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The day before the contentious 2020 election, Jim Troupis ranked among the most respected attorneys in Wisconsin. Two years after he represented President Donald Trump in his Badger State election challenges, Troupis says he couldn’t find a lawyer to write his estate plan. A lot of the friends he worked with over his distinguished legal career disappeared faster than a lawsuit against a prosecutor. 

“Nothing had changed, I had simply represented Donald Trump,” Troupis told conservative talk show host Vicki McKenna Tuesday afternoon. “This has been unbelievably painful for me and my family.” 

The pain got worse Tuesday as Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a highly partisan Democrat with higher political ambitions, announced more criminal charges against Troupis, fellow Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, and Trump campaign official Michael Roman. The three men are caught up in Kaul’s politically driven electors prosecution, a last-ditch effort to try to lock up allies of President-elect Trump and send a message that the left’s scorched earth lawfare campaign is far from over. 

10 More Charges

Tuesday’s extended conversation with McKenna marked Troupis’ first public comments since June, when the leftist attorney general held a state Capitol steps press conference to announce a trumped-up forgery-related charge against Troupis and his co-defendants. Kaul and his allies in the accomplice media have accused the men of engaging in a “fake electors” scheme for enlisting a slate of 10 Republican volunteers to serve as alternate — or contingent — electors for Trump to protect the president’s electoral votes should he succeed in his post-election legal challenges. Kaul’s own Department of Justice has previously opined that there was nothing wrong with the Trump campaign’s alternate electors strategy in Wisconsin, a strategy used or considered in past disputed presidential elections. 

As his troubled forgery case appears to be crumbling, Kaul doubled down on Tuesday and filed 10 additional charges each against the two attorneys and the Trump campaign aide. The amended complaint, filed just two days before the accused are scheduled to make their initial appearance in Dane County Circuit Court in Madison, accuses the defendants of forgery to defraud each of the Republican electors who met at the state Capitol on Monday Dec. 14, 2020 to cast their ballots for Trump after Democrat challenger Joe Biden claimed victory in Wisconsin and in the presidential election at large. 

Each of the charges, a class H felony, carries a maximum six-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. So Kaul and his political pals are trying to put Troupis, a 71-year-old former judge, and his co-defendants away for dozens of years.  

The attorney general alleges that the electors didn’t know that their signatures on the alternate ballot would be submitted to Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, the day the electoral votes were tallied and the day of the Capitol riot. 

‘These are Political Cases’

Troupis has filed several motions to dismiss the original charge, asserting Kaul has no case because he has no probable cause that a crime has been committed. The defendants didn’t commit an act of forgery, the motions state, because the document the electors signed was exactly what it purported to be, a slate of alternate electors for Trump in the event the president’s legal challenges prevailed and he was found to have won Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes. 

The zealous AG’s case also runs afoul of the constitution’s Supremacy Clause, and he unlawfully bypassed the legal process to bring charges; Wisconsin law requires election-related criminal allegations first be taken to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the filings state. 

Troupis told McKenna that even the lawyers inside the attorney general’s office “know these are political cases.” Perhaps they know that because Kaul’s own deputies advised the Elections Commission that nothing in state law “prohibits or otherwise limits a party from meeting to cast electoral votes during a challenge to an election tabulation.” 

Kaul didn’t include that important bit of information in his criminal complaint. The court document notes WEC’s legal counsel’s memo “does not address other potential violations of law,” such as forgery. But the DOJ memo does. It shot down a leftist lawfare organization’s contention that the alternate electors “met in a concerted effort to ensure that they would be mistaken, as a result of their deliberate forgery and fraud, for Wisconsin’s legitimate Presidential Electors.”

‘It Wasn’t That They Came After Me’

Troupis said the price he has paid for serving as Trump’s legal counsel has been “very steep” over the past four years — in many ways. He told McKenna that he has spent more than $1 million defending himself from the onslaught of legal attacks against him. He said he’s endured harassment, attacks on his reputation, death threats. 

But the former judge said nothing compares to seeing his family suffer. 

“It wasn’t that they just came after me. They came after my wife, they came after my son, they came after my daughters, they came after anyone with the last name Troupis,” he said.

He talked about returning from a Disney cruise with his family and watching customs officials pull his son aside and take him into a locked room where they demanded his computers and smartphone. Troupis quickly realized that his son was being hounded because he shares his father’s name and they could get at the younger Troupis’ electronic devices in a way they couldn’t target the attorney. 

“There isn’t a single morning or single night since early in 2021 that I have not worried about this case,” he told the talk show host. “Every single day my wife Karen woke up thinking they’re going to break the front door down.” 

‘In an Instant’

Badger State conservatives like Troupis had seen this movie before, knowing well the pre-dawn raids on the right-of-center targets in Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigations of a decade or so before. He has watched as Biden’s Justice Department ripped apart the lives of so many Americans at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Troupis has been a top target in the reign of terror pushed by well-funded leftist groups like the 65 Project and the campaign to go after attorneys who had the audacity to represent Trump in the 2020 election challenges. As nonprofit tracker InfluenceWatch reports, the project was “devised” by former Clinton administration official Melissa Moss. 

“It is a project of Law Works, a group with no website or public financial disclosures. LawWorks has previously received grants from public policy-oriented foundation Democracy Fund and is a fiscal project of the Franklin Education Forum, a nonprofit organization that provides training and support to, “advance and broaden the appeal of the progressive cause,” InfluenceWatch notes. Its mission has been to disbar more than 100 Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Troupis and Chesebro. Interestingly, the group is led by Michael Teter, a former litigation associate with Perkins Coie, a law firm with deep ties to the Democratic National Committee — a law firm where Kaul once worked. 

Troupis asserts it’s all “a coordinated takedown.” 

“In an instant they destroyed my reputation,” the attorney said. “They can absolutely destroy people’s lives in an instant.” 

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.