Former Dane County Judge James Troupis and a pair of other former Trump aides pleaded not guilty Tuesday to felony forgery charges for their role in planning the fake elector plot that played an instrumental role in what became the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

Troupis, attorney Kenneth Cheseboro and Trump campaign aide Mike Roman entered the pleas in Dane County Circuit Court Tuesday. The trio is accused of falsifying Electoral College documents to say President Donald Trump won the 2020 election in the state. 

The three men face 11 felony forgery charges which are each punishable by up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine. They argue they committed no crime and were just keeping the president’s appeal options open. 

Prosecutors argue that the three men misled Wisconsin’s 10 Republican electors, telling them the Electoral College votes for Trump were only being cast in case the various court challenges against the election results were successful. Those challenges ultimately failed, but the Electoral College votes were presented to Congress as a pretense to reject the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. 

Troupis has spent months trying to avoid his prosecution. He penned a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice late last month asking for more than $3 million from Trump’s since-scrapped “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate him for the “nightmare” of facing the charges against him. Last week, he filed a motion seeking to have his case moved to Jefferson County Court, arguing he can’t receive a fair trial from the liberal jurors in  Dane County. He’s also filed to have the case against him dismissed because he was pardoned by Trump for any potential federal charges related to the fake electors scheme.

A Dane County judge ruled Friday that lawmakers could not block administrative rules that had been through the rulemaking process and received approval from Gov. Tony Evers.

Evers and the Republican-led Legislature have been fighting over administrative rulemaking abilities for years. The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in its July 2025 Evers v. Marklein II ruling that statutes allowing a legislative committee to pause or suspend administrative rules indefinitely were unconstitutional.

Following that decision, Evers started taking steps to implement 12 administrative rules he had previously approved,  without getting sign-off from legislative committees. Republican lawmakers responded by instructing the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) not to  publish any rule that hadn’t gone through a review by the Legislature. 

Evers sued in Sept. 2025 to block the lawmakers’ action.

Judge Nia Trammel granted Evers’ request for a declaration that LRB publish all administrative rules that have gone through the rulemaking procedures and have been approved by the governor.

In the ruling, Trammel said a rule can go into effect because there isn’t a statute prohibiting promulgation of a rule even if a standing committee has not completed a review and if one did exist it would be “facially unconstitutional.”

Trammel cited the state Supreme Court’s Marklein II decision, which found that “the ability of a ten-person committee to halt or interrupt the passage of a rule, which would ordinarily be required to be presented to the governor as a bill, is simply incompatible with Articles IV and V of the Wisconsin Constitution.”

“For the same reason, if the Court found that the standing committee had an ability to pause promulgation for up to sixty days, if not possibly months, it would also be unconstitutional,” Trammel wrote. 

Evers said in a statement that the decision is a win for Wisconsin and “our efforts to continue restoring the balance of power in Wisconsin.” 

“For far too long, the Republican Legislature had a gerrymandered majority that enabled them to undermine our constitutional separation of powers and give themselves outsized influence and power over state government,” Evers said. “A handful of lawmakers should not be able to singlehandedly bring the state to a standstill and stop good work from happening on behalf of the people of our state.”