Kenneth Chesebro, the right-wing attorney who helped devise the Trump campaign’s fake electors plot in 2020, concealed a secret Twitter account from Michigan prosecutors, hiding dozens of damning posts that undercut his statements to investigators about his role in the election subversion scheme, a CNN KFile investigation has found.
Chesebro denied using Twitter, now known as the platform X, or having any “alternate IDs” when directly asked by Michigan investigators last year during his cooperation session, according to recordings of his interview obtained by CNN.
But CNN linked Chesebro to the secret account based on numerous matching details — including biographical information regarding his work, family, travels and investments. The anonymous account, BadgerPundit, also showed a keen interest in the Electoral College process and lined up with Chesebro’s private activities at the time.
The Twitter posts reveal that even before the 2020 election, and then just two days after polls closed, Chesebro promoted a far more aggressive election subversion strategy than he later let on in his Michigan interview….
Chesebro claimed to investigators he saw the alternate slates of Republican electors only as a contingency plan to have ready in case the Trump campaign won any of its more than 60 lawsuits challenging the election results — which it didn’t. He also told Michigan investigators that in his conversations with the Trump campaign, he made clear that “state legislatures have no power to override the courts.”
But just days after the 2020 election, BadgerPundit tweeted that the court battles didn’t matter and that Republican-controlled legislatures should send in their own GOP electors, predicting even then that then-Vice President Mike Pence could use them to throw the election to Trump….
“You don’t get the big picture. Trump doesn’t have to get courts to declare him the winner of the vote. He just needs to convince Republican legislatures that the election was systematically rigged, but it’s impossible to run it again, so they should appoint electors instead,” wrote BadgerPundit on November 7, 2020, the day multiple media outlets, including CNN, called the election for Joe Biden.
Yet in his interview with Michigan investigators, Chesebro said the very opposite, claiming that the entire electors plan was contingent on the courts.
“I saw no scenario where Pence could count any vote for any state because there hadn’t been a court or a legislature in any state backing any of the alternate electors,” Chesebro said….
After the 2020 election, BadgerPundit tweeted more than 50 times that Pence had the power to count the electors benefitting Trump, according to a CNN KFile analysis of the account.Chesebro also told investigators that he felt “misled” by the Trump campaign for concealing the entirety of their plan from him. He claimed that it wasn’t until last year that he fully realized the campaign had always intended to deploy the fake electors regardless of the outcome of its election lawsuits.
That idea was first raised in a September 2020 article in The Atlantic, which quoted a “Trump legal adviser” who described using alternate electors to overturn a Trump loss.
When asked by Michigan investigators if he had knowledge of The Atlantic article at the time it was published, Chesebro said he did not. Yet BadgerPundit tweeted about it the same day it was published and defended the plot.
Chesebro’s attorneys acknowledged in an interview with CNN that “there’s clearly a conflict” between some of his tweets and what he told Michigan prosecutors, and that some of the elector theories he embraced online were “inconsistent” with his subsequent legal advice to the Trump campaign.