This week, as former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows make headlines around their appearance at the Fulton County Jail, many of their lesser-known co-defendants have dutifully surrendered with a fanfare more in proportion to their public stature. Among these are Kenneth Chesebro, Ray Stallings Smith and Michael Roman, three of the people who helped to orchestrate the “fake electors” component of the alleged election conspiracy.
Before they were indicted by District Attorney Fani Willis, these men were hardly household names. But they were — allegedly — indispensable to a nationwide conspiracy that sought to overturn a constitutional republic of 330 million people. This indictment shows how big conspiracies end up being carried out by a cohort of commonplace operatives. In fact, the vast majority of the indictment’s 98 pages make no mention of Trump, Giuliani, Meadows, Sidney Powell, or any of the other better-known participants in the “criminal enterprise.” To have any chance of success, such a conspiracy required a large cast of sordid characters — many hands make light work, as they say.
Chesebro, Smith and others like them worked far from the Oval Office. Their activities, as outlined in the charging documents, seem small, even mundane, when viewed in isolation. They did the unglamorous work of reserving meeting rooms where Trump loyalists could gather. They made phone calls or sent emails to help coordinate activities. They arranged for others in the Trump orbit to be picked up at airports. They put together spreadsheets of names and contact information for those whose work they were coordinating.
Each of these co-defendants seems to have joined the Trump campaign’s post-2020 election plot for a different reason. Some, no doubt, were true believers who thought that keeping Trump in office was the only way to save America from socialism and political correctness. But others seem not to have been motivated by ideology or politics alone. They may have gone along simply because they were asked to, because they hoped for some unspecified reward, or to advance their careers. Or perhaps they were “caught up in the moment,” so to speak, or took pleasure from being involved in something bigger than themselves, giving in to what sociologist Jack Katz calls the “seductions of crime.”
But without them and that work, Trump’s coup attempt could not have gotten off the ground or gotten as far along as it did. As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols argues, these “minor figures […] may be as much a menace to democracy as Trump himself.”
Reading the Georgia indictment is a reminder of what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil,” or as psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains it: “The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.”
It takes integrity and spine to stand up to those forces, and these alleged enablers apparently lacked both.
This is most clear in what we now know about the fake electors’ scheme and those allegedly involved in it — Chesebro, Smith and Roman. In that plot, the president and his allies attempted to create competing slates of electors in seven states Trump lost: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The idea was to create the appearance of a dispute between dueling slates of presidential electors so that Vice President Mike Pence could use this as a pretext not to certify the election result on Jan. 6, 2021. The New York Times rightly calls the fake electors scheme “the longest-running and most expansive of the multiple efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.” And it was Chesebro who initially concocted this idea.
Chesebro, a wealthy appellate lawyer, was prominent in neither Republican circles nor among Trump supporters. The Guardian describes him as “low-profile, bright, seemingly decent” person who stood out, it says, for “his demure, scholarly demeanor [… and for] working in relative obscurity” — not “your average Trump guy.” In fact, Chesebro, who went to Harvard Law School, has gained attention as a former research assistant for Laurence Tribe, the prominent liberal constitutional scholar.
While Chesebro later was drawn increasingly to the radical right, he seems to have joined the conspiracy at the start because he was enlisted to help challenge the election results in Wisconsin. He was asked to do so by his friend James Troupis, a former judge and Trump’s main campaign lawyer in the state. Chesebro did not get paid for his help or for concocting the fake electors plan (which he conceded later “could appear treasonous”).
Perhaps, as his law school classmate Jeffrey Toobin speculates, he just “got carried away by the gamesmanship of it all,” but two months after his first memo, he was all in. On Jan. 6, he showed up outside the Capitol building wearing a red MAGA cap. To have any chance of success, such a conspiracy required a large cast of sordid characters. Atlanta-based Ray Smith was drawn into the so-called Big Lie conspiracy via a more formal route, when he was hired as Trump’s local counsel. Like Chesebro, he also practices law, specializing in business, real estate and probate litigation, as well as election law. Unlike Chesebro, Smith got paid for his work. A local news report describes Smith’s contribution to the election conspiracy as having advised “the alternate GOP electors who cast votes for Trump and signed documents that falsely claimed Trump had won the election. Following the 2020 election, Smith reportedly sent a letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and submitted several affidavits supporting Trump as the winner.” Willis’ indictment charges him with seven separate criminal acts, including “unlawfully soliciting, requesting, and importuning […] public officers” to violate their oath of office by “unlawfully appointing presidential electors from Georgia.” Among the co-defendants involved in the fake electors’ scheme, Mike Roman’s motivation seems to have been the most ideological. Roman has been a longtime Trump enthusiast who “joined the 2016 Trump campaign and later the White House staff as a special assistant to the president before he was appointed […] director of Election Day operations for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign,” according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Roman did “much of the legwork around organizing the seven slates of fake Trump electors purporting to represent the electoral votes from battleground states including Pennsylvania,” the Inquirer explains, noting that he also did the unglamorous work of compiling fake electors’ “names and contact information in a spreadsheet.” The Georgia indictment charges Roman with five separate offenses, including “conspiracy to impersonate a public officer” for his role in the fake electors’ plan. Along with Trump and his more prominent collaborators, Chesebro, Smith, Roman and the other lesser-known figures must be held accountable for their roles in the effort to overthrow American democracy. That accountability is all that may dissuade others from allowing themselves to be swept along in future plots to undo the results of other elections.
Dennis Aftergut
Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, the former chief assistant city attorney in San Francisco and currently counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy. He signed LDAD’s December 2021 and States United Democracy Center's October 2021 bar disciplinary complaints against John Eastman.
Austin Sarat
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College. 
