Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro was slated to be the first of those indicted along with former President Donald Trump for challenging the 2020 elections to go to trial. On Oct. 20, he pleaded guilty in a plea bargain.
He was originally charged with seven felony crimes. The bargain included nulling six of those counts and charged him only for count 15 of the indictment, conspiracy to commit filing false documents, which carries a minimum sentence of one year and a maximum of five years.
Jury selection was slated to begin the same day, with the trial officially beginning on Oct. 23. Under the First Offender Act, Mr. Chesebro will serve five years on probation, pay $5,000 restitution, complete 100 hours community service, write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, testify truthfully in all cases against codefendants, and have no communication with codefendants, witnesses, and media until all cases have completed. His probation would terminate after three years of good behavior.
Mr. Chesebro has already submitted the apology letter and recorded proffer, or statement, to the state.
“Once you’ve completed First Offender [probation], you can honestly say that you have not been convicted of a felony,” said Fulton County Executive District Attorney Daysha Young. If he breaks the law during probation, the terms of the deal may be negated. He has four years to file a habeas corpus challenging the voluntary nature of the plea.
Mr. Chesebro lives in Puerto Rico and will stay in Fulton County for a few more days to sort out the details of his probation. The hearing lasted about 20 minutes in full.
On Aug. 14, 19 defendants were charged with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act plus a total of 40 other counts between them. Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell had been the only defendants to demand a speedy trial.
The parties would have had to seat and swear in a jury by Nov. 5, the end of the court term, or else the cases against Mr. Chesebro would have been dismissed.
Case
In November 2020, Mr. Chesebro was contacted by James Troupis, a former judge and colleague of his who was at the time an attorney for President Trump.Mr. Troupis asked him to research the 12th Amendment and Electoral Count Act, and thus began Mr. Chesebro’s involvement with the Trump Campaign.
Mr. Chesebro has been widely publicized as the attorney who proposed the use of alternate slates of electors in several states, and a delay in the certification of votes in Congress in order to bring the issue to court and clarify election law.
The part of the RICO case against Mr. Chesebro centers around five emails and legal memos he produced for the Trump Campaign, strategizing legal avenues President Trump could take to challenge and investigate the election results in a few key states.
Mr. Chesebro’s legal team had tried to keep the emails from being entered into evidence, arguing they must be kept private under the attorney-client privilege that neither Mr. Chesebro nor the Trump Campaign has waived.
Just ahead of the trial, the judge dismissed the motion, questioning whether attorney-client privilege truly existed in this situation, while also noting that he did not think it prudent to exclude evidence that has already been made public, as at least one of the emails had also been leaked to the media.
“The Court also notes that it is in the awkward position of determining whether widely disseminated documents should be protected from disclosure as a matter of law,” the judge wrote. “In the event the communications were leaked by the campaign, the privilege is waived. Furthermore, an in camera inspection appears to serve no purpose when the documents are already possessed by both parties and in the public arena.”
“But setting aside these more convoluted questions of whether the Defendant has established an attorney-client relationship or the existence of a waiver, the Court reaches the conclusion that the documents are not privileged because they fall within the crime-fraud exception.”
The judge had noted that the bar for establishing a crime-fraud exception in this case only needed the impression there was a crime, and the prosecutors did not at this point have to prove their case before the emails could be used.
Besides addressing the emails as evidence, Mr. Chesebro’s legal team had also made several attempts to dismiss the charges against him and the case as whole.
All such motions have been rejected by the judge, who declined to rule on whether Mr. Chesebro was covered under the First Amendment for his legal advice and political speech in pretrial motions hearings.
The prosecutors argue that because Mr. Chesebro intended to commit a crime—furthering President Trump’s alleged criminal conspiracy to interfere with an election—he has no such defenses.
The judge noted that both sides seemed eager to “do battle,” but such arguments should be saved for trial, not a pretrial motions hearing. If the jury is seated and sworn in on Nov. 5, they will be able to do just that.
