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    From Bush v. Gore to ‘Stop the Steal’: Kenneth Chesebro’s Long, Strange Trip

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    Mr. Chesebro, a buttoned-down Harvard lawyer, evolved from left-leaning jurist to key player in the Trump false electors scandal. What happened?In January 2001, Kenneth Chesebro was a mild-mannered Harvard lawyer toiling for Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount battle. Two decades later, on Jan. 6, 2021, he joined the mob outside the Capitol, reborn as a MAGA-hatted kingpin.On Friday, Mr. Chesebro’s journey took another turn, when he pleaded guilty in a criminal racketeering indictment in Fulton County, Ga., and agreed to testify against former President Donald J. Trump and other co-defendants, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and several other top Trump aides.Mr. Chesebro, 62, a workaholic who brought platinum credentials to Mr. Trump’s shambolic legal team, is the third defendant to plead guilty for his role in what prosecutors say was a criminal conspiracy to create fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors in six states, including Georgia, that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won.Mr. Chesebro’s trial, which had been scheduled to begin Monday, will no longer go forward. Liberal lawyers from his former life had hoped it would provide clues to an enduring mystery: What happened to “The Cheese?’’“I still don’t see what should have been a warning sign,” Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard constitutional law scholar who was Mr. Chesebro’s mentor, said in an interview. “Was there anything I could or should have done?”Some former colleagues say Mr. Chesebro’s 180-degree turn came after a lucrative 2014 investment in Bitcoin and a subsequent posh, itinerant lifestyle. Others, like Mr. Tribe, see Mr. Chesebro as a “moral chameleon” and his story an old one about the seduction of power.“He wanted to be close to the action,” said Mr. Tribe, who is among 60 lawyers and scholars who signed an ethics complaint in New York that could result in Mr. Chesebro’s disbarment. At Harvard, Mr. Chesebro assisted Mr. Tribe on many cases, including Bush v. Gore, which Mr. Tribe, as Mr. Gore’s chief legal counsel, argued before the Supreme Court.“I was representing a vice president who might become president,” Mr. Tribe said. Mr. Chesebro, he continued, “saw me as having access to power. When the world turned and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him.”Laurence H. Tribe was a mentor to Kenneth Chesebro at Harvard Law School. When Mr. Tribe represented former Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount battle, Mr. Chesebro helped him.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Chesebro has responded that in his work for Mr. Trump, he was providing him with the zealous legal advocacy that all clients deserve when he proposed a scheme that he acknowledged at the time “could appear treasonous.”“It is the duty of any attorney to leave no stone unturned in examining the legal options that exist in a particular situation,” Mr. Chesebro said in an interview with Talking Points Memo, before he was indicted. Beyond that interview, he has said very little, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination for most of a deposition he gave to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.Emails released in the run up to Mr. Chesebro’s trial suggest it was not just the law that drove him. In emails to the other Trump lawyers fighting to overturn the 2020 results, Mr. Chesebro estimated the odds of the Supreme Court stepping in at 1 percent. Still, he added, appealing to the high court has “possible political value.”After his guilty plea on Friday, Mr. Chesebro’s lawyer, Scott R. Grubman, said in an email that “Mr. Chesebro is glad to be able to move on with his life and avoid spending even a minute in jail.” Mr. Grubman noted that Mr. Chesebro had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, rather than the racketeering charge.‘The Cheese’ RisesMr. Chesebro grew up in Wisconsin Rapids, in the heart of the state. His father, Donald Chesebro, was a high school music teacher, clarinetist and local bandleader inducted into the Polka Hall of Fame.Mr. Chesebro graduated from Northwestern University and went on to Harvard Law School, where in a nod to his roots in America’s dairyland classmates dubbed him “The Cheese.” (His name is actually pronounced CHEZ-bro.)His classmates remember him as intelligent and clever among the students who clustered around Mr. Tribe. They describe him as socially awkward — “Hi, it’s um, Ken,” he would say on phone calls — and in trying to ingratiate himself with faculty staff members ended up pestering them by hanging around a little too long at their desks.But he worked hard, pulling all-nighters in writing briefs, especially if one was going to have Mr. Tribe’s name on it.Mr. Chesebro graduated from law school in 1986 and secured a coveted job, clerking in Washington for U.S. District Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, who presided over some of the most pivotal political cases of the 1970s and 1980s.Judge Gesell, who died in 1993, ruled against the Nixon administration’s effort to stop The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers about America’s involvement in Vietnam. He presided over several Watergate trials, ruling that President Richard M. Nixon’s office tape recordings were in the public domain because they had already been played in court, and that Nixon’s firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox was illegal.The energetic judge prided himself on moving swiftly through his caseload with the help of a single clerk, who from 1986 to 1987 was Mr. Chesebro.Early one morning the judge entered his chambers to find Mr. Chesebro asleep on a sofa. A former clerk recalled that Mr. Chesebro confessed to him that without telling the judge, he had been living in the courthouse. The judge was generous with his staffers, the former clerk said, and had Mr. Chesebro told him he needed housing, he