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MADISON, Wis. (CN) — Jim Troupis, one of the defendants hit with forgery and conspiracy charges after submitting a slate of fake presidential electors to Congress in 2020, condemned the charges as politically motivated during a bond hearing Thursday.
“Not a day goes by that my wife does not worry that my home will be invaded," Troupis said after the hearing.
Prosecutors say Troupis, President-elect Donald Trump’s lawyer in Wisconsin for the 2020 election, acted in concert with Trump’s campaign adviser Kenneth Chesebro and his Election Day director Mike Roman to organize a secret meeting of Trump-Pence electors to certify that Trump, not Joe Biden, won the state in the 2020 presidential election.
On Dec. 14, 2020, the presidential electors certified by Governor Tony Evers met in the state capitol building to cast their Electoral College votes for Biden. That vote would be certified and delivered to Congress to be counted on Jan. 6, 2021, by former Vice President Mike Pence.
The unappointed electors met at the same time, in secret, on the opposite side of the statehouse and signed the “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Wisconsin,” which they knew to be a false document, Wisconsin Department of Justice Special Agent Mary Van Schoyck says in the amended complaint filed this week.
On Thursday, Chesebro and Roman appeared by phone while Troupis appeared in person for an initial court appearance to determine bond. A judge assigned all three a $500 signature bond and instructed them to report to Dane County Jail to complete the booking and fingerprinting process before the preliminary hearing set for Jan. 28. The judge also ordered them not to have any contact with the 10 alternate electors or individuals referred to as A, B and C in the indictment.
Initially, Troupis faced a charge of forgery-utterance related to the creation and submission of the Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Wisconsin to Congress. The amended complaint adds 10 more counts of felony forgery.
After the hearing, Troupis claimed he publicly announced the plan to hold a meeting of an alternate slate of electors to support Trump’s right to appeal the election, which he says is a process protected by the Electoral Count Act.
“Four years ago this very day, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul was told about the plan and he approved it. He notified the Wisconsin Election Commission in an email that the meeting was going to occur. No one objected,” Troupis, surrounded by nodding supporters, told reporters outside the courtroom.
He said Kaul wrote in 2022 that the use of alternate electors was legally correct and consistent with the law, and that there was no evidence of forgery or fraud. Kaul did not return a request for comment by press time.
“My family and I have endured nonstop, vicious and unrelenting savage attacks on my reputation, my livelihood, even my children have been interrogated," Troupis said. “This is a political case that has nothing to do with the law. The attorney general should be ashamed.”
According to the criminal complaint, memos and text messages between the three which show a clearly devised plan to give the Republican elector votes directly to Pence to count on Jan. 6, when all Electoral College votes are tallied and certified by Congress.
In an email exchange outlined in the complaint, Chesebro asked Roman if “the VP has ultimate authority on which slate of electors should be chosen,” to which Roman says that a “very good argument” could be made that Pence may open and count the Republican elector votes instead of the certified Democratic elector votes.
The state added 10 counts of felony forgery counts amid new evidence that Troupis, Chesebro and Roman misrepresented the meeting of the fake electors to the electors themselves.
“In interviews with law enforcement, the majority of the unappointed electors stated that they did not believe that their signatures on the unappointed elector certificate would be submitted to the president of the Senate at the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 as if they conveyed Wisconsin’s electoral votes without a court ruling declaring them as such,” Schoyck says in the complaint.
The conspiracy is a Class H felony, which carries a fine of not more than $10,000 and six years in prison.
Law Forward, a nonprofit legal watchdog for elections and gerrymandering, has filed a grievance with the Office of Lawyer Regulation against Troupis for his role in the fake elector plan, which they say is in direct violation of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s rules of professional conduct for attorneys.
Troupis is a seasoned attorney and a former judge in Dane County. He filed four motions for dismissal beginning in early December, claiming the state failed to allege a criminal offense, deliberately left out facts or violates the supremacy clause. He also claims the court lacked competency to hear the case. Those motions remain pending.
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