michael gableman bak

see preibus on WI fraudit

see john doe fuckery

eric o'keefe dirty tricks and dark koch $ failed retaliation

am oversight docs

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Audit Costs

The Senate originally provided $150,000 for the election “audit,” but in the months since the total cost ballooned to at least $6 million thanks to outside donations. Records included in Tuesday’s document production reveal how quickly the price tag rose: Among other payments, more than $400,000 went to private security contractor Law Enforcement Specialists, and the American Voting Rights Foundation sent $500,000 went to contractor CyFIR and $250,000 to StratTech Solutions. Another email from early August involving Sigman, Mitchell, and representatives of Wake Technology Services Inc., which left the operation in May, shows that AVRF wired $250,000 to Sigman to cover costs.

Other Records

Cyber Ninjas was hired by the state Senate in the spring, and questions remain about how the firm was selected, given its lack of election experience and previous statements by Logan in which he advanced conspiracy theories about voting machines. The privilege log indicates that communication between Logan and Fann began as early as Feb. 5, and texts released by the Senate on Tuesday include one from March 17 between Fann and a lobbyist who refers to “Doug.”

The newly released records also reveal that the deference to conspiracy theories and false allegations of voter fraud evident in Fann’s post-election communications has continued into recent months: On Aug. 23, Fann forwarded to Bennett, Pullen, and Logan an article about a report on missing Wisconsin ballots.

Finally, the new records also suggest that audit officials were in touch with former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who was hired to run the bogus election investigation initiated by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. On Aug. 7, Pullen texted a “Justice Michael G” with “Three big political points.” In response, the recipient wrote, “these are helpful fundings [sic].” The week before, Christina Bobb had asked Fann if she could share her contact information with Gableman; Fann replied, “Absolutely of course.”

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Fury from the conservative base': Meet the man behind the right’s Supreme Court supermajority - Alternet.org](https://www.alternet.org/leonard-leo-2665891182/)

PRO P ANDY ET AL

Series: Friends of the Court:SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships With Billionaire Donors

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decades-long friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation's highest court.

The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two dozen federal and state judges — a gathering that required U.S. marshals with earpieces to stand watch while a Coast Guard boat idled in a nearby cove.

Caterers served guests Pol Roger reserve, Winston Churchill’s favorite Champagne, a fitting choice for a group of conservative legal luminaries who had much to celebrate. The Supreme Court’s most recent term had delivered a series of huge victories with the possibility of a crowning one still to come. The decadeslong campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, which a leaked draft opinion had said was “egregiously wrong from the start,” could come to fruition within days, if not hours.

Over dinner courses paired with wines chosen by the former food and beverage director of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., the 70 or so attendees jockeyed for a word with the man who had done as much as anyone to make this moment possible: their host, Leonard Leo.

Short and thick-bodied, dressed in a bespoke suit and round, owlish glasses, Leo looked like a character from an Agatha Christie mystery. Unlike the judges in attendance, Leo had never served a day on the bench. Unlike the other lawyers, he had never argued a case in court. He had never held elected office or run a law school. On paper, he was less important than almost all of his guests.

If Americans had heard of Leo at all, it was for his role in building the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. He drew up the lists of potential justices that Donald Trump released during the 2016 campaign. He advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Before that, he’d helped pick or confirm the court’s three other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But the guests who gathered that night under a tent in Leo’s backyard included key players in a less-understood effort, one aimed at transforming the entire judiciary.

Many could thank Leo for their advancement. Thomas Hardiman of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled to loosen gun laws and overturn Obamacare’s birth-control mandate. Leo had put Hardiman on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist and helped confirm him to two earlier judgeships. Kyle Duncan and Cory Wilson, both on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, both fiercely anti-abortion, were members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the network of conservative and libertarian lawyers that Leo had built into a political juggernaut. As was Florida federal Judge Wendy Berger, who would uphold that state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Within a year of the party, another attendee, Republican North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. (no relation), would write the opinion reinstating a controversial state law requiring voter identification. (Duncan, Wilson, Berger and Berger Jr. did not comment. Hardiman did not comment beyond confirming he attended the party.)

The judges were in Maine for a weeklong, all-expenses-paid conference hosted by George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, a hub for steeping young lawyers, judges and state attorneys general in a free-market, anti-regulation agenda. The leaders of the law school were at the party, and they also were indebted to Leo. He had secured the Scalia family’s blessing and brokered $30 million in donations to rename the school. It is home to the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, named after the George H.W. Bush White House counsel who died this May. Gray was at Leo’s party, too. (A spokesperson for GMU confirmed the details of the week’s events.)

The judges and the security detail, the law school leadership and the legal theorists — all of this was a vivid display not only of Leo’s power but of his vision. Decades ago, he’d realized it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices. To undo landmark rulings like Roe, his movement would need to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges.

Leo began building a machine to do just that. He didn’t just cultivate friendships with conservative Supreme Court justices, arranging private jet trips, joining them on vacation, brokering speaking engagements. He also drew on his network of contacts to place Federalist Society protégés in clerkships, judgeships and jobs in the White House and across the federal government. He personally called state attorneys general to recommend hires for positions he presciently understood were key, like solicitors general, the unsung litigators who represent states before the U.S. Supreme Court. In states that elect jurists, groups close to him spent millions of dollars to place his allies on the bench. In states that appoint top judges, he maneuvered to play a role in their selection.

And he was capable of playing bare-knuckled politics. He once privately lobbied a Republican governor’s office to reject a potential judicial pick and, if the governor defied him, threatened “fury from the conservative base, the likes of which you and the Governor have never seen.”

To pay for all this, Leo became one of the most prolific fundraisers in American politics. Between 2014 and 2020, tax records show, groups in his orbit raised more than $600 million. His donors include hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow and the Koch family.

Leo grasped the stakes of these seemingly obscure races and appointments long before liberals and Democrats did. “The left, even though we are somewhat court worshippers, never understood the potency of the courts as a political machine. On the right, they did,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a visiting professor at Georgetown Law and a former president of the American Constitution Society, the left’s answer to the Federalist Society. “As much as I hate to say it, you’ve got to really admire what they achieved.” Belatedly, Leo’s opposition has galvanized, joining conservatives in an arms race that shows no sign of slowing down.

Historians and legal experts who have watched Leo’s ascent struggle to name a comparable figure in American jurisprudence. “I can’t think of anybody who played a role the way he has,” said Richard Friedman, a law professor and historian at the University of Michigan.

To trace the arc of Leo’s ascent, from his formative years through the execution of his long-range strategy to his plans for the future, ProPublica drew on interviews with more than 100 people who know Leo, worked with him, got funding from him or studied his rise. Many insisted on anonymity for fear of alienating allies or losing access to funders close to Leo. This article also draws on thousands of pages of court documents, tax filings, emails and other records.

After months of discussions, Leo agreed to be interviewed on the condition that ProPublica not ask questions about his financial activities or relationships with Supreme Court justices. We declined and instead sent a detailed list of questions as well as facts we planned to report. Leo’s responses are included in this story.

Having reshaped the courts, Leo now has grander ambitions. Today, he sees a nation plagued with ills: “wokism” in education, “one-sided” journalism, and ideas like environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies sweeping corporate America. A member of the Roman Catholic Church, he intends to wage a broader cultural war against a “progressive Ku Klux Klan” and “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who demonize people of faith and move society further from its “natural order.”

Leo has the money to match his vision. In 2021, an obscure Chicago businessman put Leo in charge of a newly formed $1.6 billion trust — the single-largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history at the time. With those funds, Leo wants to expand the Federalist Society model beyond the law to culture and politics.

The guests at Leo’s party in June 2022 celebrated into the night. One esteemed attendee imbibed so much he needed help to get up a set of stairs. Eventually, the guests boarded buses back to their hotel. The next morning, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization news broke: The Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. When Leo next stepped out for his regular walk, it was into a world he had remade.

When Leo was in kindergarten, he got in a fight over Matchbox cars. “There was a classmate who had a nasty habit of punching me in the nose on the playground,” Leo wrote in response to a question about his earliest memories of growing up Catholic. “I gave him one of my Matchbox cars, hoping a little kindness would help. He accepted the gift and punched me again anyway. I saw then that doing what our faith requires isn’t always going to make life easier or more comfortable, but you have to do it anyway.”

Leo was born on Long Island in 1965. When he was a toddler, his father, a pastry chef, died. His mother remarried and the family eventually settled in Monroe Township, a central New Jersey exurb where you’re not sure if you root for the Yankees or the Phillies.

In the 1983 yearbook for Monroe Township High School, Leo, who often dressed in a shirt and tie, was named “Most Likely to Succeed.” He shared the distinction with a classmate named Sally Schroeder, his future wife. In the yearbook photo, they sit next to each other holding bills in their hands, with dollar signs decorating their glasses. Leo told ProPublica that he was so effective at raising money for his senior prom and class trip that his classmates nicknamed him “Moneybags Kid.”

When Leo arrived at Cornell University as an undergraduate in the fall of 1983, a counterrevolution in the legal world was gaining momentum. Iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s Robert Bork and the University of Chicago’s Antonin Scalia were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as originalism. When interpreting the Constitution, they argued, judges and scholars should rely solely on the “original intent” of the framers or the “original public meaning” of the document’s words when they were written. Originalism was a rebuke to the idea of a “living Constitution” and the more expansive approach taken by the liberal Supreme Court majority under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Law students were also fueling this new movement: In the spring of 1982, three of them founded the Federalist Society, a debating and networking group for conservatives and libertarians who felt ostracized on their campuses. Scalia and Bork spoke at the group’s first conference, at Yale Law School. There weren’t enough people to fill the school’s auditorium, so they held it in a classroom.

Leo encountered the Federalist Society while working as an intern for the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington in the fall of 1985. At a luncheon hosted by the group, Leo heard a speech that he later said “had an enormous impact on my thinking.” It was delivered by Ed Meese, Reagan’s new attorney general. Meese made an impassioned declaration that originalism would be the guiding philosophy for the Reagan administration. “There is danger,” Meese said, “in seeing the Constitution as an empty vessel into which each generation may pour its passion and prejudice.”

Leo continued to Cornell Law School. The Federalist Society had no presence on campus, so Leo founded a chapter in the fall of 1986. He brought Meese and other conservative scholars to give talks. This went largely unnoticed by Leo’s classmates. To be a conservative legal thinker in those days was to be dismissed as a fringe type. Originalism “wasn’t something that I personally took very seriously,” said Mike Black, a classmate of Leo’s at Cornell Law. “I was clearly wrong.”

If his early brushes with the Federalist Society shaped Leo’s legal philosophy, then the battle over Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in the fall of 1987 showed him how rancorous judicial fights could be. The attacks on Bork’s views were “character assassination,” Leo would later say, fueling a sense of grievance that liberals and the mainstream media demeaned conservatives. But it was also a failure on the part of the Reagan White House, which hadn’t anticipated the fierce opposition to Bork and was unprepared to defend him.

Leo and his new wife, Sally, moved to Washington after Leo finished law school so he could clerk for two federal judges. Then he had a choice: Take a job with a firm, or work full time for the fledgling Federalist Society.

Leo chose the Federalist Society. But first, he took a short leave to work on what would turn into one of the most contentious Supreme Court nominations in modern history. The nominee was an appeals court judge named Clarence Thomas who Leo had befriended during a clerkship. Leo was only 25 years old. Allegations of sexual harassment by law professor and former Thomas adviser Anita Hill had surprised Thomas and his supporters, and the George H.W. Bush White House scrambled to discredit her. Leo was tasked with research. He spent long hours in a windowless room gathering evidence to bolster Thomas. The Senate confirmed him 52 to 48, the narrowest tally in a century.

The searing experience of the Thomas nomination was soon followed by another shock.

In a 5-4 decision in 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey to uphold the constitutional right to an abortion. The three justices who wrote the majority’s opinion — Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter — were all Republican appointees. Here was the greatest challenge to the movement: Even an ostensibly conservative nominee could disappoint. So Leo and his allies set out to solve this recurring problem. They needed to cultivate nominees who would not only start out loyal to the cause but remain stalwart through all countervailing mainstream pressures. Leo and his allies concluded that they needed to identify candidates while they were young and nurture them throughout their careers. What they needed was a pipeline.

That meant finding young, talented minds when they were still in law school, advancing their careers, supporting them after setbacks and insulating them from ideological drift. “You wanted Leonard on your side because he did have influence if you wanted to become a Supreme Court clerk or an appellate clerk,” said one conservative thinker who has worked with Leo. “He was very good at making it in people’s interests to be cooperating with him. I don’t know if he did arm-twisting exactly. It was implicit, I would say.”

The strategy was a hit with donors. As Leo took on more responsibilities as the group’s de facto chief fundraiser, the Federalist Society’s budget quadrupled during the ’90s, with industry executives and major foundations making large donations. The Federalist Society did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

When George W. Bush became president, Leo seized the opportunity to have even greater influence. He recommended lawyers to hire for key administration jobs and was tapped as one of four outside advisers on judicial nominees — a group nicknamed the “four horsemen.” Leo and Brett Kavanaugh, then a young White House lawyer and an active Federalist Society member, teamed up to break a logjam in the Senate blocking Bush’s lower-court nominees. In one email, a White House aide called Leo the point person for “all outside coalition activity regarding judicial nominations.”

In another email chain, previously unreported, a group of Bush Justice Department lawyers discussed how best to publicize a white paper promoting a controversial nominee to an appeals court. One lawyer said he was looking for an organization to “launder and distribute” the paper, presumably so it wouldn’t come from the Bush administration itself. “Use fed soc,” Viet Dinh, a Federalist Society member who was then a high-ranking official at the DOJ, replied. “Tell len leo I need this distributed asap.” (Leo declined to comment on this.)

In 2005, Leo’s bonds with the White House tightened further, when Bush was presented with two U.S. Supreme Court vacancies in rapid succession. On a flight on Air Force Two, Vice President Dick Cheney gave Steve Schmidt, then a White House deputy assistant, two duffel bags full of binders on potential nominees. Schmidt gathered a team to push through the nomination of John Roberts, Bush’s choice to fill the seat of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The group met in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a warren of offices next to the White House. At first, Leo was one among the crowd. But he pushed his way up, Schmidt said. “If you take it down to a school committee, like the PTA committee, who’s going to be the chairperson of the committee? It’s going to be the person who cares the most and shows up to all the meetings,” Schmidt said in an interview. “This is what Leonard Leo did.”

Leo worked outside the administration, too. In a sign of his growing sophistication, he formed what would be a key weapon in furthering the conservative takeover of the courts. He and several other lawyers launched the Judicial Confirmation Network, a tax-exempt nonprofit that could spend unlimited sums without publicly revealing its donors. The group did something unusual for that time: It treated a confirmation battle like a political campaign. JCN ran positive ads about Roberts while its spokespeople fed reporters glowing quotes. On paper, the network was independent of the Federalist Society and the White House, but the boundaries were porous. Leo didn’t formally run it, but White House staffers understood that JCN was a Leo group. “Leonard was the guy,” Schmidt said. “A hundred percent.” In his response to questions, Leo confirmed he helped launch the group. (JCN did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Roberts’ confirmation was swiftly followed with yet another Supreme Court opening. Bush at first nominated his counsel, Harriet Miers. Conservatives — Leo’s allies — protested: Her resume was thin, her views on abortion suspect. Bush soon withdrew her nomination and offered a hard-right conservative: Samuel Alito. JCN ran yet more ads.

At a 2006 Federalist Society gala, Leo introduced now-Justice Alito to rapturous applause. He also made light of the group’s growing influence over judicial selection, which had drawn suspicions from Democrats. “It is a pleasure to stand before 1,500 of the most little known and elusive of that secret society or conspiracy we call the Federalist Society,” he said. “You may pick up your subpoenas on the way out.”

One of the first things a visitor sees upon entering the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington is a painting of a smiling young girl. Jesus Christ stands above her, eyes closed and a hand on her head. The girl is identified as “Margaret of McLean.” Margaret was Leo’s oldest child, who died in 2007 from complications related to spina bifida when she was 14 years old. Leo has said that his faith was deepened by Margaret’s life and death.

The Catholic Information Center is a bookstore, event space and place of worship. Its location in the nation’s capital is no accident: On its website, the center boasts that it is the closest tabernacle to the White House. Leo is a major supporter of the CIC, and its unabashed projection of political power aligns with the central role of religion in Leo’s political project. Standing at the nexus of the conservative legal movement and the religious right, Leo forged a connection with several of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, who shared a deep Catholic faith and a legal ideology with Leo. Antonin Scalia, Leo has said, became “like an uncle.” Thomas is a godfather to one of Leo’s daughters and keeps a drawing by Margaret in his chambers. Leo has dined and traveled with Alito, displaying in his office a framed photo of himself, Alito and Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, standing outside the Palace of Versailles.

George Conway saw this courtship firsthand. Before he became one of the most prominent “Never Trumpers,” Conway had been a veteran of the conservative movement. He served on the Federalist Society Board of Visitors, donated to the group and was briefly considered for a top position in the Trump Justice Department. His then-wife, Kellyanne Conway, was a prominent pollster who later managed Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

From his rarefied position, Conway watched Leo become what he called a “den mother” to the justices. In liberal Washington, conservatives — even the most powerful ones — believed themselves to be misunderstood and unfairly maligned. Leo saw it as his responsibility, Conway said, to help take care of the judges even after they had made it to the highest court in the country. “There was always a concern that Scalia or Thomas would say, ‘Fuck it,’ and quit the job and go make way more money at Jones Day or somewhere else,” Conway said, referring to the powerful conservative law firm. “Part of what Leonard does is he tries to keep them happy so they stay on the job.”

On the sidelines of the Federalist Society’s annual conference, Leo made a habit of hosting a dinner at a fancy restaurant where he invited one or two justices or prominent political or legal figures (Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who would later serve in Trump’s cabinet, was one guest) and major donors. “With Leonard, it went both ways,” Conway said. “It made the justices happy to meet people who revered them. It made the donors happy to meet the justices and no doubt more inclined to give to Leonard’s causes.”

In 2008, as ProPublica first reported, he helped organize a weekend of salmon fishing in Alaska that included Alito and Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire and Leo donor. Leo invited Singer on the trip, according to ProPublica’s reporting, and Leo also asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on Singer’s plane. The Alaskan fishing lodge where the three men stayed was owned by Robin Arkley II, a California businessman and also a Leo donor. (Alito has written that the trip did not require disclosure.)

Leo has helped arrange for Scalia and Thomas to attend private donor retreats hosted by the Koch brothers dating as far back as 2007; once, Leo even interviewed Thomas at a Koch summit. The Federalist Society flew Scalia to picturesque locales like Montana and Napa Valley to speak to members. After his Napa appearance, Scalia flew to Alaska for a fishing trip on a plane owned by Arkley. Both Singer and Arkley were generous and early donors to JCN. (Arkley said in a statement: “Nothing has been more consequential in transforming the courts and building a more impactful conservative movement than the network of talented individuals and groups fostered by Leonard Leo.” Singer did not comment.)

Leo came to the aid of Thomas’ wife, Ginni, when she launched her own consulting firm, and he directed Kellyanne Conway in 2012 to pay her at least $25,000 as a subcontractor, according to The Washington Post. “No mention of Ginni, of course,” Leo instructed Conway. Leo denied that the payments had any connection to the Supreme Court’s work, and he said he obscured Ginni Thomas’ role to “protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

Leo was not the only person who used faith and ideology as a bridge to the justices. Reverend Rob Schenck is a longtime evangelical Protestant minister who spent decades as a leader in the religious right. Schenck didn’t work directly with Leo, but he said he too befriended several justices, praying with them in their chambers and socializing with them outside of the court. He came to recognize the justices’ “feet of clay,” their human appetites and frailties.

“I know how much it benefited me to say to donors, ‘I was with Justice Scalia last night or last week’” or that I “‘had a lovely visit with Justice Thomas in chambers,’” Schenck said in an interview. “Anybody can try to get change at the Supreme Court by filing an amicus brief — almost anybody, let’s put it that way. But how many people can get into chambers, or better yet into a justice’s home?”

In 2007, Leo gave the young Republican governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, a career-defining test. A vacancy had opened up on the state Supreme Court. Missouri has had a nonpartisan process for picking new justices, in which a panel of lawyers and political appointees select candidates for the governor to choose. Known as the Missouri Plan, it had been adopted in some way by dozens of states. Blunt, the scion of a Missouri dynasty, was likely to uphold that tradition as his state’s governors had for the last 60 years. But Leo pressed him to jettison it. Leo did not do this politely.

That year, with the Alito and Roberts confirmations in hand, the Federalist Society was turning its attention to the state courts, devoting nearly a fifth of its budget to the initiative. Leo traveled the country, delivering a stump speech of sorts. His early target, in ways that have not been previously reported or understood, was Missouri.

He and his allies did not like the state’s system. To conservatives, the plan’s nonpartisan structure was a cover for allowing the left-leaning bar to pack the bench with centrist or left-wing justices. Leo’s allies preferred, according to interviews, that the power to select judges be put in the hands of the executive or given to voters at the ballot box. “If you could beat the Missouri Plan in Missouri, you could tell the rest of the states, ‘There is no more Missouri Plan,’” the former chief justice of Missouri’s supreme court, Michael Wolff, said in an interview. “It was a big deal.”

To achieve that, Leo worked a back channel directly to Blunt. The outlines of Leo’s campaign are contained in the paper records of an old whistleblower lawsuit and in emails obtained by The Associated Press as part of a 2008 legal settlement with the Missouri governor’s office. These records show Leo lobbying Blunt’s chief of staff, Ed Martin, and sometimes Blunt himself.

In the summer of 2007, the judicial panel offered Blunt three finalists. Two were Democrats. The third was Patricia Breckenridge, a centrist Republican. When her name appeared, Leo and his team mobilized, collecting negative research on Breckenridge and lobbying the governor. “I was shocked to see the slate tendered by the Commission the other day,” Leo wrote in an email to Blunt. “It would be very appropriate for you to scrutinize the candidates, and if they fail to pass those tests, to return the names.”

