Trump’s “Election Fraud” Henchmen Charged in Yet Another State

Kenneth Chesebro got smacked with a felony fraud charge by Wisconsin prosecutors on Tuesday. Largely considered the architect of the fake electors plot to flip the 2020 election to Trump, Chesebro was charged alongside Michael Roman, head of Trump’s 2020 Election Day operations, and fellow Trump lawyer James Troupis. All were charged with one count of forgery in the case brought by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Paul, according to court records.

The statute listed for the Trump trio’s charges, “forgery-uttering,” is a Class H felony in Wisconsin, essentially defined as touting bogus official statements or fake legal documents or public records as true while knowing they’re fraudulent.

Chesebro, as part of the fake elector scheme, attempted to send fake certified elector documents—which falsely claimed Wisconsin and Michigan electors chose Trump—to Washington, D.C., ahead of 2020’s presidential electoral certification process. The plot was spoiled when the documents infamously got stuck in the mail, leading to a last-minute scramble by the schemers to get the phony paperwork into the hands of then–Vice President Mike Pence in time to certify election results on January 6, 2021.

Chesebro is also named as a co-conspirator in Georgia’s fake elector charges, where he is cooperating with the state and has pleaded guilty to planning the goofily villainous scheme. Chesebro is reportedly also cooperating with prosecutors in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Tuesday’s charges are a first for Troupis and Roman, who join the vaunted ranks of at least a dozen other Trump lawyers and toadies who conspired to submit fake electors to certify the 2020 election for Trump. Troupis and Chesebro are also being sued by Biden electors in Wisconsin for the plot, where 10 other Republican electors settled a lawsuit in December 2023 forcing them to admit Biden won the 2020 election.

In the latest erosion of personal freedoms at the hands of Republicans, a GOP lawmaker has requested to dig through the personal emails of a private citizen. But it’s OK, because the citizen in question is Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who Republicans are convinced has done something really wrong, despite his repeated testimony to the contrary.

Last month, Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about a disturbing set of emails in which he wrote that he’d been able to skirt requests under the Freedom of Information Act by deleting official correspondence and using his personal Gmail account.

During an interview on Fox Business on Tuesday morning, Representative Brad Wenstrup, the Republican chair of that subcommittee, confirmed that to follow up on Morens’s emails, he intends to dig through Fauci’s personal emails too.

“Dr. Morens said in his emails that, ‘Tony uses Gmail, too. I can contact Tony on Gmail, or I can just walk right into his office, or I can go to his house,’” said Wenstrup. “So, we have asked for Dr. Fauci’s Gmails, and I think it’s important that we get them.”

“Yesterday he said, ‘No, I never did any official business on my Gmail.’ Well, we’re gonna try and find out just as we did with Dr. Morens,” said Wenstrup. The Ohio Republican and foot doctor, who has opposed vaccine mandates, requested Fauci’s personal emails and phone records on May 29.

In his opening remarks before the subcommittee on Monday, Fauci testified that he “knew nothing” about Dr. Morens’s conduct and insisted that the two didn’t really work together. He also tried to put the Gmail rumors to rest.

“To the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email,” said Fauci, who has previously said he has complied with all of the panel’s requests.

Wenstrup condemned Fauci during the hearing for his role in creating supposedly “oppressive” federal rules to usher Americans through the early days of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, taking aim at mask mandates and social distancing guidelines.

“Americans were aggressively bullied, shamed, and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines, or the origins of Covid,” Wenstrup whined.

Rooting through Fauci’s emails seems to be the latest pivot for Republicans, after they tried to pin everything from alleged misconduct to tedious safety measures on the former health official.

The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents trial, Aileen Cannon, is so unpopular that a federal appeals court was forced to announce it will no longer accept complaints about her.

The 11th Circuit Judicial Council, which oversees the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida where Cannon serves, said in a May 22 opinion that its clerk has received more than 1,000 complaints about Cannon since May 16.

The complaints “raise allegations that are similar to the allegations raised in previous complaints” and seem to be part of an “orchestrated campaign,” according to the council, which ordered its clerk to stop accepting complaints about Cannon.

Specifically, these complaints claim Cannon’s is delaying issuing rulings in the classified documents case as well as making incorrect rulings. Many complaints also ask that Cannon be removed from the case altogether.

Cannon’s conduct certainly appears questionable. On Monday, she agreed to hear Trump’s arguments that the FBI plotted to assassinate him—a completely made-up conspiracy theory. Last week, she blocked a gag order request from special counsel Jack Smith because it was “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy.” Last month, she effectively delayed Trump’s case indefinitely to resolve pretrial motions. Even one of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb, thinks that Cannon is doing a terrible job with the case.

