Trump lawyer: 'Pence is to blame' for rioters wanting to hang him
A day after Trump supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol and chanted for the hanging of then-Vice President Mike Pence, former Trump lawyer Ken Chesebro had decided whom to blame for the fiasco.
In a newly unearthed message flagged by Politico's Kyle Cheney, it seems that Chesebro said Pence was the primary culprit for the deadly riots at the Capitol.
"I think Pence is a lot to blame for this fiasco," Chesebro wrote on January 7th, 2021.
"He had top-flight advice available to him more than a month ago... I sketched what we had in mind for alternate electors, with Pence not opening envelopes. I detected no enthusiasm for any deviation from the [Electoral Count Act].
"I now think Pence had decided by then not to do anything to press the envelope or create a test case, but decided to not be straight with the president."
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Chesebro then speculated that if Pence had said from the very start that he believed Trump's plan to remain in power was flatly unconstitutional, then "Trump would have known he had no chance to win" by piling pressure on his vice president to unilaterally reject certified election results.
"If I'm right, Pence gave him false hope," Chesebro insisted. "He allowed Trump to hear of valid legal theories from Rudy [Giuliani] and [John] Eastman which gave him hope, which was crushed when Pence suddenly crushed them at the end."
In fact, the "valid legal theories" put forth by Giuliani and Eastman are widely seen as fringe by the vast majority of constitutional experts, and Trump relied upon them only after rejecting advice from his own administration lawyers that he had no chance at winning the 2020 election.
Both Eastman and Giuliani, alongside Trump, have since been indicted in the Fulton County District Attorney's Office's sprawling racketeering case alleging a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
Chesebro was also indicted, but pleaded guilty after making a deal that involved him sharing evidence with prosecutors.