Dragged through the Democrats’ endless lawfare campaign, Jim Troupis is asking the liberal-led state Supreme Court to consider due process.
Raked over the coals in a years-long leftist lawfare campaign, former state circuit court Judge Jim Troupis is asking the controlling liberals on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to do what it seems incapable of doing: Act fairly and impartially.
Troupis, facing 11 fraud and forgery counts in Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s political mission to punish President Donald Trump’s allies, filed motions on Friday asking two extremely partisan Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from a case apparently perverted by lower court misconduct.
“Their statements, spanning years, not only create the appearance of bias but also demonstrate actual bias against Troupis,” the former Dane County judge’s attorney wrote, referring to far-left Wisconsin Supreme Court justices Jill Karofsky and Rebecca Dallet.
Both justices clearly despise President Donald Trump and the attorneys who represented him in the wake of 2020’s rigged presidential election.
Karofsky has accused Troupis trying “to overturn this election so that your king [Trump] can stay in power…” And Dallet, like Karofsky, accused Trump’s Wisconsin legal team of being racist for calling into question tens of thousands of votes cast in Dane and Milwaukee counties, deep blue counties that saw unprecedented election irregularities.
The recusal motions are the latest turn in a politically weaponized prosecution nearly two years in the making after percolating though the Democrats’ never-ending vendetta against Donald Trump.
Political Prosecution
Troupis, a nationally-renowned campaign- and election-law attorney, and appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro , who served as legal counsel for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, represented Trump in his Wisconsin legal challenges following Democrat Joe Biden’s razor-thin win in 2020. Democrats and their allies have accused Trump and his legal representatives of illegally attempting to overturn the results in swing state Wisconsin and all but one critical battleground state in which Biden claimed electoral victories.
As the Federalist has extensively reported, the Democratic Party and their useful idiots in corporate media have pushed the narrative that Troupis, Chesebro, and Mike Roman, Trump’s director of Election Day Operations, broke the law in a legal strategy using alternate electors. The plan was to retain Wisconsin’s 10 electors for Trump should he prevail in his legal challenges. Liberals have accused the president and his advisers of creating a slate of “fake electors” meant to usurp Democrat candidate Joe Biden’s “rightful” Wisconsin victory. Attorneys in Kaul’s own Department of Justice advised the Wisconsin Elections Commission that there was nothing illegal about a legal strategy employed in multiple presidential elections — a strategy Gore’s campaign considered in the U.S. Supreme Court-decided 2000 election.
But pressed by the exigencies of partisan politics, Wisconsin’s leftist attorney general incredibly filed forgery charges against the three Trump representatives in June 2024, just as Trump was preparing to accept his third GOP presidential nomination. Perhaps determining his flimsy charges wouldn’t survive scrutiny in any court bound by the rule of law, Kaul upped the ante later that year, filing 10 additional fraud charges against the men.
They are among several Trump legal and political representatives fighting for their reputations, their livelihoods, and their freedom in the left’s years-long lawfare campaign following the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Bombshell Charges of Judicial Misconduct
The case was turned over to Circuit Court Judge John Hyland in Dane County, one of the most liberal courts in America. In August, Hyland denied a motion to dismiss the political prosecution.
Following Hyland’s ruling, Troupis’ defense team became suspicious that the judge may not have actually written the order. Its sardonic language and particular turns of phrase seemed strikingly reminiscent of newly retired Dane County Judge Frank Remington, who, according to the defense, was no fan of the conservative Troupis. Their suspicions were heightened when they found that Remington’s son Andrew, a Dane County Circuit Court clerk, appeared in the document’s meta-data. The majority of the order was written on his computer.
Troupis’ attorneys brought in a nationally-recognized forensic linguist expert who determined it was “highly likely” that Remington wrote Hyland’s order for him. Hyland, according to court documents, admitted he got the full draft of the order before he’d finished reading the defendants’ arguments.
