Former President Donald Trump tosses hats to supporters during a rally on August 5, 2022 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.)
A group of pro-Donald Trump fake electors in Wisconsin has reached a settlement in a lawsuit requiring them to admit President Joe Biden won the 2020 election and requiring them “fully cooperate” with the U.S. Department of Justice’s current or future Jan. 6 probes.
Khary Penebaker and Mary Arnold, two real Wisonsin electors, and Bonnie Joseph, a voter, sued in Dane County back in May 2022 on behalf of fellow Democrats.
At the time, Wisconsin GOP Chairman Paul Farrow called the lawsuit “frivolous,” asserting that the case was “yet another Democrat attempt to resurrect a baseless story from two years ago.” Robert Spindell, one of the fake electors, also called the lawsuit “political in nature.”
Now that the case has reached a settlement agreement, however, Spindell and his fellow fake elector defendants Bill Feehan, Kelly Ruh, Carol Brunner, Edward Grabins, Kathy Kiernan, Darryl Carlson, Pam Travis, and Mary Buestrin will have to submit a public statement that says they weren’t who they claimed to be.
The public statement will be sent to the “President of the United States Senate, the Wisconsin Secretary of State, the Archivist of the United States, and the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin,” documents said.
The agreed upon statement, which the settlement documents revealed in full, admits that Trump lost the 2020 election, says that Democrats were actually the “duly elected” electors, assigns blame for the fake elector scheme to the Trump campaign and Wisconsin GOP, and acknowledges that Dec. 14, 2020 documents claiming the fake electors were “duly elected” presidential electors were “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”
The full statement:
On December 14, 2020, in compliance with requests received from the Trump campaign and the Republican Party of Wisconsin, we met at the Wisconsin State Capitol and executed a document titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Wisconsin.” That document stated, in part, that we were “the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Wisconsin.” The Elector Defendants took the foregoing action because they were told that it was necessary to preserve their electoral votes in the event a court challenge may later change the outcome of the election in Wisconsin. That document was then used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
The duly elected presidential electors for the State of Wisconsin for the 2020 presidential election were: Meg Andrietsch, Shelia Stubbs, Ronald Martin, Mandela Barnes, Khary Penebaker, Mary Arnold, Patty Schachtner, Shannon Holsey, Tony Evers, and Benjamin Wikler.
We hereby reaffirm that Joseph R. Biden, Jr. won the 2020 presidential election and that we were not the duly elected presidential electors for the State of Wisconsin for the 2020 presidential election.We oppose any attempt to undermine the public’s faith in the ultimate results of the 2020 presidential election.We hereby withdraw the documents we executed on December 14, 2020, and request that they be disregarded by the public and all entities to which they were submitted.
A related consequence of the settlement is that the defendants can neither serve as presidential electors in 2024 nor do so “in any United States presidential election in which Donald J. Trump is on the ballot.”
Even more noticeable, the defendants further agreed to “fully cooperate, or continue to cooperate, with any ongoing or future investigation or prosecution” by the U.S. DOJ about “(a) any efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power related to and following the 2020 presidential election; (b) any efforts to interfere with the certification of electoral votes during the Joint Session of Congress convened on January 6, 2021.”
That cooperation requirement “shall cease” if the Wisconsin fake electors end up targets of a federal “criminal investigation or prosecution.”
The settlement does not, however, put the fake electors on the hook for the plaintiffs’ attorney’s fees and costs. The agreement also doesn’t mean the fake electors are “admitting any liability or culpability.”
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