The chairman of the Nevada Republican Party has been indicted. So did the former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party. In Michigan, a former state party co-chair faces charges.
As former President Donald Trump goes to trial in the New York criminal case, other investigations and prosecutions in five crucial swing states continue to examine the steps he and his allies took to try to circumvent the will of voters after the 2020 election.
The investigations focus mainly on the plan to mobilize fake voters in states that Trump lost. Documents emerging from the state cases highlight divisions among Trump’s advisers after the 2020 election over the use of hedging language in the fake certificates they sent to Washington aimed at assigning electoral votes to Trump. They also undermined claims by some Trump aides that they played little role in the fake voters’ plot.
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Georgia, Michigan and Nevada have already brought charges against a total of 25 fake voters, including current and former Republican Party leaders in those states. The Georgia case, led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, went further, bringing charges against Trump himself and several of his advisers.
Investigations are also underway in Wisconsin as well as Arizona, where state Attorney General Kris Mayes is expected to file charges soon. Grand jury subpoenas were recently issued to people who acted as fake voters in Arizona, including Kelli Ward, the former Republican state chairman. Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign official already facing charges in Georgia, is also among those subpoenaed in the Arizona case.
There are so many state investigations underway that “they all work together,” said Manny Arora, lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, the architect of the fake voter plot who has emerged as a key witness in the investigations.
“Most jurisdictions keep it local and leave the big questions to the feds,” Arora said, adding that he didn’t expect most state cases “to be as comprehensive as Georgia’s.”
Evidence has also emerged from state civil lawsuits filed on behalf of legitimate Joe Biden voters in 2020, and the federal case brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Trump.
State-level investigations are being led by Democrats, with one exception. Pete Skandalakis, a Republican who leads a nonpartisan state agency in Georgia, said last week that he would investigate Lt. Gov. Burt Jones for his role as a fake voter. Willis was disqualified from investigating Jones because she had organized a fundraiser for one of Jones’s political opponents.
It is unclear whether either case will significantly affect Trump’s 2024 campaign. The former president’s most immediate legal challenge is the criminal trial that began this week in New York City, focusing on hush-hush payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels .
In election interference cases, lawyers for Trump and other defendants have generally not challenged the evidence, opting instead to challenge investigations on free speech, immunity or procedural grounds.
But Trump’s legal team also continues to be the target of scrutiny. One of his top lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, was closely involved in the fake voter effort, his emails and text messages show. (“Does the VP have final authority over which electoral slate should be chosen?” Epshteyn texted Chesebro on December 12, 2020, as the plan was germinating.)
Trump has described himself as the victim of a broad conspiracy and made his legal difficulties the focus of his campaign. During Easter, he released a story comparing his legal challenges to the trials of Jesus.
Many of those who tried to keep Trump in power after the 2020 election remain defiant. Anthony Kern, an Arizona state lawmaker who served as a fake voter there, said late last year that “there are no fake voters.”
Others expressed contrition. Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign, tearfully apologized in October when she pleaded guilty to a crime in Atlanta, telling a judge she looked back on “this experience with deep remorse.”
A few weeks later in Michigan, a fake Trump voter and former state trooper named James Renner told state investigators that he regretted his actions in 2020 after learning more about what happened.
“I felt like I was in a situation that I should never have gotten involved in,” he said in an interview with investigators from the Michigan attorney general’s office, according to a transcript obtained by The New York Times. The charges against Renner were dropped and he agreed to cooperate.
Chesebro, who pleaded guilty to a crime last year in Georgia, later told investigators in Michigan that he had been misled by the Trump campaign and was unaware that it was “trying to create chaos in state legislatures.”
He said he was financially devastated by legal fees.
“It’s been a real lesson in not working with people you don’t know and aren’t sure you can trust,” Chesebro told Michigan investigators, according to a recording of his interview with them that was previously reported. by CNN. “I ended up losing. I had a wonderful apartment in New York City that I had to sell at a $2 million loss and lost almost all of my net worth because of the lawyer bill.”
In December, Andrew Hitt, who headed the Wisconsin Republican Party during the 2020 election, told a local ABC affiliate that he and other fake voters “were fooled” by the Trump campaign into thinking they were just acting as a contingency, in case the litigation was successful.
These fake Wisconsin voters agreed in a recent civil settlement that the document they signed was “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election” and said they would cooperate with the Department of Justice.
Wisconsin authorities have not yet publicly confirmed that they are investigating fake voters. But Chesebro was interviewed about the matter last year by the office of Josh Kaul, the state attorney general, according to Arora.
Neither case is expected to be resolved before the November elections. A trial in Nevada, where charges were filed in December, has been postponed until next year. In Michigan, the case is still in the pre-trial hearing phase.
Willis was the first to launch an investigation, charging 19 people in August in a wide-ranging racketeering case. But she was slowed by the scope of her case and a recent attempt by the defense to disqualify her due to her romantic relationship with a lawyer she hired to oversee the case.
Chesebro’s communications continue to emerge. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, he believed there was “voluminous evidence in several states of a fraudulent election,” as he put it in an email, but he had difficulty persuading some whose support he sought that such evidence existed. He sent anonymous direct messages to James Widgerson, then the editor of a conservative Wisconsin website, to tell him about a hearing on voter fraud led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a strong Trump ally. Widgerson responded, “I can’t roll my eyes that much.”
Chesebro repeatedly sought to insert language into the fake Electoral College certificates that were drawn up for the slates of fake voters to make clear that they served only as a contingency should legal challenges to Biden’s 2020 victory be successful. Chesebro texted Roman, the Trump campaign official, and said he thought the language “should be changed in every state.”
“I don’t,” Roman replied.
Chesebro added that he could help draft the text, but Roman responded with a dismissive expletive.
The contingency language ended up being included only in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, and appears to have prevented the prosecution of fake voters in those states. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, cited the contingency language in January after declining to bring charges.
“When the Trump campaign contacted the fake New Mexico voters, the campaign had added conditional language to the certificate,” Torrez wrote in a January letter to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Because of this, she added, “there is not enough evidence” to “support a charge of forgery.”
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