A Dane County judge has rejected Jim Troupis’ motion to force him off a felony fraud case stemming from the 2020 election, shooting down the former Donald Trump attorney’s claims that the judge had committed misconduct.
Judge John Hyland yesterday rebuffed Troupis’ claim that retired Judge Frank Remington had a hand in writing all or parts of an August ruling rejecting a motion to dismiss the case. He also found Troupis offered no evidence that he had any personal bias against the GOP attorney.
In motions filed Monday, Troupis wanted the entire Dane County bench disqualified because they have a personal animus toward him. He also wanted a Monday preliminary hearing called off and for a judge in another county to hear his claims that Remington was involved in the Aug. 22 order.
Hyland rejected all of the requests.
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Troupis’ filings were initially put under seal with no details of the misconduct claim that the GOP attorney had lodged against Hyland. But as part of yesterday’s order, Hyland unsealed two documents Troupis had submitted to make his arguments.
That includes testimony from an expert on the writing style of the Aug. 22 decision rejecting the motion to dismiss. That filing found parallels between Remington’s work and the language used in the Aug. 22 decision, such as the use of “unusual adverbs such as ‘impliedly.”
According to one of Troupis’ filings, Remington’s son is a law clerk and appeared in the metadata of the Aug. 22 order.
Hyland wrote in his ruling that no one other than the judge and a staff attorney had a hand in writing the August decision.
Former GOP Gov. Scott Walker appointed Troupis to the Dane County bench in 2015. Troupis served less than a year, stepping down to attend to his mother’s estate after she died. He had also hoped for an appointment to the state Supreme Court at the time, but didn’t get it.
Troupis’ attorney wrote in one of the filings that was unsealed that he wasn’t everyone’s “cup of tea” while on the Dane County bench. Remington joined the bench in 2011 and retired in May.
But Hyland noted he wasn’t on the bench when Troupis was in office. Neither were five of the other seven judges in the Dane County criminal division.
Dem AG Josh Kaul filed 11 felony charges against Troupis, Kenneth Chesebro and Mike Roman, all of whom were involved in the effort to cast Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes for Trump even though Joe Biden won the state in the 2020 election.
The allegations include that they tried to defraud the 10 GOP electors who signed the documents falsely claiming Trump had won.
