Pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro warned Donald Trump campaign official Mike Roman in a text message exchange they might want to alter the language in the fake elector certificates, just to make sure what they were signing wasn't illegal — and Roman stomped on that idea hard, reported The Detroit News on Tuesday.
The exchange took place on December 12, 2020, as the fake electors were preparing to sign declarations that were meant to be a pretext to stop the electoral count on January 6 — and it came as the electors in Pennsylvania, specifically, were asking for boilerplate language calling themselves electors "contingent" on there being challenges to the vote in their state. Chesebro suggested this should apply to all the fake electors across the other battleground states, only to be denied.
"Mike, I think the language at start of the certificate should be changed in all the states," said Chesebro in the text exchange. "I can help with drafting in a couple hours."
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"I don't," replied Roman. "F--k those guys."
"Just placate pa? Ok," Chesebro responded.
Law professor Anthony Michael Kreis was quick to weigh in on the new revelations in a post on X. "New evidence indicates that the Trump campaign purposefully rejected qualifying language on fake elector 'certifications,'" he wrote. "What end did that serve? The sole purpose of rejecting the Pennsylvania verbiage: it set up the fake electors to justify Pence triggering a soft coup."
Ultimately, Chesebro's instinct was probably correct — experts believe that the "contingent" qualifying language makes it unlikely the Pennsylvania fake electors will ever be criminally charged. At the same time several fake electors have been charged in Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada, where there was no such language and they simply declared themselves to be the legitimate electors.
Chesebro himself, a key architect of the whole scheme, has also been charged in the Georgia case, along with Trump himself.