likely would have helped, the clerk said.Judge Gerhard Gesell, who presided over some of the most pivotal political cases of the 1970s and ’80s, prided himself on moving swiftly through his caseload with the help of a single clerk. From 1986 to 1987, that was Mr. Chesebro.Diana Walker, via Getty ImagesAfter his clerkship Mr. Chesebro did not join the government or a big plaintiffs’ firm, as many Gesell protégés did, but moved back to Cambridge and hung out his own shingle. For the next two decades he did occasional work for Mr. Tribe, writing briefs for his mentor.In 1994 he married Emily Stevens, a physician. Around the same time he began writing appellate briefs for a slew of cases brought by smokers against the major American tobacco companies. He registered to practice in multiple states, and crisscrossed the country.Holly Hostrup, a California lawyer who worked with Mr. Chesebro on appellate briefs defending multibillion-dollar verdicts against Philip Morris, recalled him as a fine lawyer. “He was obviously bright and had good arguments and had good experience and had been hired onto big cases and won big cases,” she said. Ms. Hostrup belongs to a lawyers’ email list and said that Mr. Chesebro had been weighing in on tobacco cases as recently as this year.After Mr. Chesebro’s indictment Ms. Hostrup asked an expert in courtroom psychology to help her understand: “How does a person who worked on all those cases on the plaintiffs’ side become a MAGA Republican?”“To my mind,’’ she said, “it was like turning around and going to work for Philip Morris.”Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University law professor and president of its Public Health Advocacy Institute, devised the legal strategy for suing the tobacco giants. “Ken was a guy with really interesting ideas, and proud of them,” he recalled.“I can see the seduction,” he added, speaking of Mr. Chesebro’s embrace by Trump World. “I’m a Democrat, and if I had some bright ideas Biden’s advisers were taking seriously, that’s a big deal, a kind of opportunity.“But of course I’m not about to throw my body over the tracks by saying this is a wonderful human being and whatever he was doing had to be for good reason.”Sudden Wealth, Severed TiesDuring the 2000 presidential election recount battle in Florida, Mr. Chesebro served on the research team assisting Mr. Tribe and other legal luminaries representing Mr. Gore. After Mr. Gore lost, Mr. Tribe and Mr. Chesebro worked together on a few more big lawsuits, then largely went separate ways.But they stayed in touch. Mr. Chesebro’s 2014 investment in Bitcoin netted him “several million dollars,” he wrote in an email to Mr. Tribe that was quoted in a recent article in Air Mail. His marriage ended, and Mr. Chesebro acquired expensive homes in Boston and Manhattan, and a villa in Puerto Rico.Soon after Mr. Chesebro’s big payday, his name began appearing on legal briefs filed by far-right conservatives, including John Eastman and a former Wisconsin judge, James Troupis. All three were described as co-conspirators in the federal indictment for the 2020 election scheme. He made hefty campaign donations to far-right Republicans, maxing out to Mr. Trump in 2020.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers, Scott Grubman and Serreen Meki, speaking to journalists after his guilty plea in Atlanta on Friday.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerMr. Troupis appealed to Mr. Chesebro for help several days after the election. According to the Georgia indictment, Mr. Chesebro drafted a flurry of incriminating memos.In emails laying out the false electors plan, Mr. Chesebro misinterpreted Mr. Tribe’s work on Bush v. Gore, repeatedly citing it to support his theories. Mr. Tribe called him out in an article in August titled “Anatomy of a Fraud.” More

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      N.H. GOP Fights 14th Amendment Bid to Bar Trump From Ballot

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      In New Hampshire, Republicans are feuding over whether the 14th Amendment bars Donald J. Trump from running for president. Other states are watching closely.New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary is quickly becoming the leading edge for an unproven legal theory that Donald J. Trump is disqualified from appearing on the ballot under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.A long-shot presidential candidate has filed a lawsuit in state court seeking an injunction to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot. And a former Republican candidate for Senate is urging the secretary of state to bring a case that could put the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court.On Wednesday, Free Speech for the People, a liberal-leaning group that unsuccessfully tried to strike House Republicans from the ballot in 2022, sent a letter to the secretaries of state in New Hampshire, as well as Florida, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin, urging them to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.These efforts employ a theory that has been gaining traction among liberals and anti-Trump conservatives: that Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, disqualify him under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars people from holding office if they took an oath to support the Constitution and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”The theory has been gaining momentum since two prominent conservative law professors published an article this month concluding that Mr. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from running for office.But even advocates of the disqualification theory say it is a legal long shot. If a secretary of state strikes Mr. Trump’s name or a voter lawsuit advances, Mr. Trump’s campaign is sure to appeal, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court, where the 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices nominated by Mr. Trump.