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- Trump's lawyer suggested telling people it was normal for his electors to send in votes in losing states, according to a newly released memo.
- The idea was part of a larger plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the NYT reported.
- The New York Times was the first to report on and obtain the previously secret memo.
One of former President Donald Trump's campaign lawyers, in a previously secret memo, suggested telling people who were skeptical of a plan to overturn the 2020 election using fake electors that it was normal to have Trump's electors vote in losing states.
The New York Times first obtained and reported on the memo Tuesday.
The previously unknown campaign memo from December 2020 — penned by then-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro — outlined a plan to overturn the 2020 election results.
Neither Chesebro nor representatives for Trump immediately responded to Insider's requests for comment on the memo.
According to the memo, the plan included having Trump-Pence electors in all six contested states send in certificates with their votes if one of the pending lawsuits looking into possible election interference was decided in the Trump campaign's favor.
Chesebro wrote in the memo that their electors' votes, which would be cast in December, as well as news of the plan, would leak before the presidential certification on January 6.
"If the Trump campaign ends up deciding to have all of its electors vote on December 14, even in States in which Trump has not been declared the winner, presumably word of this will leak out prior to December 14," Chesebro wrote, adding that "there should be messaging that presents this as a routine measure that is necessary."
He said that the Trump-Pence team should tell skeptics that they had their electors cast official votes in favor of Trump "to ensure that in the event the courts (or state legislatures) were to later conclude that Trump actually won the state, the correct electoral slate can be counted in Congress in January just as the Democrats did in Hawaii 1960, which ended up with Hawaii's electoral votes being awarded to Kennedy, even though the litigation was not resolved until after the electors voted."
In 1960, Nixon won Hawaii by just 140 votes, Politico reported in 2022. A recount of the votes were underway when presidential electors met to cast their ballots. At the time, Politico reported, Kennedy's elector nominees from the state signed certificates at the same time Nixon's electors did, even though Hawaii's governor had certified Nixon's win.
The existence of this campaign memo was revealed in Trump's indictment in connection to the January 6 riot last week, but details of it were not known until the New York Times reported on it Tuesday.
The Times reported that prosecutors in the January 6 case against Trump are now using the memo as a link to underline their allegations that the Trump campaign committed a criminal conspiracy in an effort to overturn the election results.