proposals. Epshteyn asked if the filibuster emails were “talkers for Congress and Pence,” while Justin Clark, a Trump campaign official, briefly entertained a version of Chesebro’s idea in another thread, writing on Dec. 24 that “it also sounds like Jan 6 is a hard deadline for legal recourse unless congress doesn’t count the votes one way or another.” 

Troupis, the former Wisconsin judge who initially brought Chesebro into the Trump legal effort, had maintained a direct line to senior Trump White House officials and to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

Troupis came back to Chesebro two days after he pitched the Jan. 20 delay plan with exciting news: Sen. Johnson would hold a hearing on Trump’s voter fraud claims later that week — on Dec. 16. There would likely be a photo op with President Trump afterwards; would Ken like to come? 

Chesebro traveled to Washington to meet with Trump on Dec. 16 alongside a coterie of other Trump campaign attorneys. 

Three years later, in the interview with Michigan prosecutors, Chesebro recalled the meeting with Trump: “The marching orders were, don’t say anything that would make [Trump] feel more positive than he did at the beginning of the meeting.”

He did not follow that advice. Chesebro told prosecutors that he began to speak with Trump after listening to the President talk on speakerphone with Newt Gingrich about something to do with Georgia voting machines. Then, the conversation turned to Trump’s chances in Arizona. 

Chesebro did exactly what he had been told not to do: give Trump a sense of hope. He recalled telling Trump that the “real deadline” was Jan. 6. He was later admonished by former White House chief of staff Reince Preibus because, as Chesebro put it later to prosecutors, “the vibe that I had given him was some ground for optimism.” 

Chesebro himself compared the meeting to a widely reported and infamous late-night encounter, two days later on Dec. 18, between Trump, Sidney Powell, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and the White House counsel’s office, saying that it was “sort of unauthorized.” 

In late 2020, a group of conservative movement attorneys set out to build a legal pathway by which Donald Trump could stay in power, having lost the election. 

We’ve known about the outcome of their work for three years now: how it led to the violence of Jan. 6, and fed the dream of Trump’s supporters that he might continue to serve after Jan. 20, 2021.

But TPM can now reveal the ways in which their theorizing, in early stages, went even further than previously known, imagining a Jan. 6 that lasted for not hours but days, an intervention by Supreme Court justices that they presumed to be loyal to President Trump, and a vice president who upended his constitutional duties, allowing the U.S. to descend into chaos. 

A trove of documents obtained by TPM details many of the conversations among Trump campaign lawyers, and, in particular, the theories offered by Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who worked with the campaign in the months leading up to Jan. 6. 

Within weeks of Trump denouncing the election itself and claiming that he had won, Chesebro and Trump campaign attorneys around him began to explore more exotic legal theories in which endless chaos in Congress would prove that the legislature could not certify a winner. That stalemate, they theorized, would force the Supreme Court to act. 

Chesebro, an appellate lawyer, provided a legal framework in which, he contended, Trump could still win — or at least cause enough confusion and chaos that the conservative Supreme Court would have to get involved in picking the president. His plan envisioned several gambits which have now become familiar building blocks of the legal portion of the coup attempt, and the basis for criminal charges across the country: creating slates of fake electors, having Mike Pence refuse to count Biden’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, and ultimately tossing the whole issue to the high court. 

TPM obtained the trove of documents after Ken Chesebro supplied emails, texts, and memos from his time with the Trump campaign to Michigan prosecutors in Attorney General Dana Nessel (D)’s office, which has been investigating the fake electors scheme. Multiple defense attorneys for already-charged fake electors told TPM that they had received the documents as part of the discovery process in that case. After Michigan prosecutors sent out the documents, CNN and the Detroit News reported on his Oval Office encounter with Trump and the fake electors scheme using records from the same trove obtained by TPM.

The thousands of emails, memos, and texts only represent what Chesebro experienced directly and what he chose to share. Other emails and texts among Trump lawyers from which Chesebro was excluded are not included here. The records are not comprehensive of the Trump campaign’s entire effort to reverse the President’s loss; they reflect what Chesebro provided as he sought to avoid further prosecution, and what reached TPM. 

Specifically, some of the documents not in the trove obtained by TPM include a portion of Chesebro’s communications with another Trump attorney. Chesebro also sat for a 4 and a half hour long interview with Michigan prosecutors in December 2023 as part of his cooperation and recounted his actions from three years before. He told prosecutors in the interview that many of his communications with Boris Epshteyn, the Trump surrogate and attorney who reportedly appears in Jack Smith’s D.C. Jan. 6 indictment as co-conspirator 6, took place via Signal. Those were deleted automatically, he said. 

