Trump’s 6 Unnamed Jan. 6 Co-Conspirators Are Thinly Veiled — With One Exception

Former President Donald Trump may be the only man charged in a historic four-count indictment over his plot to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election, but federal prosecutors noted that he didn’t act alone.

“Among” his enablers, Special Counsel Jack Smith said, were six co-conspirators who have not yet been indicted. 

The Department of Justice typically shields the identities of those who have not been charged, but the fact that they are not named does not mean prosecutors did not want to disclose who they were. In fact, the 45-page indictment does everything to tip the reader off about them, except in one instance.

Rudy Giuliani

In his remarks at the Ellipse before the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump’s lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously urged the crowd to engage in “trial by combat.” Special Counsel Jack Smith quotes that line directly, coming from the mouth of “Co-Conspirator 1.” 

There’s another obvious Giuliani quotation in the indictment: "We don't have the evidence, but we have lots of theories,” which Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers recalled Giuliani telling him on Dec. 1. 

By that time, Giuliani had filed and lost a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania, despite his admitted lack of evidence. His filing of that “frivolous” claim led a disciplinary panel from the D.C. Bar to recommend Giuliani lose his law license.

Prosecutors describe “Co-Conspirator 1” broadly as an ​​”attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant's 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not.” 

From there, the details get more specific: “Co-Conspirator 1” is said to have disseminated tape from the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Ga., in service of false claims of election fraud. 

That’s a clear reference to Giuliani, who used such footage to vilify Georgia election workers: mother Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. 

Using edited footage, Giuliani falsely claimed that the pair transported boxes of illegal ballots, along with another wild theory that Moss handed a “USB drive” full of votes to her mother Freeman, “as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” (Freeman and Moss are Black women.) 

During her testimony before the House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection, Moss testified that the purported flash drive was actually a ginger mint. State and federal authorities reviewed the surveillance footage in full, interviewed key witnesses and cleared the women of wrongdoing. Trump’s latest indictment notes that the Justice Department debunked the claims about election fraud in Georgia at a meeting on Dec. 15, 2020, where the ex-president and top ranking prosecutors were present in the Oval Office.

“During the meeting, the Justice Department officials specifically refuted the Defendant's claims about State Farm Arena, explaining to him that the activity shown on the tape Co-Conspirator 1 had used was ‘benign,’” the indictment alleges.

Moss and Freeman are currently suing Giuliani for defamation, and he recently admitted that his statements about them are not true. 

Most other mentions of “Co-Conspirator 1” in the indictment detail the fake-elector scheme, which Giuliani participated in in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.

John Eastman

The architect of the so-called “coup memo,” conservative attorney John Eastman came up with a six-part plan to have then-Vice President Mike Pence block the certification of the election. 

That matches the description of “Co-Conspirator 2,” a lawyer who devised a “strategy to leverage the Vice President's ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election.”

Eastman spoke about those theories at Trump’s rally on the Ellipse, in remarks quoted at length in the indictment. 

"[A]ll we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o'clock he let the legislatures of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not,” Eastman told the crowd. “We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can't get the answer to this question."

During the Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation, House Counsel Doug Letter fought to uncover Eastman’s communications in court, calling the Trump lawyer “a central player in the development of a legal strategy to justify a coup.” 

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter agreed, finding that Eastman “more likely than not” committed two federal felonies in his advocacy for Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Carter made those findings in the context of overruling Eastman’s claims of attorney-client privilege on the grounds of the crime-fraud exception. 

Calling Eastman’s scheme a “coup in search of a legal theory,” Carter wrote: “The illegality of the plan was obvious,” referring to the professor’s scheme to overturn the election.

For now, Eastman remains uncharged.

Sidney Powell

From her ill-fated cameo among Trump’s “elite strike force” team to her suite of failed “Kraken” lawsuits, Sidney Powell stood out among 2020 election-denying attorneys for the sheer outlandishness of her conspiracy theories. 

She was the lead attorney behind a slate of legal actions seeking to overturn the election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. All that she ultimately got out of it was a sanctions order, referring her to bar authorities for possible discipline or disbarment — and an untold amount of cash to her dark-money group, Defending the Republic. 

Thinly masked as “Co-Conspirator 3,” the special counsel introduces her by flagging the characteristic feature of her theories: their oddness.

Powell, prosecutors note, is “an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded ‘crazy.’” 

“Nonetheless, the Defendant embraced and publicly amplified Co-Conspirator 3's disinformation,” the indictment states.

At a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020, Powell encouraged Trump to seize voting machines and “find evidence that foreign adversaries had hacked those machines and altered the results of the election.” She shared her far-flung theories about Dominion Voting Systems on Fox News, which eventually agreed to pay a $787.5 million civil settlement to resolve a lawsuit over such election misinformation.

Though the Trump campaign officially distanced itself from her, Powell told the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection that the former president considered appointing her as a special counsel probing alleged voter fraud. The election fraud theories propounded by Trump and his allies — including Powell — were ultimately rejected in more than 60 state and federal courts.

Jeff Clark

Branded “Trump’s Big Lie Lawyer” by a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeffrey Clark served as head of the Justice Department’s civil division during the Trump administration, and he worked mostly in the realms of environmental law before becoming the DOJ official who most fully embraced the former president’s election fraud claims.

Calling him “Co-Conspirator 4,” prosecutors note that Clark “attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”

On Dec. 28, 2020, Clark proposed sending a letter that he wanted the Justice Department to send to Georgia state officials, calling for the state legislature to evaluate supposed voter “irregularities.”

“No doubt, many of Georgia’s state legislators are aware of irregularities, sworn to by a variety of witnesses, and we have taken notice of their complaints,” Clark wrote in the draft letter.

According to testimony before the House January 6 Committee, Richard Donoghue, former acting deputy attorney general, had warned Clark that his letter urging state legislators not to accept the result of the election, could incite a “constitutional crisis.” Pat Cipollone, former white house counsel, said if Clark were to send the letter to Georgia officials it would be a “murder-suicide pact.”

The indictment tells the backstory of this meeting, via a meeting between Trump and Clark days earlier on Dec. 22.

“Co-Conspirator 4 had not informed his leadership at the Justice Department of the meeting, which was a violation of the Justice Department's written policy restricting contacts with the White House to guard against improper political influence,” the indictment states.

Kenneth Chesebro

At least as of late last year, the New York Times noted that attorney Kenneth Chesebro enjoyed far less name recognition among the gallery of lawyers who helped Trump try to overturn his defeat.

Associated with the fake-electors scheme, Chesebro played a particularly influential role in a series of memos behind that plan, starting with one that the special counsel’s office describes as the “Wisconsin Memo” on Nov. 18, 2020.

“The memoranda evolved over time from a legal strategy to preserve the Defendant's rights to a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors' votes from being counted and certified,” the indictment states.

The Wisconsin memo proposed having fake Trump electors meet and cast votes on Dec. 14, the date the Electoral Count Act mandated the actual electors vote. 

Another memo, dated Dec. 6, escalated the strategy by “advocating that the alternate electors originally conceived of to preserve rights in Wisconsin instead be used in a number of states as fraudulent electors to prevent Biden from receiving the 270 electoral votes necessary to secure the presidency on January 6,” the indictment notes.

Prosecutors say that Chesebro’s Dec. 9 memo contained his instructions on “how fraudulent electors could mimic legitimate electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania , and Wisconsin.”

Co-Conspirator 6

The exception that proves the rule of thinly disguised accused accomplices is the “political consultant” identified in the indictment as “Co-Conspirator 6,” whom prosecutors describe as someone “who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”

If that person’s identity is disclosed, this story will be updated.