Leaders of 2020 Wisconsin Fake Electors Scheme Charged With Felonies

Kenneth Chesebro. Photo courtesy of the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office.

Wisconsin’s attorney general filed felony charges Tuesday against three people in connection with a 2020 scheme to submit a slate of false electors in support of former President Donald Trump.

Attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis, as well as political operative Michael Roman, each face one count of felony forgery for their roles in the scheme, which involved signing official-looking documentation claiming that Trump won Wisconsin in 2020, even though he had narrowly lost.

The felony charges were filed Tuesday morning by Attorney General Josh Kaul in Dane County Circuit Court.

Chesebro is considered the mastermind behind the plot, which extended to multiple swing states that Trump had lost in the days following the 2020 presidential election. In a memo he sent to Troupis, who was then the lead attorney for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, he laid out a strategy to use “alternate” electors to contest the election results.

Chesebro and Troupis recently settled a civil lawsuit related to their actions in Wisconsin.

In December, the 10 Wisconsin Republicans who signed onto the false elector documents also settled that lawsuit, which alleged the plot helped pave the way to the deadly Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. The false electors admitted no wrongdoing but said their actions were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”

Defendants in that case have said they were attempting to preserve Trump’s legal options as court cases challenging the election results made their way through the courts. Dozens of such cases in both state and federal courts were either tossed or resolved in favor of President Joe Biden’s victory in the contested battleground states.

Gov. Tony Evers responded to the news Tuesday with a one-word statement: “Good.”

Roman, the third person charged, is a former Trump campaign aide who was also indicted in Trump’s federal election interference case in Georgia.

The three men are due in court on Sept. 19, according to public court documents.

The false electors scheme launched from Wisconsin

In addition to Wisconsin, charges related to the false elector schemes have also been filed in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia.

Roman has been charged in both Arizona and Georgia, and Chesebro has pleaded guilty to charges in Georgia.

The plot allegedly was born in Wisconsin, however, with Troupis and Chesebro using Wisconsin as a testing ground for a strategy that expanded to other battleground states.

The 10 Wisconsin Republicans who signed their names to documentation include sitting Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Bob Spindell and former Wisconsin GOP Chair Andrew Hitt.

Hitt has alleged the group was “tricked” into thinking they were providing a contingency for the Republican candidate in the event that legal challenges went through. He said they were following the advice of lawyers when they met on Dec. 14, 2020 — the constitutionally mandated day for state electors to cast ballots for the winner in a presidential race — and did not know that they were part of a broader scheme.

“It’s clear now that those documents were used on Jan. 6 to, at the very least, help create the chaos of that day,” he said in a December interview with WISN-TV.

Editor’s note: This story will be updated.

Charges filed against people involved in 2020 Wisconsin false electors scheme was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.