Pro-Trump Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro Makes Final Arguments to Dismiss Georgia RICO Charges

ATLANTA — Pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro’s attorneys continued their last ditch efforts on Friday to have charges against their client dismissed before a fast-approaching Oct. 20 trial date. 

In a trio of legal filings Friday, Chesebro seeks to dismiss the Fulton County grand jury indictment and the racketeering charge he faces. He also argues that part of the criminal charges lodged against him deal with federal law and should have been filed in federal court.

Chesebro's filings come on the last day for parties in the trial to file written responses to motions and are replies to responses from District Attorney Fani Willis' prosecutors to Chesebro’s original demurrer seeking to dismiss the case against him. 

They follow an order Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee issued Friday morning that shot down a separate Chesebro motion to dismiss the indictment over a supposed paperwork snafu, which the judge styled as a “dead parrot” of a motion, in reference to the iconic Monty Python sketch.

Chesebro, who is set to stand trial alongside Sidney Powell, has pleaded not guilty to seven state felony counts. Both co-defendants have secured public hearings set for Tuesday and Wednesday before McAfee to make their arguments in court.

In Chesebro’s replies filed Friday, he argues that the indictment should be dismissed because he has “First Amendment protections,” and separately that racketeering charges should go away because the state has failed to prove a pattern of racketeering activity, and has applied the law in such a way that diverges from the “legislative intent” of the law. 

Chesebro’s attorneys are seeking to have a former state senator, Chuck Clay, who authored amendments to Georgia’s RICO law in 1997, testify or provide a written affidavit in support of their argument. 

McAfee in open court last week seemed somewhat skeptical of the relevance of Clay’s testimony and Chesebro’s argument. 

“That’s an interesting argument, you know, he [Clay] wasn't the only one that voted on it. So you're also going to bring the governor that signed it… the 50 other senators that voted on it, and even then I think we're getting into areas where the Supreme Court has said legislative intent is really irrelevant,” McAfee said. 

Chesebro’s argument that he has First Amendment protection stems from the nature of the allegations against him. He is accused of being the mastermind of the so-called “fake” electors plan, a scheme to appoint alternate, pro-Trump electors in battleground states Trump lost and submit those votes to Congress to disrupt and delay the certification of Joe Biden’s White House win.

“Mr. Chesebro’s involvement in these alleged conspiracies consisted solely of his interpretation of the Electoral Count Act ('ECA') and his legal advice to his client about what conduct is permissible under the ECA in line with his interpretation,” Chesebro’s attorneys argue in one of Friday’s briefs.

Prosecutors assert Chesebro committed fraud and advanced lies aimed at deceiving the Georgia government.

In a four-page brief late on Friday, Chesebro added another motion that argues that he should not be charged in state court with any allegations related to the events after Dec. 8, 2020 — the deadline for states to certify their votes under the federal Electoral Count Act.

"After December 8, 2020, all authority to determine who a State’s electors are falls under Congress’ authority," Chesebro's lawyers wrote. "Thus, pursuant to the Supremacy Clause, conduct that occurred after December 8, 2020 was subject solely to federal law, and therefore could only be a violation of federal law."

Chesebro's brief comes in response to a filing last week in which prosecutors in the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said his Supremacy Clause claims were "based on novel, flawed, and unsupported misapplications of federal and state law and the Supremacy Clause."

"The Defendant's argument for immunity is not immediately clear, nor the legal basis of his motion readily apparent, beyond that he asks the Court to dismiss the indictment against him and that he, in passing, refers to the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution," Willis wrote last week.

Chesebro also on Friday filed a list of prospective witnesses and evidence he expects to cite at trial. The list of eight witnesses and pieces of evidence includes two prominent Atlanta-area journalists and their social media posts from December 2020, as well as Georgia lawyer Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow, who has represented several of Georgia's so-called "fake" electors.