“Return the names” sounded anodyne; it was not. Leo and other Federalist Society leaders had a strategy: They wanted to tarnish Breckenridge’s reputation, spike her candidacy and then use the ensuing disarray to pry Missouri away from its long-standing way of picking justices. Blunt found the character attacks distasteful and worried that if he rejected Breckenridge, the panel would pick one of the Democrats, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Leo wasn’t having it. “He will have zero juice on the national scene if he ends up picking a judge who is a disgrace,” Leo wrote to Martin, the chief of staff. “If this happens, there will be fury from the conservative base, the likes of which you and the Governor have never seen.”

Blunt appointed Breckenridge anyway. Leo piled on. “Your boss is a coward and conservatives have neither the time nor the patience for the likes of him,” he wrote to Martin.

The person familiar with Blunt’s thinking said the governor did not feel threatened. But a few months later, Blunt, surprising nearly everyone, said he wasn’t running for reelection. He had, he said, accomplished all he wanted. At 37 years old, his political career was over.

For four more years, Leo’s team continued to target the Missouri Plan in Missouri. The Judicial Confirmation Network, now rebranded as the Judicial Crisis Network, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the effort. It failed again. But Leo, JCN and the Federalist Society took the lessons they learned in Missouri and applied them elsewhere, with profound implications for democracy.

As Leo continued to work his influence with state judicial appointments, he also homed in on what proved to be a softer target: states that elected their top judges. Judicial elections were low-information races, where money could make a difference. After a decade and a half, he achieved what he had not in Missouri: more partisan courts, with hard-line conservatives having a shot and many taking their places on the bench.

Leo became interested in Wisconsin in 2008. An incumbent state Supreme Court justice, Louis Butler, had angered the state’s largest business group with his ruling in a lead paint case. The ensuing ad campaign was contentious and expensive, featuring commercials showing Butler, who is Black, next to the picture of a sex offender who was also Black. To have those two pictures “right next to each other, one sex offender, one a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, took our breath away,” Janine Geske, a former justice on the court, said in an interview. (She was initially appointed by a Republican governor to fill a vacancy.) “Most of us were looking at that, thinking, what have we descended to in terms of ads?”

Behind the scenes, Leo himself raised money for Butler’s challenger, Michael Gableman, according to a person familiar with the campaign. Leo passed along a list of wealthy donors with the instructions to “tell them Leonard told you to call,” this person said. Each donor gave the maximum. Gableman won the race, the first time a challenger had unseated an incumbent in Wisconsin in 40 years. Leo declined to comment on his role.

The push for loyal conservatives intensified after the 2010 election cycle. Republicans took over many state houses and legislatures. But they realized they could sweep to power, yet judges could overrule their initiatives. Republicans counted on Leo for $200,000 to elect a judge who would back Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who was then embroiled in a recall campaign, according to emails. That judge won. Walker stayed in power.

In 2016, Walker had a vacancy to fill, and it was a plum one: The new justice would fill out three and a half years before having to run for the seat. Walker had three people on his shortlist: two court of appeals judges and Dan Kelly. Kelly had been an attorney for an anti-abortion group and was the Milwaukee lawyers chapter head of the Federalist Society, but he had never been a judge.

“Leo stepped in and said it’s going to be Dan Kelly,” a person familiar with the selection said. “There is zero question in my mind, the Federalist Society put the hammer down.” When asked about this, Leo wrote, “I don’t remember,” adding, “I have known Dan Kelly for a number of years.” Walker said he had not discussed the race with Leo. Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.

Over the next several years, Leo, through the Judicial Crisis Network, continued to back conservative candidates in Wisconsin, where judicial elections are, putatively, nonpartisan. In one 2019 race, JCN funneled over a million dollars into the contest in its final week; the Republican narrowly won. But money can’t always deliver in politics. In the complicated political year of 2020, Kelly, even with the backing of Leo and Trump, lost the race to hold on to his seat.

He ran again in 2023. By this time, the Democrats had caught on and the arms race was joined. Democrats, activated by the Dobbs decision and a gerrymander that had left Republicans with a dominant position in the state Legislature, ponied up with big money.

At least $51 million was spent, including millions from groups associated with Leo. He personally donated $20,000, the maximum allowable, to the Kelly campaign. This was after Kelly aligned himself with those rejecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

The most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history ended the night of April 4, 2023. The candidate the Democratic Party supported, Janet Protasiewicz, won handily, giving the liberals control of the state court for the first time in years. Kelly conceded on a bitter note. “It brings me no joy to say this,” he told the affirming crowd. “I wish in a circumstance like this I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent. But I do not have a worthy opponent to which to concede.”

Kelly’s loss was Leo’s loss. But it was also, paradoxically, a win. Conservatives were acting as if judgeships were a prize for a political party, rather than an independent branch of government — what Geske calls “super-legislators.” And thanks to Leo, those super-legislators could be especially hard-line.

In North Carolina, Leo and his allies found another lab for their strategy.

In 2012, JCN began spending in North Carolina, part of an infusion of funds that toppled Judge Sam Ervin IV, the grandson of the Watergate prosecutor. “All of a sudden we started seeing what I would consider misleading and distortive” political ads, Robert Orr, a former Republican state Supreme Court justice in North Carolina, said in an interview. “We’d never seen those in judicial races.” Democrats were able to resist the onslaught for several years, maintaining control of the high court. But conservative outside groups consistently outspent their Democratic-leaning counterparts, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan legal institute. The Republican State Leadership Committee, or RSLC, a group focused on state elections, outspent all the other groups. JCN has been a top donor to the group.

By 2021, tax returns show, virtually all of JCN’s budget came from the Marble Freedom Trust, for which Leo is trustee and chairman. JCN and RSLC did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2022, a year generally unfavorable to Republicans, the RSLC claimed credit for flipping North Carolina’s top court to a 5-2 Republican majority. Almost as soon as it was seated, the freshly Republican-dominated court did something extraordinary. In March 2023, the court reheard two voting rights cases its predecessor had just decided. The first was over gerrymandered districts that heavily favored Republicans. The second was over a voter identification law the previous court had found discriminated against Black people.

Nine months earlier, Justice Phil Berger Jr., son of the state Senate president, had attended the party at Leo’s home, in Northeast Harbor, Maine, as conservatives basked in the triumph of their movement.

Now, the newly elected conservative majority delivered victories for Republicans in the two cases. The voter ID decision was authored by Berger.

In 2013, Mike Black, Leo’s former classmate at Cornell Law, was leading the civil division of the Montana attorney general’s office as a career employee. A new attorney general had just been elected, bringing with him a number of new staffers to the office. Black had a matter to discuss with one of them: a tall, rangy Harvard Law School graduate named Lawrence VanDyke. VanDyke had been hired as solicitor general, the top appellate litigator in the attorney general’s office, responsible for defending state laws.

Standing in VanDyke’s office, Black noticed several bobblehead dolls on a shelf. “There was like Scalia for sure. And I think probably Alito, there were like four or five. And then there was this one younger-looking guy, and I said, ‘Well, who the heck is this?’” Black recalled. “And he goes, ‘Well, that’s Leonard Leo.’”

Black was astonished.

What Black did not know was by that time that Leo had helped to cultivate an entire generation of conservative lawyers on the rise. The system was like a positive feedback loop: Young attorneys could accelerate their own careers by affiliating with the Federalist Society and then prove their worth by advancing bold, conservative doctrines in the courts. Leo himself would suggest candidates to state attorneys general. According to one former Republican attorney general: “He won’t say, ‘Hire this person,’ in a bossy way. He’ll say: ‘This is a good guy. You should check him out.’”

In 2014, the Republican Attorneys General Association, a campaign group, became a standalone organization. The first 17 contributions were each for $350 apiece. Then came a donation of a quarter of a million dollars. It came from JCN. Rebranded as The Concord Fund, the group remains RAGA’s biggest and most reliable funder today. (In response to questions for this story, RAGA’s executive director said “Leonard Leo has done more to advance conservative causes than any single person in the history of the country.”)

Attorneys general are more likely than private plaintiffs to have the ability, or standing, to bring the types of high-impact cases prioritized by Leo and his network. After the federal government itself, state attorneys general collectively are the second-largest plaintiff in the Supreme Court.

VanDyke had been a Federalist Society member since his time at Harvard Law. He was an editor of the conservative Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He worked at a major firm in Washington under Gene Scalia, the Supreme Court justice’s son, before becoming assistant solicitor general in Texas.

Despite his skill and credentials, VanDyke quickly alienated colleagues in the Montana attorney general’s office. Black said VanDyke had little appetite for the bread-and-butter state court cases that came with the job. Instead, emails show, VanDyke was excited by hot-button issues, often happening out of state. For example, he recommended Montana join a challenge to New York’s restrictive gun laws, passed after the Sandy Hook school massacre, adding as an aside in an email, “plus semi-auto firearms are fun to hunt elk with, as the attached picture attests :)” VanDyke persuaded Montana to join an amicus in the Hobby Lobby case, which led to the Supreme Court recognizing for the first time a private company as having religious rights.

For many years, solicitor general was considered a slow-metabolism job. VanDyke, who declined to comment, represented a new generation who had a distinctly aggressive, national approach to the law. Just recently, state solicitors obtained an injunction blocking federal agencies from working with social media companies to fight disinformation, persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to undo the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan and limited the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses. Dobbs, the ruling that ended women’s right to an abortion, was argued by Mississippi’s solicitor general.

For VanDyke, state solicitor general was a stepping stone on the judiciary path, especially with Leo’s hand at his back. In 2014, he quit the Montana attorney general’s office to run for state Supreme Court, in what turned out to be a bitter contest inflamed by record independent expenditures. The Republican State Leadership Committee, which received funding from JCN, spent more than $400,000 to support VanDyke. He lost. After that, Leo made at least one call on VanDyke’s behalf to an official who might be in a position to give him a job, a person with knowledge of the situation said. This was not an uncommon move.

Leo said he did not recall making calls on VanDyke’s behalf. He acknowledged nurturing the careers of a whole generation of young conservative attorneys, among them VanDyke; Andrew Ferguson, the Virginia solicitor general; Kathryn Mizelle, the federal judge who struck down the federal mask mandate for air travel; and Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case.

After Montana, VanDyke landed in Nevada as solicitor general under Adam Laxalt, an ally of Leo’s. In the Trump administration, VanDyke worked briefly for the Justice Department before the president nominated him to be a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Less than a year later, Trump released a fourth list of potential Supreme Court nominees. More than a third of the names were alumni of state attorney general offices.

The final name on the list: Lawrence VanDyke.

In August 2012, the attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbott, had a conference call scheduled with Leo. It was Leo’s third calendar meeting with Abbott that year, records show. (Abbott is now the governor.) This meeting included not only Abbott and Leo, but also Paul Singer, the hedge fund manager who had been on the Alaska fishing trip. Two attorneys representing a small Texas bank, which had sued the Obama administration over its rewrite of banking laws, were invited. The meeting, which hasn’t previously been reported, highlights another key lever in Leo’s machine: The ability to bring donors’ policy priorities to public servants who can do something about those priorities.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, aimed at preventing another meltdown. Singer became one of the law’s biggest critics. In op-eds and in speeches, he argued that the new banking rules were unworkable and that efforts to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail could in fact make the system more fragile. Singer was especially critical of a provision known as “orderly liquidation authority,” which allows regulators to quickly wind down troubled institutions, calling it “entirely nutty.”

Leo took up the cause. According to interviews and meeting details obtained by the liberal watchdog group Accountable.US, Leo spoke with attorneys general in at least three states about a legal challenge to Dodd-Frank. He scheduled conference calls with the Oklahoma and Texas attorneys general at the time, Scott Pruitt and Abbott, respectively, to talk about what they could do about Dodd-Frank.

Oklahoma and Texas joined the bank’s case as co-plaintiffs. Montana joined, too. A person who worked in the Montana attorney general’s office said Leo called its newly elected leader, Republican Tim Fox, about the case. Montana would not have joined the suit, this person said, if Leo had not called Fox. VanDyke, then Montana’s solicitor general, became an attorney of record on the case.

Singer, Fox, Abbott and VanDyke did not comment for this story. Leo told ProPublica he didn’t recall a meeting with Abbott and Singer, and didn’t remember placing a call to Fox. He said he supported a legal challenge to the Dodd-Frank law on the grounds that its creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional.

In total, 11 states signed on. When they joined, the suit was amended to specifically challenge orderly liquidation authority as unconstitutional — the provision that Singer had singled out for criticism. For two years, the suit advanced through the courts, landing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2015. After an adverse ruling there, the attorneys general dropped out.

There had been doubters. A high-ranking attorney in the Texas attorney general’s office thought the suit was likely to fail. One former Republican attorney general from a different state said he didn’t believe the suit was critical to his state’s interests.

Leo’s network made an example of one. After Greg Zoeller, Indiana’s Republican attorney general, did not sign on, The Washington Times ran an opinion piece by JCN’s policy counsel — himself a former assistant attorney general in Missouri — speculating that Indiana’s attorney general may have been motivated by “strong alliances with Wall Street banks.” After two terms, Zoeller chose not to run for reelection in 2016, saying before he left office, “I don’t know if I fit today’s political arena.”

On a chilly day in March 2017, about six weeks into Trump’s presidency, Leo arranged for a select group to have a private audience with Justice Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court. The attendees were a group of high-net-worth donors who had been organized by Singer to marshal huge resources toward electing Republicans and pushing conservative causes. That afternoon, the donors spoke with Thomas. The previously unreported meeting was described by a person familiar with it and corroborated by planning documents.

The donors left the meeting on a high and walked a short distance to the soaring Jefferson building of the Library of Congress. Singer’s group, the American Opportunity Alliance, was holding a gala dinner for 75 people, where they would hear from “scholars, university leaders and academics bringing unique insights on the issue of free speech,” according to planning documents obtained by ProPublica. Leo told ProPublica that while not all of the alliance’s donors give money to his causes: “They are thought leaders who should know more about the Constitution and the rule of law. I was happy to arrange for them to hear about these topics from one of the best teachers on that I know, Clarence Thomas.” Singer declined to comment. The Supreme Court didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A year and a half later, when Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was teetering, Leo turned to Alliance donors to raise emergency funds for advertisements that would counter the relentless stream of negative press. He told donors that he needed to raise $10 million as fast as possible, according to a person familiar with the call. Swiftly, JCN was on the airwaves defending Kavanaugh. Leo called Mike Davis, the top aide on nominations for Senate Republicans, and urged him to press ahead, emails show. (Leo declined to comment on this.)

Leo had been in a state of high mobilization since Scalia’s death in February 2016 while Barack Obama was still president. “Staring at that vacancy,” Leo later said, “fear permeated every day.” In late March, with Trump’s nomination all but wrapped up, Leo, Trump and his campaign lawyer Don McGahn met at the offices of the law firm Jones Day. Trump emerged with a list of potential nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court and then advertised it: “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society,” he said.

With Scalia’s vacancy and two more justices approaching the end of their careers, Leo embraced a more public position. “He makes a calculation to kind of come out from the shadows and put himself front and center, because he knows that that will give Republican voters confidence to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election,” Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a Pomona College professor and author of “Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution,” said in an interview. “But that’s sort of an Icarus moment too, where they’re getting really close to the sun.”

Once Trump took office, he gave control over judicial picks to Leo, McGahn and other conservative lawyers with strong connections to the Federalist Society. With Leo’s help, Trump appointed 231 judges to the bench in his four years. Of the judges Trump appointed to the circuit courts and the Supreme Court, 86% were former or current Federalist Society members.

The Federalist Society’s alliance with Trump appalled some of its prominent members. Andrew Redleaf, a longtime donor and adviser to the group who has known its co-founders since college, viewed Leo’s work for Trump as “an existential threat to the organization,” he said in an interview. Redleaf and his wife, Lynne, offered to donate $100,000 to pay for a crisis communications firm that could distance the group from Leo and his work for Trump. Federalist Society President Gene Meyer was “genuinely sympathetic” to his position, Redleaf said, but declined the money and advice. Meyer did not respond to requests for comment.

Leo said in a statement: “The Federalist Society today is larger, more well-funded, and more relied upon by the media and thought leaders than ever before. So much for Mr. Redleaf’s ‘existential threat.’”

In early 2020, Leo told the news site Axios he planned to leave his day-to-day role at the Federalist Society after nearly 30 years, though he would remain on the board. Soon, Leo received all the money he would ever need to fuel his next efforts. For more than a decade, he had cultivated a relationship with a businessman named Barre Seid, who ran and owned the Chicago electronics manufacturer Tripp Lite.

Seid, who is Jewish, had long donated to conservative and libertarian causes, from George Mason University to the climate-skeptic group the Heartland Institute. Seid decided to put Leo in charge of his fortune — $1.6 billion, what was then the largest known political donation in the country’s history. Through a series of complicated transactions, Seid transferred ownership of his company to a newly created entity called Marble Freedom Trust, of which Leo was the sole trustee. (Seid did not respond to requests seeking comment.)

In late 2021, Leo took over as chairman of a “private and confidential” group called the **Teneo Network. In a promotional video for the group, Leo sits on a couch in a charcoal jacket, no tie. Over upbeat music, Leo says: “I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. At some point or another, I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’” Leo went on to say his goal was to “roll back” or “crush liberal dominance.” The group had long quietly gathered conservative capitalists and media figures with politicians like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. Under Leo’s watch its budget soared, and new members have joined from all the corners of Leo’s network: federal and state judges, state solicitors general, a state attorney general and the leaders of RAGA and RSLC.

Other of Leo’s ventures show a willingness to embrace increasingly extreme ideas that could have sweeping consequences for American democracy. The Honest Elections Project, a direct offshoot of a group in Leo’s network, focused on election law and voting issues, was a major proponent of a legal concept known as independent state legislature theory. That theory claimed that, under the Constitution, state legislatures had the sole authority to decide the rules and outcomes of federal elections, taking the role of courts out of the equation entirely. If the theory prevailed, experts said, it could have given partisan state legislators the power to not only draw gerrymandered maps but potentially subvert the result of the next presidential election.

The Honest Elections Project filed an amicus brief when a case about the theory reached the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against an expansive reading of the theory but did not entirely rule it out in the future.) Leo defended the Honest Elections Project, saying that “in all of its programming” it “seeks to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. That’s a laudable goal.”

Leo’s own rhetoric has grown more extreme. Late last year, he accepted an award from the Catholic Information Center previously given out to Scalia and Princeton scholar Robert George. Rather than strike a celebratory tone, he reminded his audience of Catholicism’s darkest days in history starting with the Siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in the 17th century. Today, he continued, Catholicism remained under threat from what he called “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who he calls “the progressive Ku Klux Klan.” These opponents, he said, “are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.” And after Dobbs, these barbarians were “conducting a coordinated and large-scale campaign to drive us from the communities they want to dominate.”

It wasn’t long before the backlash to Dobbs, and to Leo’s role in that decision, arrived on his doorstep. In 2020, Leo and his family moved to Northeast Harbor, a wealthy enclave on the Maine coast. The Leo family had spent time each summer there for almost two decades. In 2019 they bought a $3 million mansion, Edge Cove, from an heir of W.R. Grace, founder of the chemicals corporation.

Leo told The Washington Post that Edge Cove — which underwent more than a million dollars’ worth of renovations — would serve as “a retreat for our large family and for extending hospitality to our community of personal and professional friends and co-workers.” The Leo family eventually started living there most of the year.

But Northeast Harbor has not proven to be the quiet retreat that Leo hoped it would be. In 2019, Leo hosted a fundraiser at the Maine house for Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Collins had cast the deciding vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination, and the news of the fundraiser sparked protests by local residents and liberal activists in the area. After the Dobbs decision, locals say, Leo’s presence became an ongoing flashpoint and a source of drama in a town unaccustomed to such things.

On the evening of the Dobbs decision, protesters held a vigil outside Leo’s house, which was followed by frequent protests. One resident planted a sign in her yard that urged passersby to “Google Leonard Leo.” Another wrote messages like “LEONARD LEO = CORRUPT COURT” in chalk in the street outside Leo’s house.

Bettina Richards runs a record company in Chicago and spends the summers in Northeast Harbor. She lives just down the road from Leo. She didn’t know much about Leo until the Dobbs decision, but afterward, she said protestors got permission from a neighbor of Leo’s to hang a pink fist flag across from his house. Leo displayed several different flags with Catholic iconography outside his house.

One day Richards got a call that Leo’s security guard had walked onto private property to tear the fist flag down. Richards biked over to repair it. Leo approached with his guard, and Richards told them not to touch it. “I will allow it,” Leo replied, according to Richards. (Leo said in his written statement: “The owner of that property came to us some weeks later stating that whoever put the flag up did not have permission and that the property owner would be taking it down.” Richards said another household member had OK’d the flag.)

As Leo enters his fifth decade of activism, he has become too big to ignore. Liberal opposition research groups with their own anonymous donors have launched campaigns to expose his influence and his funders; one group even projected an image of Leo’s face onto the building that houses the Federalist Society’s headquarters in Washington. In August, Politico reported that the District of Columbia’s attorney general was investigating Leo for possibly enriching himself through his network of tax-exempt nonprofit groups. A lawyer for Leo has denied any wrongdoing and said Leo will not cooperate with the probe. In response to ProPublica’s reporting about Leo’s role in connecting donors with Supreme Court justices, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., demanded information from Leo, Paul Singer and Rob Arkley about gifts and travel provided to justices. A lawyer for Leo responded that he would not cooperate, writing that “this targeted inquiry is motivated primarily, if not entirely, by a dislike for Mr. Leo’s expressive activities.”

Through it all, Leo has remained defiant. His vision goes beyond a judiciary stocked with Federalist Society conservatives. It is of a country guided by higher principles. “That’s not theocracy,” he recently told a conservative Christian website. “That’s just natural law. That’s just the natural order of things. It’s how we and the world are wired.”

https://www.alternet.org/how-lawless-maga-republicans-are-trying-to-overthrow-democracy/

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these are not normal times. Still, as Will Bunch observed in a powerful column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, out of force of habit, laziness or just plain denial, a lot of journalists continue to treat the Republican presidential contest as if it were a regular political event instead of the lawless authoritarian movement it really is.

