Trump and some of his allies latched on to the idea of Wisconsin decertifying its election results after Michael Gableman, the special counsel Vos appointed to investigate the state’s election, suggested in March the state should take a “hard look” at doing so (his investigation did not find any signs of widespread fraud). Legal experts, including Gableman’s own attorney, have said decertification would be legally impossible and “pointless,” however, and the Washington Post reports Gableman himself later told Vos that doing so would be “a practical impossibility” and “[raise] numerous substantial constitutional issues that would be difficult to resolve.” Vos hired Gableman in June 2021 to investigate the state’s election results but fired him 14 months later in August and ended the probe, calling the special counsel an “embarrassment.” Vos is one of a number of Republicans who have opposed the House committee’s subpoenas in court, though CNN notes those challenges so far remain pending or have been unsuccessful, and several Trump allies have been held in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply.
Headline:
WTMJ, 9/27/2022
All records from the Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin are being uploaded to a website for the public to view. That’s what an attorney representing the office created to lead the investigation told a judge on Tuesday. The investigation was led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who was fired in August by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. But the office Gableman led still exists after he was fired. American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group, has filed four open records lawsuits against Gableman, Vos and the office seeking records created during the investigation.
"I was surprised to receive a subpoena since I have no information to provide about the events surrounding January 6th," Vos said in a statement. [emphasis added]
[snip]
Vos' new battle to avoid testifying comes after two years of Trump leveling the weight of his voice in the Republican Party against the Wisconsin Assembly speaker to extract a promise from him to overturn Trump's 2020 election loss, a move that has been repeatedly rejected by Vos and would have no practical outcome.
Legal scholars, attorneys, lawmakers, professors and constitutional experts characterize Trump's wish to be nothing more than a fantasy the former president could use to falsely claim to his supporters that he did not lose the presidential vote in Wisconsin.
Trump made a phone call to Vos in July after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the use of unmanned absentee ballot drop boxes were illegal. The ruling governs future elections, however, and does not invalidate votes cast via dropbox as Trump contends. Drop boxes have been used in Wisconsin for years, including in 2016 when Trump carried the state.
"So what’s Speaker Robin Vos doing on the Great Wisconsin Supreme Court Ruling declaring hundreds of thousands of Drop Box votes to be illegal? This is not a time for him to hide, but a time to act!" Trump said in a statement blasted July 19 to millions of followers after his phone call to Vos.
Committee chair and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., issued the subpoena on Saturday, which references a July phone call Vos, R-Rochester, had with Donald Trump in which the former president asked Vos "to take measures to change the result of the 2020 Presidential election in Wisconsin," according to court documents first reported by Politico.
Vos filed a suit on Sunday in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, arguing the subpoena "imposes an undue burden, seeks to infringe on Speaker Vos’ legislative immunity from civil process, lacks a lawful purpose, and was issued from an unlawful Committee," according to court documents. The lawsuit has been assigned to Chief Judge Pamela Pepper.
Pepper is an Obama appointee.
9/20/2022 update starts here
Gableman spent more than a year searching for evidence of fraud in the 2020 election but his review resulted in little more than lawsuits over his failure to produce public records showing how he spent taxpayers’ money. Multiple lawsuits, recounts, reviews, audits and investigations have affirmed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes.
On Monday, Gableman appeared in court on behalf of Harry Wait, a 66-year-old Racine County man who has admitted to requesting absentee ballots in the name of Vos and City of Racine Mayor Cory Mason. Wait said online he made the requests in an attempt to prove that the state’s online voter registration and ballot request system, MyVote, is vulnerable to fraud.
Elections officials have said Wait’s request of the ballots is only evidence of a crime, not evidence that the system is vulnerable. Voter impersonation using an absentee ballot would be detected as soon as the person being impersonated attempted to request an absentee ballot or vote in person.
9/17/2022 update starts here
Headline:
WKOW, 9/16/2022
Gableman delivered the remarks at a Constitution Day dinner held by the Outagamie County Republicans Sept. 9 in Appleton. Tim Michels and Eric Toney, the GOP candidates for governor and attorney general, respectively, were the featured guests alongside Gableman.
Lauren Windsor, a liberal citizen journalist, recorded the video. A recording posted by her outlet, The Undercurrent, shows Gableman and conservative talk radio host 'Regular Joe' Giganti call out Windsor and invite her up to the stage.