“When it gets to the Supreme Court, as it surely will, this will test the dedication of the justices to principles of law, more than almost anything has for a very long time,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who believes the insurrection disqualification clearly applies to Mr. Trump, “because they will obviously realize that telling the leading candidate of one major political party, ‘no, no way, you’re not eligible’ is no small matter.”However long the odds of success, discussion of the amendment is bubbling up across the country. In Arizona, the secretary of state said he had heard from “concerned citizens” about the issue, and the Michigan secretary of state said she was “taking it seriously.” In Georgia, officials are looking at precedent set by a failed attempt to use the 14th Amendment to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from the ballot in the 2022 midterms.But New Hampshire has jumped out as the early hotbed of the fight.The New Hampshire Republican Party said this week that it would challenge any effort to remove Mr. Trump, or any other candidates who have met requirements, from the ballot.“There’s no question that we will fight, and we’ll use all of the tools available to us to fight anyone’s access being denied on the ballot,” said Chris Ager, a Republican state committeeman in New Hampshire. “And if there’s a lawsuit, we are likely to intervene on behalf of the candidate to make sure that they have access. So we take it very seriously that the people of New Hampshire should decide who the nominee is, not a judge, not a justice system.”Chris Ager, a Republican state committeeman in New Hampshire, shaking Mr. Trump’s hand at the state party meeting in January.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLate last week, Bryant Messner, a former Trump-endorsed candidate for U.S. Senate, who goes by Corky, met with New Hampshire’s secretary of state, David M. Scanlan, to urge him to seek legal guidance on the issue. After Politico first reported the meeting, Mr. Scanlan and John M. Formella, the state’s attorney general, issued a joint statement saying that “the attorney general’s office is now carefully reviewing the legal issues involved.”Other secretaries of state have also been seeking legal guidance.“We’re taking a very cautious approach to the issue,” Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said in an interview. “We’re going to be consulting with lawyers in our office and other folks who will eventually have to deal with this in the courts as well. We don’t anticipate that any decision that I or any other election administrator might make will be the final decision. This will get ultimately decided by the courts.”Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, said his office had already heard from “concerned citizens” regarding Mr. Trump’s eligibility under the 14th Amendment.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThough the argument is particularly appealing to liberals who view Mr. Trump as a grave threat, most of the recent momentum on this topic has come from conservative circles.Mr. Messner, a self-described “constitutional conservative,” said he was seeking to create case law around the issue. He said he had not yet filed a legal challenge because he first wanted the secretary of state to open up the candidate filing period and decide whether he would accept Mr. Trump’s filing. He argued that the lawsuit filed on Sunday by a Republican candidate, John Anthony Castro, was unlikely to advance because the filing period has not yet opened.“Section 3 has not been interpreted,” Mr. Messner said in an interview. “So, my position is let’s find a way for this to get into the court system as soon as possible. And then hopefully we can expedite through the legal system, to get it to the Supreme Court as soon as possible.”The precedent is by no means settled. A case filed against then-Representative Madison Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, ended with Judge Richard E. Myers II of U.S. District Court, an appointee of Mr. Trump, siding with Mr. Cawthorn. The judge ruled that the final clause of Section 3 allowed for a vote in Congress to “remove” the disqualification and that the passage of the Amnesty Act of 1872 effectively nullified the ban on insurrectionists.But on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overruled that argument, saying the Amnesty Act clearly applied only to confederates, not future insurrectionists. The case was declared moot after Mr. Cawthorn lost his re-election in the 2022 primaries.Other cases may also come into play. An administrative law judge in Georgia ruled that plaintiffs failed to prove that Ms. Greene, Republican of Georgia, was in fact an insurrectionist. And cases against Representatives Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, Republicans of Arizona, were similarly dropped.Advocates of the disqualification clause fear that judges and secretaries of state could decide that any case against Mr. Trump will have to wait until a jury, either in Fulton County, Ga., or Washington, D.C., renders judgment in the two criminal cases charging that Mr. Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia indicated that previous cases involving Ms. Greene would continue to guide his office, and that “as secretary of state of Georgia, I have been clear that I believe voters are smart and deserve the right to decide elections.”“In Georgia, there is a specific statutory process to follow when a candidate’s qualifications for office are challenged,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a statement. “The secretary of state’s office has and will continue to follow the appropriate procedures in state law for any candidate challenges.”There has been one settled case since Jan. 6 that invoked the 14th Amendment. In September, a judge in New Mexico ordered a county commissioner convicted of participating in the Jan. 6 riot removed from office under the 14th Amendment. He was the first public official in more than a century to be barred from serving under a constitutional ban on insurrectionists holding office. More

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      A Stanford Student Mocked the Federalist Society. It Jeopardized His Graduation.

