Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro is shown in a police booking mugshot released by the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, in Atlanta on Aug. 23, 2023.
Source: Fulton County Sheriff’s Office
A 2020 Trump campaign aide and two attorneys who did work for the campaign were charged Tuesday with forgery related to the so-called fake electors scheme to undo President Joe Biden‘s electoral victory in that state.
The charges against former campaign aide Mike Roman and attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis are the last in a series of criminal prosecutions related to former President Donald Trump‘s attempt to reverse his loss to Biden in the 2020 election.
“The criminal complaint in this case alleges that the defendants were part of a conspiracy to present a certificate of purported electoral votes from individuals who were not Wisconsin’s duly appointed electors,” said Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul in a statement.
“The Wisconsin Department of Justice is committed to protecting the integrity of our electoral process,” Kaul said.
Trump himself is charged in federal court in Washington, D.C.and state court in Georgia with crimes connected to that effort. The Georgia case, which charges multiple other defendants, also involves alleged crimes related to a scheme to have fake electors vote in the Electoral College for Trump.
The new charges in Wisconsin come three months after Chesebro and Troupis, as part of a settlement of a civil lawsuitturned over 1,400 pages of records showing how Republicans linked to Trump coordinated efforts to put forward slates of Trump Electoral College voters across seven states that Biden had won.
In this handout provided by the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, Trump campaign staff member Michael Roman poses for his booking photo at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, on Aug. 25, 2023.
Handout | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Prosecutors in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada also have charged other people with crimes related to assembling slates of Electoral College electors for Trump in 2020.
Biden’s margin of victory in the Electoral College over Trump came in the seven states that were targets of the fake electors strategy. The Electoral College designates the winner of U.S. presidential elections after the popular vote in November.
Chesebro, a 62-year-old who lives in Puerto Rico, in October pleaded guilty in the same Georgia case against Trump to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents in connection with his coordination of a plan to have 16 Republicans falsely claim to be legitimate electors.
Attorney James Troupis speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 16, 2020.
Greg Nash | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Roman, who was a White House aide during Trump’s administration, is charged in the Georgia case with crimes including conspiring to impersonate a public officer, to commit first-degree forgery and to file false documents. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.
Roman, a 51-year-old from Philadelphia, was director of Election Day operations for Trump’s 2020 campaign.
Troupis, 70, is a Wisconsin lawyer and a former judge. He remains a member of Wisconsin’s Judicial Conduct Advisory Committeeaccording to the website of that panel, which is appointed by the state’s Supreme Court to advise on judicial ethics.
Court records show that the initial court appearance for Roman, Chesebro and Troupis in the Wisconsin case will be on Sept. 19 in Dane County Circuit Court.
The forgery charge they each face has a maximum possible prison term of six years if they are convicted.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, in a one-word statement on the indictments against the trio, said, “Good.”
Trump is set to be formally confirmed as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in July, several days after being sentenced in his criminal hush money case in New York City.
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