Alyssa Pointer/Pool Photo via AP
Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, center, appears before Judge Scott MacAfee during a motions hearing in the election subversion case, October 10, 2023, in Atlanta.
On Tuesday, Wisconsin became the fifth state to file criminal charges stemming from the plot by Republicans to overturn the 2020 election by submitting forged electoral certificates falsely claiming that Donald Trump had won the vote.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced a felony indictment on June 4 against two attorneys, Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis, and campaign aide Mike Roman, all of whom helped orchestrate the scheme to submit false paperwork claiming to represent that state’s electoral votes. The group was charged with conspiracy to commit forgery.
The indictments are another small step toward establishing the official record of the stunning and destabilizing events of the 2020 election, even in the face of a continuing barrage of disinformation from the Republican Party, and despite the plodding pace and laxity of law enforcement in one of the most important criminal cases in the country’s history.
A former adviser and assistant to then-President Trump, Peter Navarro, recently reported to prison to serve a sentence for contempt of Congress, after defying a subpoena to testify about the plot. Rudy Giuliani, another former adviser and Trump lawyer, was served with an indictment for his participation in the scheme in Arizona, after disclosing his location at a birthday party in a social media post that mocked law enforcement officials for being unable to locate him. And Trump himself was convicted last week for falsifying records in an effort to cheat in the previous presidential election, in 2016. And that’s just since March.
Meanwhile, Republicans remain uniformly unbothered by the unprecedented, multipronged assaults on our democracy, and by Trump’s personal role. And they’ve continued to push false narratives about the former president being politically targeted, along with a need to protect against allegedly widespread voter fraud.
Still, the verdicts thus far, the plea deals, pending prosecutions, and indictments, as well as the public evidence, tell a different story. Taken together, they make it clear that there was an illegal scheme, involving the core of the Republican leadership, to overturn a legitimate election by fraud and by force—and that those efforts to disenfranchise voters were targeted against Black and Latino people specifically.
The broader scheme that resulted in the recent charges in Wisconsin, for example, didn’t question ballots across the state. It sought to disqualify votes only in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, where a supermajority of nonwhite Wisconsinites live. (Milwaukee County includes the city of Milwaukee, and Dane includes college town and liberal bastion Madison.)
That observation wasn’t lost on a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, who told Troupis in 2020 that Trump’s lawsuit asking the courts to scrap hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots solely in those counties “smacks of racism.”
The same goes for just about every other county and city whose voters were portrayed by Trump and his allies as potential criminals and somehow “illegitimate,” like Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix; Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas; and Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit.
If you’ll recall, the dog whistles being used at that time were often pitched at the tone of an emergency siren; the underlying racism was fairly obvious to many other observers.
Bob Bauer, then a senior legal adviser to President Joe Biden’s campaign, told NPR in November 2020 that there was nothing subtle about Trump’s “targeting of the African American community.”
“It’s quite remarkable how brazen it is,” Bauer said. “This is straight out, discriminatory behavior.”
The illegal plot to overturn the election is overwhelmingly a racist plot to return Black voters and other voters of color to second-class citizenship, stripped of their voting rights.
And here’s how Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, put it when I interviewed him that same month: “I can say, as succinctly as possible: These are Jim Crow-era efforts to disenfranchise voters.”
The “fake elector” scheme was a central component of Trump and his allies’ scattershot strategy to subvert the election result, according to the separate indictments and ongoing prosecutions brought by the Justice Department against the many co-conspirators.
The latest indictments in Wisconsin are the first in the state, which was where the plot actually originated before being attempted elsewhere.
The charging documents lay out the three defendants’ role in promoting the theory behind the unlawful scheme, and how they coordinated to transmit forged electoral certificates to a law student who unwittingly served as their bagman, ultimately delivering the fraudulent paperwork to Chesebro in Washington, D.C. The young woman received a selfie from Chesebro so that she could identify him, and later text-messaged the co-conspirators saying, “5 mins until I make the drop,” adding, “I feel like a drug dealer.”
The forged documents were delivered to a staffer for an unnamed Pennsylvania congressman; and the plan was supposed to culminate with then-Vice President Pence simply rejecting his legal duty to open the envelopes containing the electoral vote certificates, or reading out the results from the fake certificates instead, according to the indictments.
