Court Filings Call For End Of Leftist Wisconsin AG’s Witch Hunt

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s politically driven “forgery” case against respected jurist Jim Troupis is wrong on multiple counts and should be immediately dismissed, according to new filings. 

The four motions to dismiss, filed last week in Dane County Circuit Court in Madison, lay out the many reasons why Troupis, caught up in leftist political climber Kaul’s bogus “fake electors” case, did nothing wrong in faithfully representing President Donald Trump —  the man the left loves to hate. Kaul’s own office acknowledged as much long before the Democrat, who reportedly has visions of higher office, rolled out his political hit job against Troupis, fellow Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro, and Republican political operative Michael Roman in June. 

Leftist prosecutors in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona also are pushing charges against individuals involved in alternate elector strategies, part of the Democrat Party’s crumbled narrative that Trump, his attorneys, and anyone questioning the 2020 presidential election results are a threat to democracy. Chesebro, viewed as the mastermind behind a legitimate strategy to protect electoral votes, has been harassed by liberal prosecutors in multiple states.

Troupis’ motions rip apart Kaul’s flimsy forgery charge, ultimately arguing that the Dane County Circuit Court, where the charges were filed, has no jurisdiction over the case because there simply is no case. The attorney general’s office has failed to show probable cause that Troupis committed the crime of forgery or conspired with others to utter a forged document, as Kaul alleges, according to the motions.  

While the latest court filings incorporate many of the legal arguments contained in the previous two motions to quash the state’s suspect subpoenas, they raise some compelling new arguments. Perhaps most notably is that among the “layers and layers of problems” devouring Kaul’s legal theory, “the most glaring and fundamental” is that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which, in a word, makes clear federal law trumps state and local laws. 

“…[T]he State has not only run roughshod over the law of forgery and plead around the Legislature’s protections for election-related crimes, but the State has also sought to hinder the exercise of a federal right,” Troupis’ attorney Joseph Bugni writes in the final of four motions filed on Friday. 

“Go after the President’s electors or go after the President’s lawyer, it’s all the same thing. The State is trying to imprison Troupis for doing what the law demands,” the filing states. “By criminalizing what that law — the federal law — provides, the State has done many things, the most glaring of which is to violate the Supremacy Clause, and that requires that this case must be dismissed.”

The Madison attorney argues the motions must be heard before Troupis’ scheduled initial appearance, at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, on the suspect forgery charges. 

‘Precisely What It Purports to Be’

Kaul’s prosecution has dragged on since early June when the AG called a Wisconsin State Capitol steps press conference to announce felony charges tied to the 2020 plan by Trump campaign attorneys to draft and use a slate of alternate electors in the event a recount in the closely contested swing state or court rulings found the Republican president had defeated Democrat challenger Joe Biden. 

Kaul, on what sources tell The Federalist appear to be marching orders from national Democrats, alleges Troupis and Chesebro engaged in a scheme following the rigged 2020 presidential election to enlist 10 “false electors” in Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn Biden’s victory in the Badger State. As The Federalist has reported, Kaul’s legal theory massages the state’s forgery-uttering law to accuse the defendants of knowingly promoting a false slate of electors as authentic and falsely communicating the scheme. 

Troupis and his co-defendants each face a maximum sentence of up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine if found guilty of the Class H felony. 

“This is an investigation into alleged criminal conduct, and we’re gonna follow the facts wherever they lead,” Kaul claimed at the press conference. “The investigation is not focused on any particular person, but on those facts, and what information we can gather, and then making a determination based on the law,” Kaul told reporters hungry for the latest get-Trump headline.

Kaul’s facts are fiction, Troupis’ court filings assert. And the prosecutor is all wrong on the law.  

As the motions spell out, Kaul’s charges do not comport with the state’s statutes on forgery. A forged document, after all, is one “altered to appear as something other than it is,” the motions note.

“Here, there can be no dispute that the document (an electoral ballot) appears to be precisely what it purports to be. And under Wisconsin law, that isn’t forgery,” the previous motion to quash states. “Likewise, you can only ‘utter’ a forged document, you cannot utter a document that is what it purports to be.” 

