Chesebro becomes latest member of Team Trump to plead guilty

Up until recently, Kenneth Chesebro was known to the political world as the attorney who worked on Donald Trump’s fake electors scheme. Now, as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained, the lawyer’s reputation has a striking new dimension.

An NBC News report added that the attorney from Team Trump now faces “five years probation, a $5,000 fine, 100 hours of community service, and must continue to provide documents and evidence to the state, according to the terms of the deal.”

For those keeping track, there were 19 co-defendants — including Donald Trump — indicted as part of the election interference case in Fulton County. Three of the 19 have now pleaded guilty: A local bail bondsman named Scott Fall pleaded guilty nearly a month ago, while Sidney Powell pleaded guilty last week. It was the next day when Chesebro joined the club.

As a result, there are now two former members of Trump’s legal team who’ve confirmed in court that they committed crimes related to the Republican effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The details surrounding the Chesebro case are important — Friday’s report from my colleague Lisa Rubin is well worth your time — but stepping back, I’m also struck by the volume of criminals in Trump’s legal and political operations. A few years ago, NBC News’ Geoff Bennett characterized it as a “culture of lawlessness“ surrounding the former president, and the relevance of the phrase lingers.

Let’s update the list that might be familiar to regular readers:

• Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was charged, convicted and sentenced to prison.
• Trump’s former campaign vice chairman, Rick Gates, was charged, convicted and sentenced to prison.
• Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was charged, convicted and sentenced to prison.
• Trump’s former adviser and former campaign aide, Roger Stone, was charged, convicted and sentenced to prison.
• Trump’s former White House national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was charged and convicted.
• Trump’s former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, was charged, convicted and sentenced to prison.
• The Trump Organization’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was charged, convicted and sentenced to prison.
• Trump’s former White House adviser, Peter Navarro, was charged and convicted.
• Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was charged with wire fraud and money laundering, in addition to a conviction in a contempt case similar to Navarro’s.
• Two pro-Trump lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have pleaded to election-related crimes.
• Though he was later acquitted at trial, Trump’s former inaugural committee chair, Tom Barrack, was charged with illegally lobbying Trump on behalf of a foreign government. (Elliot Broidy was the vice chair of Trump’s inaugural committee, and he found himself at the center of multiple controversies and also pled guilty to federal charges related to illegal lobbying.)
• The former president’s business was itself found guilty of tax fraud.

This list doesn’t include assorted civil cases that might yet prove highly problematic for the former president, or the criminal cases pending against Trump himself.

To be sure, some of the aforementioned people were ultimately pardoned by Trump, who doled out pardons as party favors before exiting the White House, but this doesn’t change the "remarkable universe of criminality" surrounding the Republican.

Circling back to our earlier coverage, the number of criminals is important, but so too is the degree to which this dynamic conflicts with the story Trump was eager to tell about himself. For years, the Republican presented himself as being aggressively “tough on crime,” which he frequently tried to incorporate into his political message. Similarly, he billed himself — and continues to present himself — as an enthusiastic proponent of “law and order.”

In 2019, for example, while making the case for a border wall, the then-president declared, “The Democrats, which I’ve been saying all along, they don’t give a damn about crime. They don’t care about crime. ... But I care about crime.”

Trump cared so much about crime that he apparently surrounded himself with criminals.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.