The Republican party has been hijacked by Donald Trump. His enablers here in Wisconsin are part of a destructive cabal that is undermining democratic institutions and the rule of law.

That’s the context around Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Ziegler’s denunciation of the “rogue lawlessness” of the new liberal court majority for daring to set procedural rules.

Ziegler’s claim that the court’s 4-3 liberal majority has staged a “coup” and conducted an “illegal experiment” by choosing a new administrator of state courts and changing some procedural rules is demonstrably false. In a calm, clear email response grounded in reality and the Wisconsin Constitution, Justice Rebecca Dallet explains why Ziegler is wrong.

The Wisconsin Constitution clearly states that a four-person quorum of justices constitutes a majority for the conduct of the court’s business, including setting internal operating procedures. The chief justice exercises “administrative authority pursuant to procedures adopted by the supreme court.”

Ziegler doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

From one angle, this looks like a tempest in a teapot. Dueling late-August memos about internal court procedures don’t generally rise to the level of headline news.

But the battle for control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court by a right-wing minority that lost its power in the recent spring election is part of a bigger plot by MAGA Republicans to flout the will of the voters and entrench minority rule

Take this week’s seemingly unrelated AP story about the right-wing groups preparing to gut the federal government if they succeed in getting Trump reelected. Project 25, funded by the Heritage Foundation and fueled by former Trump administration officials, “is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term,” AP reports. The idea is to “gut the ‘administrative state’ from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.”

The Project 25 handbook includes a suggested purge of tens of thousands of federal employees, replacing civil service jobs with patronage positions, stopping the FBI from working to curb the spread of misinformation and stepped-up prosecution of anyone who helps provide abortion pills by mail. It’s scary stuff.

Anti-government rhetoric has been a Republican staple for decades. But the willingness to spread lies, destroy democratic institutions and subvert elections to hold onto power is something new.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Justice Janet Protasieiwiczunless she recuses herself from a challenge to the Republicans’ gerrymandered voting maps. By stating the truth during her campaign that the current maps are “rigged” to give Republicans a disproportionate legislative majority — an observable fact with which a federal court, a majority of Wisconsin voters and even Vos himself have agreed — Protasiewicz opens herself up to “corruption” charges if she doesn’t disqualify herself, Vos says.

The impeachment threat, like the caterwauling by the Chief Justice, is absurd. The judicial branch, as a coequal branch of government, has its own recusal rules. Those rules do not require justices to recuse themselves from cases because of remarks they made during a campaign. If the Legislature intervenes and impeaches a justice who follows the rules, it violates the separation of powers among the branches of government. But the emboldened right-wing majority in the Assembly might give it a try anyway, as The Washington Post reports, in order to set up a process by which the Republicans can block a gerrymandering lawsuit that could diminish their power. The point would not be to convict Protasiewicz of anything, just to gum up the workings of the Court long enough to slow down a challenge to the gerrymandered map.

A successful impeachment vote in the Assembly would force a justice to stop hearing or weighing in on cases until the Senate holds a vote on removal from office. Given the Senate’s track record of delaying confirmation hearings for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ nominees, it’s easy to foresee the foot-dragging that would ensue, at least until the 2024 election is over.

Stop calling them ‘conservatives’

On the same day the dueling memos between the new Wisconsin Supreme Court majority and the power-grabbing right-wing minority came out, the Senate held a public hearing on whether or not Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe should be allowed to continue in her job. The hearing went forward against the advice of legislative attorneys and Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul,who have held that the Senate does not have the power to remove Wolfe. It featured MAGA cult members Michael Gableman, who was fired as head of the Legislature’s bumbling “investigation” of the 2020 election, and Racine County election conspiracy theorist Harry Wait, who is facing criminal charges for making fraudulent absentee ballot requests.

One thing Gableman, Wait andChief Justice Ziegler all have in common is that they supported Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results in Wisconsin. Had a lone conservative on the court, Brian Hagedorn, not voted with the liberal minority, Trump’s challenge would have been upheld.

Ziegler joined team MAGA — and very nearly made the Wisconsin Supreme Court the only forum in the nation to allow Trump’s spurious challenge to the election results to move forward.

Let’s stop calling these people “conservatives.” The Republican Party has devolved into a cult of personality, working to install a strongman in the White House who has been charged with 91 felonies and who could easily be convicted and sentenced before the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee. It’s a real possibility that Trump could deliver his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination from prison.

Wisconsin is going to play a key role in the next election, and defending democracy and justice in this state is going to be critical to preventing our country’s slide authoritarianism.

To protect the elected majority on the state’s highest court, theoretically, Protasiewicz could seek an injunction against the Legislature and prevent them from impeaching her in violation of her free speech rights.

In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court held in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White that the First Amendment protects the rights of candidates for judicial election to announce their views on disputed legal and political issues. The opinion written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia,

Time is of the essence, though. That lawsuit would have to be filed promptly to head off the Legislature’s impeachment delaying tactic.

Another possibility is that Protasiewicz, if impeached by the Assembly, could resign. Then Democratic Gov. Evers could appoint another justice to take her place. Evers could choose someone like former Democratic Rep. Chris Taylor or progressive Judge Everett Mitchell. The new appointee would finish out Protasiewicz’s term, which runs until 2027. Protasiewicz could then run against MAGA Justice Rebecca Bradely in 2026. Given the outcome of recent Wisconsin Supreme Court races, it seems likely she’s win again.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Justice should file charges against Wisconsin’s fake electors – one of whom, Robert Spindell, is still serving on the state elections commission.

The only way to defeat the sheer chutzpah of the right-wing attack on democracy is by fighting back just as aggressively. Our future depends on it.

https://www.americanoversight.org/document/wisconsin-assembly-records-of-gableman-investigation-costs-and-contracts

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https://www.alternet.org/gop-megadonor-citizen-ballot-initiatives/

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/23/foundation-government-accountability-democracy

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This GOP megadonor is funding efforts to 'derail citizen-led ballot initiatives': report

Alex HendersonJune 23, 2023

Over the years, Illinois-based shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been major donors to the Republican Party. And these days, they have a preference for far-right MAGA candidates, including 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (who lost by double digits to Democratic now-Gov. Josh Shapiro).

In 2023, The Guardian reports, Richard Uihlein has been a major funder of a Florida-based group known as theFoundation for Government Accountability (FGA) — who are trying to make it more difficult to get initiatives on ballots.

The Guardian's Brendan Fischer, in an article published June 23, reports, "These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41 percent of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59 percent."

READ MORE: 'A stark illustration of our broken campaign finance system': Here's how rich mega-doners hacked US politics

Fischer notes that in "at least four states," FGA has "lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule."

He then explains, "The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60 percent support from voters — rather than a simple majority — and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds…. FGA's tactics in Ohio echo those used previously — and unsuccessfully — in Arkansas and South Dakota."

In 2021, Fischer reports, FGA "issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60 percent requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process."

READ MORE: Appeals court dismisses GOP megadonor’s lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke: report

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.

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Opportunities Solutions Project

Travis N. Taylor, of Hamilton County, holds a PhD in political science and serves as a visiting fellow with the Opportunity Solutions Project (OSP). The Florida-based organization isnon-partisan but describes its mission as “advocating for public policies based on the principles of free enterprise.”

OSP has had an in-state visiting fellow advocate for raising requirements to pass constitutional amendments previously in Arkansas. OSP has also advocated for election changes in Pennsylvania, Florida, Iowa, and Kansas.

The Kansas City Star reported in a profile of OSP, “In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen, the organization has become a leading advocate for state bills to place restrictions on election administration.”

The Opportunity Solutions Project’s CEO, Tarren Bragdon, is also the CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Founded by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, ALEC crafts model policy bills for legislators to use around the country.

Ohio state Rep. Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, who sits on the Ohio House Government Oversight Committee, also sits on ALEC’s Board of Directors. Seitz currently has a separate bill moving to install photo voter ID in Ohio, as well as legislation to overhaul the Ohio Elections Commission.

In line with the ALEC priorities listed on the FGA website regarding welfare program reform, the OSP also has a track record of lobbying around the country for new restrictions on public benefit programs. In Kentucky it advocated for work requirements for food assistance, and in Wisconsin it backed similar requirements for Medicaid recipients. In Kansas, OSP lobbied for both.

As a 501(c)(4)organization, OSP doesn’t need to list its donors. In its native Florida, OSP has backed and even helped draft legislation that would further shield the identity of entities that contribute to organizations like itself.

The argument

Taylor argued the changes proposed for Ohio’s Constitution are a “simple reform with strong roots in American constitutionalism.” Demanding broad consensus for passage, he argued, insulates the constitution from frivolous changes.

“Out of state interests,” Taylor argued, “have made it their mission in recent years to drop into states, skirt the people’s representatives — you all — produce slick and at times misleading advertising campaigns, and pass their preferred policies by a slim margin of the vote.”

He insisted that approach undermines the integrity of the process. A higher threshold for passage, he argued, “would give Ohioans an important layer of trust in the initiative process.”

“Constitutions are fundamental law,” he said, “and changing that fundamental law should be more difficult than simply enacting a statute.”

Taylor went on to note excepting the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution has been amended just 17 times in 231 years. He argued the proposed changes won’t foreclose access to the ballot.

The questions

Taylor spent the better part of the next hour fielding questions from Democratic committee members. The irony of Taylor warning of out of state interests while speaking on behalf of a Florida-based dark money group wasn’t lost on Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Cleveland.

“Isn’t that an out of state based organization?” Sweeney asked about Opportunity Solutions Project.

“I know you’re an Ohioan yourself,” she went on, “but you’re here representing an organization that, your work is to go into states — which I’m not saying that’s wrong or bad — but your organization comes in to share your perspective, your agenda in multiple different states on ballot issues like this.”

Reps. Bishara Addison, D-Cleveland Heights, and Elgin Rogers, D-Toledo, both pressed Taylor on dark money. If Taylor’s complaint is with well-funded out of state interests, they asked, why aren’t you advocating for financial transparency legislation?

“It sounds like philosophically, you have an issue with out of state interests or out of state money coming into Ohio’s electoral process,” Addison said, “So do you have a position on the kinds of money that come into our campaigns?”

Chair Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, batted those questions down, however, arguing they strayed too far from the content of the resolution.

Rep. Richard Brown, D-Canal Winchester, grilled Taylor on the proposal’s timing. If greater consensus will better protect the constitution, Brown asked, why would the amendment go to voters during a low-turnout, odd-year primary election? Taylor didn’t offer much in response.

“I can’t speak to the intent of the sponsors, or to the wisdom of which ballot this should go on should it pass the House,” he said. “This is about restoring trust in democracy, and I believe that this resolution would accomplish that.”

The road ahead

The committee schedule for the coming week isn’t set. Before gaveling out, though, Chair Wilkin noted they may meet again Monday. That likely gives the committee time to vote on the resolution, and get it to the House floor next week.

Speaking after the hearing, Wilkin explained they held back a planned vote on the resolution because a few members weren’t able to attend. As for next week’s hearing, Wilkin said he expects the resolution will get a vote.

Follow OCJ Reporter Nick Evans on Twitter.

---

ref 4

intercept

no lnx

MARCH, TWO former Ohio Republican Party leaders were convicted on racketeering and bribery charges in a scheme that federal prosecutors described as the state’s largest-ever corruption case. In total, five Republican operatives were indicted in the plot, which involved a power company bankrolling efforts to elect industry-friendly lawmakers and a new state House speaker who would support a $1.1 billion bailout of a failed nuclear power plant.

Now, despite the departure of the convicted Ohio Republican state House speaker and state party chair, the vestiges of Ohio’s GOP are still trying to undermine democracy in the state — and getting help from powerful outside groups.

In November, Ohio voters could decide on ballot measures covering abortion, cannabis legalization, and qualified immunity, the legal principle that protects government officials, including police, from many civil suits. Before those proposals are voted on, however, a separate measure put forward for an August special election could determine their fate. The measure would amend the state constitution to require more votes to approve the November ballot measures.

The constitutional amendment is deeply unpopular — it was first introduced in January and faced bipartisan opposition — but the proposal counts a major national political force among its supporters: Chicago-area billionaire Richard Uihlein, a GOP megadonor who supported groups involved in the January 6 attack in Washington and subsequent efforts to overturn elections.

The amendment is one of a raft of efforts in states across the country where extremist Republicans are taking drastic measures to circumvent the will of the public on issues like abortion, criminal justice, and education.

“It’s a broader project of enforcing political power for the hard-right-end of the Republican party.”

“It’s hard to come up with a better example of one individual — who, by the way, is of course not from Ohio and has no connection whatsoever to Ohio — using nothing but raw financial power to interrupt democracy,” Eli Szenes-Strauss — political director at Public Wise,a watchdog organization that has tracked Uihlein’s spending on election denial efforts — said of Uihlein. “It’s a broader project of enforcing political power for the hard-right-end of the Republican party.”

Uihlein’s support for the amendment to preempt the ballot measures is being funneled through a new political action committee formed in March called Save Our Constitution PAC, which is running ads in support of the change. Uihlein, founder of the shipping company Uline, gave the PAC $1.1 million last month. The contribution has not yet appeared in public financial disclosures and was first reported by the Columbus Dispatch. Uihlein has also funded smaller independent expenditures backing the measure, according to Public Wise, which also operates a PAC. (Neither Save Our Constitution PAC nor representatives for Uihlein responded to requests for comment.)

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One of the country’s biggest conservative political donors, Uihlein was the primary funder of the group that organized the rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol.In the days after the attack, he and his wife gave more than $5 million to groups seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election. Last month in Wisconsin, the Uihleins poured money into a competitive state Supreme Court race and backed a conservative candidate who lost.

CRITICS OF THE constitutional amendment have pointed out that voting on the proposal in August, instead of November, could mean that Republicans pushing the measure are violating a recently passed election law — that was advanced by Republicans. The August vote, however, will go ahead as planned unless the state Supreme Court decides otherwise in response to a pending lawsuit.

An advocacy group called One Person One Vote filed the suit against the Ohio Ballot Board earlier this month, arguing that putting the measure on the August ballot would violate the GOP’s new voting law that went into effect this year. The law prohibits elections with statewide ramifications from occurring outside of the regular primary or general election, partially because of the low attention voters pay to elections held in off-months.

One Person One Vote filed a second suit on Tuesday against the ballot board, claiming that it adopted a “misleading, prejudicial ballot title and inaccurate, incomplete ballot language that improperly favor[s] the Amendment in flagrant violation [of] Ohio’s Constitution and laws and this Court’s jurisprudence.”

The irony of Republicans trying to break their own law by holding an election in a summer month when voters won’t be paying attention was not lost on political observers: Republicans could use low turnout to advance a measure that would allow a minority to stop constitutional changes with support from the majority of Ohio voters.

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The proposed constitutional amendment asks voters to relinquish “the power of our majority vote and elevate minority rule in Ohio,” Ohio Capital Journal columnist Marilou Johanek wrote last week. Giving a minority of voters the power to block the majority could have an affect on hot-button issues, as in the case of abortion in Ohio, where a majority of voters — nearly 60 percent — support abortion rights.

Should it win in August, the constitutional change could make it harder to pass two other proposed November ballot initiatives that would legalize recreational cannabis and make it easier to hold police accountable for violating people’s civil rights. The second proposed change would prohibit the use of qualified immunity as a legal defense to civil actions brought under the amendment.

“Call it the tyranny of the minority over the will of most Ohio voters on abortion rights, on fair legislative districts, on commonsense gun safety, on minimum-wage increases,” Johanek wrote. The measure’s GOP sponsor and his colleagues “openly admit their plan is to thwart a likely pro-choice amendment on the November ballot with a preemptive legislative amendment to obliterate majority rule.”

Republicans claim the measure is an effort to fight outside special interests pushing a pro-abortion agenda. Those claims are belied by the fact that a billionaire from Illinois is funding the Republicans’ own anti-abortion effort.

“I’ll give them this, they’re very good at what they do,” said Szenes-Strauss, of Public Wise. “If I worked for them, I’d be pleased with their progress. It’s just a rolling effort to find a place where your money can make sure that people don’t do with democracy things that you’d rather they not do.”

some lnx

...The constitutional amendment is deeply unpopular — it was first introduced in January and faced bipartisan opposition — but the proposal counts a major national political force among its supporters: Chicago-area billionaire Richard Uihlein, a GOP megadonor who supported groups involved in the January 6 attack in Washington and subsequent efforts to overturn elections.....

one of the country’s biggest conservative political donors, Uihlein was the primary funder of the group that organized the rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In the days after the attack, he and his wife gave more than $5 million to groups seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election. Last month in Wisconsin, the Uihleins poured money into a competitive state

...:

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https://www.propublica.org/article/voter-ref-foundation

Billionaire-Backed Group Enlists Trump-Supporting Citizens to Hunt for Voter Fraud Using Discredited Techniques

database

At a wedding hall in rural northwest Wisconsin, an evangelist hollered a question to an eager crowd of conferencegoers: “Who thinks Wisconsin can be saved?”

He was answered with enthusiastic whistles and cheers. The truth, he said, would be revealed. “We need transparency!”

The subject: the nation’s election systems. The preacher was among a group of conservative speakers, including politicians, data gurus and former military officers, who theorized on the mechanics of voter fraud in general — and specifically distrust in the voter rolls, the official lists of eligible voters.

“Voter rolls are very, very important to the process,” Florida software and database engineer Jeff O’Donnell told the gathering of 300 in late January in Chippewa Falls, deeming the rolls “the ground zero” of what he called Democratic plots to steal elections. The only way former President Donald Trump could have lost his reelection campaign in 2020, O’Donnell said in an interview, was if voter rolls had been inflated with people who shouldn’t have been able to cast ballots.

Ever since Trump failed to convince the world that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, like-minded people across the country have been taking up the same rallying cry, revisiting that vote with an eye toward what will happen in 2022.

Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.

Calling its work unprecedented, the Voter Reference Foundation is analyzing state voter rolls in search of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters credited by the rolls as having participated in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.

The foundation, led by a former Trump campaign official and founded less than a year ago, has dismissed objections from election officials that its methodology is flawed and its actions may be illegal, ProPublica found. But with its inquiries and insinuations, VoteRef, as it is known, has added to the volume in the echo chamber.

Its instrument is the voter rolls, released line by line, for all to see.

In early August, the foundation published on its website the names, birthdates, addresses and voting histories for 2 million Nevada voters, information that is normally public but only available on request, for a fee. It claimed to have found a significant discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, despite being warned by state election officials that its findings were “fundamentally incorrect.”

In the months since, VoteRef has reported similar discrepancies in rolls posted for 18 other states, including the 2020 election battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. Most recently, it added Texas. It intends to post the rolls of all 50 states by year’s end.

“Voter File Transparency site adds Michigan; large discrepancy found,” read a headline on a Dec. 6 press release put out by the organization, which is led by Gina Swoboda, a high-ranking officer in the Republican Party of Arizona.

The project is still in its early stages, and the people at the Chippewa Falls conference did not mention VoteRef specifically.

Still, the VoteRef initiative is an important indication of how some influential and well-funded Republicans across the country plan to encourage crowdsourcing of voter rolls to find what they consider errors and anomalies, then dispute voter registrations of specific individuals. Visitors to the VoteRef site are able to scroll through data on more than 106 million people in a free, easy-to-use format. The VoteRef data includes personal identifying information of every voter and the years they voted, but not how they voted.

[People line up at a polling place in Franklin, Wisconsin, on Nov. 3, 2020. VoteRef has posted that state's voter rolls. Credit:Chang W. Lee/The New York Times via Redux

VoteRef’s methods have already led to pushback from state officials. The New Mexico Secretary of State believes posting data about individual voters online is not a permissible use under state law and has referred the matter to the state attorney general for criminal investigation.

And an attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of State notified VoteRef in January that state law prohibits publishing the voter rolls on the internet and asked that the data be removed. VoteRef complied.

ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

“The accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s election has been confirmed by hundreds of audits, numerous courts and a GOP-led Oversight Committee analysis,” said Tracy Wimmer, director of media relations for Michigan’s secretary of state.

“This is simply another meritless example of election misinformation being disseminated to undermine well-founded faith in Michigan’s election system, and from an organization led by at least one former member of the Trump campaign,” Wimmer said.

VoteRef, records show, is an initiative of the conservative nonprofit group Restoration Action and its related political action committee, both led by Doug Truax, an Illinois insurance broker and podcaster who ran unsuccessfully in the state’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in 2014.

A ProPublica review found that VoteRef’s origins and funders are closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline. A descendant of one of the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Uihlein is a major Trump supporter and a key player in Wisconsin and Illinois politics. Among his political donations:$800,000 in September 2020 to the Tea Party Patriotspolitical action committee, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.

Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have contributed in excess of $30 million combined over two decades to mainly Republican candidates on the state and local level, particularly in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donor information. The total includes money given to groups that advocate on behalf of candidates as well as direct contributions.

Doug Truax during his unsuccessful 2014 campaign in Illinois for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. VoteRef is an initiative of Truax’s nonprofit group Restoration Action and its political action committee. Credit:Joe Lewnard/Daily Herald via AP Photo

Voter rolls are public information, typically used by campaigns to identify potential supporters, target messages or persuade people to go to the polls. Journalists and some businesses also at times use the rolls for newsgathering or commercial purposes.

VoteRef has said its aim is to increase transparency in the elections process, echoing the language used to justify door-to-door address checks, painstaking ballot audits and other efforts that Trump supporters are continuing to employ to parse the 2020 election. To publicize the results of its analysis of ballot inconsistencies, it crafted press releases that then were parroted on sites that purport to be legitimate news outlets and were connected to a media network that received large sums of money from VoteRef.

“VoteRef is the beginning of a new era of American election transparency,”Swoboda, VoteRef’s executive director, said in its Nevada press release. “We have an absolute right to see everything behind the curtain.”

