Kenneth Chesebro, alleged architect of fake electors’ plot, followed Alex Jones

CNN
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When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones marched his way to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, riling up his legion of supporters, an unassuming middle-aged man in a red “Trump 2020” hat conspicuously tagged along.

Videos and photographs reviewed by CNN show the man dutifully recording Jones with his phone as the bombastic media personality ascended to the restricted area of the Capitol grounds where mobs of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters eventually broke in.

While the man’s actions outside the Capitol that day have drawn little scrutiny, his alleged connections to a plot to overthrow the 2020 election have recently come into sharp focus: He is attorney Kenneth Chesebro, the alleged architect of the scheme to subvert the 2020 Electoral College process by using fake GOP electors in multiple states.

When asked by the House select committee where he was the first week of January 2021 and on January 6, Chesebro invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. But a CNN investigation has placed him outside of the Capitol at the same time as his alleged plot to keep Trump in office unraveled inside it.

There is no indication Chesebro entered the Capitol Building or was violent. Jones did not enter the Capitol on January 6, 2021, or engage in violence, but he had warned of a coming battle the day before and urged his supporters to converge on the Capitol.

Chesebro is the only one of the unindicted co-conspirators in Trump’s recent federal indictment and only member of Trump’s legal efforts who is now known to have been on the Capitol grounds on January 6.

CNN was able to place Chesebro at the protest through publicly available databases with photos and videos from that day. Interviews with his acquaintances also confirmed his identity. Chesebro declined CNN’s requests for comment, citing ongoing litigation.

It was unclear why Chesebro was following Jones on January 6.

“Even if Chesebro is simply a diehard Infowars fan, I think that would further illustrate how thin the line was between the serious, credentialed people who sought to undermine election results and the extremist figures who sought to unleash havoc was in that period, to the extent it meaningfully existed at all,” said Jared Holt, an expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue which investigates extremism, hate and disinformation.

Until 2022, the extent of Chesebro’s involvement in the alleged plot to subvert the 2020 election was relatively unknown. The Harvard-educated attorney is now indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, along with Trump and 17 others with prosecutors alleging they were involved in a criminal conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in Georgia in favor of Trump.

Chesebro’s path to Trump’s orbit was untraditional. He is a former research assistant of Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s most esteemed liberal constitutional scholars. Chesebro reportedly said he made a small fortune in cryptocurrency and by 2020 was donating thousands to Republican candidates.

In November 2020, he began his work advising the Trump campaign attorney Jim Troupis on the potential to use fake electors in Wisconsin, first reported by the New York Times.

Chesebro later wrote a series of memos that outlined plans in which fake Trump electors in states won by Biden might be recognized “by a court, the state legislature, or Congress.”

In a December 2020 email exchange between Chesebro and John Eastman, another architect of the fake electors’ scheme, discovered by the House select committee investigating January 6, Chesebro suggested that “chaos” on January 6 could pressure Supreme Court justices to act before the count could occur. He wrote, the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”

In Trump’s recent federal indictment, Chesebro was identified by CNN as co-conspirator 5 — described by prosecutors as an attorney “who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”

On January 6, photos and videos show Chesebro with Jones for about an hour, starting a short distance from Capitol at around 1:40 p.m. As Jones and his entourage make their way to the Capitol, Chesebro followed with his phone out, seemingly recording Jones.

CNN recreated Chesebro’s…