At this point, the Wisconsin case seems pretty airtight. Ten people who actually stood in as “alternate” (i.e., fake) electors have accepted a settlement in a different, civil lawsuit brought by two (real) Wisconsin electors and a voter. The Wisconsin fake electors even formally repudiated their false claims as part of the settlement, including admitting that they “were not the duly elected presidential electors,” and that their actions were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential elections.” One of the false electors, who is also a former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, has said they were “tricked by the Trump campaign” into signing a document claiming Trump won the state.
Chesebro and Roman have also been charged along with Trump in a racketeering indictment in Georgia; Chesebro has pleaded guilty in that case and agreed to provide evidence. (The case was temporarily put on hold Wednesday while the court reviews a conflict-of-interest allegation against the prosecutor, which likely pushes out that trial beyond the presidential election.)
The indictments in other states also shore up the allegations about the conspiracy, and they show the involvement of Republican Party leadership around the country.
State authorities in Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Arizona have also brought charges stemming from the plot. The former chairs of the Michigan Republican Party and the Georgia Republican Party have been charged for helping submit electoral certificates. And the indictments against Chesebro and others implicate the Republican National Committee as well.
The latest charging documents point out that “Trump, Michael Pence, and the Trump campaign filed lawsuits in Dane County Circuit Court and Milwaukee County Circuit Court, ‘seeking to invalidate a sufficient number of Wisconsin ballots to change Wisconsin’s certified election results.’”
The two cities are Wisconsin’s most diverse. The city of Milwaukee, for example, is majority-minority, with Black and Latino people accounting for about 59 percent of its population.
Those patterns hold in virtually all of the places targeted by the Trump campaign and Republican Party’s efforts. Both Maricopa County and Clark County, for example, are about 32 percent Latino, and Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit are all plurality- or majority-Black.
Of course, the specter of massive voter fraud in those counties and cities was and is a myth, based on nothing more than racist tropes, and barely hidden by racially coded language.
Trump and his allies routinely invoke race, almost always to marginalize and degrade nonwhite people, but often without actually using explicitly racist or racial language. The illegal plot to overturn the election, in other words, is overwhelmingly a racist plot to return Black voters and other voters of color to second-class citizenship, stripped of their voting rights.
As part of the scheme, Trump and other defendants spread knowingly false claims of election fraud, including lies about two specific, Black Atlanta election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss—facts that are a part of the federal and Georgia indictments.
Trump, for example, falsely claimed that Freeman, a temp worker in her sixties, was actually a “professional vote scammer” and “hustler.” He mentioned Freeman by name 18 different times in his now-infamous call in which he pressured and at times threatened Georgia officials to alter the election results.
While trying to overturn the election in 2020, Trump baldly asserted that Detroit and Philadelphia are “two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily.” He has previously singled out Oakland and Baltimore, saying living in those cities is “like living in hell.” And the former president has also described Atlanta as “crime-infested” and a “Murder and Violent Crime War Zone.”
Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani, falsely claimed that there was video footage of Freeman and Moss acting suspiciously during the voting process, and compared them to drug dealers “passing out dope.”
Freeman and Moss have since faced horrific, racist death threats, as they explained during emotional congressional testimony in June 2022. Because of this, they sued Giuliani and were awarded $148 million in damages for defamation.
Giuliani also held a press conference in the midst of the unfolding scheme, where he claimed that people are still using the names of dead Black Philadelphians—mentioning Joe Frazier and Will Smith’s late father, specifically—to vote long after they are deceased.
Legal scholars Catherine Powell and Camille Gear Rich explained in a 2020 paper how Trump’s language in the Georgia phone call effectively remobilized the old racist trope of a political trickster known as the “welfare queen,” transforming her from a welfare-and-benefits fraudster into a voter fraudster, “still Brown, female, and poor, but now out to steal American democracy.”
Despite all the evidence—including public admissions of the conspiracy, if not all the details—we are still quite far from official legal accountability and consequences for what was a serious, internal attack on our democratic institutions. Still, the public record is clear enough, even today, as a matter of history, and the enforcement actions by officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere will continue to flesh out the details of the crimes.