Until a few months before the 2020 election, Swoboda, a resident of Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, was a professional in Arizona’s election system, working as the campaign finance and lobbying supervisor in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.

Swoboda then served as Election Day operations director for the Trump campaign in Arizona, according to a sworn court affidavit she gave in Arizona in November 2020 as part of Trump’s legal challenge to election results there. She described how she took complaints from people who thought poll workers allowed defective ballots to be submitted, in what later became known as “SharpieGate.” (Votes made with a Sharpie do count, the state said.)

She and others associated with VoteRef declined to be interviewed for this story. But Swoboda did respond via email.

“In each of the states we’ve researched to date, the election data math simply doesn’t add up,” she wrote. “That requires reform. We seek to spur this reform through the sustained spotlighting of inaccuracies or wrongdoing.”

Flawed Methodology

As of late February, VoteRef showed 431,173 more ballots cast overall than people credited by voter rolls with having participated in the 2020 election.

To those unschooled in the mechanics of elections, VoteRef’s approach could seem reasonable: Compare the total number of ballots cast in the Nov. 3, 2020 election with the number of current voters on the rolls who have recorded histories of having participated in the vote.

For example, the VoteRef table for Nevada shows 8,952 more ballots cast than individuals credited with voting, based on histories obtained in February 2021.

“Theoretically, these numbers should match,” VoteRef claimed in an August press release.

But there are valid reasons the numbers do not match.

Nevada election officials explained it this way in a press release: “If ‘John Doe’ votes and has his ballot counted in Lander County, then moves to Mineral County, once he is registered in Mineral County, he will show no vote history because he has no vote history in Mineral County. The farther away from the election the data is acquired, the more it will have changed.”

In Connecticut, there were 1,839,714 ballots cast in 2020, according to VoteRef, but the group’s examination of voter histories in October, 2021, showed 1,802,458 people voting. VoteRef’s conclusion is that there was a discrepancy of 37,256 ballots.

But state election officials said that the registration database is “live,” and voting histories of those who moved out of state or died in the months after the election would have been removed from the rolls, accounting for the discrepancy.

“The list is not a static list,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill. “It changes all the time.”

In Michigan, where VoteRef found a difference of more than 74,000 votes, an elections official said that state’s qualified voter file also constantly changes as it's updated, making the data the foundation relied on in late May 2021 — more than six months after the election — out of date.

In a recent email to ProPublica, Swoboda conceded as much.

“It's up to election officials who run election offices to reconcile their data, not the Voter Reference Foundation, which merely publishes their information in a consumer-friendly format,” she said. “Of course, our election experts are well aware of the time lag between certification and data pulls — we posted the documents online for all to see!”

Federal law requires that election supervisors make reasonable efforts to update voter lists, but provides leeway in how states carry out the task. The law prohibits administrators from removing people for simply not voting in repeated elections, unless notices go unanswered and officials wait for two federal election cycles before putting the voters on an inactive list.

Counties haven’t always done a good job, however, in maintaining the voter rolls, leading some people to distrust the system. One of VoteRef’s key aims is to task ordinary people with the chore of finding anomalies.

Scrutinizing Voter Rolls and Neighbors

In announcing the launch of its website, the Voter Reference Foundation touted it as a “first of its kind” searchable tool for all 50 states “that will finally give American citizens a way to examine crucial voting records.”

“Citizens will be able to check their voting status, voting history, and those of their neighbors, friends and others. They will be able to ‘crowd-source’ any errors,” the press release stated.

The group’s backers have encouraged scrutiny outside of one’s own household.

“With VoteRef.com you can find out who voted and who didn’t. Did your aunt who died 10 years ago ‘vote’ after she died? Did your ‘neighbor’ who moved to another state vote? Did 55 votes emerge from a five-unit apartment complex?” Jeffrey Carter, a partner in a venture capital group who earlier had appeared on Truax’s podcast, wrote on the newsletter site Substack in December.

Matt Batzel, whose organization American Majority recently highlighted VoteRef’s efforts in Wisconsin, said in an interview with ProPublica that VoteRef’s vision is for citizens to detect and then report potential problems with the voter rolls, such as people who are registered to vote at vacant lots or unusually high numbers of votes coming from nursing homes.

Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy.

[A woman votes in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 3, 2020. The Voter Reference Foundation has posted that state’s voter roll. Credit:Maddie McGarvey/The New York Times via Redux

Even without any clear evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, the vast, decentralized election system still is drawing scrutiny from those who believe that the system can be easily manipulated. At the daylong voter integrity conference in Chippewa Falls, speakers invoked war imagery, spoke of coverups, and urged people to “expose the tactics” of the political left. The group —saluted via video by Trump acolyte and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — is seeking to put like-minded individuals in vote-certifying secretary of state offices nationwide.

The voter rolls have been targeted, too, by others in Wisconsin, including special counsel Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter who the state’s Republican Assembly speaker appointed in June to conduct a review of Wisconsin’s administration of the 2020 election. On March 1, Gableman released a report blasting what he called “opaque, confusing, and often botched election processes.”

Gableman urged the Legislature to consider legal methods to enable citizens or civil rights groups to help maintain election databases.

“As it stands, there is no clear method for individuals with facial evidence of inaccurate voter rolls to enter state court and seek to fix that problem,” he wrote. He envisioned a system that “could even provide nominal rewards for successful voter roll challenges.”

While information about voters is available in most states, it comes at a cost and with limits on how it can be distributed to avoid having some private information be easily accessible.

In January, an official with the Pennsylvania Department of State wrote to Truax warning that it appeared that the Voter Reference Foundation had “unlawfully posted Pennsylvania-voter information on its website” and demanding that the organization “take immediate action” to remove the information.

Soon, Pennsylvania data disappeared from the website. Swoboda declined to answer questions about the matter. Attempts to reach Truax were unsuccessful.

In New Mexico, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver also said the undertaking is not an allowable use of voter data. By state law, she said, the rolls can only be used for governmental or campaign purposes.

“Having voter registration data ‘blasted out across the internet’ violates state law limiting use of the voter rolls solely for campaign or government activities,” she said. In December, Toulouse Oliver’s office referred the matter to the state attorney general for investigation and possible prosecution.

Associates of the Voter Reference Foundation dismiss these privacy concerns.

"You are joking, right?” said Bill Wilson, chairman of the conservative-leaning Market Research Foundation of Fairfax, Virginia, which paid more than $11,000 to the state of Virginia in March 2021 for the voter roll data and shared it with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“Big tech, both political parties and big media have no interest or concern for privacy and have mountains of data on individuals that is shared and sold on an hourly basis. You called me at my home, after all.’’

Support in GOP Circles

Restoration Action/PAC describes itself on its website as an “effective dynamo against those trying to destroy our country.” It produces ads on behalf of state and national candidates, castigates Planned Parenthood, “biased liberal media” and “Big Tech” and advocates for fair elections.

Truax, the group’s head, frequently assumes the role of news anchor to host the First Right video podcast, interviewing far-right conservatives. In early June last year, he introduced his audience to VoteRef, telling them: “We helped create the organization, and we’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks.”

Gina Swoboda, left, who leads VoteRef, appears with Truax on his video podcast. Credit:Screenshot via RestorationPAC, YouTube

Richard Uihlein’s quiet role was essential. He’s been the primary funder of Restoration PAC since its inception in 2015, contributing at least $44 million, according to the data from OpenSecrets. In May 2021, Federal Election Commission records show, Uihlein donated $1.5 million to Restoration PAC. That same month, the Voter Reference Foundation was incorporated in Ohio.

Two weeks after the Uihlein donation, money started flowing from Restoration PAC to a media network that did some data procurement and analysis for VoteRef, with payments totalling more than $955,000 as of the end of 2021, the FEC records show.

The network, which includes Pipeline Media, is operated by Bradley Cameron, a Texas business strategist, state corporation records show. Brian Timpone is listed as a manager at Pipeline Media. He made headlines a decade ago after his firm, then called Journatic, came under fire for outsourcing hyperlocal news offshore using phony bylines.

In recent months, VoteRef has released press releases about its activities that have been turned into stories on sites owned by Metric Media, which Cameron leads, according to his online profile. The sites mimic legitimate news outlets but print press releases, shun bylines, do little to no original reporting and rely on automated data. “New website to publish which Arlington residents voted, did not vote in gubernatorial election,” read an Oct. 28 headline in the Central Nova News of Virginia, a Metric Media site.

Uihlein did not respond to calls or emails from ProPublica seeking comment. Cameron and Timpone also did not reply to messages seeking an interview.

Political figures with ties to Trump have been touting the efforts of VoteRef.

Among them: former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner appointed by Trump to serve as acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Cuccinelli now heads the Election Transparency Initiative, a Virginia organization opposed to expanding early voting or easing registration requirements. The initiative, a project of the conservative group Susan B. Anthony List, says it partners with The Heritage Foundation’s political arm.

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Cuccinelli spoke in September to about 100 party loyalists at a gathering at a suburban Milwaukee hotel about how they could use the VoteRef tools and become involved in securing the elections process.

Similarly, J. Hogan Gidley, former national press secretary for the 2020 Trump campaign, promoted the work of VoteRef on Philadelphia conservative talk radio before Christmas.

“We’re doing some work with them, too. We know the folks over there really well,” said Gidley, who is now with the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit packed with Trump administration alums.

Truax, meanwhile, brought in Swoboda for his podcast last summer. They talked about the Arizona ballot audit and briefly referenced her work with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“It always feels like to me that the states, in general, have gotten a little sloppy in different areas and just you know nobody’s really paying a lot of attention to it,” Truax said.

He added: “Now I think as conservatives we’re in a place we really got to pay a lot more attention. There’s a lot of energy now on this.”

===}}}

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/09/06/the-thomas-more-society-and-other-outside-groups-influence-on-partisan-wisconsin-election-investigation/

This piece was written and published by American Oversight on September 2 2022here.

Days after being fired as head of the Wisconsin Assembly’s partisan investigation of the state’s 2020 election, Michael Gableman had listed as his new employer the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal organization that was involved in various efforts to cast doubt on the election’s results.

The Thomas More Society, which has for years also fought for more restrictions on abortion rights, had been mentioned in conjunction with the investigation at various points, including — as revealed in public records obtained by American Oversight — for having subleased office space from Gableman. Prior to his termination by Speaker Robin Vos on Aug. 12, Gableman, as head of the Assembly’s Office of Special Counsel (OSC), pushed false allegations of widespread voter fraud, called for local mayors and election officials to be jailed, and voiced support for the legally impossible proposal to “decertify” the state’s 2020 election results.

Gableman’s newly announced employment with the Thomas More Society raises serious questions about the extent of the group’s involvement in the inquiry. In its investigation of OSC’s review, American Oversight obtained several documents that shed light on the group’s influence over Gableman’s work, as well as that of other outside groups and legal activists that had also worked to sow distrust of the 2020 election’s integrity — or to overturn the results.

The Thomas More Society and Other Outside Groups and Activists

The Thomas More Society is the parent organization of the Amistad Project, which bills itself as an election integrity project. Following the 2020 election, the Amistad Project played a role in the coordinated, multi-state effort to submit to Congress false electoral slates in support of Donald Trump. Erick Kaardal, a conservative lawyer and special counsel to the Thomas More Society, represented both that group and the Amistad Project in several lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election in Wisconsin and other states, and public records revealed that his Minneapolis law firm, Mohrman, Kaardal, & Erickson, also subleased office space from Gableman’s review.

Kaardal also brought several lawsuits alleging issues with Wisconsin’s 2020 election, including a September 2020 case brought by the Wisconsin Voter Alliance (WVA) challenging election administration grants given to Wisconsin’s five largest cities. That December, Kaardal filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence on behalf of WVA and other plaintiffs, an effort to prevent Pence from allowing Congress to certify the correct election results on Jan. 6, 2021. The federal judge in that case later referred Kaardal for an ethics inquiry for filing a “sweeping complaint filled with baseless fraud allegations.”

In August 2021, Kaardal represented WVA, Wisconsin Rep. Janel Brandtjen, and the conservative Wisconsin group HOT Government in a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) that alleged misconduct in its administration of the 2020 election. Brandtjen chairs the State Assembly’s elections committee and is a vocal proponent of Trump’s stolen-election lies, having pushed for a fuller review of Wisconsin’s 2020 results than the investigation authorized by Vos. Harry Wait, the head of HOT Government, has been criminally charged for having requested multiple mail-in ballots in the names of other voters, which he said he did to expose the ease of committing fraud.

In November 2021, OSC employee Zak Niemierowicz said that Ron Heuer, the president of WVA, was one of five staff members working for the review. The next month, Gableman publicly revealed the names of most OSC employees for the first time, including Heuer and Gary Wait, a brother of Harry Wait and a retired private detective. Records obtained by American Oversight that same month showed that Harry Wait was in touch with OSC’s review since at least the summer of 2021, and an OSC email from October said that he was “helping us with the Racine investigation.” Other records obtained by American Oversight include an unsigned contract between OSC and Heuer that states his work for the Assembly would include “reporting and working directly with Phill Kline,” the president of the Amistad Project.

American Oversight’s Investigation of the Election Review

Gableman was hired to lead the Wisconsin Assembly’s 2020 election review in July 2021. He performed little substantive work during his first few months, later testifying in American Oversight’s lawsuit for records that, during that time, he “did not have a very sophisticated or intricate understanding” of election processes. Through the course of American Oversight’s investigation of OSC’s work, we have obtained numerous documents that point to the involvement of the Thomas More Society, Kaardal, and other outside groups active in elevating the Big Lie.

Public reporting as well as other records released through American Oversight’s litigation show that Kaardal directly assisted Gableman with aspects of the review, although there is no evidence of any official contract between Kaardal and Gableman or OSC. Emails suggest Kaardal participated in OSC calls as early as October 2021, and he and other associates of the Thomas More were in contact with Gableman and Brandtjen months prior.

Earlier that year, Kaardal was the featured speaker at an invitation-only hearing before Brandtjen’s committee, during which he discussed his lawsuits challenging the election administration grants. In April 2021, Kaardal emailed a file called “Racine WI documents” to Kline and Luis Cornelio, an associate of the Thomas More Society, then sent the email to Brandtjen. Records later posted on OSC’s website in response to American Oversight’s litigation included more evidence of contact between OSC and the Thomas More Society, including an email sent from the personal account of Jordan Moskowitz, the data and political director for the Wisconsin Republican Party, to Cornelio on Sept. 1, 2021, titled “Meeting with Justice Gableman.”

In October, Kaardal’s firm helped draft subpoenas seeking information on election administration grants from local Wisconsin officials, according to other records obtained by American Oversight. Similar subpoenas were issued by OSC in January 2022.

Also in October, Kaardal emailed Gableman to suggest that he hire the president of the public relations firm handling the Thomas More Society’s media requests, saying that he was “ready to discuss a PR role for the Office of Special Counsel.”

In March 2022, Gableman presented OSC’s “Second Interim Investigative Report” on its findings before Brandtjen’s committee. Kaardal appeared beside Gableman during the presentation, which featured a video of Kaardal interviewing his clients — residents of long-term care facilities — about how they voted in 2020. Emails later posted to the review’s website show that Kaardal had drafted portions of that report, which floated the (legally impossible) action of “decertifying” the state’s 2020 election results. Another email posted to the review’s website suggests that the Thomas More Society had edited the video content for OSC.

Following Gableman’s presentation, Kaardal and Brandtjen both spoke at a Thomas More Society news conference, where they alleged that Wisconsin election officials had broken the law while administrating the 2020 election and again voiced support for overturning the results. That news conference was introduced by Heuer, who said that WVA had begun working with the Thomas More Society on an “investigation,” which was how he was introduced to Brandtjen.

On Aug. 17, 2022, WVA announced in an online post written by Heuer that Niemierowicz had begun working as an “administrator” for the organization. Heuer also wrote that he “had actually recruited [Niemierowicz] to work in the Office of the Special Counsel to work with Mike Gableman.”

You can read more about American Oversight’s investigation of Gableman’s election review here, including their findings on the inquiry’s taxpayer-funded expenses and its poor record-keeping practices.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/**2021/08/**25/reince-priebus-says-680-000-more-spent-election-review/5583974001/

no lnx

Reince Priebus says subpoenas will be issued soon in Wisconsin review of election that will cost $680,000 or more

Patrick Marley

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON - Wisconsin lawmakers will spend hundreds of thousands to review the presidential election and will soon issue subpoenas as part of their effort, according to Reince Priebus, the former head of the state and national arms of the Republican Party.

Priebus, the first chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, made the comments Tuesday on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's podcast. He described the plans three days after Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester met with Trump about his plans to review the election.

Vos has faced pressure from both the left and right as he seeks to examine an election that courts have determined was conducted properly. Joe Biden narrowly won the state and gained a handful of votes in recounts requested by Trump in Dane and Milwaukee counties.

MORE:Four election reviews are ongoing in Wisconsin after Donald Trump's loss to Joe Biden.Here's where they stand.

Priebus told Bannon that Republicans who control the Legislature had agreed to "fully fund" an investigation that would cost "about $680,000, at least to start." He did not say whether the funds would come from taxpayers, donors or a mix of the two.

Vos this summer hired former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to oversee the review. Gableman in November contended the election was stolen.

"I’m told that subpoenas are going to be issued in the next week or two," said Priebus, who before his stint with Trump led the Republican Party of Wisconsin and the Republican National Committee.

"There'll be more outside money coming into Wisconsin," said Priebus, who has long been friends with Vos.

In a statement, Vos confirmed he had approved spending more on Gableman's efforts but did not disclose how much. He said he would be hiring contractors to help Gableman but did not name them.

"We believe a cyber-forensic audit is necessary to ensure issues did not happen in 2020," Vos said in his statement.

Vos did not describe what he meant by a "cyber-forensic audit." Both he and Gableman have said in recent weeks that there were no clear definitions describing what a forensic audit is.

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who serves as chairwoman of the bipartisan state Elections Commission, said Republicans are engaging in unfortunate efforts that sow distrust in an election that courts have repeatedly upheld.

Fact check: No evidence of 8 million 'excess' Biden votes from 2020 election

"I think that these multiple attempts to invalidate Wisconsin’s elections are a waste of taxpayer dollars and a waste of the time of the individuals involved," she said.

This month Republican Rep. Janel Brandtjen of Menomonee Falls, the chairwoman of the Assembly Elections Committee, issued her own subpoenas in an attempt to seize ballots and voting machines from Brown and Milwaukee counties.

Nonpartisan legislative attorneys have said Brandtjen's subpoenas are invalid because Vos hasn't signed them. Priebus didn't say whether Vos would sign Brandtjen's subpoenas or have Gableman issue new ones seeking different documents.

If Vos and Gableman seek ballots or voting machines, they could quickly find themselves in a legal fight with clerks, Democrats or the U.S. Department of Justice. The department has warned states that seizing such material could violate a federal law that requires election officials to maintain control of election records for 22 months after each election.

Brandtjen and some other Republicans have pushed Vos to conduct an election audit similar to a partisan, months-long review of ballots in Arizona.

Fact check: Arizona early votes falsely cited as evidence of voter fraud

Election security experts and other critics, including some high-profile Republicans in Arizona, have called the review sloppy and untrustworthy. It is being conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based computer firm that has never before reviewed election results.

Gableman this month visited Arizona to talk to officials conducting a partisan election review in that state and attended a South Dakota forum hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has promoted baseless conspiracy theories that China hacked the election.

Fact check: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell spreads false claim about Arizona election results

Rep. Mark Spreitzer, a Beloit Democrat who sits on the Assembly Elections Committee, saidVos has caved to pressure from Trump and his allies after resisting it for months. He said Vos's recent meeting with Trump — and the photo of it Vos posted on Facebook — proved to be a turning point.

"He needed the photo op so that he could satisfy Republicans back here in Wisconsin. And he had to pay for the photo and he’s paying for the photo by giving Trump what he wants," Spreitzer said.

Vos and other top lawmakers have faced mounting calls in recent weeks from Republicans who say they need to more fully investigate the election. Dozens of county Republican Party chapters have approved resolutions or issued statements asking for further review.

Jefferson Davis, a former village president of Menomonee Falls, said he is helping line up thousands of volunteers and donors who could help with a review of the election. He declined to name computer experts who he said he is working with.

He said he believed a review would turn up problems that could lead to state lawmakers trying to revoke the state's 10 Electoral College votes and holding another election or declaring Trump the winner. But there is no mechanism for reversing electoral votes and Davis acknowledged such an effort would draw immediate legal challenges.

He said he wanted experts to analyze voting machines to see if they had been compromised and examine ballots to see if any of them were fake. But there has been no evidence of such tampering during the recounts and a slew of court cases.

Davis, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor campaign finance violations in 2005, said the election review should include having volunteers knock on the doors of thousands of voters to confirm they live where they say they live. Democrats said such a plan would risk intimidating or harassing voters.

"This is the most sick, despicable, evil, toxic thing you could ever imagine in the history of our state," Davis said of the way the 2020 election was run. "And we are never going to allow that to happen."

Priebus calls for wide-ranging review

On Bannon's show, Priebus said officials need to look into whether people or groups ballots for others, which he called "ballot harvesting." There were no indications this happened on a large scale in Wisconsin in 2020.

He also called for examining whether any ballots were "machine created or anything like that." Some conservatives have questioned whether some ballots were filled out by machines before they were cast, but they have offered no evidence that it happened.

Priebus said officials need to review the state’s voter rolls, which are publicly available and are routinely monitored by political activists from both sides. The state Supreme Court in a 5-2 ruling in April determined election officials had properly maintained the voter rolls when considering whether people had moved.

Priebus said Gableman needs to “forensically review” absentee ballots that were cast by voters who said they were indefinitely confined because of age or disability. Under state law, those voters don’t have to show ID to vote absentee.