Overall, the trove of documents details how Chesebro gave the Trump campaign what it desperately wanted: procedurally and substantively radical ideas which would allow the President to exert maximum leverage on any body or person in the country that might conceivably have the power to keep him in office. TPM provided Chesebro’s attorneys with a list of questions; in an interview, they offered broad responses characterizing their client as someone who loved to theorize, and who was convenient for a Trump campaign which had already decided that it was going to try to keep the election unresolved as long as possible. “He’s the only one that could validate what he was saying through facts and law, versus talking about space lasers and Hugo Chavez,” Chesebro attorney Manny Arora told TPM.

The trove includes encounters that, in typically Trumpian fashion, range from the showy to the menacing to the bizarre. At one point, Chesebro infuriates former chief of staff Reince Preibus by telling Trump in December 2020 that he still has a chance at winning on Jan. 6; at another, John Eastman speculates that Chief Justice John Roberts might be on their side if not for fear of how “to account for the riots angle” should the Supreme Court declare Trump the winner. Chesebro at one point referred to Pence declining to open electoral votes from Georgia as a “fairly boss move;” at another, he forgets that Biden, and not Pence, was Vice President in 2016 while asking a Pence attorney about his plans for Jan. 6, 2021. 

The trove provides a definitive account of how a small group of attorneys, dedicated to Trump, designed and tried to implement the portion of the coup attempt which unfolded via legal arguments. They burnished the former president’s efforts with a veneer of respectability that at times masked their radicalism: This portion of the effort to reverse Trump’s loss did not proceed via loud claims of voter fraud or through Sidney Powell’s promise of a “Kraken” lawsuit that would wipe her enemies away, nor did it move forward through the actions of mobs and street thugs primed to seize the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Rather, the attorneys involved all had extensive experience in the practice of law. Chesebro is a Harvard Law graduate who spent much of his early career working on appellate cases with liberal commentator and Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe. John Eastman was a longtime conservative movement attorney who had been dean of Chapman University Law School. Others, like Pennsylvania attorney Bruce Marks, had built careers out of an extensive civil practice. 

TPM is beginning this series with an exclusive story examining the plan to extend Jan. 6 for weeks — until Congress, the Supreme Court, or, in Eastman’s view, state legislatures filled the void by declaring Trump the winner. It’s shockingly congruent when matched up with the reality of what ultimately took place through violence, not legal maneuvering: as Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with one version of the plan, an angry mob forced a partial delay by storming the Capitol. 

Overall, what the Trump attorneys developed was an elaborate fantasy of epic proportions. Chesebro emerges as an attorney willing to push the bounds of the law, but who is unmoored from a basic sense of proportion. He seems, in the documents TPM obtained, to lack an understanding of the import of his proposals, and also of some professional faux pas: many long memos examining various theoretical scenarios appear to go unanswered, before Chesebro follows up with more lengthy memos further elaborating on his theories. 

During the interview with prosecutors, Chesebro cast himself as the latest in a long line of attorneys to be victimized by Trump and those around him. He blamed the campaign for throwing him under the bus in the years after the Capitol insurrection, suggesting that the campaign ordered him to stay quiet, while also casting him to the Jan. 6 Committee as a rogue attorney, all while refusing to pay his legal bills. 

“It’s been a real lesson in not working with people that you don’t know and are not sure you can trust. It really went south for me,” Chesebro told prosecutors. “I had a wonderful apartment in NYC that I had to sell for a $2 million dollar loss, and lost almost all my net worth because of the attorney bill.” 

While much of Trump’s effort to reverse his loss unfolded in full public view, with Trump publicly announcing his plans and threatening Pence and others to cooperate, the Chesebro documents offer a look at the portion of the coup attempt which proceeded behind closed doors: how elements of the legal strategy were devised, including both the longshot bids to throw an elephant-sized wrench in the gears of Congress and more mundane but telling examples of how the Trump campaign chose which lawsuits to bring before the Supreme Court. That includes calculations from Eastman about how many states needed to have their results contested in order for the Supreme Court to be able to overcome Trump’s electoral vote gap. 

In late 2022, TPM brought you The Meadows Texts: a definitive, comprehensive look at how the White House chief of staff coordinated the scheme to subvert the 2020 election. Now, with the Chesebro documents, we have a view into how one of the main legal architects of the coup advocated for his ideas — which were far more successful than anyone could have predicted, and included discussions of unrealized, theoretical possibilities that were far more radical than we knew. It’s the anatomy of a legal coup, but also something else: an attempt to twist the law in order to instigate a constitutional crisis.