Leftist WI AG Just Can’t Quit His Phony ‘Fake Electors’ Witch Hunt

Imagine a sheriff arrests you for what he previously assured you was not a crime. That’s effectively what partisan hack Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul did to one of the state’s most respected constitutional law jurists in his phony “fake electors” witch hunt.  

Joseph Bugni, a Madison attorney for former Dane County judge and Trump campaign lawyer Jim Troupis, cites Kaul’s bludgeoning of Troupis’ due process and First Amendment rights in his latest brief to dismiss the leftist attorney general’s political prosecution. 

“The State is barred from charging Troupis for conduct that it previously endorsed,” the omnibus brief, filed late last week in Dane County Circuit Court, asserts. 

Seemingly driven by the left’s No. 1 malady, Trump derangement syndrome, Kaul has relentlessly pursued — and doubled down on — prosecuting Troupis and two others representing President Donald Trump’s campaign on legally twisted forgery and fraud charges. As The Federalist has extensively reported, the charges stemming from Wisconsin Republicans’ use of alternate electors following the rigged 2020 presidential election came nearly four years later and long after Kaul’s office opined that Troupis and his colleagues did nothing wrong. 

The brief blasts Wisconsin’s top prosecutor for putting politics above the law — and eviscerating the Constitution in the process. 

“The law does not tolerate the State endorsing the Republican electors’ actions in 2020 and then trying to send Troupis to prison for the very same action in 2025,” Bugni wrote in the 42-page court filing. “It doesn’t tolerate trampling on a person’s First Amendment rights simply because the person is unpopular.”

‘Follow the Facts’

In June, the highly partisan attorney general with higher political ambitions held a state Capitol-steps press conference to announce a forgery-related charge against Troupis and his co-defendants, fellow Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, and Trump campaign aide Michael Roman. Curiously, the charges and the made-for-corporate-media announcement dropped just a few days after a Manhattan kangaroo court found Trump guilty in a Soviet-style show trial and as the former president awaited the GOP nomination. 

Troupis and his co-defendants were swept up in the left’s phony “fake electors” narrative for their effort to enlist a slate of 10 Republican volunteers to serve as alternate — or contingent — electors to protect Trump’s electoral votes should he succeed in his post-election legal challenges. Kaul massaged a state forgery-uttering law to accuse the defendants of knowingly promoting a false slate of electors as authentic, or at least uttering as much.

In announcing the felony charge, Kaul said he would “follow the facts wherever they lead.” But even as his case seemed to crumble in the face of facts and precedent (alternate electors have been used in other disputed presidential elections throughout U.S. history), Kaul ratcheted up his partisan prosecution following Trump’s victory in November.   

In December, Kaul filed 10 additional charges against the two attorneys and Trump’s campaign aide. They now stand accused of forgery to defraud each of the 10 Republican electors who met at the state Capitol on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020, to cast their ballots for Trump after Democrat challenger Joe Biden claimed victory in Wisconsin and in the presidential election at large. Kaul essentially abandoned his troubled forgery theory in favor of fraud, insisting that Troupis and the others duped the electors into filling out the ballot. 

‘Doing What the Law Demands’

Each of the charges, a class H felony, carries a maximum six-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. So Kaul and his political pals are trying to put Troupis, a 71-year-old former judge, and his co-defendants away for dozens of years. 

The AG is doing so, Troupis contends, after his “staff of talented attorneys” at the state Department of Justice twice gave their blessing to the alternate electors plan and after leaving out key details in Kaul’s criminal complaint.  

Troupis has argued that he was “doing what the law demands” in representing his client, President Donald Trump. That meant legally protecting and preserving his options should the Wisconsin Supreme Court and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court, find that Trump won Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes in 2020. To do so, the alternate Republican electors were chosen and bound to vote for Trump while a legal controversy remained — just as took place in the controversial election of 1876 and again in 1960. As court filings show, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was advised to do the same — he did not follow that advice — in the disputed 2000 election. 

Troupis had historical precedent and the law on his side. That’s not only Troupis’ argument. It was Josh Kaul’s contention, or his agency’s.  

‘It’s Not a Crime’

Kaul’s own deputy in a memo advised the Wisconsin Elections Commission that nothing in state law “prohibits or otherwise limits a party from meeting to cast electoral votes during a challenge to an election tabulation.” The memo shot down a leftist lawfare organization’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.”