Contact Patrick Marley at patrick.marley@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @patrickdmarley.

am oversight docs

https://www.americanoversight.org/document/nara-records-regarding-invalid-elector-slates

https://www.americanoversight.org/news-roundup-the-wild-creative-fake-electors-scheme

Fake Electors and the Jan. 6 Investigation

}:“Kind of wild/creative” — that’s how a Trump-allied lawyer, in an early December 2020 email, characterized the scheme to submit fake electoral certificates as a way to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

The lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, was explaining the idea to Boris Epshteyn, a Trump campaign adviser. He repeatedly used the word “fake” to describe the certificates, following up with another email in which he wrote that calling them “alternative” was “probably a better term” — then added a smiley face emoji.
That email, :{reported on by the :(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:*:{New York Times:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:*, was one of dozens exchanged campaign advisers and Trump allies — including lawyers who “made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny” — who were focused on drawing up the bogus slates in the month before Jan. 6.

According to the Times, Wilenchik had helped coordinate the fake certificate from Trump supporters in Arizona. Many of the same Trump associates who appear in the emails reviewed by the Times also figure into subpoenas issued last month to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and state Sen. Kelly Townsend.

Those subpoenas, as :{reported by the :(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:*:{Washington Post:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:* this week, seek Fann’s and Townsend’s communications with those associates or relating to the fake certificate scheme.
American Oversight’s :{investigation of the Arizona Senate’s discredited “audit”:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: of Maricopa County’s election results revealed that at that time in late 2020, as the former president’s allies desperately searched for voter fraud and sought ways to flip the state’s election results, Fann had been in touch with Rudy Giuliani and the Trump team.
The Post’s story also mentions :{the**letter, obtained by American Oversight,**:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:that Townsend sent to Vice President Pence in late December asking him “to refrain from accepting the Biden electors” until legislators could look into election fraud claims.

The subpoenas to Fann and Townsend, reported the Post, “show the breadth of the criminal investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington,” which :{Attorney General Merrick Garland said:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: was “the most wide-ranging” in the history of the Justice Department.

Justice Department investigators recently :{interviewed Marc Short and Greg Jacob:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, two top advisers to the former vice president, and :{CNN reported:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: that the department has also reached out to additional :{Trump White House officials:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:.
Prosecutors are also looking into Trump’s actions, reported the *Washington Post*, having recently asked “about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle” who sought to submit the fake electors.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that it had :{obtained a new search warrant:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: for the phone of Trump-allied attorney John Eastman, who had sought to block investigators from accessing his files.

Meanwhile, the House Jan. 6 committee, which is considering issuing a subpoena :{to Ginni Thomas:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, is also expanding its investigation :{into Trump’s cabinet:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, having already interviewed :{Steve Mnuchin:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:. It is also in discussion :{with Mike Pompeo:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: for his testimony. Here are more headlines related to the investigation:

Trump’s defense secretary denies there were orders to have 10k troops ready to deploy on January 6 (*CNN*)
Mick Mulvaney, ex-White House acting chief of staff, testifies before the Jan. 6 committee (*CNN*)
House Democrats call for a new inspector general in Secret Service text investigation (*NPR*)
Secret Service identified potential missing text messages on phones of 10 individuals (*CNN*)
Trump didn’t want to call for Jan. 6 rioters’ prosecution, new video shows (*Washington Post*)

‘Absolutely No Evidence of Fraud’

:{:{

}:During a Thursday hearing in one of American Oversight’s lawsuits seeking public records from the partisan investigation ofWisconsin’s 2020 election, Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn said that the our litigation revealed the inquiry has shown :{“absolutely no evidence of election fraud.”:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:}:

Bailey-Rihn also noted that the state officials responsible for the investigation had failed to fully comply with Wisconsin’s open records law and had spent large amounts of taxpayer money at times when “there was no actual work being done.”
During the early months of the investigation, Bailey-Rihn said, “taxpayers were paying $11,000 [a month] for somebody to sit at the New Berlin library to learn about election law because they had no experience in election law.”
That “somebody,” of course, was attorney Michael Gableman, who heads the investigation and has advocated for state lawmakers to consider :{“decertifying”:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: the 2020 election, a :{legally impossible:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: recommendation that led this week to :{another grievance against him:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: being filed with a state oversight board.
This week, :{American Oversight sent a letter:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which has failed to provide adequate responses to our requests for records in the possession of Commissioner Robert Spindell, who was one of his state’s fake electors.
:{The letter:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: informs the commission that we will pursue all legal avenues to ensure the public release of those records, as required by the state’s open records law.

Lies about voter fraud have maintained a strong hold on conservatives in Wisconsin, where the wider effort to undermine faith in democracy is, as the *:{New Yorker:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:*:{’s Dan Kaufman wrote:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: this week, “part of a national Republican strategy to take control of election administration and to make it harder to vote.”

Wisconsinvoters with disabilities have :{filed a lawsuit:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: arguing that the state supreme court’s recent decision banning the returning of absentee ballots by caretakers violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the U.S. Constitution.

Of course, voter-suppression efforts aren’t limited to Wisconsin. Here are headlines related to voting rights in other states:

Abortion opponents push to remove ballot drop boxes ahead of Kansas amendment vote (:{Kansas City Star:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:)
New Georgia election law allows any resident to challenge another voter’s eligibility (:{Atlanta Journal Constitution:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:)
A new Georgia voting law reduced ballot drop box access in places that used them most (:{NPR:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:)
Kari Lake wants to upend how Arizonans vote, how their votes are counted (:{Washington Post:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:)

JULY 20 2022

An election official in Wisconsin has shed light on the recent phone call he received from former President Donald Trump.

According toWisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, Trump is still attempting to pressure him into "purportedly rescind the Badger State’s 2020 electoral votes, even though there is no legal way to do so and no ground to even consider such an action," The Independent reports.

However, there is no legal basis for such action to take place. During a recent interview, Vos detailed the phone call he received.

READ MORE: This hypnotherapist and failed politician helped fuel the never-ending hunt for election fraud in Wisconsinhttps://www.alternet.org/2022/05/voter-fraud/ JAY STONE SEE GABLEMAN]

“It’s very consistent — he makes his case ... he would like us to do something different in Wisconsin, I explained that it's not allowed under the Constitution,” said Vos, adding that Trump “has a different opinion."

The call Vos has detailed occurred on Tuesday, July 19, according to the news outlet. The former president is reportedly attempting to try and take advantage of a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that will ultimately prohibit the use of ballot drop boxes for all future elections.

Now, Trump is arguing that President Joe Biden's Wisconsin victory is invalid since the court also ruled that the Wisconsin Election Commission overstepped its authority when it allowed the use of ballot drop boxes due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a statement, Trump asked, “So what’s Speaker Robin Vos doing on the Great Wisconsin Supreme Court Ruling declaring hundreds of thousands of DropBox votes to be illegal?”

Although Trump is verbalizing his concerns, the news outlet notes that the Wisconsin Supreme Court's latest ruling has nothing to do with the 2020 presidential election.

"In reality, the court ruling did not invalidate a single vote cast by drop box," The Independent reports. "And neither Mr. Vos nor the Wisconsin legislature have the authority to retroactively invalidate votes or rescind electoral votes."

This hypnotherapist and failed politician helped fuel the never-ending hunt for election fraud in Wisconsin

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/voter-fraud/ JAY STONE SEE GABLEMAN]

REF

PRO PUBL

Jay Stone grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago ward politics, the son of a longtime city alderman. But his own forays into politics left him distrustful of Chicago Democrats.

When he ran for alderman in 2003, he was crushed at the polls after party leaders sent city workers out to campaign against him. Even his own father didn’t endorse him.

Then when Stone sought the mayor’s office in 2010, he only mustered a few hundred of the 12,500 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. He filed a federal lawsuit over the requirement and lost.

His father, Bernard Stone, who held office for 38 years, once told the Chicago Tribune: “My son is very good at what he’s trained to do. And that’s not politics.”

Jay Stone’s training was in hypnotherapy, and he eventually walked away from Chicago politics, carving out a living using hypnosis to help people with anxiety, weight gain, nicotine addiction and other issues. Only in retirement, and after a move to Wisconsin, did he finally find his political niche.

In 2020, Stone played a crucial, if little-known, role in making Wisconsin a hotbed of conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the state’s 10 electoral votes from then-President Donald Trump. The outcry emanating from Wisconsin has cast Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a force of untoward political influence and helped create a backlash against using private grants, including large donations from Zuckerberg, to assist election officials across the country.

In Wisconsin, Stone has finally been embraced politically, by activists and politicians who, like him, didn’t approve of the so-called “Zuckerbucks” or of big-city Democratic mayors. They, too, are unhappy with the way the 2020 presidential election was run in Wisconsin and how it turned out. And they, too, show no inclination of giving up, even when their claims have been rejected and other Republicans have told them it’s time to move on.

“The best part of getting involved in politics in Wisconsin is the wonderful people I’ve been meeting,” Stone said in an interview. “They’re just a great group of men and women that I admire and respect.”

The questioning of the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 20,000-vote victory in Wisconsin continues thanks to Stone and others who have emerged to take on outsize roles after the election. Among them: a retired travel industry executive who has alleged voter fraud at nursing homes. Ten alternate GOP electors who signed documents to try to subvert the certification of Biden’s election. And some state legislators who are still looking for ways to hand the state to Trump, a year and a half after the election.

Stone hasn’t garnered much public attention, but records indicate that in the summer of 2020 he was the first person to complain to state authorities about grant money accepted by local election officials. The funds were earmarked for face masks, shields and other safety supplies, as well as hazard pay, larger voting facilities, vote-by-mail processing, drop boxes and educational outreach about absentee voting.

Stone, however, saw the election funding, which came from a Chicago nonprofit, as a way to sway the election for Biden by helping bring more Democratic-leaning voters to the polls in Wisconsin’s five largest cities.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission rejected Stone’s claim last year, on the grounds that he didn’t live in any of the cities he mentioned and that the complaint did not allege any violations that the commission had the authority to investigate. A separate complaint Stone filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which he objects to the Zuckerberg money, has not been resolved.

Nonetheless, the idea that the election was somehow rigged lives on.

Chief among the election deniers is Michael Gableman, who served on the state Supreme Court for a decade. A Trump ally, Gableman was named as special counsel by the GOP-controlled State Assembly to investigate the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Not only did Gableman give Stone’s accusations a platform, he took them even further. In his review for the Assembly, Gableman labeled the grants a form of bribery.

Gableman expressed his admiration for Stone during a March interview on the “Tucker Carlson Today” show, which streams online.

It’s “a private citizen, a guy named Jay Stone, who really deserves a lot of credit,” Gableman said, referring to questions about the election grants.

“He saw all of this coming,” Gableman said. “And he’s not a lawyer. I don’t know what his particular training is —he’s trained in the medical field.He filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission back in August of 2020, well before the election. And he foresaw all of this, he foresaw the partisan nature of all of the Zuckerberg money and all of the Zuckerberg people coming in to influence the election.”

Gableman, who has not responded to requests for an interview, had hired Stone as a paid consultant for his review by the time he appeared on Carlson’s show.

But that’s not the only thing keeping Stone from a quiet retirement in Pleasant Prairie, not far from the Illinois border, where he grows his own fruits and vegetables and heats his home only with firewood. Once again, he’s got his eyes on political office. This time he’s running for the Wisconsin State Senate.

The Chicago Connection

In the summer of 2020, cities across the U.S. were canceling Fourth of July firework celebrations. Public health departments were scrambling to put contact tracing measures in place to track the spread of COVID-19. Movie theaters remained shuttered. Vaccines were still undergoing testing.

Against this backdrop, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit based in Chicago, decided to get involved. Its stated mission is to ensure that elections across the country are “more professional, inclusive and secure.”

The group approached the mayors of Wisconsin’s five largest cities — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine — and encouraged them to draw up a “Safe Voting Plan” outlining how they would spend more than $6 million in grant money to make it easier for people to vote while also limiting their exposure to the highly contagious coronavirus.

Wisconsin’s April elections, including the presidential primary, had been a near-disaster. The state’s Democratic governor and GOP-controlled legislature bickered over whether to postpone the balloting. Election offices were deluged with requests for absentee ballots. National Guard troops stepped in to replace poll workers too scared to volunteer. Polling places closed or relocated. Some voters waited in long lines for hours.

The Safe Voting Plan envisioned a smoother election that November. The goals were to keep voters safe and educate them about how to cast a ballot properly, whether in person or by mail. The plan also expressed the desire to ensure the right to vote “in our dense and diverse communities.”

Green Bay, for example, proposed using $15,000 to partner with “churches, educational institutions, and organizations serving African immigrants, LatinX residents, and African Americans” to help new voters obtain documents needed to get a valid state ID that they could show at the polls or to get an absentee ballot.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life awarded the $6.3 million to Wisconsin’s five largest cities in early July 2020. That’s when a friend of Stone’s sent him a link to a newspaper article about the grants.

“Within 10 minutes, I knew this was a scam, because they were targeting the Democratic strongholds in the state of Wisconsin,” said Stone.

Stone recognized that the organization’s address on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile was in the same building that had once housed Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, which he felt confirmed his instincts.

He took exception to the proposed outreach to communities that traditionally vote Democratic, saying such efforts are the responsibility of candidates and parties, not municipal election workers. On Aug. 28, 2020, he fired off a 27-page complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which included 167 exhibits.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life “exploited COVID-19” to help Democrats, Stone wrote. “All of CTCL’s $6.3 million expenditures will increase voter turnout in Wisconsin cities that are heavily Democratic and increase the likelihood that Democrat Joe Biden will win Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes.”

Less than a week later, CTCL made a major announcement: It had received a $250 million donation from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The couple later added an additional $100 million. CTCL’s previous funding had come from a variety of foundations.

Ultimately, CTCL awarded grants to more than 2,500 elections offices across 49 states, including rural parts of Wisconsin. The sums included $5,000 to small communities such as Ralls County, Missouri, and $10 million each for the city of Philadelphia and for Fulton County, Georgia, which encompasses most of Atlanta.

In an interview, Stone said he wouldn’t have objected if the grants had been awarded to each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties — with every county getting an equal amount per registered voter.

According to a ProPublica analysis, the biggest municipalities in Wisconsin received the most money and had higher per capita grants than smaller places like Waukesha, Brookfield and Fond Du Lac, which all had a history of voting for Trump. For instance, the per capita figure for Milwaukee was more than 10 times that of nearby Waukesha.

An analysis by Ballotpedia, a nonprofit focusing on elections, found that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan — swing states that ended up in the Biden column — received some of the highest per capita grants from CTCL. However, it’s nearly impossible to discern what may have turned the tide in those states and whether turnout was affected by the grant money, a motivation to vote against Trump, or other factors.

CTCL was formed in 2014. One of its founders, Tiana Epps-Johnson, was named an Obama Foundation fellow in 2018, providing her with leadership training and other resources to help her in her work. She has described CTCL as nonpartisan, but Stone said the Obama Foundation connection suggests otherwise.

Epps-Johnson, who is CTCL’s executive director, did not respond to a voice message left on her direct line, but the group replied with a statement saying the grant money was available to all parts of the country. “Every eligible local election office that applied was awarded funds,” CTCL stated.

The center also defended its actions in a lawsuit the Trump campaign filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission; the suit alleged, in part, that the state election commission had improperly supported the five cities’ plan to promote expanded mail-in voting.

In an amicus brief in that case, CTCL wrote: “Most of those funds were used to purchase personal protective equipment for voters and election workers, to recruit and train additional staff, to provide improved security, to establish in-person polling places, to process mail-in ballots, and to ensure emergency preparedness. CTCL’s program thus helped officials throughout the nation to run secure, lawful, and efficient elections for all Americans.”

A federal judge appointed by Trump found no merit in the former president’s case and dismissed it.

Zuckerberg also denies having hidden motives in funding nonprofits that targeted voting issues. His spokesperson Brian Baker said in an email to ProPublica that Zuckerberg and his wife stepped in when “our nation’s election infrastructure faced unprecedented challenges” and the federal government “failed to provide adequate funds.” The goal, Baker said, was to “ensure that residents could vote regardless of their party or preference.”

When Wisconsinites went to the polls in November 2020, there were far fewer issues with people having trouble casting a ballot or having to wait in long lines than there had been in the spring election.

Jay Stone’s Grievances

Stone’s skepticism was deeply rooted. His own family and his political failures were shaped by Chicago politics, giving him a close-up view of the unseemly tactics of loyalists associated with Democratic rule under Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and then, to a lesser extent, his son Richard M. Daley.

Running for 32nd Wardalderman on Chicago’s North Side in 2003, Stone preached good government, transparency and election reform. He lost. Testimony in a 2006 federal corruption trial involving top Daley administration officials described how party bosses ordered city workers to campaign for Stone’s opponent, the sitting alderman.

“They wanted a puppet they could control,” Stone said.

After his election defeat, Stone filed a claim against the Daley administration as part of a class-action suit seeking compensation for damages related to political patronage. A federal monitor awarded him $75,000 based on Stone’s claims about city workers forced to campaign against him. His efforts taking on the Daley machine earned him a description as a “passionate independent” from a reporter for the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly.

Reflecting on the experience, Stone said that even his father was unwilling to endorse him for fear of political retribution. (Stone’s father died in 2014. Jay Stone said that despite their political differences, they remained close.)

Undeterred, in 2010 Stone made a bid for mayor, hoping to take on Richard M. Daley, but Daley announced he would not run for a record seventh term.

Stone didn’t obtain enough signatures to qualify for the ballot and sued the city’s Board of Election Commissioners, claiming the requirement was onerous and unconstitutional, designed to keep the machine in power. The courts disagreed, and the case failed.

Stone never won an election in Chicago, but he was able to build a professional life there as a hypnotherapist in private practice. Stone decided to enter the field after earning first an undergraduate philosophy degree and then an MBA.He received a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy through remote learning from a now-shuttered California institute.

Hypnotherapists are not licensed in Illinois. But the treatment has gained acceptance. According to the National Institutes of Health, hypnosis has been shown to help people manage some painful conditions and deal with anxiety.

Stone sought to help clients visualize a better future, a goal he said he wanted to achieve in politics, too. In hypnosis, Stone said, some of his patients experienced flashbacks to past lives that helped them find peace and change their behavior for the better. He wrote a paper, posted on his website, on the potential to use DNA to prove the existence of past lives.

Science, he noted, always starts with a theory. “And then you have to be able to prove it,” he said.

His theories about elections tend to lump all Chicago Democrats together, so that Michelle and Barack Obama are considered just as capable of unsavory political tactics as the two Daleys who governed Chicago for decades.

Stone maintains that the Obamas have unduly influenced elections through a network of former White House staffers associated with nonprofits Stone believes are inappropriately registering and influencing voters. (He said he soured on Barack Obama long ago because he believed that Obama had failed to confront the Chicago Democratic machine as a U.S. senator.)

He is particularly opposed to the star-studded nonprofit When We All Vote, set up by Michelle Obama to register voters and help “close the race and age gap.” By the 2020 election, more than 500,000 people had started or completed their voter registration process through When We All Vote, according to the group.

“I believe Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote is the most powerful political organization or political machine in the country,” Stone said in a video he posted on Rumble, a video platform that’s popular among some conservatives. “When We All Vote is more powerful than the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee combined.”

When We All Vote told ProPublica in an email that it is nonpartisan and works with schools and educators to increase civic engagement and voter participation, saying its “initiatives comply with the letter and spirit of the law.”

Stone filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission against the former first lady, alleging criminal violations for offering financial prizes to schools that registered the most voters and for enticing people to early voting sites with food and music. The commission, in a 5-1 vote in April, dismissed the matter “due to a lack of reasonable suspicion” and fined him $500 for filing a “frivolous” complaint. (Stone on Friday appealed that decision in Kenosha County Circuit Court.)

Stone saw the supposed Obama network’s fingerprints on the 2020 election grants offered by the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

And while he measures his words more carefully than Gableman and others who see the 2020 Wisconsin election results as tainted, he clearly is in that camp.

“There was so much, I don’t want to say ‘fraud,’ but there was so much deviation from the election laws and the election norms, it raises serious questions,” he said of Trump’s loss in Wisconsin.

“I don’t think the election was fair and just.”

Allies in Wisconsin

The CTCL money has become a central theme in complaints about Biden’s victory in Wisconsin — and in the review by Gableman. Under pressure from Trump, GOP Assembly Speaker Robin

Vos appointed Gableman to review whether the election was administered fairly and lawfully.

Gableman has fallen short of proving fraud, but did use an interim report and an appearance before the legislative oversight committee on March 1 tohighlight the Zuckerberg money and call for disbanding the Wisconsin Elections Commission. He said the legislature should look into decertifying the 2020 election results, but even Republican officials balked at that.

Republican Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke tweeted that “handing authority to partisan politicians to determine if election fraud exists would be the end of our republic as we know it.”

Jay Stone sat in the front row behind Gableman during the meeting, where Gableman released a report of his findings thus far. It spanned 136 pages, half of which dealt with the CTCL grants, which he characterized as “election bribery.”

Stone helped in the review but won’t talk about what exactly he did in the ongoing investigation, which was budgeted by Vos to cost taxpayers $676,000. “I’m on a confidentiality agreement,” Stone said.

Stone billed Gableman $3,250 for 128 hours of work between Feb. 16 and March 1, according to an invoice obtained by the nonprofit group American Oversight, which has sued to get access to Gableman’s records.

Asked about Gableman’s bribery terminology, Stone sighed. “It’s not a typical case where somebody gives a politician money for, let’s say, a zoning change,” he said. “So, it’s not your typical bribery case, but certainly it’s worth looking into.”

Lawsuits in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota about the CTCL grants have failed, as did Stone’s complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Just last week in Madison, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Ehlke called the election bribery allegation “ridiculous,” saying he saw no evidence that CTCL offered anything to change anyone’s vote. “I mean, what proof is there in the record anywhere of an inducement of bribery? That whole thing just falls away. There’s nothing in the record. Is there?”

Minnesota lawyer Erick G. Kaardal, who continues to challenge the grants, replied that he reads state law to mean: “We don’t want Wisconsin public officials taking money to get people to go to the polls.”

