Eastman and Chesebro: What MAGA Had Planned For Pence On Jan. 6 //Talking Points Memo

Shocked to learn that Kenneth Chesebro - co-lead attorney for plaintiffs in the landmark evidence case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals - has gone MAGA.  His December 13, 2020 memo to Rudy Giuliani spelled out the "president of the Senate strategy".  Key was for Mike Pence to declare himself the final word on which states' electors' votes should be counted. 

I have had some experience with Chesebro - positive experience. One Saturday morning in the spring of 1992 I saw a brief item in the Times.  The Supreme Court had granted cert in Daubert v. Merrell Dow.  I had been waiting for such a move by the court.

FedSoc types had been boosting a book called Galileo's Revenge - Junk Science in the Courtroom.  Shills for the pharma companies like Vice President Dan Quayle claimed shoddy science was pushing good drugs from the marketplace.

I had represented the Association of Trial Lawyers before the New Jersey Supreme Court - successfully arguing against rigid application of the statistical measure `2.0 risk ratio' as the standard for proving probable cause of disease.  The New Jersey Supreme Court had rejected that approach in Landrigan v. Celotex.

Figuring that if if it were me whose cert petition the Supreme Court had granted I wrote I would be in my office the next morning, I called Chesebro in his Cambridge office.  A Laurence Tribe protege - like many Harvard grads - he picked up the phone. I reported our New Jersey win and offered to lend a hand - an offer he welcomed.  With Michael Gottesman of Georgetown and Chesebro as co-lead counsel ATLA coordinated a quiver of friend of the court briefs.  One was my initiative.  With the late Brian Koukoutchos I co-authored a brief embraced by Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard evolutionary biologist and historian of science.  Labeled the Brief of Historians and Philosophers of Science we argued that Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions refuted as a false claim the Quayle attack: that only consensus scientific opinion should be admitted in evidence.  The conservatives lost.  There is such a thing as "shaky but admissible evidence", wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in Daubert.  

- GWC

What MAGA Had Planned For Pence On Jan. 6

By Josh Kovensky

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June 1, 2022 12:53 p.m.

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One of the still-murky aspects of Jan. 6 and its preparation has to do with the effort to pressure Mike Pence into unilaterally throwing out elector slates from states that Trump lost.

A newly released memo, unveiled by the Jan. 6 Committee last week in a lawsuit against John Eastman, adds more detail to what Trump’s legal team had in mind for Pence.

The memo comes in the form of a Dec. 13, 2020 email — flagged by Politico — from attorney Kenneth Chesebro to Rudy Giuliani.

Chesebro told Giuliani in the message that he was sending “some quick notes on strategy” along after he had lost a more extensive memo “due to a reboot on the hotel computer.”

What follows is a multi-page plan for how Pence was to conduct himself before Jan. 6 and on the day of, and what the consequences of the plan for Pence may have been. Even if the effort failed to install Trump for a second term, Chesebro wrote, “much will still have been accomplished in riveting public attention on election abuses, and building momentum to prevent similar abuses in the future.”

Chesebro, an appellate attorney with a Harvard Law pedigree, reportedly joined the Trump legal team in November 2020, after sending memos to attorneys working to subvert the election which advocated for the use of “alternate electors.”

Per the plan, swing states that Biden won were supposed to submit pro-Trump electors — a key part of a broader plan to subvert the election results by presenting Pence on Jan. 6 with a supposed choice between competing interpretations of who swing states selected for president.