The man who helped to develop and implement Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election is asking a Georgia court to invalidate his guilty plea last year in the sprawling state RICO case.
Ken Chesebro’s filed the motion to invalidate his guilty plea Wednesday morning. It is not related to Trump’s victory in the 2024 election or to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s withdrawal of the federal Jan. 6 case. Rather, Chesebro wants out of his state-level guilty plea because the judge in the case invalidated the charge earlier this year.
In September, Fulton County Superior Court judge Scott McAfee ruled that three counts in District Attorney Fani Willis’s RICO indictment were unconstitutional. McAfee found that the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause precluded the charges, which had to do with making false statements to a federal body, from being filed.
At the time of the judge’s September ruling, Chesebro had already pleaded guilty to one of the now-dismissed counts, a charge of conspiracy to file false documents. Chesebro argues in today’s filing that the charge should be dismissed because it has been found to be unconstitutional, regardless of his guilty plea.
Jan. 6, in Chesebro’s vision, was meant to be a more expansive delay in the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win. Congress would have been mired in debate over the fake electoral certificates that the Trump campaign submitted, with federal lawsuits asking to reverse the result seeded in swing states around the country. In theory, with Congress swamped by the fake elector certificates, the Supreme Court could have stepped in to deliver Trump an illegitimate victory.
Read the filing here:
