Corrupt Democrats and deep staters who have twisted justice to target their political enemies can’t stand the idea of their victims receiving restitution.
It should be no surprise that D.C. creeps like Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. — who should be behind bars, not in Congress — have excoriated President Donald Trump and his administration’s “anti-weaponization fund.” Nor should it be a surprise that the Trump-hating accomplice media is throwing gasoline on the Democrat-lit bonfire over the fund. Some Republican senators, ever afraid of Trump sparks, and their own shadows for that matter, have joined the pitchfork parade.
While the $1.776 billion indemnity does raise some transparency concerns, its political critics like to contend that A) the Biden administration did not use the Department of Justice and outside lawfare bloodsuckers to lead witch hunts against Trump, his allies and other Democratic Party political enemies and B) Trump allies victimized by weaponized government don’t deserve recompense.
They also insist that the pool is an “illegal slush fund.” It is not. Congress authorized and established a fund to pay judgments against the United States 70 years ago.
“The Fund was created as a permanent, indefinite appropriation to streamline payments for eligible judgments and later settlements where no other agency funds were available,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told The Federalist. Its history is well documented.
Lost in the din of who does and doesn’t deserve restitution from government abuses are the people crushed under the corrupt justice of political weaponization. The victims are men like Wisconsin attorney and former judge Jim Troupis and Dr. Ron Elfenbein, dragged through hell in years-long — and ongoing political prosecutions. They have been ground underfoot by what Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has described as the weaponized “machinery of government.”
‘Five Years of Time Lost’
Troupis, who is being prosecuted by far-left Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul for having the temerity to represent Trump’s Wisconsin campaign in the wake of the rigged 2020 election, is seeking $3.2 million from the anti-weaponization fund, according to a request obtained by The Federalist. In his letter to Blanche, the former Dane County, Wisconsin judge and nationally renowned election law expert, writes that he and his family have lived a nightmare since he stepped forward in November 2020 to represent the president.
“The government weaponization against me includes no fewer than 17 separate legal actions,” Troupis writes, asserting that he has been buried under $1.7 million in costs associated with the left’s lawfare campaign against him over the past five-plus years. Troupis, 72, claims he’s been forced to draw down his retirement savings to cover his defense costs, expenses that “will likely cost me our family home and the balance of my retirement funds.”
He’s paid much more, he writes, in the annihilation of his reputation and law practice, “thousands of hours in preparation and response” to the relentless legal assault against him, prosecutorial harassment of family members, and “five years of time lost with my children and grandchildren.”
As The Federalist has extensively reported, Troupis, his fellow legal counsel Kenneth Chesbro, and Trump campaign aide Mike Roman, are among the targets of the Democrats’ bogus “fake electors” prosecutions. Troupis and Chesebro advised their client to set a slate of alternate electors to protect Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes while the Trump campaign legally challenged election results in the battleground Badger State following the irregularities-plagued presidential election. A coordinated campaign, swing state leftist prosecutors and their chums in corporate media pushed the “fake electors” narrative to charge Trump allies.
But as Kaul’s own state Department of Justice twice noted, the legal strategy wasn’t a crime. In fact, previous presidential campaigns have employed or considered using alternate electors while election results were being challenged.
Kaul decided to ignore his prosecutors’ counsel and ultimately opted to hit Troupis and his co-defendants with a legally contorted forgery-uttering law charge — just as Trump was wrapping up his third GOP presidential nomination. Kaul later upped the ante, filing several additional charges alleging fraud.
The case has been marred by controversy, including allegations that a former Dane County judge with a grudge against Troupis was the ghostwriter of a ruling killing a motion to dismiss Kaul’s politically-driven prosecution.
Similar alternate elector cases have collapsed in other battleground states. In Michigan, District Court Judge Kristen D. Simmons tossed out the bogus felony charges against 15 Republicans, finding the defendants, “were executing their constitutional right to seek redress.” Arizona’s far-left attorney general has broken the law multiple times in her crooked attempt to keep her flimsy electors case alive.
‘Grievously Harmed’
But Kaul’s political prosecution moves on, with a trial expected to take place in the middle of the contentious midterm election campaigns.
“Sadly, while my experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do, I know so many others have suffered even more,” Troupis wrote in his request to Blanche. “All this, for doing exactly what the law required to preserve President’s Trump’s rights.”
The letter lists what Troupis asserts are the many acts taken to destroy his life and the lives of his family.
The list includes a March 2022 “Secret Subpoena of Gmail account (privileged attorney/client)” and a May 2022 “coordinated multimillion dollar Civil Suit” premised on the Democrat-led J6 and U.S. Department of Justice investigations.
In November 2022, disgraced federal prosecutor and Democratic Party henchman Jack Smith identified Troupis as a target of his weaponized investigation into Trump. In January 2024, the attorney was the subject of a second secret subpoena by the U.S. Department of Justice seeking privileged attorney/client communications.
Troupis previously told The Federalist that his son was pulled aside by federal law enforcement officials and interrogated in a locked room as he was leaving a September 2022 Disney Cruise with his family. He said the agents seized his son’s phone and confiscated his computer, an action taken to “intimidate” their real target.
“Judge Troupis has been grievously harmed by AG Kaul’s lawfare against him,” Johnson, Wisconsin’s senior senator, told The Federalist earlier this week. He said the prosecution led by the Democrat attorney general, previously a lawyer at the firm that employed Russia collusion hoax peddler Marc Elias, was based on the Biden administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice “against anyone involved in questioning the numerous irregularities of the 2020 election.”
