Court Documents Shed Light on Wisconsin's False Electors Scheme

Tuesday, June 11th, 2024 -- 11:01 AM

(Anya van Wagtendonk, Wisconsin Public Radio) For months, participants in Wisconsin’s false electors scheme, in which 10 Republicans signed official-looking documentation attesting that former President Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2020, although he had lost, have maintained that they were developing a contingency plan in the face of pending legal action.

But, according to Anya van Wagtendonk with Wisconsin Public Radio, documents cited in the criminal complaint brought against three alleged masterminds behind that scheme, filed by Attorney General Josh Kaul earlier this week, appear to contradict that claim.

Attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and James Troupis exchanged emails suggesting that they weren’t depending on court cases to grant them cause to submit false slates of electors from certain key swing states on January 6, 2021, the Constitutionally mandated date for certifying an election.

And political operative Michael Roman used colorful language when rejecting the idea of including a qualifier on the false elector sheet that it should be treated as a backup.

“There’s a lot more documentation that the Attorney General here in Wisconsin has been able to sort of comb through to see the communication that this was intentional, and that there was a plan,” said Lily Goren, a political scientist at Carroll University in Waukesha. “It wasn’t, you know, a kind of like, ‘Oh, let’s just try this and see if it works.”

That’s the argument Kaul put forward when he charged Chesebro, Troupis and Roman with one felony charge each of forgery on Tuesday. Chesebro and Roman have also been indicted elsewhere for their alleged role developing and executing the strategy, which was first developed in Wisconsin.

Troupis, then the lead Wisconsin attorney for Trump’s campaign, and Chesebro appeared to have used Wisconsin as a testing ground for a novel legal strategy arguing that courts, state legislatures or even the Vice President, acting in his role as president of the U.S. Senate, could determine a state’s election results.

In a Dec. 8, 2020 email cited in Kaul’s criminal complaint, Chesebro tells Troupis that providing alternate electors could be a way of exerting “leverage” on Congress.

“Court challenges pending on Jan. 6 really not necessary,” Chesebro wrote. In a Dec. 12, 2020, a text message between Roman and Chesebro, Chesebro said he thought that language should be appended to the electors documents clarifying that they are not official.

“I don’t,” Roman responded.  “f— these guys.” Roman, a longtime conservative opposition researcher and later Trump White House staffer, is alleged to have delivered the false documentation to Congress on January 6, 2021, the day of the deadly U.S. Capitol riots.

The criminal complaint says that Pennsylvania’s false elector documents did include that distinguishing language. “And so there’s some discussion about whether some of the electors were aware” that they weren’t creating a contingency, said Goren, the political scientist.

“One of the other persons casting one of the fake elector votes noted that they knew that the court had finished its decision that morning, in fact, and that there were no more pending legal issues in Wisconsin.”

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