The county case is an appeal of the elections commission’s rejection of a similar complaint Kaardal filed there about the grants. Ehlke has yet to rule.

Gableman’s work, meanwhile, has been widely discredited, cast by politicians, including some Republicans, and legal analysts as unprofessional and amateurish. Wisconsin’s Democratic governor called the investigation a “ colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.”

“This effort has spread disinformation about our election processes, it has attacked the integrity of our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers, and it has emboldened individuals to harass and demean dedicated public servants,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a prepared statement.

The issue of using private grants in administering elections, however, remains alive.

Zuckerberg will not be making future donations to election offices, his spokesperson told ProPublica earlier this month, calling it “a one-time donation given the unprecedented nature of the crisis.”

More than a dozen states, meanwhile, have banned or restricted the use of private funds for election offices. The Wisconsin legislature passed a bill in 2021 prohibiting counties or municipalities from applying for or accepting any private donations for elections, but left room for the Wisconsin Elections Commission to take outside grants so long as the money is distributed statewide on a per capita basis. Evers vetoed it.

In southeastern Wisconsin, however, the Walworth County Board of Supervisors passed its own ban last month, prohibiting the county from accepting donations or grants for election administration from individuals or nongovernmental entities.

Now that he’s left a mark as a political activist in Wisconsin, Stone is back on the campaign trail.

At an event hall near Kenosha this month, Stone addressed about 100 people gathered at a regular meeting of the H.O.T. Government group, a right-leaning Wisconsin grassroots organization that adopted an acronym for the words “honest, open and transparent.” (Stone is the group’s vice president.) A stuffed effigy of a torso with a white foam head hung from the rafters, wearing a shirt labeled “Corrupt Officials.”

Standing before a large American flag, he politely asked people to sign his nominating forms. Republican State Rep. Janel Brandtjen, who chairs the elections committee overseeing Gableman’s investigation and supports the effort to overturn Biden’s Wisconsin victory, jumped up from her seat to lead the crowd in a chant: “Jay Stone! Jay Stone!”

“Jay is the one who filed the complaint in the very beginning,” she told the audience. “Jay is a real hero in what he’s done for Wisconsin.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/donald-trump-boasts-path-reinstatement/

https://urbanmilwaukee.com/**2022/03/**02/the-gableman-conspiracy-circus/

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three and a half hours of conspiracy-laden testimony that included downplaying the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, recorded interviews with sleeping senior citizens and attacks on a number of election officials and organizations, former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman presented the “second interim report” of his partisan review of the 2020 presidential election on Tuesday to the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections.

Gableman, whose review has been widely derided as unprofessional, dangerous to democracy and extremely partisan, recommended that the state Legislature should disband the Wisconsin Elections Commission and decertify the results of the 2020 election — a move that has become a key issue for right-wing gubernatorial candidate Tim Ramthun, but legal experts have said is impossible and unconstitutional.

“At this point, I believe the Legislature oughta take a very hard look at the option of decertification of the 2020 Wisconsin presidential election,” Gableman said.

The review has been operating at the direction of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington) since last year and even though Gableman’s review has gone months past his original deadline without a contract with the Legislature after the initial one expired in December, he insisted that his review will continue, saying “this will not end.”

Gableman’s statement that his work will continue comes even though the Assembly has adjourned for the 2021-22 session. Gableman told Rep. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) that his ability to continue working past the end of the session and without a contract is “complicated.”

Numerous lawsuits, audits, recounts and reviews have repeatedly affirmed that Joe Biden won Wisconsin’s 2020 election. While Gableman was testifying, Democrats and Republicans issued statements disputing his assertions, calling his work a “circus,” an “attack on democracy” and a “fool’s errand.”

“This circus has long surpassed being a mere embarrassment for our state,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a statement. “From the beginning, it has never been a serious or functioning effort, it has lacked public accountability and transparency, and it has been a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, who Gableman repeatedly attacked in his testimony for filing lawsuits against the review over subpoenas issued against election officials, said the testimony is a stain on Wisconsin.

“The Vos-Gableman investigation will long be remembered as a shameful, deeply embarrassing episode for our state Legislature,” Kaul said in a statement. “The Republicans in the Legislature who are responsible for this train wreck have an obligation to our democracy to condemn and end this preposterous fake investigation.”

The condemnation of Gableman’s testimony didn’t just come from Democrats. After Gableman said he believes decertification of the state’s election is a valid avenue for legislators to take, Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna) said that’s an impossible move.

“It would have no practical impact [because] there is no Constitutional way to remove a sitting president other than through impeachment or incapacity,” Steineke tweeted. “Fool’s errand. Focus on the future.”

Vos, who has been attacked from Wisconsin’s right wing for not doing enough to overturn the 2020 election results and said previously that decertification is impossible, praised Gableman’s work.

“I’d like to thank the Office of Special Counsel for their tireless efforts in finding the truth,” Vos said in a statement. “They’ve done a good job at showing there were issues in 2020, and the report is intended to ‘help correct these processes for future elections.’ Unfortunately, we’re experiencing obstruction by ligation, and must first get through the nine separate lawsuits that have been filed to allow us to complete the review.”

Despite his numerous accusations of criminal actions by elections officials across the state, most of Gableman’s allegations were theories that have bounced around Republican circles since the November 2020 election and have been repeatedly debunked by nonpartisan officials. In his hours of testimony, he only focused on a few sections of the 136-page report he filed to the committee just minutes before appearing.

Occasionally turning around to directly address the audience of supporters who came with him, Gableman alleged that members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) had broken the law by sending absentee ballots to nursing homes; that grant money accepted by the state’s five largest cities to assist with running the election amounted to “bribery” and that former adviser to President Barack Obama David Plouffe was involved in interfering in the state’s elections.

“The opinions in the Special Counsel’s latest interim report were fixated on topics that have been thoroughly addressed,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement. “The integrity of the November 2020 election, and of the WEC, has been shown time and time again through court cases and previous investigations.”

As evidence for his claim that senior citizens were taken advantage of in 2020, Gableman showed video clips from a number of interviews his staff had conducted with nursing home residents and their families, who allege that elderly people were forced into voting by facility staff.

This claim, which has been frequently made by Republicans, stems from the allegations of Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the WEC chose to forgo the normal process of sending so-called special voting deputies into residential care facilities to assist with voting because visitors were being prohibited from entering nursing homes to protect residents from the virus. Schmaling has attempted to charge five of the six Wisconsin election commissioners with felony election fraud for not sending the deputies.

In the videos, some of the residents appeared confused and one woman, surrounded by her family, was asleep. The family members were expressing surprise that their relatives were able to vote as attorney Erick Kaardal, a member of Gableman’s staff, asked a series of questions apparently meant to determine if someone is competent enough to vote.

One of the videos includes a clip of a woman saying she was surprised her mother had been voting off and on for the past ten years because she thought being institutionalized meant someone couldn’t vote anymore.

In fact, nursing home residents retain their right to vote even if they are under the guardianship of a relative. The only way for someone to lose their right to vote because of their mental capacity is if they’re declared incompetent by a judge.

“People in nursing homes are not required to complete push-polls to exercise their constitutional right to vote,” Democrat-appointed elections commissioner Ann Jacobs tweeted. “These interrogations by Kardaal are completely irrelevant to whether people have a right to vote. You are allowed to vote for a candidate for any reason you choose.”

Gableman also spent a long portion of his testimony laying out a number of tenuous connections between grants received by municipalities to assist with election costs and former Obama adviser Plouffe as well as billionaire philanthropist George Soros and various organizations aimed at assisting election administration.

Since November 2020, Republicans have highlighted more than $8 million in grant money that Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine received from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), an organization that is partially funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.Gableman repeatedly referred to these cities as the “Zuckerberg Five” even though more than 200 jurisdictions in Wisconsin also received grant money from the group.

Through staff members at CTCL, the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research — which aims to help boost election security — and the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — which is a collaboration between 30 states to help maintain accurate voter lists when people move or die — Gableman alleged a nefarious plot involving Plouffe, Wolfe and CEIR Executive Director David Becker to boost only Democratic turnout.

Gableman was especially focused on “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump” a book published in 2020 by Plouffe that Gableman alleges is a blueprint for stealing the election through private grants and increased use of absentee ballots.

Part of the grant money received by the municipalities was spent on helping with voter registration and absentee ballot requests from people of color, who have historically been prevented by voting through measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation and restrictive voter ID laws. Gableman said he found this suspicious because Black voters typically vote for Democrats and he doesn’t believe this group has ever been disenfranchised.

“They started using a phrase along the lines of ‘we have to target historically disenfranchised populations,’” Gableman said. “Historically, so sometime in the past, disenfranchised, disenfranchised means, you don’t have the right to vote. None of these voters, who are the targets of the Zuckerberg Five cities’ get out the vote campaigns, that I know, were disenfranchised. Everyone has the right to vote.”

“Why the focus, why David Plouffe and the Biden campaign and why did the CTCL money directed to the five cities, why did it focus on African Americans?” he continued. “Because as the Brookings Institute tells us, from November 2020, the headline ‘Black Americans have a strong preference for the Democratic Party.’”

Gableman tied all of this to ERIC — which Wisconsin has been a member of for years because of legislation passed by Republicans and signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker — through Becker, who helped found the organization. In the past, Republicans have said ERIC’s data is so accurate that it must be used to remove people from the state’s list of active voters.

Becker, who previously worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, repeatedly refuted Gableman’s allegations.

“Failing to find any fraud, or any problem with the way [Wisconsin] election officials of both parties facilitated democracy, sadly Gableman now simply resorts to ad hominem attacks and guilt by association (and even that is false),” Becker tweeted. “It’s yet another sad day for American Democracy.”

Later in the hearing, while taking questions from committee members, Gableman lashed out at Democrats who questioned his findings.

Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison) asked Gableman about his connections to Republicans, his previous statements that he believes the election was stolen and if he would eventually release all the documents that have been created as he’s conducted his review, to which Gableman responded by accusing Subeck of impugning his honor.

“You are questioning my integrity, and I must respond,” Gableman said, occasionally addressing her as “Ms. Subeck” instead of using her official title of “Representative.”

“I want to be judged, not on the fact that [Former Republican Gov.] Tommy Thompson appointed me [as a district attorney], even though I was an independent at that time, not a Republican or Democrat. I want to be judged on the quality of my work. And in order to do that, I have to show people what I relied on. If there’s a disconnect, well, then I have no credibility. And then this whole exercise has been pointless. Do I look or sound to you like a man who wants to do a pointless or illegitimate exercise?”

After Subeck tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to get Gableman to say whether or not he’d release all of his documents, the committee’s chair, Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) jumped in.

“I would just like to remind people that this is not a Spanish Inquisition,” Brandtjen said.

Gableman also spent a lot of time criticizing efforts to rein in his sprawling review and conduct oversight on his use of taxpayer funds. Those efforts include lawsuits filed by Kaul and lawyers for the mayors of the five cities he targeted to reduce the scope of Gableman’s subpoenas. Gableman has threatened to throw the mayors of the five cities in jail for failing to sit for private interviews.

In court, an attorney for Gableman stated that the work of the review is more important than the constitutional concerns raised by the subpoenas.

Gableman and Vos have also been fighting open records requests filed by government watchdog American Oversight for the documents created as the review is conducted.

In the report and in his testimony, Gableman said these efforts to shed light on how he’s digging through the state’s elections amount to obstruction.

“Not only has the Wisconsin Attorney General intervened (and lost) in court to block certain subpoenas, and not only have left-wing groups provided support adverse to Wisconsin taxpayers — for instance by providing legal support to government employees seeking to keep their work secret, filing dilatory open records requests, and advancing frivolous complaints before various boards — but the Administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) has explicitly stated to the Chairwoman of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections that she is prohibited by law and by private contract from turning over certain public records,” the report states. “Until these lawsuits are resolved, there appears to be no way to fully vindicate the right of the people of the State of Wisconsin to know how their government is run. Such lawsuits have proved a costly and time-wasting exercise.”

After the hearing, the three Democrats on the committee said that the conspiracy theorists had succeeded in attacking Wisconsin’s democracy.

“Today, conspiracy theorists got exactly what they wanted from the sham investigation overseen by Republican Speaker Robin Vos,” a statement from the Democrats said. “For hours, innuendo and wild accusations took center stage in the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections. Mike Gableman’s assertion that the Legislature should consider decertifying the 2020 election — which nonpartisan attorneys have determined is illegal — represents a direct attack on our democracy. The only people helped by promoting this reckless legal theory are people like former President Trump, who will stop at nothing to undermine faith in the election he lost.”

“Meanwhile, Mike Gableman made clear that he will continue his sham investigation at taxpayer expense, despite not having a written contract extension since 2021 to authorize his activity moving forward,” the statement continued. “Speaker Vos should take responsibility for this unaccountable behavior and make it clear whether or not Mike Gableman actually works for him, what his new deadline is, and how much more taxpayer money will be wasted on this partisan stunt. We must all be clear: Joe Biden won the 2020 Election. Donald Trump lost. It’s far past time for Republicans to move on.”

In conspiracy-laden ‘circus’ Gableman attacks Wisconsin election administration was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner.

More about the 2020 General Election

Trump Calls For Nullification of Wisconsin’s 2020 Election - Henry Redman - Jul 12th, 2022

Legal Fight Over Gableman Probe Keeps Growing - Shawn Johnson - Jun 30th, 2022

Back In the News: Fake Elector Scheme Dogs Ron Johnson - Bruce Murphy - Jun 28th, 2022

Judge Lifts Contempt Order for Speaker Vos - Rich Kremer - Jun 24th, 2022

Gableman’s Office Held in Contempt of Court - Madeline Fox - Jun 10th, 2022

Murphy’s Law: The Bradley Foundation’s Election Deniers - Bruce Murphy - Jun 7th, 2022

The State of Politics: ‘Telling The Truth’ Led to Knudson Resignation - Steven Walters - Jun 6th, 2022

Gableman Election Review $220,500 Over Budget - Henry Redman - Jun 2nd, 2022

Another Judge Rejects Challenge to 2020 Election Grants - Shawn Johnson - Jun 1st, 2022

Gathering To Spread the Big Lie - Henry Redman - May 25th, 2022

Read more about 2020 General Election here

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/lawyer-loses-challenge-judges-ethics-referral-after-failed-election-lawsuit-2022-03-22/

mar 22 2022 reuters

Lawyer loses challenge to judge's ethics referral after failed election lawsuit

By Mike Scarcella

Court says Erick Kaardal's challenge premature

Kaardal's lawsuit for Wisconsin and other voters sought to stop Pence from counting electoral votes

D.C. judge dismissed "baseless" lawsuit

(Reuters) - A Minnesota lawyer on Tuesday lost his bid in a U.S. appeals court to block an attorney ethics inquiry spurred by a federal judge who quickly dismissed his "baseless" and "sweeping" lawsuit attacking the 2020 election.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said attorney Erick Kaardal, a litigator at Minneapolis-based law firm Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson, acted too early to contest the judge's referral of him to the Washington, D.C., federal court's grievance committee. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg's referral did not suggest whether any discipline should be imposed.

The appeals court called the referral "no different from a run-of-the-mill agency order initiating an administrative investigation." D.C. Circuit Judge David Tatel, writing for the unanimous panel, said such an agency order "initiating enforcement proceedings is nonreviewable."

Kaardal declined to comment on Tuesday. His lawyer, Channing Shor of Eccleston & Wolf, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Some lawyers in other cases that contested the 2020 presidential election also have faced ethics questions. A U.S. appeals court last month rejected an attempt from Sidney Powell and other lawyers to pause a trial judge's sanctions order.

The D.C. Circuit panel, which included Circuit Judges Ketanji Brown Jackson and Gregory Katsas, expressed some skepticism of Kaardal's claims at a hearing in December. Jackson, since nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, did not participate in Tuesday's opinion, a common practice for pending nominees.

Kaardal was counsel to the Wisconsin Voters Alliance and other plaintiffs suing then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop him from counting electoral votes that showed Joe Biden had won the race for the White House. Boasberg denied a request to enjoin Pence.

"To call the underlying action in this case ambitious would be an understatement," Tatel wrote in Tuesday's ruling.

The D.C. Circuit's order said "a referral to the committee on grievances neither determines whether an attorney will receive discipline nor what form that discipline may take."

Kaardal still will have a chance to contest any adverse decision from the grievance committee, the court said.

The case is Wisconsin Voters Alliance v. Harris, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, No. 21-5056.

For Erick Kaardal and Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson: Channing Shor and Justin Flint of Eccleston & Wolf

For amicus curiae: Matthew Etchemendy and Jeremy Marwell of Vinson & Elkins

Texas regulators seek punishment for pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell

Appeals court says Sidney Powell can't dodge non-monetary sanctions

Lawyer who sued Pence faces dubious D.C. Circuit panel on ethics matter

https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/blurring-of-lines-private-lawyer-plays-starring-role-in-taxpayer-funded-wisconsin-election-probe/

Blurring of lines': Private lawyer plays starring role in taxpayer-funded Wisconsin election probe

With no contract and no official role, the work of attorney Erick Kaardal of the Thomas More Society dominates the 2020 investigation headed by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman.

Wisconsin Watch

April 27, 2022

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two-story office building in a Milwaukee suburb houses three entities that have led a months-long campaign sowing doubt about Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election.

The gray, indistinct building in Brookfield lists about a dozen occupants, including a marketing company on the first floor, and financial services firms on the second.

But there are three occupants whose names are nowhere to be found: Special Counsel Michael Gableman, attorney Erick Kaardal and the Thomas More Society.

The three, led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Gableman, are collaborating on the $676,000 investigation into alleged election fraud launched by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

Although he lacks a contract or official role in Gableman's taxpayer-funded investigation, Kaardal has become a de facto lead investigator. A Wisconsin Watch analysis shows roughly half of the chapters in Gableman's 136-page interim report are based on Kaardal's work.

Since September, the Minnesota attorney and the conservative Chicago law firm for which he works have subleased office space for about $3,000 a month directly from a company owned by Gableman.

A two-story office building with tinted windows is faced by bushes and leafless trees.]

This Brookfield office building is the headquarters for former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s investigation of the 2020 election. Attorney Erick Kaardal and the Thomas More Society are subleasing office space from Gableman’s company as they assist in the Assembly’s investigation. The building was photographed on April 13, 2022. (Credit: Matt Mencarini / Wisconsin Watch)

An office building interior shows a directory with the title "Executive Center," with fake plants arrayed in different locations of the space.

This is the front lobby of the Brookfield office building, where former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is running the Assembly’s investigation of the 2020 election. Gableman, attorney Erick Kaardal and the Thomas More Society’s names are not listed as occupants on the directory. It was photographed on April 13, 2022. (Credit: Matt Mencarini / Wisconsin Watch)

Kaardal's and Thomas More Society's connections to — and potential influence on — Gableman's investigation stretch beyond 2,100 square feet of office space. As a private attorney, Kaardal also represents people under guardianship orders featured in Gableman's investigation — clients he charges are victims of "voter abuse."

Rep. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, a member of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, said he "absolutely" has concerns about the relationship between Kaardal, the Thomas More Society and Gableman.

Spreitzer also criticized the quality of the information Gableman has released so far, such as the suspiciously high voter turnout rates for nursing homes — claims that media organizations have debunked.

"It's cherry-picked (data) at best, and simply wrong at worst," Spreitzer said.

Mark Spreitzer shakes hands in the Wisconsin Assembly chamber.

Assembly elections committee member Rep. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, says he isconcerned about the role of Erick Kaardal and the Thomas More Society in the taxpayer-funded probe into Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election. He is seen at Gov. Tony Evers' second State of the State address at the State Capitol on Jan. 22, 2020 in Madison. (Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)

Gableman's office did not return a message seeking comment, and neither did representatives for Vos, R-Rochester, or Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, who is suing Gableman and Vos, arguing they lack authority to force officials to participate in the investigation.

Gableman's original contract expired at the end of 2021, but was extended through the end of April 2022. It now appears to be nearing a close. Gableman has said Vos intends to halt his investigation before the end of the month.

'Pro-family' group shifts to elections

For nearly 25 years, the Thomas More Society was best known for filing pro-life and “pro-family” litigation, including representing a California baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding.

But in recent years, Kaardal and the Thomas More Society have become central figures in questioning the validity of the 2020 election — pushing theories that judges, audits and other reviews have rejected.

The society's funding has ballooned as it added election-related litigation to its focus areas. Its financial statement for the 2020 fiscal year, the most recent available, showed $17.4 million in revenue, up from $9.6 million the previous year.

That money has helped Thomas More file lawsuits in multiple states challenging how the 2020 election was administered, with a particular interest in the grant money to local municipalities from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Mark Zuckerberg-funded charity.

A screenshot shows Erick Kaardal speaking in front of a podium in a legislative hearing room, with observers seated in the background.]

Erick Kaardal delivers remarks to members of the Wisconsin Assembly elections committee at the State Capitol in Madison on March 1, 2022. Kaardal and the nonprofit law firm, Thomas More Society, are playing unofficial but central roles in the ongoing investigation into Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election. (Credit: Courtesy of WisEye)

Among Kaardal's other election-related lawsuits is a 2020 case against then-Vice President Mike Pence, Congress and others seeking to stop the Electoral College count that was so filled with "baseless fraud allegations and tenuous legal claims" that the judge filed an ethics referral against him. That matter is still pending.

In March 2022, as Gableman presented the findings in his interim report to the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, he complimented Kaardal and the Thomas More Society, saying they'd done "very substantial and very wonderful work on behalf of the people of this state."

But the tangled relationships raise questions about who Kaardal is really working for: himself and his clients, the Thomas More Society or the state of Wisconsin.

'Unseemly' relationship?

Much of what Gableman released in March repackaged previous work from Kaardal and the Thomas More Society, including video interviews with seven of Kaardal's own clients.

Kaardal told Wisconsin Watch he provided the former justice with information that he gathered while preparing for lawsuits and complaints, but that Gableman didn't pass along anything his team had learned.