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      The Stanford student sent a satirical flier that drew a complaint from the conservative group. The university then placed a hold on his diploma.It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.His offense: sending an email flier to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.The satirical flier promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Mr. Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter.“I was astounded,” Mr. Wallace, 32, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe that without any more than this letter of concern they placed my graduation and everything I’ve worked for for the last three years, they’ve placed that under threat.”Mr. Wallace’s predicament drew national attention from both free speech groups and conservatives. It served as another example of the intense debate over political speech on college campuses in America.In response to questions on Wednesday, a spokesman for Stanford University said in an email that Mr. Wallace would be allowed to graduate after all after administrators consulted with the university’s legal counsel, who concluded the matter involved issues of protected speech.“In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent,” said the spokesman, E.J. Miranda. “The complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible, and the respondent and complainant have been informed that case law supports that the email is protected speech.”Mr. Miranda said that the university would also review its procedures for placing holds on student diplomas in judicial cases close to graduation.The president of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday night.Mr. Hawley, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, was widely criticized for objecting to the certification of the presidential election results. Mr. Paxton has drawn scrutiny for his appearance at a rally in support of Donald J. Trump in Washington on the day of the siege.Representatives for Mr. Hawley and Mr. Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday night.Grabbing attention itself was Mr. Wallace’s satirical flier, which he said he had emailed to a Listserv forum for law school students on Jan. 25, nearly three weeks after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.The flier said that the event was being presented by the Federalist Society on Jan. 6.“Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,” the flier said, offering Grubhub coupons to the first 30 students who R.S.V.P.’d for the fictitious program. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”Two days after the satirical flier was sent by Mr. Wallace, it was the focus of a fact check article by USA Today, which reported that the email was a form of satire.In a complaint to the university, unidentified officers of the Federalist Society chapter said that Mr. Wallace’s email had caused significant harm and had led other organizations to cancel their events with the group.“Wallace defamed the student group, its officers, Senator Josh Hawley, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” the complaint said. “Wallace, impersonating the Stanford Federalist Society, wrote on the flyer that ‘Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,’ insinuating that the student group was encouraging and hosting a riot. He also wrote that Attorney General Paxton advocates for ‘overturn[ing] the results of a free and fair election’ by ‘calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol.’ And he wrote that Senator Hawley believes that violent insurrections are justified.”The names of the complainants were redacted from the complaint, which was posted online on Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group working to defend free speech on college campuses. Mr. Wallace had sought the group’s help.“By instituting an investigation and placing a hold on Wallace’s degree days before his graduation, Stanford betrays its legal and moral commitments to respect its students’ expressive rights,” the group said in a letter on Tuesday to one of the law school’s deans.The flap drew the notice of Slate magazine. The writer of that article, Mark Joseph Stern, was the featured speaker in a conversation about the Federalist Society that Mr. Wallace said he had organized about a month after he sent the satirical email.Mr. Wallace’s cause was also taken up by Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University.“Mocking an ideologically-based group can’t be made a basis for denying academic privileges in any open society worthy of respect,” Mr. Tribe wrote on Twitter. “If accurate, this report shows Stanford Law School to be unworthy of treatment as an academic institution.”George T. Conway III, one of the founders of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, also rallied behind Mr. Wallace.“As someone who been involved with the Federalist Society for over 35 years, I agree that this is totally ridiculous,” Mr. Conway said on Twitter, responding to Mr. Tribe.Mr. Wallace, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, said that he is supposed to take the bar exam this summer in his home state and then start a job with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C.He said that he would not have been able to take the bar exam without his law school diploma, which he will receive on June 12. More