Three of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s allies appeared before a judge on Thursday in Wisconsin in a criminal case related to 2020 election interference, one of five state cases that are inching forward even as Mr. Trump prepares to return to the White House.
And in Georgia, where another of the cases is proceeding, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney overseeing it, pushed back against an attempt by Republicans in Congress to investigate her prosecution. In a scathing letter to Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Ms. Willis wrote that the committee’s “dogged attempt to disrupt an independent state prosecution is an unconstitutional perversion of congressional oversight authority.”
The defendants in Wisconsin, two of whom appeared via telephone before a state judge in Madison, are all expected to plead not guilty to the 11 felony charges. They include Kenneth Chesebro, a Wisconsin native who devised a plan to deploy fake electors for Mr. Trump in swing states that he lost in 2020, and Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign adviser who played a major role in carrying out the plan.
The third defendant, James R. Troupis, is a Wisconsin lawyer who circulated the fake elector plan within the Trump campaign. The Trump team’s strategy ultimately involved submitting paperwork to federal officials falsely claiming that Mr. Trump had won several battleground states; it led to criminal prosecutions in Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.
Georgia is the only state that has charged Mr. Trump himself, but legal experts do not expect him to stand trial while he is a sitting president. Several of his current and former advisers are far more likely to face trial, including the three Wisconsin defendants. Michigan and Arizona have also brought charges.
Mr. Trump continues to falsely claim he won the 2020 election, and his incoming administration is even asking perspective jobholders their opinion about who won the 2020 election. But false claims about what happened in 2020 continue to crumble. Last week, Dinesh D’Souza, a Trump ally who wrote and directed “2000 Mules,” a movie that spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, acknowledged that the findings it presented were based on a faulty analysis; Mr. D’Souza is facing a lawsuit over the film.