Tom Brejcha, Thomas More Society's president, said in an interview that he saw no conflicts of interest with the connections and communications between himself, his law firm and Gableman. And he became angry when pressed to clarify those relationships.

"We worked with him on the investigation," Brejcha said of the connection with Gableman, later adding that "we wanted to know the nature of the investigation and how we could help."

Gableman had shared information with them, he said, but nothing that was confidential.

"I'm sure we've exchanged information about matters of public concern," Brejcha said, adding that he's talked with Gableman "a handful of times but declined” to say how often or when they last spoke.

Peter Breen and Thomas Brejcha stand in a room with bookshelves in the background.]

Attorneys for the Thomas More Society, Peter Breen, vice president and senior counsel, and Thomas Brejcha, president and chief counsel, pose in their Chicago offices on July 10, 2013. The Thomas More Society is playing a central but unofficial role in the investigation into Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election. (Credit: Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

At one point, Brejcha accused Wisconsin Watch of launching an "attack" on Gableman. "I don't care to continue this anymore," he said, and eventually hung up.

Jeff Mandell, a Madison attorney who specializes in election law, said it's an "unseemly" relationship between entities with different goals.

"There's certainly a blurring of lines," he said, "between what's supposed to be an independent government investigation and private, partisan actors."

'Protect the people from the government'

Kaardal has been a lawyer since the early 1990s and, in his own words, has made a career of suing the government.

"My viewpoint is that the most important thing for courts to do is protect the people from the government," he said.

He's filed dozens of lawsuits in state and federal courts — many of them over election administration.

In 2012, Kaardal unsuccessfully challenged Minnesota's same-day voter registration procedure, which Wisconsin also has. That lawsuit also alleged that Minnesota residents who were under guardianship orders and ineligible to vote were able to register and cast ballots, a claim he's made in Wisconsin in recent months in complaints he filed with the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The argument also failed in Minnesota, but Gableman included the allegations in his report and presentation in March.

In 2019, Kaardal represented a group of landlords in Minneapolis and St. Paul in a federal lawsuit that argued ordinances that required them to provide voter registration information to new tenants violated their First Amendment right to not speak.

Kaardal and the landlords won.

'Christian heritage' advocacy, ethics complaint

As the 2020 election neared, Kaardal filed a flurry of lawsuits in multiple states.

He sued over masks mandated for in-person voting in Minnesota, which he lost. He represented Kanye West in his attempts to get on the presidential ballot in Wisconsin, and lost.

And in December 2020, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of plaintiffs including the Wisconsin Voters Alliance — part of a multi-state "election integrity watchdog" group — to prevent Pence and Congress from counting the electoral votes on Jan. 6, arguing that only state legislatures had the authority to certify the election.

The day after the election was certified, Kaardal voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C. But that didn't stop a federal judge from referring him to the Committee on Grievances for potential discipline. The judge called Kaardal's legal theory "somewhere between a willful misreading of the Constitution and fantasy." Kaardal is fighting the referral. He declined to comment on it.

Kaardal also co-authored several books, including a 2013 tome that advocated for preserving "“the Christian cultural heritage" of the United States through immigration policies that would limit the number of people who are not Jewish or Christian to no more than 10% of the population.

A book cover reads "The Rebirth Constitution: A Whole New Constitution for the Freedom Loving People of the United States" with a "Don

In his 2013 book, Erick Kaardal, an attorney for the Thomas More Society, argues for a national immigration policy to limit non-Christians and non-Jews to less than 10% of the U.S. population. Kaardal is playing a central but unofficial role in the election investigation led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. (Credit: Amazon.com)

In an email, Kaardal defended his writing, saying, "The books, if one reads them, stand on their own as an attempt to contribute to current political philosophy."

Thomas More turns to elections

Since the early 1990s, the Thomas More Society — which operates as a tax exempt 501(c)(3), the same nonprofit designation as Wisconsin Watch — has spent much of its time and resources on anti-abortion and self-described family values lawsuits. It is named after St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers among Catholics.

The law firm successfully defended a maternity shelter in Missouri that fought a state mandate to provide insurance coverage for contraception. And during the pandemic, it represented churches that refused to abide by government-issued COVID-19 restrictions, getting victories for some of their clients.

In January, the firm won a $75,000 settlement for a Louisville, Kentucky police officer who was investigated for marching in uniform with protesters outside of an abortion clinic.

A year before the 2020 election, the public interest law firm added "voter integrity" and "voter participation" to its mission statement for the first time. Kaardal told Wisconsin Watch that the group had seen election administration issues had "ripened" over the years and become "politicized."

Mandell, the election law attorney, said despite the society being new to election litigation, "They have certainly come with a vengeance for it in Wisconsin."

Election grants at heart of probe

In his March presentation to the committee, Gableman adopted the society's oft-repeated claim that officials in five Democratic-leaning cities — Green Bay, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Madison and Racine — committed "election bribery" by accepting $8.8 million in grants.

Gableman's charge is that officials in those "Zuckerberg 5" cities used illegal grant money from the Center for Tech and Civic Life — which went to more than 200 Wisconsin municipalities — to facilitate voting. The money went toward training additional election workers, adding secure ballot drop boxes, conducting voter education campaigns and other tasks.

The state election bribery law bans anyone from giving money, employment or anything else of value to entice someone to vote or not vote, or to vote a particular way. Gableman devotes nearly half of his 136-page interim report to these grants.

Michael Gableman speaks in a legislative hearing room with video cameras and their operators in the background.

Michael Gableman delivers remarks to members of the Wisconsin Assembly elections committee at the State Capitol in Madison on March 1, 2022. Roughly half of Gableman's report on his election investigation delivered that day was based on work by attorney Erick Kaardal and the nonprofit Thomas More Society law firm, who have no official role in the taxpayer-funded probe. (Credit: John Hart / Wisconsin State Journal)

Prior to the election, Kaardal filed a federal lawsuit in Wisconsin over the CTCL money, which a judge dismissed. After the election, he filed complaints with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which were also thrown out.

"We can't have third parties using private money to influence cities to do an illegal ... election administration," Kaardal said. "And so that's why we're gonna win."

But so far, that hasn't happened.

He's filed state and federal lawsuits over the CTCL grant money in at least five states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Georgia. Kaardal lost all the lawsuits filed before the election. Some suits Kaardal filed after the election remain pending.

Atiba Ellis, a Marquette University law school professor who specializes in election law, said grants to help municipalities run elections are accepted practice across the country.

"Short of voters getting paid directly out of these grants, it seems difficult for me to make a connection between what the folks who are getting these grants are doing and credible claims or bribery," Ellis said.

He said labeling the grants as election bribery is "a dangerous road to go down" because local governments rely on grant money to carry out all sorts of basic functions.

It's a "disservice to the law," Ellis said, "to suggest fraudulent behavior on the most tenuous evidence."

Spreitzer, the Democratic Assembly member, said he asked the Legislative Council for any case law supporting Gableman's bribery claim. He said there was none.

Kaardal's self-styled competency tests

A second major Kaardal and the Thomas More Society claim that landed in Gableman's report: that nursing home residents who lacked mental capacity to vote had cast absentee votes — a practice they call "voter abuse."

In four cases, Gableman alleged that residents who had been found legally incompetent to vote had cast ballots, which raises questions about the validity of those votes.

But in other cases, Gableman relied on Kaardal's personal assessment to question a voter's competence.

That is not how Wisconsin law works, however. Only a judge in the context of a guardianship proceeding can determine whether a person has the mental capacity to cast a ballot, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Being placed under guardianship on its own does not remove a person's right to vote. And, "state law does not allow for the right to vote to be taken away, even by family members, without such an adjudication," the elections agency said.

Gableman included videos of Kaardal interviewing nursing home residents along with their guardians — who are also Kaardal's clients — in his presentation to the Assembly elections committee in March. He said he got his clients' approval before sharing them.

Kaardal asked about a preferred choice between hypothetical candidates — one who wanted to raise taxes and another who didn't — as well as questions about what happens on Election Day and how a winner is picked. The befuddled residents often stumbled over their answers to Kaardal's sometimes long-winded questions.

A video screenshow shows Erick Kaardal speaking with Sandra Klitzke, seated in a wheelchair, while another person stands next to them, in a room with a television, tables and other furniture.

Erick Kaardal interviews nursing home resident Sandra Klitzke in a screenshot from a WisEye video played at a March 1, 2022 Wisconsin Assembly elections committee hearing. Klitzke's last name is misspelled on the video. (Credit: Courtesy of WisEye)

Gableman described Kaardal's test as "questions that are put out by the elections boards to help determine whether someone has the acuity to be able to make a knowing choice for voting. He's not making these questions up. They're standardized questions to determine if a potential voter has the mental capacity to vote."

But Kaardal described them much differently. He told Wisconsin Watch he found the questions online in a law review or medical journal article. While on the phone with a reporter, Kaardal searched for the article and its questions online, but could not find them.

"I don't even know if I spent the time saving it, but I should have," he said. "... I found it online. If I searched a little bit more I could find it. But if you just put in 'competency assessment test for voting,' I think you'll end up finding where I found it.”

The top Google search results for "competency assessment test for voting" include a Wikipedia article describing literacy tests that some jurisdictions used to disenfranchise Black voters for a long stretch of American history. Such tests have been banned for more than 50 years, since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

'Their voting rights must be upheld'

Barbara Beckert, of the advocacy group Disability Rights Wisconsin, picked apart Kaardal's self-styled competency examination during the Wisconsin Elections Commission meeting in March.

"Wisconsin does not require or allow voting tests that people must pass in order to vote — nor should they," Beckert said. "No voter in Wisconsin has ever (been) asked this type of question, and voters are never asked to explain why they vote for a particular candidate."

Federal law requires Medicaid-certified long term care facilities to support residents who want to vote, she said, "And we're concerned that as a result of these investigations, care facility staff are now afraid to assist residents with voting."

Beckert added that "It's discriminatory and unconscionable to disenfranchise Wisconsin citizens simply because they live in a care facility. Their voting rights must be upheld."

After Gableman showed the videos during the March 1 hearing, Spreitzer said he submitted an open records request for the full, unedited version of the interviews. He was told Gableman didn't have them — raising yet more questions, Spreitzer said, about the role of Kaardal and the Thomas More Society in the investigation.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

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julia c

political observers on Friday were alarmed by a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of drop boxes for absentee election ballots—not just because the decision will make it harder for many residents to vote, but also because the high court's right-wing majority openly embraced in its ruling former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

In the 4-3 decision, the court's conservative justices argued that the use of ballot drop boxes is unlawful because the boxes are not explicitly mentioned in the state's laws, which allow for absentee ballots to be returned to a municipal clerk.

The return of a ballot "does not mean nor has it been historically understood to mean delivery to an unattended ballot drop box," wrote Justice Rebecca Bradley in the majority opinion.

Bradley continued that the state's longtime use of hundreds of drop boxes "directly" harmed Wisconsin voters in 2020, when President Joe Biden won the state by about 20,000 votes, beating former President Donald Trump.

Trump and his allies took aim at the drop boxes after the election, saying their use is not explicitly allowed under state law and filing a number of lawsuits.

Bradley suggested that anyone who used a drop box for an absentee ballot did not qualify as a "lawful" voter and said their method of voting "weakens the people's faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will."

"The Wisconsin voters, and all lawful voters, are injured when the institution charged with administering Wisconsin elections does not follow the law, leaving the results in question," shewrote, adding that "throughout history, tyrants have claimed electoral victory via elections conducted in violation of governing law" and comparing Biden's win to that of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern called the language used in Bradley's opinion "outrageously irresponsible."

With the ruling, said journalist John Nichols, the right-wing majority "is not acting as a court. It's a political cabal with a partisan agenda."

The Wisconsin Democrats called the ruling "a slap in the face to democracy itself" and warned that the absence of ballot drop boxes that many voters have used for years will "impact people with disabilities, seniors, people living in rural communities, people with limited means, few transport options, and inflexible work schedules, who are disproportionately young people and people of color."

"For decades throughout Wisconsin, municipal clerks have used drop boxes to collect documents like tax returns, municipal bills—and absentee ballots," said Ben Wikler, chair of the state Democratic Party. "It's always been safe, secure, and convenient. Drop box use expanded dramatically in 2020, in red and blue areas alike."

"But then after the GOP lost Wisconsin in 2020, the GOP decided that the issue wasn't that they couldn't convince voters to support them—it was that people who didn't support them were able to vote," he added.

The three justices who dissented in the ruling denounced Bradley's claims of rampant illegal voting in 2020 as "nonsense."

"There is no evidence at all in this record that the use of drop boxes fosters voter fraud of any kind," they wrote. "None... But concerns about drop boxes alone don't fuel the fire questioning election integrity. Rather, the kindling is primarily provided by voter suppression efforts and the constant drumbeat of unsubstantiated rhetoric in opinions like this one, not actual voter fraud."

The court's right-wing justices also ruled in November that a new redistricting plan should make the least amount of changes possible to maps drawn by the Republican-led Legislature in 2011, ensuring a map that will favor GOP majorities in Wisconsin for at least another decade.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is also overseeing an investigation into the 2020 election and hassuggested that state lawmakers should try to decertify the results.

Friday's ruling came "from what might be the most rogue and vehemently anti-democratic state court in the nation," saidDaniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief of Bolts.

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-didnt-mention-his-guest-trying-decertify-2020-election-wisconsin

March 7, Tucker Carlson hosted Michael Gableman, a special counsel hired by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature, to highlight an interim report by Gableman about the 2020 election. The segment was touted by a spokesperson for Donald Trump. But it left out some crucial details. [vid]

CARLSON (HOST): So you learn a lot about what the people in charge care about by what they won't allow you to say. And at the very top of the list of things you're not allowed to say, can literally get you silenced and censored for saying, is that there was voter fraud in the last election. But the fact is there was and the deeper you dig, the more of it you find.

The Wisconsin Office of Special Counsel has just released its second report on the subject, and it's pretty unbelievable. The report found, among other things, quote 100 percent voting rates in many nursing homes in Brown, Dane, Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Racine counties. Several of these nursing home residents that had voted had been previously declared incompetent. Michael Gabelman is the special counsel to the Wisconsin Assembly, he is also a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. By the way, we will be speaking to Mr. Gableman at much greater length at Tucker Carlson Today. But we wanted to preview the conversation right now. Mr. Gableman, thanks so much for coming on. Now, I – the report is, in my opinion, pretty shocking. But just give us give us the overview of what you found.

MICHAEL GABLEMAN (SPECIAL COUNSEL TO THE WISCONSIN ASSEMBLY): Tucker, the overview relates right back to what you said in your opening segment, the relatively unremarkable observation that all lives are equal. Well, it should be relatively – It should be also unremarkable to say that all votes in a democracy are equal. But that wasn't the case in Wisconsin in November 2020. We had a wave of massive election bribery in which government officials in the five Zuckerberg-sponsored cities participated, as well as what you related when you introduced your audience to me, which is the government-sponsored elder abuse, all to wring out votes from people who frankly were victimized by the very people at the Wisconsin Elections Commission who are supposed to keep our voters safe.

CARLSON: I'm a little confused. So, Mark Zuckerberg is a tech billionaire. He's not a government official. He has no legal or constitutional right to control our elections. But it sounds like he had a great deal of control over the elections in Wisconsin.

GABLEMAN: He had a great deal. He adopted a plan by a guy who became his employee named David Plouffe, who wrote the unsubtlely-titled book A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump. And in Nevada, on November 11, 2016, David Plouffe did a postmortem on the Hillary Clinton campaign failure to win. And he said the two big mistakes that the Hillary Clinton campaign made were failing to target cities like Milwaukee and failing to drive out the numbers of the African-American vote. And so Mark Zuckerberg has $330 million dollars that he's going to spend to defeat Donald Trump, and he puts David Plouffe's lessons in the of the 2016 campaign into operation in Wisconsin. And now we are seeing a complete cover-up and obstruction by the very so-called public servants who ran this election, who should have been in charge, but who delegated it out to Mark Zuckerberg's agents and virtually employees. We had one guy, Michael Spitzer Rubenstein, a lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, who was running the election site on Election Day in the city of Green Bay. One of our five largest cities, also one of the five cities to receive the Zuckerberg money – $8.8 million dollars between the five.

CARLSON: That's just it's all beyond belief, and you'd think that people who wanted to defend democracy would be outraged, but of course, they're in favor of it. Michael, this report, and again, we haven't always highlighted voter fraud on this show, but this report proves it. It's horrifying and really look forward to speaking to you at much greater length on Tucker Carlson Today.

Here’s some of what Carlson left out.

To start with, neither Carlson nor Gableman mentioned that Gableman has called for decertifying Wisconsin’s 2020 election, even though that’s not legally possible, according to lawyers for the legislature. That’s a fairly large omission right from the jump, and it gets worse.

Neither Carlson nor Gableman disclosed that Gableman had previously appeared at a Trump rally.

Gableman’s report, his presentation to the Wisconsin assembly, and much of his segment with Carlson were based on a conspiracy theory about Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s private donations to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which helped over 2,500 jurisdictions across the country hold an election during the pandemic.

As NPR reported back in 2020, “The money arrived as historically underfunded election department budgets were sapped from unforeseen purchases during the primaries and were forced to spend money on election workers, postage and printing for the increasing number of voters who wanted to vote by mail.” The NPR report even broke down how some Wisconsin jurisdictions used the money.

Conspiracy theories have swirled in right-wing circles about the grants since the election, but as NPR noted, “An APM Reports analysis of voter registration and voter turnout in three of the five key swing states shows the grant funding had no clear impact on who turned out to vote.” The Associated Press also reported that three lawsuits arguing that the funding was illegal under state law were all rejected.

Sarah Mimms at BuzzFeed News dove into Gableman’s criticism of how the state handled senior citizen voting; he claimed a decision not to send voting assistants into nursing homes meant mentally unfit residents cast ballots. She noted that Gableman's team interviewed nursing home residents about how elections work “apparently as a test of their capacity to have voted,” but that a Democratic legislator at the presentation noted that only a judge can take away a person's right to vote.

Mimms also noted that Gableman’s report asked nursing home residents “whether they would support a hypothetical candidate for office who wanted to raise taxes to create government health insurance, apparently as a test of their capacity to have voted.” And she wrote that a Democrat pointed out to Gableman at the hearing that only a judge can prevent a person from voting.

The AP also noted in a fact check that the history behind the nursing home decision was far more complicated than Gableman let on:

State law does require local election clerks to send so-called special voting deputies to nursing homes to give residents an opportunity to vote. After trying to make two visits, the deputies can mail absentee ballots to the residents instead.

But early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Wisconsin Elections Commission made its decision, the state was under a safer-at-home order and nursing homes were severely limiting who could come into their facilities, often not even allowing immediate family members inside.

The elections commission, split evenly among Republicans and Democrats, in March 2020 voted unanimously that poll workers could not be sent into nursing homes. The commission voted 5-1 in two follow-up votes extending the order through the November 2020 election before rescinding it in March 2021. Instead of sending in voting deputies, the commission directed clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing home residents who had requested them.

State election commissioners have defended their move, saying they were trying to ensure nursing home residents could vote by sending absentee ballots instead of voting assistants who may not have been allowed to enter.

Mimms also noted that Gableman struggled to explain why, if there was as much fraud as he suggests, Trump did so much worse than other Republicans on the ballot.

And she highlighted one detail that might explain why Gableman is interested in a media tour right now: His contract may be up.

Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, a Republican who is retiring at the end of the year, tweeted Tuesday that he will “do everything possible to stop any effort, to put politicians in charge of deciding who wins or loses elections.” Speaker Robin Vos, who hired Gableman, did not respond to a request for comment.

When Vos first started the 2020 election investigation, under intense pressure from Trump and his supporters, he insisted that its focus wasn’t on trying to undo the 2020 election, but on providing a rationale for passing election reforms through the legislature this year. Gableman’s report, however, came too late for that. As Democratic Rep. Mark Spreitzer noted during the hearing, Vos passed a few election-related bills last week — which would not survive a veto from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — and the Assembly is unlikely to meet again this session.

Gableman told legislators Tuesday that he is planning to continue his investigation, but that the status of his contract with Vos is “complicated” and they are “going back and forth on the terms and the scope of the continued contract.” Vos did not respond to a request for comment on the contract.

“I believe that I do have a continuing contract through the rendering of services,” Gableman said. “Others take the position that my authority ran out at the end of December of ‘21."

This segment is indistinguishable from the right-wing media segments that served as a pretext for the January 6 insurrection. We’re more than a year past that awful day, and Fox News is still throwing gasoline on American democracy. It’s only going to get worse.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/01/20/robin-vos-strips-vocal-denier-2020-election-outcome-staffer/6591998001/

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Assembly Speaker Robin Vos disciplines GOP lawmaker who is the most vocal denier of 2020 election outcome

Molly Beck

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Rep. Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport, listens to testimony.]

MADISON – The Republican leader of the state Assembly on Thursday placed sanctions on one of his members who has for more than a year falsely claimed former President Trump won the 2020 election in Wisconsin and has proposed legislation to pull back Wisconsin's electoral votes, which is impossible.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos stripped Rep. Timothy Ramthun of Campbellsport of his only staffer after Ramthun falsely accused Vos of signing a deal with attorneys for former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to authorize ballot drop boxes, according to Vos's office.

Vos told reporters Thursday that no one agrees with Ramthun’s claim that Wisconsin can revoke the 10 electoral votes it delivered to President Joe Biden more than a year ago. He said an election review he authorized last summer is aimed at changing how future elections are conducted.

“There are some who believe — there's one who believes — that we somehow have the right (to withdraw electoral votes) even though every lawyer that we have worked with in Wisconsin says we cannot undo the 2020 elections, “ Vos said. “You know, Rep. Ramthun has that belief. That’s his right. But I think that what we're focusing on is not the past. We are looking at the past to learn from it.”

Ramthun did not return a phone call from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

More:A who's who guide to the Republican review of Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election]

Intra-party tension exposed

The move underscores the tension between Vos and members of his caucus who do not believe Vos is doing enough to litigate the outcome of the 2020 election, despite the ongoing taxpayer-funded election review Vos authorized in 2021.

