Will Wisconsin's Fake Electors Pay a Price?

BILL LUEDERS
JUL 25, 2023

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In February 2022, Law Forward asked Ismael Ozanne, the Democratic district attorney of Dane County, which includes Madison, to bring charges. Mandell recalls that “senior members of [Ozanne’s] office told us they were looking into it,” but that was at least a year ago and nothing more has come to light. So Law Forward did the only thing it was able to do on its own accord: It sued the bastards.

The group’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of plaintiffs including two actual state electors in May 2022 and amended in March 2023. It alleges that the state’s ten fake electors and two instigators broke multiple laws, including, as one reporter summed it up, “counterfeiting public records, illegally interfering with official procedures, defrauding the public and engaging in conspiracy.” It also alleges that the defendants bear some responsibility for the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. It seeks $2.4 million in damages.

The lawsuit names all ten individuals who met secretly at the Wisconsin state Capitol on December 14, 2020, to sign the papers attesting that Trump won the election. They are:

Andrew Hitt, then-chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin;

Kelly Ruh, former chairwoman of the 8th Congressional District Republican Party;

Carol Brunner, vice chairwoman of Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District Republican Party;

Scott Grabins, then-chairman of the Dane County Republican Party;

Bill Feehan, who ran unsuccessfully for state Senate as a Republican in 2012;

Robert F. Spindell Jr., a Republican-appointed member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission;

Kathy Kiernan, chairwoman of the 5th Congressional District Republican Party;

Darryl Carlson, who ran unsuccessfully for state Assembly as a Republican in 2014;

Pam Travis, vice chair of the 7th Congressional District Republican Party; and

Mary Buestrin, former national committeewoman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

Spindell, who as a member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted against taking action against himself and others in the fake electors scheme, had in December 2020 appeared at a “stop the steal” rally at the state Capitol. This January, he sent a memo to fellow Republicans saying that he was “proud” of the “substantial & very effective Republican Coordinated Election Integrity program” that succeeded in suppressing the election turnout in “overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic areas” including Milwaukee.

Also named as defendants in the lawsuit are attorney Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s point person on 2020 election challenges, and Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump-affiliated lawyer who was described in an ethics complaint submitted to the Supreme Court of New York’s attorney grievance committee as “the apparent mastermind behind key aspects of the fake elector ploy.” Indeed, Chesebro’s memo to Troupis, dated Nov. 18, 2020, is, according to the New York Times’s Charlie Savage, “the earliest known memo putting forward a proposal for having a slate of Trump supporters purport to be electors.” Mandell says this is what makes Wisconsin’s fake electors scheme nationally unique.

As he told The Bulwark:
Initially, it was our hypothesis that Chesebro, working for the White House or for the national Trump campaign, came up with this concept and then reached out to the states that he thought were close enough that this was worth pursuing in. But it turns out that's incorrect. It was Troupis working for Trump from Wisconsin who brought Chesebro into the fold. So Wisconsin plays an outsized role, because you know, without Troupis having done so, it’s not clear this would have happened anywhere. Mandell goes on to note that while Chesbro was overseeing the fraudulent electors scheme in seven states, “he chose to be in Wisconsin in the room with the fraudulent electors” when the fake documents were signed. “And so for all those reasons, I think that Wisconsin is a particularly important piece” of the national scheme.

In March, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority reappointed Troupis to its Judicial Conduct Advisory Committee, which gives formal opinions and informal advice regarding the state judicial code of conduct to judges and judicial officers. Defenders of the pretend electors contend they were acting on advice of attorneys and that the casting of two sets of electoral votes is based on a precedent set in Hawaii during a dispute over the 1960 presidential election. In a statement issued last week, Wisconsin GOP Executive Director Mark Jefferson said the goal was “to preserve all legal options that were being pursued and were still pending before the courts.” He added: “It is our understanding that had the courts come to a different conclusion, a meeting would have had to have taken place in order for Wisconsin's electoral votes to have counted.”

Much more at: https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/will-wisconsins-fake-electors-pay