The Wisconsin attorney general filed charges on Tuesday against three allies of Donald Trump, accusing them of participating in an effort to put forth a slate of fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to court records.
The men – Kenneth Chesebro, a right-wing attorney who helped devise the fake elector plot; Jim Troupis, a former Trump lawyer; and Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official – are facing forgery charges over their roles in he fake electors plot.
Wisconsin is the latest state to bring charges against individuals connected to Trump, involved in the broad scheme to overturn the presidential election results. State prosecutors in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia have also charged a swath of Trump’s allies. The list of felonies tied to Trump’s circle seems to grow daily.
An attorney for Chesebro declined to comment. Attorneys for Troupis and Roman have yet to respond.
Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued a one-word response to the charges on Tuesday: “Good.”
Chesebro has been assisting investigators in at least four states, including Wisconsin, in the fake electors scheme. Chesebro’s lawyers had hoped that his cooperation would be sufficient to stave off charges, but it seems the felonies keep piling up.
Last year, the 10 fake electors from Wisconsin disavowed their attempt to overturn Trump’s defeat in 2020, recognized the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s victory, and pledged not to serve as real electors in 2024 or any election when Trump is on the ballot – or to act as sham electors in any future election, as part of a civil lawsuit settlement.
The 10 fake electors issued a statement acknowledging that the phony certificates they signed in December 2020 were “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn” the lawful election results.
“We hereby reaffirm that Joseph R. Biden, Jr. won the 2020 presidential election and that we were not the duly elected presidential electors for the State of Wisconsin for the 2020 presidential election,” a portion of their statement said. “We oppose any attempt to undermine the public’s faith in the ultimate results of the 2020 presidential election.”
Chesebro was previously charged, and pleaded guilty, in the Georgia probe. He has also been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona state-level criminal probe focused on efforts to overturn the 2020 election and in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election case against Trump.
Roman was charged in both the Georgia and Arizona cases. Troupis has not been charged in any other criminal cases stemming from the 2020 election, but evidence has emerged in connection with the fake electors plot in Wisconsin and other key battleground states.
A tranche of emails and text messages made public as a result of a lawsuit earlier this year offered additional evidence that Chesebro pushed for the electors plot to move forward regardless of whether Trump won any lawsuits challenging the election results. This undercut his testimony to state prosecutors, in which he said the fake electors were contingent on winning the litigation.
Chesebro wrote a series of memos in 2020 spelling out what the pro-Trump electors should do in their respective states, including one memo in early December that Troupis claimed he sent directly to the White House, according to the newly released messages.
Charging documents released Tuesday lean heavily on the communications.
Prosecutors cite text messages detailing how Chesebro, Troupis, and Roman were involved in a last-minute scramble to fly the fake elector documents from Wisconsin and Michigan to Washington, DC, in the immediate lead-up to January 6, 2021.
The goal, according to those messages, was to hand-deliver the fake elector certificates to then-Vice President Mike Pence, which is vaguely referenced in Smith’s federal indictment.
Chesebro discussed the episode with Wisconsin investigators when he sat for an interview as part of the attorney general’s probe into the fake electors plot.
Wisconsin prosecutors asked about the episode “extensively,” a source familiar with the matter said at the time, noting Chesebro discussed how a Wisconsin GOP staffer flew the certificate from Milwaukee to Washington and then handed it off to Chesebro.