Following Biden’s razor-thin victory in Wisconsin, the Trump campaign sought a recount in Dane and Milwaukee counties where myriad election irregularities were reported. The campaign also argued in court that election officials violated state election law in allowing thousands of ineligible votes to be counted. While the lawsuits continued in Wisconsin’s courts, Trump’s attorneys advised that the slate of Republican electors meet and cast their ballots for their candidate on Dec. 14, 2020, as prescribed in law. 

As the motions note, alternate electors were used in the contentious presidential election of 1876, in 1960 during the close Nixon-Kennedy election, and well could have been employed in the disputed 2000 election in which George W. Bush was declared the winner after securing Florida’s electoral votes. Indeed the Electoral Count Act of 1887 devised a guide to deal with the kind of disputes arising from the 1876 election. Congress reformed the law in 2022 to clarify duties and responsibilities. 

There was nothing novel — and nothing illegal — about the Trump campaign’s use of alternate electors to protect his position in the event that the president won his legal challenges and, ultimately, the 2020 election. The Wisconsin Supreme Court issued its ruling rejecting the Trump campaign’s legal claims on Dec. 14, 2020, the day the state electors had to act. Three of the seven justices sided with the campaign, which then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Trump campaign had not yet exhausted its legal challenges, so the alternate electors remained in play and viable, the court filings assert. 

Nothing ‘Prohibits or Otherwise Limits’

Troupis and the Republican Party of Wisconsin made clear their intentions and actions, a point noted in Kaul’s state Department of Justice’s defense of the use of alternate electors. 

Soon after Biden took office in 2021 and again in 2023, leftist lawfare firm Law Forward filed complaints with the Wisconsin Elections Commission that the Trump campaign’s use of alternate electors violated the law. In a memo to Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), the DOJ found that nothing “prohibits or otherwise limits a party from meeting to cast electoral votes during a challenge to an election tabulation. [The statutes] say nothing about an alternative set of electors casting votes and do not expressly prohibit a slate of electors from casting votes to preserve their votes in case pending legal challenges prove successful.”

Kaul’s own Department of Justice shot down Law Forward’s contention that the alternate electors “met in a concerted effort to ensure that they would be mistaken, as a result of their deliberate forgery and fraud, for Wisconsin’s legitimate Presidential Electors.”

“Before and after the December 14 meeting, the Respondents publicly stated, including in court pleadings, that they were meeting to preserve legal options while litigation was pending,” the DOJ wrote in its memo to WEC, which subsequently dismissed the complaints. 

Kaul, the court documents charge, conveniently left out this important information in his case against Troupis. Bugni asserts in the motion that Kaul would be “the defense’s first witness at trial” to answer just just why that was.  

So how did something that Kaul’s own DOJ deemed anything but a crime become an offense a couple years later. What changed? The press of politics. 

‘As Telling as It was Terse’

Kaul’s press conference in June followed on the heels of the Manhattan kangaroo court conviction of Trump in the corrupt “hush money” case. Like Kaul’s forgery case against Troupis and his co-defendants, Trump-hating Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg pushed the spurious prosecution based on a twisted reading of the law. Remember, at the time Trump was soon to be nominated as the GOP’s presidential candidate, despite all of the efforts to silence him, to keep him off the ballot, and to lock him up. And he was badly beating in the polls the guy who supposedly beat him in the 2020 presidential election. 

As the motions in the Troupis case note, far-left Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, among other Democrats, ginned up the “fake electors” narrative in calling for political blood. 

For instance, in response to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about the alternate electors, somebody tweeted publicly: “What those fake electors did was wrong. People have to be held accountable for that, and I hope to hell somebody does.”

That “somebody,” of course, was tough-talking Evers, who likes to curse to cover the fact that he’s spent much of his adult life as an effete, incompetent, government bureaucrat. Later, after WEC dismissed the complaint a second time, the Democrat governor retweeted a video of the alternate electors with a warning: “Republican fake electors had the nerve to sit in The People’s House and cheer when they voted to overturn our election and tell Wisconsinites their votes didn’t matter. This never, ever, ever should’ve happened. And there sure as hell must be accountability.”

