Incriminated Trump lawyer begs state judge to respect president’s pardon

Pardons for the Plotters, Consequences for Everyone ElseThe real powerDonald Trump sits at the center of this story, not as a bystander surrounded by overzealous aides, but as the political beneficiary who keeps using power to try to erase accountability. His former Wisconsin campaign attorney, Jim Troupis, is now asking a state judge to extend Trump’s pardon into a case Trump does not control. That is the shape of the arrangement: the person who helped engineer the scheme seeks rescue from the man who ordered the culture of impunity around it.The crime was not confusionThe source describes the fake elector effort plainly: Republicans in battleground states pretended to be electors in an attempt to pressure Mike Pence into blocking certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That is not a misunderstanding of electoral law. It is an organized attempt to obstruct the transfer of power after losing an election. Troupis now faces 11 counts of forgery in Wisconsin, and that charge list matters because it reflects a state finally treating the plot as conduct, not theater.Trump’s pardon machineTrump has already pardoned Troupis and “many of his cohorts” for their role in the 2020 plot, but only in federal court. That limitation is not a technicality; it is the remaining edge of accountability. The pardon itself is an admission of allegiance: punish loyalty, not legality. When Trump pardons the people who helped manufacture false electors, he is not healing anything. He is telling future operatives that the safest way to serve him is to commit the act first and rely on him later.The blame-shifting routineTroupis’s motion leans on the usual evasions. He wants the state case dismissed because Trump “has chosen to pardon him,” as if a president can vaporize state criminal law by preference. He also wants the case moved out of Dane County, claiming local bias because the allegedly victimized ballots belonged to Dane County voters. That is not neutrality-seeking. It is a familiar tactic: turn the people targeted by the scheme into a supposed obstacle to justice, then describe the prospect of jurors hearing the facts as prejudice.Hypocrisy is the pointThe details undercut the entire posture of grievance. Troupis led the Wisconsin recount effort and tried to throw out in-person absentee ballots in Dane County, even though he and his wife both used that very voting method. His names appeared on exhibits submitted to the county board while he tried to contest the count. This is what political fraud looks like at ground level: lawmakers and lawyers claiming procedural virtue while applying one standard to themselves and another to everyone else.The patternThe deeper pattern is straightforward. Power does not always need to win legally if it can delay, pardon, reframe, and exhaust. Trump rewards the people who helped break the system. Those people then ask judges to legalize the reward. When a scheme fails, the next move is not remorse but jurisdiction-shopping, venue manipulation, and a recycled story about unfair treatment. The real scandal is not that these actors are asking for mercy. It is that they still expect the institutions they tried to damage to clean up after them. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe