Docs: WI Judge In Trump Electors Case Didn’t Right His Ruling

Explosive new court documents unsealed Tuesday detail the alleged judicial misconduct of the Wisconsin judge presiding over a politically-driven criminal case targeting the attorneys who represented the 2020 Trump campaign in the battleground Badger State. Dane County Circuit Court Judge John Hyland had outside help from a former judge with a “grudge,” according to the court filings.

Hyland, in so many words, told defendants to go pound sand. He will not remove himself from the case and the march to a perfectly-timed election-year trial will go on. To the people who feel more than ever that it will be impossible to get a fair trial in far-left Dane County, the judge effectively said, Trust me.

Earlier this week, attorneys for Jim Troupis, President Donald Trump’s Wisconsin recount counselor following the rigged 2020 presidential election, filed several motions not only asking Hyland and his staff to step aside, but to vacate the judge’s August order rejecting the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case. The omnibus motion and an appendix spelling out the allegations were sealed  — that is until Hyland opened them Tuesday afternoon.

‘Not a Fan of My Client’

Troupis, attorney Kenneth Chesebro, and Trump campaign aide Michael Roman face multiple counts on trumped-up forgery and fraud charges stemming from their efforts to file a slate of alternate — or contingent — electors to protect Trump’s electoral votes while the president contested the results of the 2020 election. Democrat Joe Biden claimed the critical swing state’s 10 electoral votes, but Trump sued in the wake of myriad voting irregularities and legal questions in the Covid-plagued presidential election. 

The defendants face decades in prison on the piled-on charges filed by Democrat state Attorney General Josh Kaul nearly four years after the election. 

Hyland, according to the unsealed filings, had the help of a former fellow judge in putting together the August opinion. The omnibus motion alleges that retired Dane County Judge Frank Remington wrote much of the order denying the dismissal motion, which, the motion argues, would be a clear breach of judicial ethics and Wisconsin law. It would also present a personal conflict. 

Troupis, a former Dane County judge and an extremely rare conservative one at that, was “not everyone’s cup of tea,” the defendant’s attorney Joe Bugni wrote. “This apparently included the retired Judge, who the defense believes wrote the August 22 Order.”

“Judge Remington was (to put it mildly) not a fan of my client when they were in practice or when they were colleagues on the bench,” Bugni alleges. “Moreover, Judge Remington retired from the bench on May 3, before the motions were ripe — we filed our reply on May 12.”

‘Same Flavor’

How does Troupis’ legal team know that Remington wrote the order? They enlisted the services of Georgetown professor Natalie Schilling, an internationally-recognized forensic linguistics expert who has logged a lot of hours on cases involving authorship attribution. And Schilling, according to the affidavit she signed, found Hyland’s “sardonic” order brimming with Remington’s “distinct style.” She compared several court documents written by Remington to the Hyland order and discovered that style was “parroted throughout.” 

“Reviewing some of the retired Judge’s prior orders, they all had the same flavor: they were written in the first person, they had the same structure, and often had the same sardonic tone,” Schilling wrote. 

What tipped Troupis’ legal team off? Bugni said he shared Hyland’s order within his office. His colleagues quickly suspected that the judge had not written the ruling. Bugni added that an attorney who represented Troupis in a related civil case told him he suspected Remington wrote it, based on the “style and tone.” 

The initial suspicion proved even more credible, Bugni wrote, when Remington’s son, a law clerk, appeared in the order’s metadata.  

“Given the father-son relationship and (what seems) the indisputable evidence that the retired Judge wrote much of this Court’s order denying Troupis’s motions, the defense can show the appearance of impropriety,” the motion asserts. 

The unsealed court document also alleges Hyland confirmed in a meeting with Bugni and prosecutors that he had not worked with Remington’s son before, yet he had received a draft of an order from the law clerk before Hyland had read all of the case’s briefs. 

Troupis’ attorney notes a similar misconduct case in which a Milwaukee circuit court judge farmed out opinion writing to a professor friend. A judicial panel found the judge had “engaged in judicial misconduct.” 

Remington could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Trial by Proxy

In his ruling letting the defendants know he was staying on the case, Hyland disputes Remington was involved in the writing of his August order. 

“The Court is satisfied that no person other the assigned staff attorney and I had a hand in drafting or editing the decision which this Court signed and entered,” the judge wrote.

Hyland insisted he held “no personal animus or prejudice toward any of the litigants” and that the parties could expect him to be fair and impartial. 

But the fog of partiality hangs over the entire case, a prosecution that’s part of a national leftist lawfare campaign against the Democrats’ top political enemy and his agenda. 

Kaul and his friends in the accomplice media have labeled the 2020 alternate elector strategy, used in past elections, as a “fake elector” scheme meant to overturn Biden’s win. Curiously, the highly partisan attorney general who previously worked for the law firm that helped deliver the Russia collusion hoax didn’t bring charges until after Trump had secured his third GOP nomination. If the proceedings stay on schedule, Democrats will have their 2020 rehash trial in the thick of the 2026 midterm campaigns. Political theater, a Trump trial by proxy to remind voters — falsely and audaciously — what a threat the MAGA movement is to democracy.   

In the meantime, Troupis and his co-defendants argue that they won’t get a fair shake from a judge and liberal circuit court they believe has stacked the deck against them. 

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.