MADISON, Wis. (CN) — Republican leaders in the Wisconsin Legislature have renewed their commitment to pay a retired state Supreme Court justice thousands per month in taxpayer money to investigate fraud in the 2020 presidential election, all but ensuring the controversial audit, currently on hold, will proceed into a second year.
According to a contract extension made public on Wednesday, former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s wide-ranging investigation into supposed improprieties in the 2020 election was extended effective May 1 with the blessing of state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R- Rochester, who first hired Gableman for the audit last summer and approved its $676,000 budget.
Though the latest contract extension includes a 50% pay cut for Gableman, he will still receive $5,500 in taxpayer dollars per month for his efforts, including $2,500 to cover the rent at his Brookfield office. The extension has no end date, making the audit’s timeline, for now, indefinite.
But according to Vos, Gableman will not be using the taxpayer funds to do any investigating for the time being. The Republican legislator told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday that the actual investigation is on hold as he, Gableman and others fight multiple lawsuits at play over the review.
President Joe Biden’s 20,000-vote win in Wisconsin over Donald Trump has been upheld by a recount, state and federal litigation, and two other audits, one by a nonpartisan legislative agency and another by a conservative nonprofit law firm and research group.
None of them discovered widespread, outcome-affecting electoral fraud, but many conservatives, Gableman included, have continued to loudly and ceaselessly call into question whether the election was legitimate.
On March 1, Gableman appeared before a GOP-controlled legislative committee to deliver the second interim report on his audit’s findings. The presentation alleged a conspiracy involving illegal election bribery between Wisconsin election officials, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and prominent liberals nationwide to deliver the 2020 election to Biden.
Gableman—who claimed without evidence in 2020 that the election was stolen from Trump, proudly admitted this year to voting for him in that election and visited the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month—called for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, or WEC, to be dissolved and encouraged lawmakers to explore decertifying the 2020 election during his presentation.
Trump has personally involved himself in the audit by calling out Vos and other “RINO” Republicans for not taking his claims of fraud seriously and leaning on state conservatives to continue investigating the election to vindicate his crusade against its outcome.
Legal experts say decertification at this point is impossible, but some in a grassroots far-right wing of the Wisconsin GOP have latched onto the idea, including dozens of county GOP chapters and Trump-anointed Assembly Representative Timothy Ramthun of Campbellsport, who has made nullifying the 2020 election the centerpiece of his bid to be Wisconsin’s governor this fall.
The WEC on March 4 issued a document correcting many of the claims in Gableman’s report, which the bipartisan commissioners say was rife with inaccuracies and falsehoods.
Vos has found himself in a difficult political dilemma balancing competing outrages from his left and right over the 2020 election. Democrats in the minority condemn him for stoking constituents’ anxieties and perpetrating a bogus investigation of a fair election for political capital, but some Republicans, including Ramthun, say he is half-stepping the investigation and have called for his resignation.
Vos himself said after a mid-March meeting with county GOP members that he believes there was “widespread fraud” in the election but did not elaborate on what that meant. Ramthun told reporters he wanted to punch Vos in the face after that meeting, which the gubernatorial candidate was barred from entering.
Gableman in recent weeks has been in the news for issuing broadsides against judges involved in lawsuits over his review, swing-vote Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn and others in radio and podcast interviews.
The former justice has also generated headlines with bizarre comments about the wardrobe choices and personal interests of women he considers to be Democratic opponents of his audit, including those of WEC administrator Meagan Wolfe, a frequent target of ire from those challenging the 2020 election. Documentation of some these comments and other election review matters have been made public on a website dedicated to the audit.
For the moment, drama over Gableman’s audit will be relegated to the courts as all involved take a break from investigating.
Lawsuits in Dane County and Waukesha County circuit courts seek to determine the legality of far-reaching subpoenas Gableman has issued. The Waukesha suit, in which Gableman previously asked police to jail Democratic mayors and others he claims refuse to cooperate with his investigation, has a hearing scheduled for July 11.
Three other lawsuits, all from nonprofit watchdog American Oversight, are trying to force the release of public records related to the audit. A judge in one of those lawsuits has found in favor of the watchdog and ordered Gableman not to delete any more records after the justice and his lawyers admitted they had been destroying records they deemed “irrelevant” to the investigation. Vos in March was found in contempt in another of the records lawsuits for willfully violating a court order.
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