Kenneth Chesebro, one of four co-defendants of President-elect Donald Trump in the Fulton County 2020 election interference case to strike a plea deal with prosecutors, is now seeking to overturn his agreement.
After Chesebro was charged with seven felony counts in the racketeering case, he pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. That plea deal allowed the Harvard-trained attorney to avoid jail time and have his criminal record wiped after successfully completing a five-year probation period as a first offender.
But in September 2024, Fulton Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee struck three counts from the indictment, including Count 15, to which Chesebro pleaded guilty. McAfee ruled that the three counts, which all involved alleged false statements made to a federal court, “lie beyond this state’s jurisdiction” under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
Because of that conclusion, Manny Arora, Chesebro’s attorney, asked McAfee on Wednesday to void his client’s plea deal.
“A failure to grant the requested relief would violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Arora wrote, quoting a federal appeals court decision that found that “nowhere in this country can any man be condemned for a nonexistent crime.”
The DA’s office was expected to appeal McAfee’s ruling but has yet to do so. A spokesperson for Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis declined to comment on Wednesday.
The election interference probe is the last active criminal case involving Trump. But the bulk of it remains on hold as the Georgia Court of Appeals considers whether to remove Willis and her office from the case due to her onetime romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the outside attorney she had hired to manage the prosecution.
On Tuesday, Willis’ attorney was in court fighting a pair of subpoenas from a state Senate committee seeking her testimony and documents related to that relationship. Later that day, another Fulton judge ordered Willis to turn over certain documents to a conservative nonprofit in Washington because the county attorney’s office had not met the filing deadline to respond to the lawsuit.
Chesebro is considered one of the main architects of the plan to use Republican presidential electors to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. He and co-defendant Sidney Powell had requested speedy trials, but hours before jury selection was set to begin in October 2023 each struck a plea agreement with the DA’s office.
Count 15 in the indictment alleged that Trump, Chesebro and a handful of other campaign attorneys and aides mailed a certificate to a federal judge in December 2020 making the “materially false statement” that it contained votes from duly qualified Republican electors from Georgia, even though Biden had been declared the winner of the state’s 16 Electoral College votes.
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