When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul held a state capitol-steps press conference in early June to announce “forgery” charges against two former attorneys and an aide to former President Donald Trump for an alleged crime that took place nearly four years ago, it felt like the fix was in.
New unsealed documents in Dane County Circuit Court suggest the real forgery is Kaul’s politically weaponized investigation into Trump allies involved in the 2020 alternative electors contingency plan — what Kaul and corporate media have falsely billed as a “fake electors scheme.”
The filing, first reported on Thursday by Wisconsin conservative talk show host Vicki McKenna and conservative activist Eric O’Keefe, sheds light on another dark prosecution that looks a lot like Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigation. That leftist prosecutor-led star chamber of more than a decade ago was declared a “perfect storm of wrongs” by the state’s supreme court and used as a national blueprint for the left’s penchant for weaponized justice.
While Kaul’s early June press conference — covered by news outlets across the country — was orchestrated for maximum exposure, his move to seal the subpoenas and silence the defendants was designed to keep the full story in the dark. More than three months after the attorney general’s office sought and received the secret subpoenas, the key documents have finally been unsealed. The raised curtain exposes a prosecutor going against his own justice department to pursue a political prosecution.
‘Gag Order’
A motion to quash the subpoena, filed by Madison attorney Joseph Bugni on behalf of defendant Jim Troupis, concludes that while the AG’s office offers statements in support of its request to seal the file and keep Troupis silenced, “it cites no case law.”
“Indeed, no information was offered to show why, in this case, almost four years after the fact and following civil litigation of the same issues, it’s reasonable for the Court to determine that Troupis might act in a way that could imperil the investigation,” the motion asserts.
“The order forbidding the disclosure of information related to the subpoena is a content-based gag order because it effectively precludes speech on an entire topic: the subpoena and records it seeks. Such a ‘naked prohibition against disclosure is fairly characterized as a regulation of pure speech,’” the motion argues, citing a 2001 U.S. Supreme ruling.
The attorney general’s office finally conceded that the documents should be unsealed and the gag order on the subpoena lifted. Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell agreed to do so last week. The court filings show how legally stretched Kaul’s charges are and how the phony “fake electors” case is built on a quivering house of cards.
Troupis, a well-respected former Dane County judge and attorney for decades, and his co-defendants, fellow attorney Kenneth Chesebro and political operative Michael Roman, are facing massaged charges under a state forgery-uttering law. Chesebro and Roman were among the 19 people, including Trump, indicted in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ disintegrating “racketeering” case that alleged the defendants attempted to illegally overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. A Georgia judge last week threw out counts in the indictment alleging the filing of false documents related to the alternate electors’ ballot there.
Kaul, at his June 4 capitol press conference, announced the charges, accusing the defendants of knowingly promoting a false slate of electors as authentic, or at least uttering as much.
Leftist Gov. Tony Evers applauded Kaul’s announcement with a snide one-word response: “Good.”
Media reports, sources say, are how Troupis and his co-defendants found out about the charges against them.
‘Ensure That Their Votes Will Count’
Troupis and Chesebro served as attorneys for Trump’s campaign following the hotly contested 2020 presidential election in which Democrat Joe Biden claimed victory in critical swing state Wisconsin by less than 21,000 votes. The attorneys earned the ire of leftist election integrity deniers for having the audacity to represent their client and challenge some of the battleground state’s myriad election irregularities and cases of fractured election law in court.
They also rolled out a plan for an alternate slate of electors, Republicans who met at the state capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, to cast their ballots for Trump. While Biden was declared the winner in Wisconsin, the court challenges had yet to be exhausted. As Troupis, alternate electors, and Kaul’s DOJ noted at the time and since, there was nothing secret or untoward about the process. Troupis and others publicly announced their plans. State elections officials and the DOJ were well aware. They voiced no red flags at the time.
Troupis had even notified the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where one of the legal challenges was ongoing, that the slate of Republican electors would vote on Dec. 14 and send the document to Congress to “ensure that their votes will count on January 6 if there is a later determination that they are duly appointed electors for Wisconsin.”
‘If Roles Were Reversed …’
There was no concern because, as Troupis noted, consideration and use of alternate electors was simply “following the recommended approach to situations involving court challenges in Presidential elections” for more than 150 years.