“Troupis’ valid claim against the federal government’s abuse would be paid out the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which was established in 1956,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “Judge Troupis deserves to be compensated out of this fund.”
‘Person of the Year’
Dr. Ron Elfenbein, like Troupis, was well respected in his field. In the early days of the pandemic, the emergency room physician was lauded as a hero for his tireless work testing and treating Covid.
In June 2021, then-Gov. Larry Hogan recognized Elfenbein for “outstanding services to the citizens” of Maryland. Later that year, the Maryland State Legislature honored him with a citation for “Stepping up for your fellow Marylanders, being on the front line fighting this pandemic, and for your honor, integrity, compassion and vision.” He also was named “Person of the Year” by the Maryland State Medical Society, an award delivered even after President Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice indicted him on suspect Medicare billing fraud charges.
When Covid hit the United States, Elfenbein set up comprehensive rapid testing sites seeing thousands of patients. By the end of 2020, he was establishing a monoclonal antibody infusion center and getting miraculous results from the treatments. The operation was so effective that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in early 2021 asked Elfenbein to establish a monoclonal antibody infusion center in a church near FedEx Field in Landover. Using a test-to-treat model, the center tested and immediately infused qualifying Covid patients.
But things quickly turned sour soon after Elfenbein began publicly criticizing the Biden administration’s change in direction on the treatments.
“The First Doctor Convicted’
In late summer 2021, Biden’s DEI secretary of HHS infused “equity” — race-based criteria — in determining who should be at the front of the line for monoclonal antibodies treatment. Elfenbein was frustrated. He wasn’t alone.
“The last thing HHS should be doing is impeding on providers’ ability to best serve their patients, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, wrote in a Sept. 2021 letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. “This recent HHS order will further prevent doctors from being able to treat their patients and prevent their patients from receiving the care they need when they need it.”
In December, the Biden administration suddenly switched up treatment suppliers, insisting the antibodies were not as effective with an emerging omicron variant of Covid. As Fox News Digital reported at the time, the Covid “experts” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were forced to backtrack on their dire warnings that omicron cases topped 72 percent, when in fact they were around 22 percent.
“The fact that these people are so adamant that they’re right when they’re using faulty data and they’re using faulty logic and frankly statistical modeling that has never been correct, ever, throughout this entire pandemic, to look at this, is just beyond the pale,” Elfenbein told Fox News Digital.
“It’s just the height of bureaucratic arrogance, and it’s just, it’s horrible,” the physician added.
A few months later, in April 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Elfenbein with three counts of healthcare fraud. Elfenbein and 17 other defendants across the country were targeted and charged in what government agents described as “various fraud schemes” resulting in $149 million in Covid-related false billing to federal programs and pandemic assistance theft. Federal prosecutors accused the doctor of upcoding his Covid testing claims to the tune of $15 million. He was ultimately charged with five counts of healthcare fraud. Elfenbein faced up to 50 years in prison for what he says was a total of $250 in alleged higher-than-allowable billing — $50 for each of the five counts.
In August 2023, a federal jury convicted the doctor, who, the DOJ beamed, became “the first doctor convicted at trial by the Justice Department for health care fraud in billing for office visits in connection with patients seeking COVID-19 tests.”
‘It Would be Unjust’
The verdict didn’t stand long. In December 2023, U.S. District Judge James Bredar, then serving as chief judge of the Maryland District, vacated the conviction. He ruled that the government failed to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Elfenbein manipulated a federal claim coding system that was in a state of constant change during the peak of the pandemic.
“[T]he evidence weighs so heavily in favor of the defendant it would be unjust to enter judgment against him,” Bredar wrote in the 90-page ruling. “Citizens, including healthcare providers, cannot be held to criminal account for doing only what a technical regulation is reasonably read to permit, even if to do so would seem to benefit them excessively.”
The Biden DOJ appealed right before the filing deadline and not long before Trump’s second presidential inauguration.
A half-year later, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed in part Bredar’s decision, finding the jury had enough evidence to reach its verdict. But the panel acknowledged that “the case was close” and agreed with Bredar in ordering a new trial. That trial is set for August.
The DOJ — the Trump DOJ — is moving forward with the re-do prosecution, and Elfenbein is right back in the crosshairs of an overreaching government.
‘It’s Just Evil’
“This has taken millions of dollars to defend myself and now I have to face a new trial and that’s going to be millions more — money by the way that I didn’t have and I still don’t have,” Elfenbein told me in an upcoming episode of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. “I’m in debt to my lawyers and I will be to the rest of my life.”
As in Troupis’ case, Elfenbein said the psychological damage that he and his family have endured has taken a huge toll. He said he went 2 1/2 years without sleeping, that he was a shell of his former self. Three of his four kids had to go into therapy.
“Im an optimistic person but I was as close to suicidal as I ever have been in my life. It was horrific. I would not wish this on my worst enemy,” the physician said.
His supporters have petitioned the president to urge the DOJ to dismiss the case with prejudice “in the interests of justice, fairness, proportionality, and public confidence in the integrity of the legal system.” It cites the myriad holes in the case and the political motivations of its prosecutors, the alleged vendetta of the Biden administration.
While it appears he has yet to seek compensation from the federal government, Elfenbein’s story — like so many others — drives home the importance of the anti-weaponization fund, and Blanche’s pledge that DOJ “will make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”
“This is the most un-America thing I can ever imagine, when your own government is weaponized against you like that. It’s just unconscionable and it’s just evil.” Elfenbein told The Federalist.
