In March, our team at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection—along with our co-counsel at Law Forward and Stafford Rosenbaum, LLP—settled Penebaker v. Hitt, a historic lawsuit brought by two Democratic Wisconsin electors against the ten individuals who fraudulently cast ballots for Trump and Pence, as well as two lawyers associated with the Trump Campaign. One of them was Chesebro himself, who already faces a public and legal reckoning for his role in the plot. The other was James Troupis, a top attorney for the Trump Campaign in Wisconsin who, until recently, had escaped significant national scrutiny.

As part of our settlement agreement, we obtained thousands of emails, text messages, and other records from the defendants, including many from Troupis and Chesebro themselves. These documents, all of which are posted publicly, provide new revelations about the development of the false electors scheme, which should guide public understanding of this element of Trump’s multipronged attempt to nullify his defeat and unlawfully retain power.

[Editor’s note: The Wisconsin documents are now integrated into a comprehensive timeline of the false electors scheme.]

This article explores three major themes exposed by the settlement: (1) the role of James Troupis; (2) the earlier-than-understood origins of the plot, just days after the election itself ; and (3) the design of the underlying scheme.

First and foremost, these documents show that without Troupis, there would not have been a false electors scheme. Troupis leveraged his connections inside Trump’s orbit to operationalize Chesebro’s ideas. Second, the timeline presented by these documents shows how the false electors scheme was hatched much earlier than previously believed by close observers and continued in earnest through the violent insurrection on January 6th. Third, these documents make clear that the scheme was not—as now alleged by Trump’s defenders—a contingency plan in case courts overturned election results. On the contrary, this was a premeditated effort to use fraudulent slates of electors to introduce uncertainty and chaos into the Joint Session, no matter what the courts ruled. To put it simply, the new information obtained as a result of the Penebaker litigation shows that the false electors scheme was not just a lawyerly subplot to a haphazard coup attempt; rather, it was the centerpiece of Trump’s well-orchestrated pressure campaign to dismantle democracy.

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Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240517123222/https://www.justsecurity.org/95670/wisconsin-lawsuit-false-electors-documents/