Trump campaign attorney James Troupis speaks during a Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee hearing to discuss election security and the 2020 election process on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via AP)
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Jim Troupis, intricately involved in multiple efforts to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, has been appointed to a judicial advisory counsel in that state.
The Judicial Conduct Advisory Committee, as it is known, convenes to “render formal advisory opinions and give informal advice to judges and judicial officers governed by the Code of Judicial Conduct concerning the compliance of their contemplated or proposed conduct regarding the code,” according to its website.
Now appointed for his second term, Troupis will remain in the position until March 7, 2026.
Troupis helped organize the fake-elector in The Badger State, and he also led a lawsuit seeking to scuttle Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin in case that went to the state’s highest court.
Despite Trump’s bluster about alleged voter fraud, Troupis’s lawsuit focused on what he claimed to have been defects in forms by the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC). Trump had no objections about those forms when he prevailed in that state during the 2016 election. He only called those forms illegal in 2020, when he lost.
In his lawsuit, Troupis argued that the supposed shortcomings of those WEC forms should overturn the results in two of Wisconsin’s most diverse counties: Milwaukee and Dane, where most of the state’s Black people live. He did not argue that the results should be overturned in any other county in the state that used those forms.
That is why Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky told the Trump lawyer: “This lawsuit, Mr. Troupis, smacks of racism,” during oral arguments in December 2020.
Troupis’s legal theory came within a hairsbreadth of carrying the day in Wisconsin’s top court, which only rejected his case by a 4-3 margin, with conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn cast a tie-breaking vote. No other pro-Trump election challenge came so close to prevailing after the 2020 election.
The Trump lawyer’s reappointment turned on a margin in the opposite direction, with three three noted dissents among the justices: Karofsky, Ann Walsh Bradley and Rebecca Frank Dallet.
Litigation wasn’t Troupis’s only tactic for attempting to scuttle Biden’s win.
In a memo brought to light by the New York Times last month, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro told Troupis to organize electors favoring the former president’s reelection, even if it “may seem odd.”
“It may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count, and no certificate of election has been issued in favor of Trump and Pence,” Chesebro told Troupis on Nov. 18, 2020. “However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”
After losing his litigation, Troupis complained before the then-GOP controlled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to “set aside” Wisconsin’s elections entirely and put them in the hands of the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature. That effort failed, too.
Troupis didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the reappointment order here.
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