As one of the motions notes in the Troupis case, the most powerful man in Wisconsin had the “power to back” up his demand that Trump’s legal counsel “be held accountable.” After Kaul brought the forgery charges, Evers tweeted a one word response that was, according to the filing, “as telling as it was terse.” 

“Good,” the hyper-partisan governor wrote on his X account. 

Keeping Politics Out of Prosecutions

As politically charged as Evers, Kaul and other Democrats have made the alternate electors issue, it is curious — and problematic, that Kaul didn’t bring charges under Wisconsin’s “Prohibited Election Practices” statutes, the court filings note. Instead, Kaul “repackaged the alleged crime and pursued a creative reading of the Wisconsin forgery statutes — a statute that has never been applied to an election case before.”

Kaul, one of the motions asserts, isn’t authorized to bring an election-related case. The statutes note that only the district attorney of the defendant’s home county can initiate such a case. Over the past half century, the state legislature has added checks on politically driven prosecutions, including statutes that require election-related criminal cases to be investigated by the state’s nonpartisan elections boards. The regulators could bring evidence to “the district attorney of the proper county or the attorney general where appropriate.” 

But the power of the prosecutor related to political probes was further limited thanks to Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigations of more than a decade ago. Prosecutors at the Democrat-led Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office joined forces with the corrupt Government Accountability Board in targeting the left’s political enemies — chiefly allies of then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The secret investigations included pre-dawn, armed raids on the homes of conservatives. The Wisconsin Supreme Court eventually shut down the star chamber and ruled it was unconstitutional — “a perfect storm of wrongs” committed on the victims. 

The legislature passed legislation disbanding the Government Accountability Board and replacing it with the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the Ethics Commission. It also reformed the state’s controversial John Doe law, removing politics from the secret investigations’ purview.

“Critically, it also stripped the power of the Attorney General and a special prosecutor from bringing election-related charges; instead, the power is vested exclusively with the District Attorney in the defendant’s home county,” the filing states. “When politicians or their lawyers face prosecution, the defendants and the public must be assured that politics and political pressure isn’t driving it.”

‘Federal Right Trumps — Every Single Time’

The problem is, Kaul has brought an election-related case without charging an election-related crime. As the motion notes, “everything Troupis did was rooted in” state election law. None of it was illegal, the filing asserts, but it was election-related. The Wisconsin Elections Commission already has dismissed complaints alleging the alternate electors plan violated the law; and the commission would have to take up a similar complaint and change its ruling for the matter to even have the chance to be referred to a prosecutor. 

“Those procedures haven’t been fulfilled — this case hasn’t proceeded from a referral by a bi-partisan body that had found probable cause, and it hasn’t been brought by the District Attorney. Thus, it must be dismissed,” the motion argues. 

Wisconsin’s top law enforcement official, who has been discussed as a potential candidate for governor in 2026, has not only failed to follow Wisconsin law, his prosecution runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution, one of the motions to dismiss charges. 

As the motion lays out, presidential elections are federal matters in accordance with the Constitution and, at the time of the 2020 election, guided by the Electoral Count Act. That federal law, born out of the controversial 1876 election of President Rutherford B. Hayes, established what to do when an ongoing legal dispute forces multiple slates of electors to vote. 

“The State’s theory that the Republican electors could not claim to be electors and could not cast their ballot on December 14 (it would be a crime to do so) conflicts with the Republican elector’s [Sic] duties under federal law,” the motion states. “And whenever there is a conflict between state and federal law, the federal right trumps — every single time. Indeed, the State cannot embrace a theory of prosecution that would hinder the Republican electors from voting in the disputed 2020 election any more than the Wisconsin Legislature could demand that the Republican electors vote in 2024 on a different date from what Congress has prescribed.”

Wisconsin appears to be facing such a conflict after its failure to update the state’s electors schedule in compliance with the federal Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. 

The motion argues that the Supremacy Clause does not allow the attorney general to punish Troupis, his co-defendants, or the Republican electors for their legal acts to ensure Trump’s votes would not be lost. 

“And again: when there is a disputed election that has not been definitively called by the time the electors must meet and vote, then both sets of electors (Republican and Democrat) must meet and vote,” the court filing states. “And the State cannot interfere with those procedures one bit — let alone try to put Troupis in prison for following those very procedures.”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.