ATLANTA (CN) — Kenneth Chesebro, one of the defendants in the racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and 17 others accused of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election defeat in Georgia, accepted a plea deal Friday, just as jury selection for his trial began.
Chesebro, an attorney from Wisconsin who worked for the Trump campaign, was charged with seven felony racketeering and conspiracy counts for his purported role in helping other defendants coordinate a plan to impanel alternative slates of GOP Trump electors in Georgia and other swing states.
But just as 450 residents of Fulton County, Georgia, appeared at the courthouse on Friday to fill out lengthy questionnaires for jury selection, Chesebro and his legal team reached a plea deal with prosecutors.
He pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents and must serve five years of probation, pay $5,000 in restitution to the state and serve 100 hours of community service. Under the terms of the deal, he also agreed to write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia and testify truthfully throughout the rest of the case.
The move comes a day after another attorney who worked with the Trump campaign, Chesebro's co-defendant Sidney Powell, also entered a plea deal.
Powell had also originally faced seven felony charges for paying employees of Atlanta tech company SullivanStrickler to travel to Coffee County in rural Georgia and copy voter data “without authority” from voting equipment. But on Thursday, she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties, in exchange for her truthful testimony in the case. She will have six years of probation and also pay a fine.
The two attorneys were slated to be tried together but separately from Trump and the other 16 defendants, after the judge accepted their requests for speedy trials. The trial had been expected to begin in two weeks and take five months.
Chesebro's plea deal came after Judge McAfee rejected bids from him and Powell to dismiss their cases, finding that the charges against them were not defective on their face.
Standing before Judge Scott McAfee of the Fulton County Superior Court and alongside his attorney, Chesebro pleaded guilty to conspiring with Trump, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman to recruit false presidential electors from Georgia. He also helped create false electoral college documents, including a false certificate of vote showing that Trump had won all of Georgia’s electoral college votes.
Prosecutors claim this was done to disrupt the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, by using the false documents to cause then-Vice President Michael Pence to violate the Electoral Count Act.
According to the indictment brought in August, Trump and the other defendants charged "refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump."
Chesebro marks the third defendant to plead guilty, bringing the total number of defendants down from 19 to 16, including Trump. Last month, Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.
According to the indictment, Hall was also present at the Coffee County elections office in January 2021, where he helped Powell access voting equipment and copy confidential data.
The guilty pleas are a legal victory for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who launched the investigation and whose office is prosecuting the case. Prosecutors not only gain testimony against the other defendants, but also now avoid an additional trial, as they had sought for all of the defendants to be tried together. Because the case was brought under Georgia’s RICO law, prosecutors intend to prove the entirety of the alleged conspiracy, presenting all the same evidence and witnesses in any trial in the case.
In a separate election interference case underway in a federal court in Washington, Chesebro is identified as “Co-Conspirator 5,” though he is not formally charged. The federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith says a series of legal memos Chesebro wrote for the Trump campaign developed into “a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”
In a petition filed earlier this month, prosecutors had sought testimony against Chesebro from conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones, after they were seen together amid the thousands of Trump supporters who gathered at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
The 62-year-old was once a registered Democrat who donated to left-leaning politicians before he began working for Trump’s campaign following the 2020 election.
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