How the Trump fake electors scheme became a 'corrupt plan,' according to the indictment
economictimes.indiatimes.comDonald Trump's desperate effort to cling to power after his defeat in the 2020 election is at the center of a four-count indictment released against the former president Tuesday. The third criminal case into Trump details, among other charges, what prosecutors say was a massive and monthslong effort to «impair, obstruct, and defeat» the federal process for certifying the results of a presidential election, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The 45-page indictment states that when Trump could not persuade state officials to illegally swing the election in his favor, he and his Republican allies began recruiting a slate of fake electors in seven battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to sign certificates falsely stating that he, not Democrat Joe Biden, had won their states. While those certificates were ultimately ignored by lawmakers, federal prosecutors say it was all part of «a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors' votes from being counted and certified.» Here's a deeper look at how the scheme unfolded, according to the indictment:
FROM 'LEGAL STRATEGY' TO 'CORRUPT PLAN'The fake electors plan began in Wisconsin, prosecutors allege, with a memorandum from Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who was assisting the Trump campaign at the time with legal challenges. Cheseboro wrote the memo in mid-November 2020 that advocated for Trump supporters in Wisconsin to meet and cast their votes for him, in case the campaign's litigation in the state succeeded. But less than a month later, «in a sharp departure,» a new memo was issued that called for expanding the strategy to other key states, creating slates
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