Josh Kaul Investigating Fake Electors?

Kenneth Chesebro. Photo courtesy of the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office.

Kenneth Chesebro, the lawyer and native Wisconsinite who was architect of the fake-electors plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election, was interviewed about this last year by the office of Josh Kaul, the Wisconsin attorney general.

So said Manny Arora, a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, in a story today by the New York Times.

This is not the first time the media has reported that Chesebro was interviewed. Back in December CNN cited unnamed sources to report that Kaul’s office, the Wisconsin Department of Justice had interviewed Chesebro and the latter was cooperating with state investigators in Michigan and Wisconsin.

But Kaul, when asked by the media at the time, would not confirm this. “We are not going to comment on anything the Wisconsin Department of Justice is up to in this respect,” he said. “It’s my view that anybody who committed a crime with the goal of overturning the results of an election should be held accountable. There are some efforts going on at the federal level and in some states, but as for Wisconsin DOJ, we generally don’t confirm or deny the existence of investigations.”

At the time, Andrew Hitt, the former chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin and one of the 10 fake electors, told WISN-TV 12 that he did not believe state officials were investigating the 10 Republican electors. But Arora’s statement now makes it clear that Kaul’s office has investigated the fake electors scheme in what the Times has called an “active investigation.”

Chesebro said he repeatedly tried “to insert language into the phony Electoral College certificates that were drafted for the slates of fake electors to make clear they were only meant as a contingency,” in case legal challenges to Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 victory were successful.

But that language was ultimately included only in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, which has apparently helped to prevent prosecution of the fake electors in those two states. “New Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, cited the contingency language in January after declining to bring charges,” the story noted.

The contingency language was not used in Wisconsin or four other states with fake electors, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.

Indeed, in Wisconsin Chesebro worked closely with attorney and former Wisconsin judge Jim Troupis on the fake elector scheme and a long account of their collaboration by the Washington Post offers no evidence Chesebro pushed for any contingency language.

Hitt has told the media that the 10 Wisconsin fake electors “were tricked. We weren’t made aware of any ulterior motive or scheme. And we wouldn’t have gone along with it had we been…We viewed what we were doing (as) simply a contingency plan.”

Except that the contingency language wasn’t included. Given that Hitt is himself a lawyer and fellow fake elector Robert Spindell was a member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and served as a Milwaukee election commissioner for 18 years, some found this claim of being tricked hard to believe.

The 10 fake electors settled a civil lawsuit where they admitted their complicity in the plan, declared that Biden won the election and agreed not to serve as electors in any presidential election in which Trump is on the ballot.

Chesebro has also claimed to somehow be a victim of his own scheme. “It’s been a real, a lesson in not working with people that you don’t know and you’re not sure you can trust,” he told Michigan prosecutors investigating that state’s fake electors, according to a recording of his interview that has been reported by CNN. “I ended up losing. I had a wonderful apartment in New York City I had to sell for a $2 million loss, and lost almost all my net worth because of the attorney bill.”

Chesebro was once a Democrat who donated to liberals like Wisconsin U.S. Senator Russ Feingold and often worked with Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, as a story by Urban Milwaukee noted. “But in his 50s, Chesebro went through a stunning mid-life crisis after investing in Bitcoin, selling out four years later and making a fortune. It was around this time that Chesebro transformed his life, splitting with his wife of more than two decades and buying a penthouse apartment at 230 Central Park South in Manhattan.”

Meanwhile he switched his political views to become a hard-core Republican. He represented Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and other Republican politicians in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on a voting-rights case out of Utah. His co-author on that brief was Troupis.

It was Troupis who called Chesebro to ask for help after Trump lost the election in November 2020. Working pro bono for the defeated president, Chesebro became the mastermind of the fake elector scheme.

Chesebro even contacted James Wigderson, then the editor of Right Wisconsin, to push him to write about alleged voter fraud in Wisconsin. But he did it anonymously, in an email the Times obtained, referencing an election fraud hearing led by Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson.

Widgerson replied: “I cannot roll my eyes that far.”