As The Federalist has reported, Democrats used the exact same approach to protect John F. Kennedy’s electors and claim to victory in Hawaii in the 1960 presidential election. As the court filing points out, Democrat Vice President Al Gore lost the disputed 2000 election because he failed to do the same. Chesebro was an attorney for the Gore campaign then, and he clearly learned the painful lesson. (Leftist lawyers still are shocked that former liberal lawyer Chesebro represented Trump.)
“[I]f roles were reversed, the Biden-Harris campaign would have done the same — the Gore team’s blunder would never be repeated,” the motion contends.
‘That Isn’t Forgery’
In announcing the charges, Kaul declared, “Our approach has been focused on following the facts where they lead.” But the highly partisan attorney general who cut his legal teeth at Democrat “fixer” and Russian dossier peddler Marc Elias’ old firm, has left out some very important facts in his political prosecution.
He brought the charges three and a half years after the “alleged” crime was committed and long after the Wisconsin Elections Commission had twice rejected complaints from a leftist lawfare group about the Republican alternate electors — with Kaul’s agency’s guidance. As the motion to quash shows, a Wisconsin DOJ memo to WEC explained, “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.” The memo notes the same legal tactics used by the Kennedy campaign.
But Kaul persists. He claims that the defendants committed felony forgery — via utterance — of public records or legal documents. Convictions come with up to six years in prison and fines up to $10,000.
The attorney general either doesn’t understand the statutes on forgery or has massaged the reading of the law to fit his political charges — similar to what Trump-hating Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg did in the specious “hush money” case.
“[T]here is not probable cause to believe that the alternate electors’ ballot was a forgery, nor is there probable cause to believe Troupis engaged in a conspiracy to utter a forged document,” Troupis’ attorney argues. “For one, Wisconsin law is clear: a forged document is one that has been altered to appear as something other than it is. 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. Likewise, you can only ‘utter’ a forged document, you cannot utter a document that is what it purports to be.”
Kaul’s political prosecution is among a spate of faulty “false electors” cases filed by leftist prosecutors. Cases in Arizona and Michigan are still live. Not long after Kaul announced his charges, a Nevada judge tossed a leftist-led indictment against six Republicans accused of submitting a false slate of electors for Trump. The Democrat attorney general there has appealed. Georgia’s trumped-up case appears off the table too. Democrat AGs in New Mexico and Pennsylvania found the electors allegations did not warrant charges.
How long will Kaul carry on his political charade? Court documents show the attorney general moved to reschedule the defendants’ initial appearance, originally slotted for next week, to Dec. 12 — more than a month after the election.
Kaul’s communications team did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment. Bugni, Troupis’ attorney, declined to comment.
‘Reminiscent of John Doe’
Kaul’s political prosecution and the dark veil of secrecy surrounding it brings to mind Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigations. The secret probes targeting then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker and conservative activists included pre-dawn raids on the homes of the wrongly accused. Families were forced to silently watch law enforcement officials root through their possessions. In one case the 16-year-old son of one of the targets was home alone and was told to remain silent while the family home was raided.
The Democrat district attorneys and leftist agents from the state’s campaign finance and elections regulator employed a long-term spying operation on the targets, who were subjected to gag orders that came with hefty fines and jail time for violators. While the John Doe investigations were supposed to be secret, leakers from within and around the agencies anonymously fed accomplice media “tips” to shape the narrative.
O’Keefe, a conservative activist who was targeted in the John Doe probe that was eventually ruled unconstitutional, told McKenna that Kaul’s silencing prosecution is “reminiscent of the John Doe.”
Troupis and his co-defendants have had their names dragged through the mud, have faced costly legal fees to defend themselves, and have lived under a cloak of suspicion for months. The leftist-led Wisconsin Supreme Court temporarily suspended Troupis from the state Judicial Conduct Advisory Committee a week after Kaul lowered the boom. He’s been convicted of nothing.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice “violated the First Amendment and the open records laws in Wisconsin,” said O’Keefe, who operates the website PrivateCitizen.org. “What the Department of Justice was able to do here was put out a smear on these attorneys that was covered coast to coast and tell them you can’t talk about it. … That is a draconian punishment in itself.”
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., took aim at the accomplice media on his X account. He said the attorney general’s “bogus” case is “grounds for impeachment.”
“Will Wisconsin media report on the outrageous actions of AG Kaul?” Wisconsin’s senior senator posted. “Hard to think of a greater abuse of public office than him hiding proof that he knew his ‘forgery’ case is bogus.”
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.
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