With plea deals on the table, which Arizona fake elector will come clean first?

The last of the 18 people indicted in Arizona’s fake elector scheme made their first court appearances on Tuesday and afterward the prosecutor spoke.

“We anticipate, I think like in any other case, that we’ll make plea offers,” Assistant Attorney General Nick Klingerman told reporters.

In fact, he told reporters the possibility already has been discussed with defense lawyers.

I picture former state GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward turning white and state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern turning positively green.

Which fake elector will come clean first?

The only question now is which one of Arizona’s fake electors and the Trump allies who enabled them will be the first to start talking?

As night follows day, one or more of them will flip in order to avoid felony convictions for fraud, forgery and conspiracy.

Just ask Kenneth Chesebro, one of the architects of the fake elector scheme. Shortly after getting a plea deal in Georgia, Chesebro flew to Arizona in December to chat with investigators for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

These days, he’s known as “Unindicted Co-Conspirator No. 4.”

So, now we wait to see who will join him in coming clean about what went on here in order to save their own skin.

Fake electors were part of a complex plot

To explain how it is the fake electors came to be meeting at state GOP headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, signing papers certifying that they were “duly elected” to cast Arizona’s electoral votes for Donald Trump when Joe Biden won the election.

How these “patriots” came up with the same wild idea that just coincidentally occurred to Republicans in six other swing states won by Biden.

And how, even as those phonies were meeting to cast their non-existent votes for Trump, across town a group of Republican legislators were signing a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Congress urging them to accept Arizona’s “alternate” electoral votes.

How then-Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the state’s loudest stop the stealers, came to be hand carrying the lawmakers’ request to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, putting it into the hands of one of Trump’s strongest acolytes on Capitol Hill, Rep. Andy Biggs.

Or how Biggs came to be videoconferencing with Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, asking him to sign onto the legislators’ request and support the decertification of Arizona’s vote.

Other states offered a hedge. Arizona did not

Oh, I know. The party line is that Arizona’s fake electors were simply doing their patriotic duty as “alternate electors,” to preserve Trump’s spot in the event the courts ruled in his favor on one of his five-zillion election challenges.

As former Senate candidate/fake elector Jim Lamon put it: “The Republican electors put forth a valid document that said, in the event that the election certification was overturned, there would be no excuse not to recognize those electors.”

Except, of course, that’s not what the document said.

Fake elector: Says they're like civil rights heroes

In Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the Trump electors added that caveat to the official certifications they sent to Congress and the National Archives.

In New Mexico, the Trump electors signed “on the understanding that it might later be determined that [they] are the duly elected and qualified Electors.”

In Pennsylvania, they said their votes for Trump should count only “if, as a result of a final non-appealable court order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized as being the duly elected and qualified electors.”

Who will say whose idea this was?

But Arizona’s fake electors offered no such hedge. They signed documents simply declaring themselves “duly elected and qualified electors” and casting their votes for the guy who didn’t win.So, who will be the first to finger the fraudsters behind the the scheme to steal Arizona’s vote?

Who will be the one to lay bare the conspiracy?

And when that happens, will that person then turn on the Trump ally who convinced our local rubes to go along with the plot?

I picture Donald Trump turning … nah.

He’s moved on, unlikely to give it — or his loyal foot soldiers who may well wind up in prison — even a passing thought.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona fake electors could get a plea deal. That should scare someone