The Talented Mr. Chesebro
October 20, A Trump Chameleon and Sycophant arrives in Court.
Former President Donald Trump understands duplicity. It’s a trademark posture for a peddler of brands: develop a charade, a con employing your opponent’s position. You build the edifice, you take on the risk and I come along with my entourage and claim the visage, the posture, the surface to which I attach my name, my fabricated influence. I make you disappear in exchange for branding your at-risk asset. It’s a phony partnership, a lamprey-like association.
According to his biographers and career investigators, Mr, Chesebro, former legal advisor to former President Trump, was always attracted to power. This attraction and an obsessive work ethic brought Mr. Chesebro into the company of and service to Lawrence Tribe, solicitor and Harvard Law Professor.
Yes, that Lawrence Tribe.
And into the company of and service to former President Donald Trump, for which the talented Mr. Chesebro in his dealings with the State of Georgia, is now convicted of a felony, the first of an individual and a lawyer from within the Trump orbit.
The journey from legal team Lawrence Tribe to legal team Donald Trump is part of the story. The moral, cautionary side to this tale is a lesson in duplicity, something that one political party has crafted a career in systematizing: I take your vote in exchange for putting me in a position to decide what’s best for us.
So convinced that his scheme to defraud the Georgia voter was supported by legal precedent, Mr. Chesebro trafficked in suppressing the Georgia outcome, fraudulently claiming a legal precedent in the Gore v. Bush Supreme Court case. And he attempted to replicate this fabricated argument to suppress the vote in multiple states.
That’s right: the same case Lawrence Tribe presented before the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiff, Vice President Albert Gore, Jr.
In the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, the character played by Matt Damon borrows a jacket with a Princeton seal — aka brand — on it to sub for a friend pianist/accompanist at a 5th Avenue wedding. Forthwith, the duplicity begins. At the wedding reception Damon’s character fakes that he attended Princeton and knows “Dickie,” in order to gain the trust of an American steel magnate who employs the newly discovered ‘Dickie’s friend’ to convince his son — real ‘Dickie’ — to return to the US and abandon his luxurious lifestyle. Damon’s character ends up inheriting a part of real ‘Dickie’s’ fortune and continuing a life of duplicity.
Multiple murders occur along the way.
In the argument that Mr. Chesebro helped craft to defend recruiting fake electors, Chesebro drew on his experience with his former employer, taking an analysis of the case by Professor Tribe in 2003. Mr. Chesebro with his Harvard pedigree and glossy liberal resume, workaholic demeanor and Bitcoin fueled wealth, changed his colors to fit the needs of his new client, Donald J. Trump.
Multiple frauds occur along the way.
Novelist Patricia Highsmith, who created Mr. Ripley, was as much fascinated with the audience reaction as she was to Ripley’s monstrous duplicity. He pulls it off!
The audience is seduced into suspending judgment on Ripley’s character because he is gosh-darn so attractive, debonair and envy harvesting. We, the audience, feel a part of Ripley in all of us. We are taken in.
In very much the same way, one side of our witness to Mr. Chesebro’s conniving with the vote process is borne on a reluctance to accept that an institution vital to democracy — the equal vote — has been assaulted.
We are taken in.
In a lengthy reprise of Chesebro’s duplicitous reading of his work, Professor Tribe writes,
In a civil suit, Judge David Carter called the 2020 election interference scheme “a coup in search of a legal theory.” What I have to offer here can shed light on the anatomy of that fraud. It shows how the attorneys concocted arguments that gave the scheme an air of legitimacy but one that could not withstand public scrutiny. I know this well because a key memorandum drafted by Chesebro — which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment — laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work. I know this especially well because of my prior communications with Chesebro. (1)
A memorandum dated, November 18, 2020, which Special Counsel Jack Smith states as core to Chesebro’s indictment to defraud voters, cites an article Tribe had written in the Harvard Law Review which argues that in Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court had used a state deadline for settling state’s electoral votes to dismiss Florida’s recount of contested votes. (2, 3)
In the body of the Memorandum, he quotes me completely out of context. I was discussing the specifics of Florida state law — not what federal law (or, for that matter, any other state’s law) requires or permits.
What’s worse, in quoting and citing two pages of an article I wrote in the Harvard Law Review, the Memorandum makes me stand for the outlandish proposition that, whatever Congress might say and whatever the State’s chief executive might have certified as its official Electoral Slate, any State is free to continue “recounting” the votes cast in that State’s presidential election until January 6, two weeks before the impending presidential inauguration.
Its clear to an observer where Chesebro was going with this misrepresentation: that even the liberal Professor Tribe aligned with a phony elector slate, as he had previously claimed had precedent.
The validation that Mr. Chesebro sought to elicit a slate of elector doubles was based on his perception that first, casting a vote for a candidate could be dislodged from the counting of votes: one simply had to recruit accomplices by shading the veracity of any outcome, in short to abort the confirmation process, if the outcome did not align with his client’s objective.
Second, to convince electors that a little distrust of the voting process exists in all of us: that we experience a kind of agony when our favorite candidate’s results don’t match our expectations. How ‘real’ is that… why can’t an outcome be otherwise? Why can’t we be sure?
We are taken in.
Following this anxiety over outcome is a terror of the ‘equal vote,’ an existential threat to a sanitized white dominion, masking a supremacy myth. The less fortunate, the marginal, the others are gaining power. In the land of abundance, there is simply not enough to go around. To paraphrase environmental ethicist, Bill McKibben, speaking to “well-off liberal parents who have turned childhood into an achievement arms race,” … ‘Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart.’ (4)
Mr. Chesebro has pleaded guilty in exchange for a generous mantle of release from jail time and probation. A separate effort to disbar Mr. Chesebro is underway. If successful in avoiding disbarment, Mr. Chesebro can return to private life and a legal career, unscathed: a remarkable journey for the alleged architect of the largest voter fraud scheme in American history.
And more likely, with respect to the Mr. Ripley from Highsmith’s novel, Mr. Chesebro will ‘suffer’ alone.
November 11
Notes
1- Lawrence Tribe, “Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election,” August 8, 2023, justsecurity.org
2- “The Court added insult to injury by denying the State of Florida the opportunity to remedy the defects that the Court identified — and, remarkably, the Court did so through an indefensible reading of Florida’s own state law, which the Court implausibly claimed the Florida Supreme Court had construed to require an end to the vote — counting less than two hours after the Court issued its decision. Nothing in One can read the Florida statutes backwards and forwards without finding even the slightest clue that the state legislature ever decided that all recounts in a contested presidential election must stop by December 12 — at whatever cost. Worse still, reading the laws of Florida, as the Court did, to mandate this purchase of electoral security at the price of tossing out into the sea thousands of ballots, many of which clearly expressed the intent of the voters who cast them, would by the Court’s own lights have been flatly unconstitutional.”
“Erog v. Hsub and its Disguises: Freeing Bush v. Gore from its Hall of Mirrors,” Harvard Law Review, August 18, 2003
3- Comment: a similar “coup in search of a legal theory” is newly elected House Speaker Johnson’s attempt to dismiss the outcome of the 2020 election because pandemic-related voting protocol changes in some states were not authorized by State legislatures, hence all the results in these Republican states could be thrown out.
4- p. 220, Naomi Klein, ‘Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World,” (2023)
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