Newly unsealed documents accuse the judge presiding over the Wisconsin fake electors case against President Donald Trump’s former associates of not drafting a key ruling himself, and instead outsourcing it to the writing skills of a retired colleague.
The court filings, unsealed Tuesday, allege that Frank D. Remington, a recently retired Dane County Circuit Court judge, ghostwrote Judge John Hyland’s Aug. 22 order that rejected the defense’s motion to dismiss the case.
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In another decision handed down this week, Hyland refused to remove himself from the case after attorneys for Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s 2020 recount counselor in Wisconsin, filed several motions asking Hyland to both step aside and vacate his allegedly ghostwritten August order.
Hyland, chairman of the equity-centered Dane County Community Justice Council, had solicited outside help on the ruling from a former judge with a “grudge,” the defense claimed in a brief, filed in support of the omnibus motion requesting Hyland’s disqualification or recusal for judicial misconduct.
According to the accompanying appendix, which outlined the accusations and was under seal until Tuesday, Remington penned the bulk of Hyland’s opinion denying the defense’s dismissal motion, constituting a clear breach of Wisconsin’s judicial code of conduct.
The lawyers representing Troupis said that Remington has hostility toward Troupis, a fellow former Dane County judge, and that the pair’s personal conflict dates back to their brief time together on the bench.
Troupis, a conservative judge in deep-blue Dane County between 2015 and 2016, was “not everyone’s cup of tea,” the defendant’s attorney Joe Bugni argued. “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 continued. “Moreover, Judge Remington retired from the bench on May 3, before the motions were ripe — we filed our reply on May 12.”
To verify who is the actual author of the August order, the legal team for Troupis enlisted the services of Georgetown University professor Natalie Schilling, an expert in forensic linguists who has worked on cases involving authorship attribution.
Schilling, according to the affidavit she signed, found that Hyland’s ruling, as written, contained Remington’s “distinct style.” She compared a series of rulings previously written by Remington to Hyland’s order and discovered via her analysis that Remington’s recognizable writing style was “parroted throughout.”
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“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’s affidavit statements said.
Other parallels included “unusual” language used in the August order, such as use of the adverb “impliedly,” Schilling said.
As for what tipped the defense off, Bugni said he shared Hyland’s order within his legal office. Bugni’s colleagues immediately raised suspicions about the ruling, with one attorney telling him that he believes that Remington wrote it based on the order’s “style and tone.”
Remington’s son, a law clerk, also appeared in the ruling’s metadata, according to Bugni.
“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,” Bugni asserted.
The defense said that Hyland confirmed in a meeting with Bugni and state prosecutors that he had not worked with Remington’s son before.
Bugni cited a similar 1998 case in which a Milwaukee judge tapped a law professor friend to write opinions on her behalf. A disciplinary proceedings panel found that the judge had “engaged in judicial misconduct” by having a friend “prepare for her use opinions on dispositive motions in cases over which she presided.”
The panel concluded that the judge willfully violated two rules of the judicial ethics code: one prohibiting private communications designed to influence a judge’s decision-making and the other forbidding a judge from ex parte communications concerning a pending matter. As punishment, however, the panel only recommended the judge be reprimanded.
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In his ruling rebuffing the judicial misconduct claims as grounds for recusal, Hyland disputed that Remington was involved in writing the order at issue.
“The Court is satisfied that no person other [than] the assigned staff attorney and I had a hand in drafting or editing the decision which this Court signed and entered,” Hyland countered.
Hyland, finding that Troupis offered no evidence that he was biased against him, maintained that he holds “no personal animus or prejudice toward any of the litigants” and that he could fairly oversee the case.
Troupis had additionally asked for an evidentiary hearing, to be held in another county by a different judge, to investigate the allegations of wrongdoing. Hyland rejected that request as well as his motion to postpone a Dec. 15 preliminary hearing.
Details of the allegations against Hyland were not initially made public because Troupis had filed a motion to seal the omnibus brief. The motion said that while Troupis “believes that there’s a strong argument for making all filings public,” as a former judge he recognizes the risk of “public humiliation” for Hyland.
The other co-defendants in the case include Trump campaign aide Michael Roman, the president’s director of Election Day operations in 2020, and attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who is considered the architect of Trump’s so-called “alternate electors” scheme.
Along with Troupis, they face a slew of felony forgery charges and decades in prison, if convicted on all 11 counts, which each carry a maximum six-year sentence behind bars.
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Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat who is running for a third term, filed the charges against them in 2024.
In their initial dismissal motion, the defendants argued that such charges cannot legally be brought in state court and that proceedings for election-related crimes can only be brought by a county district attorney, not the state’s attorney general.