And it’s not just Cannon’s favorable actions toward Trump that raise eyebrows—the infrequent trial proceedings don’t paint her in a favorable light. Cannon herself seems to be having trouble understanding basic legal proceedings and principles, leading to long explanations that she still doesn’t appear to grasp. One hearing with a Trump co-defendant devolved into a shouting match. Plus, her conduct has disillusioned some of her clerks, two of whom decided to quit as a result of her conduct on the classified documents case as well as an allegedly hostile work environment.

Legal experts think that Cannon’s actions could be part of a plan for the Trump appointee to eventually dismiss the case altogether. Trump has made no secret of how much he appreciates Cannon’s efforts. But thus far, the only responses to her actions have been the complaints to the 11th Circuit and online petitions, neither of which carry much weight.

Donald Trump might already be in jail by the time he accepts the GOP nomination for president at the Republican National Convention—at least according to RNC Chair Michael Whatley.

Whatley told Newsmax Tuesday that the GOP organization is already planning for the possibility.

“We’re working on that right now,” Whatley said. “We expect that Donald Trump is going to be in Milwaukee, and he is going to be able to accept that nomination. And if not, we will make whatever contingency plan we need to make for it. But the fact is, he is going to be our nominee, and he’s going to be the 47th president of the United States.”

When pressed for the details on the “contingency plans”—such as whether Trump would have to deliver a speech from prison or if he would need to prerecord a speech before he was sentenced—Whatley said he couldn’t elaborate but added that “everything is being thought about” and everything was being “considered at this point in time.”

“We will have to wait and see what the courts present us with the opportunity to do, but look, Donald Trump will communicate directly with the American voters the way that he always does,” Whatley said.

“Believe me, Mr. Chairman, I can feel the audience right now upset that I’m asking these questions, but I have to ask them just because we are in such uncharted territory,” responded Newsmax host Rob Finnerty.

Meanwhile, the tides are turning against Republicans who dared to respect the rule of law and the judgment of 12 jurors who convicted Trump. After a weekend of waffling on the fate of former Maryland governor and Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan, Whatley flatly said that the Republican primary winner “has to run his own race.”

“The RNC is not behind Larry Hogan?” pressed Finnerty.

“We are behind the Republican nominee, and we will support that nominee, but Larry Hogan is going to have to have that conversation with his voters there,” Whatley said.

“So the RNC won’t support Larry Hogan … as the guy on the ballot?” continued Finnerty.

“I didn’t say that. We’re making decisions based on investments in races every single day as we go forward with it,” Whatley said evasively. “Right now, we will evaluate it as we move forward in the election cycle.”

In the conspiracy world, white supremacist conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson is evidently a triumph of independent antiestablishment thought. At least if you ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running mate (and billionaire) Nicole Shanahan.

“I’m sitting across from Tucker, and he and I are so on the same page in every single way,” Shanahan boasted during a campaign stop last week in Maine, provoking cheers from the small audience. “We are on the same page because we have left ‘establishment thinking’ once and for all.”

While touting his campaign as a defiant underdog battling against the forces of establishment control, former so-called Democrat Kennedy has long been a conspiracy theorist who routinely finds himself apologizing for pushing antisemitic rhetoric and appalling conspiracies—like nonsensically claiming Covid-19 was created to spare Jews, and that vaccine requirements are worse than the Holocaust.

The anti-vax nonprofit Kennedy chairs, Children’s Health Defense, was a major propagator of anti-vaccine disinformation in 2021 and often found itself rubbing shoulders with QAnon-addled Trumpsters and election-denialist insurrectionists. According to The Washington Post, Children’s Health Defense has peddled the “great reset” conspiracy, which claims “global elites” (billionaires, like Shanahan?) planned to use the coronavirus pandemic to “push forward a globalist or Marxist plot to destroy American sovereignty and prosperity and control the population.”

Tucker Carlson was ousted at Fox News after repeatedly pushing the deeply racist ‘great replacement’ theory, a racist conspiracy that falsely claims nonwhite immigrants are relocating to the United States with the explicit intention of eliminating “white culture.” Great replacement is a staple conspiracy among the extreme far right, and has been frequently touted by racist mass shooters.

Shanahan’s embrace of Carlson, both ultrarich and espousing conspiracies either covertly or overtly rooted in racism, is just another example of how the “antiestablishment” label is often just a scam to get people buying into authoritarian, extremist ideologies.