Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro is shown in a police booking mugshot released by the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, Atlanta, Aug. 23, 2023.
Source: Fulton County Sheriff’s Office
Lawyers for a co-defendant of former President Donald Trump of their Georgia criminal election interference case asked a judge Thursday to bar using evidence obtained in a search of his email account.
Attorneys for Kenneth Chesebro, a pro-Trump lawyer, argued the search warrant used to acquire emails from his MSN email account ahead of his indictment “is flawed” and the search and seizure of the emails was “illegal.”
Of their Fulton County Superior Court filing, Chesebro’s attorneys said Georgia rules only allow using search warrants where there’s probable cause to consider that the evidence sought would otherwise be deleted.
But there was “no such concern” on this case, they argued, “because months earlier Microsoft had archived all of the e-mails in Fulton County Superior Court.”
Chesebro’s lawyers also argued they weren’t “contacted to schedule a hearing for review of the obtained documents so as to minimize review of documents falling outside the scope of the warrant,” and to ensure that prosecutors wouldn’t see emails protected by attorney-client privilege.
Those two aspects are “fatal to the search warrant,” they argued.
In a separate filing on Wednesday, Chesebro’s attorneys said that five memos he wrote in late 2020 and early 2021 on behalf of the Trump campaign must be suppressed as evidence because they’re “privileged communications between lawyers representing a client.”
4 of those memos are “specifically relied on within the indictment,” they noted, and the fifth “has been widely discussed within the press.”
A spokesman for Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis, who’s prosecuting Chesebro, Trump, and 17 others within the Georgia election case, declined to comment on the filings.
Chesebro is charged with seven counts in reference to efforts to advance slates of alternate electors who would vote for Trump in several swing states where the Republican incumbent lost to President Joe Biden, amongst them Georgia.
The fees against Chesebro include violating Georgia’s racketeering act, in addition to conspiracy to impersonate a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to commit false statements and documents.
He and the remaining of the defendants have pleaded not guilty to the indictment accusing them of conspiring to illegally overturn Biden’s electoral victory in Georgia’s 2020 election.
Chesebro and Sidney Powell, one other pro-Trump attorney charged within the case, were granted speedy trials. They’ll stand trial together starting Oct. 23.
