Seems that fields (e.g. setup) which are not returned by TestCase.filter xmlrpc call are set to None but should be made 'unknown/unfetched' instead.
Compare output of
> import nitrate
> testcases = list(nitrate.TestCase.search(script='SOME_SCRIPT'))
> for tc in testcases:
print(tc.setup)
None
None
With asking explicitly for fetch:
> for tc in testcases:
tc._fetch()
print(tc.setup)
<p> Test </p>
<p> Test </p>
When TestCase is initialized via case_id then all fields work correctly.