Donald Trump’s attorneys hatched a scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election by creating so much chaos that January 6 – the scheduled counting of the electoral votes to formally certify the winner of the election – would be delayed, lasting days if not weeks, and with Congress unable to complete the count, stop Joe Biden from being officially declared President. That alone would throw the election to the House of Representatives, or to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court had done just that — decide the result of the presidential election. Trump’s lawyers were hoping for something of a second chance in what Trump himself had crafted, a 6-3 hardcore, far-right conservative supermajority on the nation’s top court. He had placed three justices there himself, and three justices in 2020 had been part of or advisors to the George W. Bush legal team that was successful in getting the Court to side with the Texas Republican governor over the Democratic vice president.
Talking Points Memo on Monday published a portion of its massive investigation of documents and emails from Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, in which it recreated some of the potential plans Team Trump had to keep the outgoing President in the Oval Office, despite having lost the Electoral College by 306-232, and the popular vote by more than seven million.
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TPM revealed the January 6 “alternate scenario gamed out by Trump’s lawyers — one that would have expanded the hours of indecision caused by the Trump campaign’s efforts and stretched out the process for weeks, all the way until Jan. 20, 2021, the Constitution’s ironclad deadline for the transfer of power.”
Part of the plan involved Republican lawmakers who “would have feigned confusion over competing slates of electors, paralyzing Congress as the Trump campaign brought increasing pressure on the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the election in their favor.”
Central to the plan was “discarding the Electoral Count Act,” (ECA) which details very clear time caps to ensure by the end of business the candidate who won 270 or more Electoral College votes would officially be named president. “Trump campaign lawyers suggested…Republicans in Congress could halt the certification and bring forth endless claims of election fraud in swing states, a process that, according to the documents, Chesebro hoped would create a spectacle, revealing the GOP-friendly Supreme Court as the only rational, functioning actor left standing.”
Chesebro floated three possible plans, TPM reported, “for how to bulldoze the ECA and achieve the goal of an extra 14 days without a certified President.”
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Among them, TPM notes, “Mike Pence could decline to open Biden electoral votes — it would be a ‘fairly boss move,’ as Chesebro put it in one email — likely delaying the certification of Biden’s win while posing a core challenge to the ECA.”
“A ‘test case’ could be filed before SCOTUS aimed at invalidating the law. It would be filed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) acting in Pence’s place as President of the Senate.”
Or, the “Senate filibuster could be used as a blunt instrument to block the ECA from either being followed or being implemented on Jan. 6.”
Read TPM’s full report here.