Troupis sought an evidentiary hearing on the misconduct allegations and asked Hyland to recuse himself from the case. The judge refused. He said there was no need and insisted he could fairly preside over a trial scheduled for later this year. The defendants appealed to the state’s Fourth District Court of Appeals, which rejected the motion without explanation.
‘An Erroneous Exercise of Discretion’
Now, the defendants caught up in the politically-driven prosecution are asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to step in and clean up a number of messes, including the appeals court’s failure to explain why it summarily denied the motion for review. A 4-3 state Supreme Court ruling in 2021 determined that an appeals court didn’t have to give a reason for denying an appeal. The ruling is “bad law,” Troupis’ motion argues, “and this Court should take the chance to fix it.” A previous Supreme Court ruling rebuked an appeals court’s failure to explain itself as “an erroneous exercise of discretion,” the filing notes.
“The Court of Appeals should explain its discretionary decision-making to ensure the soundness of that decision-making and to facilitate judicial review,” Wisconsin’s high court wrote in the unanimous decision in 2018.
Troupis is asking the Supreme Court to grant its petition and ultimately remand the case back to the lower court for an evidentiary hearing into what appears to be Hyland’s ghost-written order. Troupis’ attorneys aren’t accusing the judge of knowingly enlisting Remington to write the rejection order, but that the evidence thus far raises serious questions about due process denied.
“No one can credibly say that the defense has no evidence to support its claims,” the motion to Supreme Court concludes.
But before the court acts, it needs to make sure that the two liberal justices with a an apparent hostile bias against Trump and his campaign’s 2020 legal counsel step away from the case.
Understandably so.
‘So Your King Can Stay in Power’
When Troupis argued on behalf of Trump in disputing the validity of ballots cast in a Covid election filled with twisted and broken election law (the Democratic National Committee sued Wisconsin to force elections officials to stop enforcing election statutes amid the pandemic), Karofsky swatted away their concerns in a way that wreaked of partisanship.
“What you want is you want us to overturn this election so that your king can stay in power, and that is so un-American,” she petulantly said during a post-election hearing.
A court corrupted by deep-seated bias is un-American.
Karofsky added that Troupis looking out for the best legal interests of his client was “unheard of in American history” and “smacked of racism.” She repeated her politically-charged claims on multiple occasions.
Dallet, too, read from the leftist book of justice.
“The only votes you wanna throw out are the votes in … the two most diverse non-white urban counties ….” the justice told Troupis during the 2020 court hearing on the Trump campaign’s legal challenges.
Dallet with a straight face charged that a 2021 judicial complaint filed against Karofsky was “an attempted weaponization of the disciplinary process.” The feckless Wisconsin Judicial Commission dismissed the complaint against Karofsky but expressed concerns about her rhetoric from the bench.
“Regardless of the nature of the case being addressed by the court, a judicial official should take special care and remain mindful of their role in proceedings as a neutral and detached magistrate, as opposed to an advocate, and avoid sarcasm when making statements from the bench, given their obligations under (the state code of judicial conduct),” the commission wrote.
Troupis’ attorneys argue that Dallet and Karofsky sitting on the case would “violate the Due Process Clause, the Wisconsin Statutes, and the Judicial Code,” noting that it’s clear the liberal members of the court don’t like Troupis.
If the past is any indication, however, Dallet and Karofsky will refuse to recuse. Under Wisconsin law, it’s up to the judge to decide whether he or she is conflicted in a case. Wisconsin’s liberal justices have had a difficult time seeing how their overtly political statements on the campaign trail and on the court could be construed as a conflict, although Karofsky has said on multiple occasions the court needs stronger recusal rules. Here’s a chance to put her money where her mouth is.
Important pardon of Alternate Electors of 2020!! pic.twitter.com/iuDGv9fqyy
— Eagle Ed Martin (@EagleEdMartin) November 10, 2025
Troupis says he deserves a “fair hearing.” He does. So do his co-defendants. But are they likely to have one from a liberal-led court that has made clear its loathing of all things Donald Trump?
