Kenneth Chesebro

In January 2001, Kenneth Chesebro was a mild-mannered Harvard lawyer toiling for Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount battle. Two decades later, on Jan. 6, 2021, he joined the mob outside the Capitol, reborn as a MAGA-hatted kingpin. Accused “mastermind behind” then-President Donald Trump’s scheme to use “fake electors” to stay in power" Indicted in August 2023 on charges related to efforts to overturn election results in Georgia. Per CNN, he "is the only 1 of unindicted co-conspirators in Trump’s federal indictment & the only member of Trump’s legal efforts who is now known to have been on the Capitol grounds on 1/6...verified through publicly available databases with photos and videos from that day. He reportedly tagged along Alex Jones at the 1/6 insurrection." Chesebro grew up in Wisconsin Rapids, in the heart of the state.He graduated from Northwestern University and went on to Harvard Law School. He secured a coveted job, clerking in Washington for U.S. District Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, who presided over some of the most pivotal political cases of the 1970s and 1980s - including those involving Watergate. After the end of his clerkship he moved back to Cambridge to work with his law school mentor, Laurence H Tribe. In 1994 he married Emily Stevens, a physician. Around the same time he began writing appellate briefs for a slew of cases brought by smokers against the major American tobacco companies. He worked for Al Gore. After Gore lost, Mr. Tribe and Mr. Chesebro worked together on a few more big lawsuits, then largely went separate ways. Chesebro’s 2014 investment in Bitcoin netted him “several million dollars,” his marriage ended and he acquired expensive homes in Boston and Manhattan, and a villa in Puerto Rico. After his big payday, Chesebro’s name began appearing on legal briefs filed by far-right conservatives, including John Eastman and a former Wisconsin judge, James Troupis. All three were later described as co-conspirators in the federal indictment for the 2020 election scheme. He made hefty campaign donations to far-right Republicans, maxing out to Mr. Trump in 2020.