In late 2020, as the legal challenges moved through the courts, Troupis and the Republican Party of Wisconsin made clear their intentions and actions, a point noted in the Kaul-led state DOJ’s defense of the use of alternate electors at the time.  

“Before and after the December 14[, 2020,] 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 complaints filed by a leftist lawfare firm. 

In the omnibus motion to dismiss, Troupis argues that Kaul has “implicated (and violated)” “the Due Process Clause guarantees that a person will not face charges for exercising a privilege that the State has clearly told him was legal.”

“The Attorney General can’t tell Troupis that having the Republican electors vote is kosher, and then years later (when it’s politically expedient) charge him with a crime for doing exactly what the State said to do. It’s not just bad form, it’s unconstitutional,” Bugni asserts in the brief. 

Kaul then criminalized the only means the Trump campaign had of preserving the candidate’s appellate rights — in the court system and in Congress, the court filing argues. In charging Troupis with violating Wisconsin’s bait-and-switch statute, the attorney general has abused the application of the law, according to the brief. “That statute does not apply when the person has a right to the property sought,” in this case the ballot. 

“Trump had the right — a right recognized by the Attorney General’s 2020 brief and 2022 Memo — to have the Republican electors cast their ballot and for his attorney to use that ballot to preserve his rights as he challenged the recount,” the brief asserts. “When a person has a lawful right to the document (as Trump did to the elector’s ballot), there can be no basis for fraud. None. It’s not a crime.”

‘Guts Any Suggestion’

Kaul’s complaint also omits “crucial facts,” according to the brief. The AG’s case greatly hinges on former Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt’s interview in a “60 Minutes” hit piece on the “fake elector” plans in swing states Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. In the interview Hitt expresses regret for serving as one of the 10 alternate electors, claiming that, if he had known better, he “wouldn’t have done it.” 

“It was kept from us that there was this alternative scheme, alternative motive,” Hitt told dutiful leftist journo Anderson Cooper in a piece specifically trained on Chesebro, “an alleged architect of the fake electors plan,” as Cooper put it. 

But Hitt didn’t deny the legitimacy of the strategy to preserve Trump’s electoral rights, a strategy the attorney general’s office had no problem with at the time. 

While the AG’s complaint relies on Hitt’s regret that he was “tricked,” it fails to note important portions of his testimony before the show trial Jan. 6 Committee. Questioned about the plan, Hitt said he received guidance from the party’s attorney, not Troupis. In fact, he said he “didn’t interact or talk much with the Trump legal team.”  

“I don’t believe Mr. Troupis and I ever talked about this,” Hitt said, according to the committee’s transcripts. “I don’t recall having any conversations with him.” 

In the brief seeking dismissal of Kaul’s Trumped-up prosecution, Bugni blasts the AG’s cherry-picking of information to prop up his crumbling case. 

“That testimony can’t be left out of the complaint in favor of some spattering of quotes from an edited 60 Minutes interview,” the brief argues. “The full (under oath) transcript guts any suggestion that there is probable cause that Troupis induced the electors to do anything.”

“Fair play” — not to mention the Fifth Amendment — “demands that relevant facts not be ignored because they don’t fit the State’s current narrative — a narrative that directly contradicts the position it took in 2020 and 2022, and a narrative that can’t be reconciled with the electors’ own statements,” the attorney argues. 

Kaul’s office did not return The Federalist’s request for comment. 

‘The Charges Must Be Dismissed’

More than four years after the contentious 2020 election, leftist prosecutors continue to push the phony “fake electors” cases through the court system in some swing states. In Arizona, a judge last month allowed two alternate electors to move forward with their attempt to dismiss the case under the state’s anti-strategic law against public participation statute, or anti-SLAPP law. The law aims to stop political prosecutions. Michigan’s far-left attorney general, Dana Nessel, is moving forward with criminal cases against Republican alternate electors. Conflicted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference case has faltered on many counts. 

In Wisconsin, Kaul, rumored to be interested in a run for governor next year, presses on with his highly flawed political prosecutions — at taxpayer expense. The omnibus brief argues that “absent a dismissal, this case will consume not just six or more weeks in front of a jury, but precious court time” as the judges work through some 14,000 documents.

In short, the brief argues, Kaul’s political case is lawfare. 

“It’s twisting the statutes to target Troupis’s legitimate acts as an attorney, who was (at all times) protecting his client’s rights under the Constitution,” the brief asserts. “And to use the criminal statutes in this way, to punish Troupis’s legitimate actions, violates the First Amendment. As such, the charges must be dismissed.”

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.