During the part of the speech where Gableman discussed the idea of revolution, Windsor said her phone was pointed toward the ceiling and didn't record video of Gableman's comments. However, the audio is consistent with Gableman's voice during the parts of the video where she's on stage with him.
Gableman broached the subject of Americans being too comfortable to carry out a rightful revolution. This was in the context of Gableman repeating debunked claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and decrying private funding Wisconsin clerks received to carry out that election.
9/11/2022 update starts her
Tomorrow, Tim Michels plans to attend a fundraiser headlined by Michael Gableman, the man who wasted over $1 million taxpayer dollars on Republicans’ sham investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and suggested the legislature should consider illegally decertifying President Biden’s victory in the state.
Trump-endorsed Tim Michels, who has voiced his support for Gableman, has said that “President Trump probably would be president right now if we had election integrity” and that he does not think that Trump “did anything wrong” on January 6. Michels also has said that illegally decertifying the 2020 presidential election will be “on the table” if he’s governor. And Michels also will not commit to letting Wisconsin’s vote for president count in 2024 if he is governor.
Gableman’s “independent” probe instead turned into a highly partisan taxpayer-funded boondoggle that cost state taxpayers more than $1 million—including $100,000 that went into Gableman’s pockets—and turned up no evidence of fraud or issues that weren’t already known, such as the use of election drop boxes.
So what did taxpayers get for that $1 million? The probe was characterized by political grandstanding, shoddy record-keeping, court challenges and bogus expense claims. The fact is that only 24 people out of nearly 3.3 million who cast ballots in Wisconsin in the 2020 election have been charged with election fraud. None of them came from Gableman’s investigation.
One of the highlights of Gableman’s probe was his admission that he didn’t understand state election procedures.
The subpoenas were issued as part of Gableman's effort to interview officials for the one-party review of the 2020 presidential election. The former state Supreme Court Justice later requested that the Waukesha County sheriff compel the mayors to meet with him or else face jail time, leading to a pending lawsuit over the matter. Several officials, including Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, said they would meet with Gableman in public but objected to doing so in a private setting as he demanded.
Headline:
CBS58, 8/25/2022
GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels and former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gablemen are both headlining a fundraiser in Appleton next month.
Protestors are demanding Michels cut ties with the man who led the investigation into the 2020 election, which costed taxpayers over a million dollars.
State Senator Chris Larson also joined the protestors today.
"We want to do the opposite of what Michael Gableman does which is promote everybody to vote. So encouraging people to get out, to register, to make sure their voice counts and to not be intimidated by this election fraud," said State Sen. Chris Larson.
"Speaker Vos has finally recognized that this cynical and divisive exercise should be ended," Madison City Attorney Michael Haas said in a statement Friday.
"Despite wasting over one million dollars of taxpayer funds, the Special Counsel has only fanned false conspiracy theories and harmed public confidence in Wisconsin elections," Haas said. "The voters and the public should observe and ask questions about our elections, but they can also have full confidence in the security and integrity of Wisconsin elections."
A private attorney for the Office of Special Counsel argued in a letter last week that Gableman’s termination had no impact on the subpoenas filed in Waukesha County seeking to jail the mayors of Green Bay and Madison unless they complied. Attorney James Bopp wrote the subpoenas were issued by the Assembly, not Gableman, and the Office of Special Counsel continued to exist.
The Department of Justice Monday said that argument lacks any merit and fails “to provide a reasonable basis for continuing this case.”
Headline:
WISN, 8/22/2022
Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling also attended Lindell's event.
A spokesperson for the Racine County Sheriff's Office said Schmaling participated in a break-out session with other sheriffs discussing voter integrity issues. The spokesperson added the trip was not funded through taxpayer dollars.
Gableman's bio at the event now listed him as a senior counsel at The Thomas More Society. A spokesperson for the law firm didn’t return a request for comment.
Gableman listed his occupation as senior counsel at The Thomas More Society in a presentation he delivered over the weekend at a conference hosted by MyPillow executive Mike Lindell that focused on election conspiracies.
The new position is being promoted days after Vos terminated Gableman's contract overseeing the Assembly's election review after Gableman campaigned for Vos' primary opponent Adam Steen, who came within 300 votes of defeating the legislative leader.
The law firm subleased office space in Brookfield from Gableman while he was conducting the election review. Gableman planned to have the firm take over the lease when his review was complete.
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