It sparked a backlash from some within a contingent in the Wisconsin Republican base who believe Vos, who is a conservative Republican, is not conservative enough.

More:Wisconsin Republican leader Robin Vos is caught in the middle over the election probe as he faces criticism from the left and right]

Jonathan Wichmman, a political newcomer running for the Republican nomination for governor, called for Vos to resign and called the move to discipline Ramthun "a declaration of war."

"Robin Vos is doing this as a power play to keep every other Assembly rep from going against him," Wichmann said in an interview with Justin Schmidtka, host of the Badger State Resistance Podcast. "We need to clean house."

Jonathan Wichmann, a 2022 candidate for Wisconsin governor

In response, Vos downplayed the number of people who support Wichmann.

“Mr. Wichmann, I think he's probably — what? — at one percent,” Vos told reporters. “He has the right to say whatever he wants, but I will stand with my colleagues. I think I'm in pretty good shape. I think most people appreciate what we're doing and that we need to focus on the future, not on trying to decertify the election and focus on the past.”

Assembly Republican leaders released a statement Thursday backing Vos and denouncing Ramthun's theories as misinformation.

"The word 'misinformation' is too often used in today’s political discourse as a way to completely discount your opponent’s position. However, adhering to the true sense of the word, Rep. Ramthun and his staffer are spreading misinformation," the leaders said.

Ramthun proposed a resolution on Tuesday that would "reclaim" the state's 10 Wisconsin electoral votes, which the Legislature's own attorneys has determined to be impossible. In a taped statement, Ramthun also called on the public to demand lawmakers take action on the resolution.

Ramthun has released a series of videos taped from his legislative office in the state Capitol detailing theories about the 2020 election and how, in his view, it was incorrectly called for Biden. His staffer Tristan Johannes produced the videos and at times appeared in them.

More: Wisconsin Republican invokes the QAnon theme as he seeks private funding for an Arizona-style election audit]

Ramthun has long called for lawmakers to move to overturn the election results despite there being no mechanism to do so and has largely been ignored by legislative leaders, with Vos once dismissing it as a "talking point of the far left and far right."

On Tuesday, Vos also publicly questioned the authority members of his own caucus who lead the Assembly's elections committee. He told reporters that committee chairwoman Rep. Janel Brandtjen of Menomonee Falls did not have power to sign a contract with a lawyer who is helping her fight a lawsuit over the Assembly's partisan review of the 2020 election.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, left, and Rep. Janel Brandtjen, right.]

“He has no contract with the Legislature,” Vos said of the attorney. “The committee can't sign one. … There's no contract.”

Vos last summer hired former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to review the presidential election at a cost of $676,000 to taxpayers on behalf of Assembly Republicans.

Recounts and court rulings found Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by nearly 21,000 votes in Wisconsin. Independent reviews have found no signs of widespread voter fraud.

Ramthun has criticized the Gableman review and called on Vos and Assembly leadership to do more but has been rebuffed before.

When Ramthun issued a similar proposal in November to pull back electoral votes, Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke said Ramthun's proposal was not based in law.

"I’ve always encouraged our members to have a full understanding of the law before putting out bills or resolutions," he said in a statement at the time.

Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.

Contact Molly Beck at molly.beck@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MollyBeck.

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'No, shame on you!' Sparks fly at Wisconsin hearing after Dem exposes Trump ties to election investigation

David Edwards and Raw Story December 02, 2021

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who is leading a partisan investigation into the 2020 election, clashed with state Rep. Mark Spreitzer (D) on Wednesday.

At a hearing before the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, Spreitzer challenged Gableman for hiring investigators with a history of working to overturn the 2020 election. Gableman has been previously criticized over the "shamefully biased" investigation.

"It seems that you are firmly in the lane of suggesting that the outcome of the election should have been overturned," Spreitzer pointed out.

"I'm going to stop you right there, Mr. Spreitzer!" Gableman interrupted. "I'm not going to let you put words in my mouth for your cheap political advancement."

"Stop!" the former justice screamed. "I have not said anything about overturning any election! Stop making things up, Mark."

"Then why hire [Ron Heuer]?" Spreitzer wondered.

"Shame on you!" Gableman shouted.

"Shame on you!" Spreitzer shot back. "Why have you hired Mr. Heuer who tried to overturn the will of the people of Wisconsin?"

"I'll get to Ron Heuer in a second," Gableman stated.

"I'd like you to get to him now," Spreitzer pressed.

"I listened to you. You're going to listen to me,"Gableman grumbled before saying the election may have been "rigged."

Spreitzer continued to press: "If you wanted this investigation to have the appearance of legitimacy, if you wanted people to withhold judgment and wait for your final report and then to have confidence in that final report, shouldn't you have avoided hiring people who sued to try to change the outcome of the past election? Shouldn't you have avoided hiring people with direct ties to the Trump Organization and, frankly, shouldn't this investigation be headed up by somebody other than you?"

The Republican committee chair then cut off Spreitzer by accusing him of "disparaging" Gableman.

Watch the video below.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/guy-running-wisconsins-fake-election-audit-admits-he-doesnt-know-how-elections-work

no lnx

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-trump-official-working-on-wisconsin-election-probe/2021/09/15/

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Democracy Dies in Darkness

Politics

Former Trump official working on Wisconsin election probe

By Scott Bauer?|?AP

September 15, 2021

MADISON, Wis. — A Republican attorney who worked in former President Donald Trump’s administration and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen in Wisconsin appears to have been hired to help with the taxpayer-funded investigation into how the election was run.

Andrew Kloster was listed as the author of a letter signed by lead investigator Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, sent in an email to county election clerks this week. Gableman has a budget of nearly $680,000 to hire whomever he wants to assist with the investigation, which was ordered by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

Gableman and Kloster did not immediately return messages Tuesday or Wednesday asking about Kloster’s role in the investigation.

Kloster worked as an observer for the Wisconsin Republican Party on election night and was accused of yelling at election workers and police in Green Bay, a claim he disputes.

Kloster’s name showed up as the author of a pdf attachment to an email sent Monday to election clerks and signed by Gableman. That email, sent under the name “john delta,” asked clerks to retain election data, which state and federal law already requires them to do.

Clerks told The Associated Press that the email raised security concerns because it had an attachment and came from a Gmail address rather than a state government account. It was flagged as junk mail in at least eight counties.

Shortly after being contacted for comment Tuesday, Kloster deleted nearly all of the tweets on his Twitter account, where he describes himself as an “ecumenical rightist.”

Gableman’s investigation has already drawn bipartisan criticism and news of Kloster’s involvement was likely to increase skepticism about the legitimacy and fairness of the probe.

Gableman has not announced the names of anyone he has hired for the investigation or submitted any invoices for expenses. Vos has said the probe would be independent and resolve any questions about whether anything irregular or illegal occurred in the election.

Republicans have questioned numerous aspects of the 2020 election, but produced no evidence of widespread fraud. President Joe Biden’s win over Trump by just under 21,000 votes has also withstood recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties and numerous state and federal lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters. To date, only two people out of 3.3 million votes cast have been charged with election fraud.

Kloster, who has deep conservative roots, has been outspoken proponent of Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him.

Gableman also told Trump supporters in November that he thought the election had been stolen. After he was hired as special counsel, Gableman said he was committed to conducting an evidence-based investigation that will thoroughly examine the election and ensure that people are confident their vote counts.

Kloster is active with the Federalist Society.A biography on its website says that he has a “long tenure in the conservative legal movement, at the Scalia Law School, the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and elsewhere.”

Kloster served in the Trump administration as deputy general counsel at the Office of Personnel Management and associate director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. In January, just before Trump left office, Kloster was appointed to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States.

After his work observing the election in Wisconsin, Kloster submitted an affidavit making unsubstantiated claims about wrongdoing in Brown County and in April published a blog post where he said, without evidence, “the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square. No use complaining.”

Amaad Rivera-Wagner, who works as a community liaison in Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich’s office, described a confrontation with Kloster on election night in an email he sent to the city’s attorney in mid-November.

Rivera-Wagner said Kloster verbally accosted him, screamed at election workers who were counting ballots, accused Rivera-Wagner of not working for the city and yelled at police.

“I then turned to him and said ‘Sir, I work for the city and I am talking to Green Bay Police Officers, I need you stop following us,’” according to Rivera-Wagner’s email. “I asked the police to ask him to stop following us.”

Other poll workers gave similar accounts in sworn affidavits.

In his statement, Kloster gives a different version of events, saying Green Bay police were called after he was asking questions of county election officials.

“At some point, I was surrounded by City of Green Bay police and was prevented from observing,” Kloster wrote.

Vos, who hired Gableman to run the investigation, did not immediately return a message Wednesday asking about the apparent hiring of Kloster. Vos consulted with Trump about the probe, promising to give the former president regular updates.

Separately, Republicans have authorized an investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, which is expected to be done this fall. A handful of Republicans, including the Assembly elections committee chairwoman, are pushing for a broader review similar to the much-derided effort in Arizona led by Cyber Ninjas, a small cybersecurity firm based in Florida picked to lead the review.

former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman sat down for his first television interview on his super-sized role in the election investigation since Speaker Robin Vos upgraded him to “special counsel” giving him the power to hire and have free rein in determining what the “Arizona-style audit” he will oversee actually does.

However, in response to repeated questions by the tenacious Up Front host Adrienne Pedersen, he never answered what the investigation will be doing on a daily basis or what evidence there is that it is needed.

During the course of :{the interview:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: he claimed it would be nonpartisan and said he is special counsel on behalf of the “entire Legislature,” despite the fact that only Republicans have challenged the validity of the election. He stated that he said he had spoken with “everyone,” elected and not, although in response to a later question he admitted he had not talked to a single Democrat. Adding to the partisan nature of his investigation, his hiring was announced at the Republican State Convention after former president Donald Trump criticized legislative Republicans for not doing enough to expose “fraud.”

He also had to justify and parse his statements from when he was speaking at a Stop the Steal pro-Trump rally where he mentioned a “stolen election.”

Gableman was frequently criticized while on the Supreme Court for failing to recuse himself from cases involving his big campaign donors and ruling on their behalf. But in this investigation, he said he will shun the powerful on behalf of the “common, average” person. “I’ve been an elected official for over 20 years. I’m familiar with how the process works. The rich and powerful do not need any more assurance that their voices will be heard.”

Gableman said he accepted his current role for the public, and not for the $44,000 his first contract paid him for several months of work, a timeline and sum which now will be longer and larger. He also said that as a special prosecutor he has been given “sole discretion” over the scope of the investigation and whom to hire.

:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;display:inline-block;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-rendering:auto"):}:

I said, if the Legislature gives me the tools I need, there will be no question about who’s running this investigation. I’m not running for anything. I don’t need money, I’m not in it for money. I’ve dedicated my career — I’ve dedicated every ounce of my professional life — to the service of the people of this state. I believe that. … Others don’t have it. But I couldn’t motivate myself to work for anything really, other than what I view as the public good. This is one more step.”

Despite the fact that the investigation will be funded by taxpayers, he said it would be conducted in secret until he unveils the report when it is done: “While the investigation is live, it’s going to be extremely confidential.”

He also slammed the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Mark Zuckerberg’s election grants, the use of absentee voting and he expressed distrust for the process of in-person voting too: “Before I began this process 28 days ago, I frankly had no idea what happened to my paper ballot once I put it in the machine at my polling place on Election Day. And I remember thinking on Election Day, as I have in many election days past, that I’m putting in my paper ballot. I’m putting my trust in the system. And really, I’m left with, sort of, the rather thin comfort of hoping for the best.”

Gableman revealed he had a personal beef with the workers at Central Count in Milwaukee, where he said he spent 24 hours last November, and within the first hour noticed that “the people running that place were not following the rules.” His concern was that as an observer he felt he was being kept too far away from the workers.

“I merely asked, I said, ‘Gee, I think the law says that I’m allowed to be about six feet away.’ And in response, one of the intermediary supervisors, bigger than I am, younger, stronger than I am … he charges me. And he starts telling me that I’m causing a disruption, and that he’s going to call the police. And he winds up and I say, ‘I’m merely asking a question.’” Eventually someone in charge asked Gableman to step outside to cool down for a bit. He added, “Yes, that did raise doubts in my mind about whether all the rules and all the laws were being followed.”

While he would not answer a number of questions, he was able to identify his mission: “My duty is to answer the question, ‘Is the American experiment over?’ If our votes don’t count, the American experiment is concluded and it has failed.”

no lnx

The organized takeover of Wisconsin courts

How big money has eroded a core democratic institution

Ruth Conniff

RUTH CONNIFF

JULY 29, 2021

It barely rated a mention in the news when, on June 28, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued an order relieving Court of Appeals Chief Judge Lisa Neubauer of her leadership duties.

Neubauer ran for the Supreme Court in 2019 with the support of Democrats and progressives, in an election won by a razor-thin margin by conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn.

The bland-sounding order ending her tenure as chief judge made it seem as though, since Neubauer’s second term had expired, after six years of service, replacing her was a routine matter. The new chief judge, William Brash, will start on August 1, the Court announced.

But, in an email objecting to Neubauer’s removal, Justices Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Frank Dallet and Jill Karofsky pointed out that “never before has this court limited the number of terms that can be served as Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals.”

Nuebauer’s predecessor served eight years as chief, and each of the two chief judges before him served nine years, the justices added in their email. They also objected to “the timing and lack of process employed by a majority of this court in the appointment process” and said they had not had an opportunity to weigh in.

“It sort of smells like retribution, doesn’t it?” says a source close to the Court.

For the general public, it wasn’t a very big story. Most people didn’t even know there is such a thing as an appeals court chief judge. It’s not a particularly powerful position; the chief mainly deals with handling the court’s budget and other administrative matters.

It's not how we want democratic institutions to work. It’s a little Banana Republic-y.

– Attorney Jeffrey Mandell

But from the point of view of some legal experts, Neubauer’s removal was a bad sign — part of an insidious pattern of politicization of Wisconsin’s courts.

Lawyers and other judges describe Neubauer as hardworking, courteous and an effective and efficient chief judge. Her removal raises questions about the way the courts are run, says Jeffrey Mandell, a Wisconsin attorney and founder of the progressive firm Law Forward. Mandell has never appeared before Neubauer or her appointed successor, Brash, and says he has no reason to doubt that Brash will do a good job as chief judge. Still, he says, “It does start to look less like a policy decision and more like some sort of personal issue, which is not how we want democratic institutions to work. It’s a little Banana Republic-y.”

Mandell sees Neubauer’s demotion as part of a pattern of lack of transparency that includes the court’s failure to set clear rules of recusal when justices have conflicts of interest, and its move to stop holding public meetings on administrative matters, including ethics and recusal, shrouding the court’s business in secrecy.

Banana Republic-y is also a good description of Justice Rebecca Bradley, who compared Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order during the pandemic to the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. She also recently diagnosed her colleagues with “‘hoplophobia’ — i.e. an irrational fear of guns,” after they sanctioned a Winnebago Co. judge who pulled a loaded Glock pistol out from under his robes during a court hearing.

How did we get here?

The court has never resolved — or recovered from — the embarrassing 2011 incident in which then-Justice David Prosser was accused of trying to choke his colleague Ann Walsh Bradley in her office during a dispute about Wisconsin’s epic battle over collective bargaining rights. That sordid affair came to symbolize the decline of our state’s democratic institutions.

But the erosion of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s reputation goes back at least to 2008, when Michael Gableman defeated Wisconsin’s first African American supreme court justice, Luis Butler, in a campaign that made national news for its sheer ugliness— Gableman ran misleading Willie Horton-style ads against Butler — and for the flood of out-of-state money that poured into the race. Outside groups spent $4.8 million — a record that was not broken until this year.

The ideological makeup of the court flipped to a 4-3 conservative majority when Gableman, who had the backing ofrightwing and pro-corporate groups, replaced Butler.

Gableman refused to recuse himself from cases involving his campaign contributorsand helped usher in an era of ethical laxness on the court. He and his colleagues worked to undermine the late, distinguished Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, who was pushed out as chief, her tenure ended prematurely by a referendum put forward by Republicans that allowed the justices to elect their own chief instead of appointing the chief based on seniority. Conservatives on the court chose Patience Roggensack as their new chief.

Nobody is seeing the urgency because it’s a lot of small potatoes stuff. But it still adds up to a larger, disturbing picture.

– Retired Dane County Judge Richard Niess

A few years later, the same justices chose toname the state law library after Prosser(who once made the news when he called Abrahamson a “bitch” and said he would “destroy” her) — not the late Abrahamson, who, unlike Prosser, was considered for the U.S. Supreme Court and widely regarded as one of the country’s great legal minds.

“A lot of it is inside baseball,” retired Dane County Circuit Court Judge Richard Niess says of the way the current court conducts its business. “Nobody is seeing the urgency because it’s a lot of small potatoes stuff. But it still adds up to a larger, disturbing picture.”

That larger picture is a push to remake Wisconsin courts by moneyed interests. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker helped that effort along when he appointed three Supreme Court justices who were members of the Federalist Society — Daniel Kelly, Rebecca Bradley and Brian Hagedorn. The Federalist Society is arguably the most powerful legal organization in the country, made up of conservative and libertarian lawyers and formed in the early 1980s to fight “liberal orthodoxy,” and, according to its homepage, dedicated to “reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law.” The group has chapters of law school students, faculty and practicing lawyers around the country and deep ties to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is also part of a nationwide network aiming to create more conservative, pro-corporate courts that has poured money into Wisconsin. “All of this is the national scene writ on a smaller stage,” says Niess.

In 2016, Craig Mastantuono, president of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy’s Milwaukee chapter, told the Wisconsin State Journal that the Federalist Society is engaged in “an organized takeover” of state and federal judiciaries. The effect, he said, is that big business and the wealthy will benefit from decision making in the courts.

Controversy around the Federalist Society’s influence in Wisconsin erupted in 2018, when Brian Hagedorn, then still an the appeals court judge, sent an email to judges around the state encouraging them to attend a Federalist Society conference and indicating that mileage and meals would be reimbursed by the state as well as offering continuing legal education credits to lawyers who attended.

Fifteen Wisconsin judges wrote to Hagedorn and the state’s judicial education committee in protest. Niess was among them.

Niess also sees Chief Justice Patience Roggesack’s pilot program in Dane County to create a separate, business court as part of a dangerous rightward drift.“Special business interests now collaborate with our Chief Justice to hand pick those judges they want to decide their cases,” he wrote in an email to local lawyers. “The Dane County Circuit Court will now be required to implement a two-tiered system of justice; one for the privileged few and one for the rest of us.”

Mandell takes a more sympathetic view of the concept of the business court, saying he understands the logic for his business clients of separating forums for different types of lawsuits. Still, he agrees with Niess about a general erosion of democracy in Wisconsin courts.

The power of a shadowy network of rightwing groups working against the public interest is evident in the coordinated effort to undermine public health orders during the pandemic by taking cases against them to the Supreme Court.

AJL is actively working to track and support right-wing legal challenges to upend COVID-19 health restrictions, fight workers’ rights to unionize, and coordinate legal strategies

– Center for Media and Democracy

Earlier this year, the Center for Media and Democracy reported on a new rightwing legal center called American Juris Linkthat is “actively working to track and support right-wing legal challenges to upend COVID-19 health restrictions, fight workers’ rights to unionize, and coordinate legal strategies”

The group was “incubated by the State Policy Network” — a network of rightwing think tanks in all 50 states — CMD reported. Its founder and president, Carrie Ann Donnell, is the director of the Federalist Society’s pro-bono center.

The Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation provided American Juris Link with $100,000 in start-up funds in 2020, and CMD identified the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) among the recipients of the group’s assistance.

Not only does the Bradley-financed Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty continually file lawsuits seeking to champion rightwing interests in the courts, a parallel effort, funded by the same group of allies that supports WILL, is transforming those courts into a friendlier forum for such lawsuits.

The tool for transforming the courts is money. As the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s former director Mike McCabe pointed out back in 2008, after the Gableman race opened the floodgates to cash in state court races, buying state supreme court seats is a relative bargain, compared with congressional races. And much of the business that concerns corporations, including environmental regulations and labor protections, happens at the state level.

Thus, the Republican State Leadership Committee poured more than $1.2 million into last-minute ads to help Hagedorn beat Neubauer by less than 1% of the vote in 2019. The Republican State Leadership Committee also spent heavily to help elect Rebecca Bradley.

“Wisconsin is not the only state where RSLC is flexing its multi-million-dollar muscle to place corporate-friendly or right-wing judges on state courts in order to advance its funders’ interest,” CMD’s Lisa Graves writes, reeling off spending on court races in Arkansas, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

Predictably, in recent years the influx of outside money has been making Wisconsin judicial races more and more expensive, according to data collected by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Candidates and outside special interest groups spent a record-shattering $10 million in the last Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April 2020, the Democracy Campaign reported.

And it has become an arms race, with money pouring in on both sides.

Top outside spenders in the latest Supreme Court race were A Better Wisconsin Together Political fund, which spent $1.87 million, mostly on ads supporting Karofsky, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, which spent $1.1 million to help Walker appointee Daniel Kelly (mostly with anti-Karofsky ads), the Republican State Leadership Committee, which spent $897,499 on Kelly, and Americans for Prosperity, which spent $479,463 on Kelly.

Karofsky, who won, set an all-time record for spending by an individual candidate at $2.7 million. And there is no end in sight.

“The 2023 election is absolutely critical,” says Neiss. “A lot of outstate money will come in on both sides.”

As a judge, I was not at liberty to freely comment on these disturbing trends without the potential for retribution from the Court

– Retired Dane County Judge Richard Niess

Niess says he became frustrated and decided to retire, in part, due to the “increasing threats to the integrity and independence of the Supreme Court by overt and covert right wing influence over its legal decisions and operating procedures.”

“The mounting secrecy surrounding the Court’s operating procedures, the sneaky imposition of the unnecessary business court on Dane County by the chief justice, and the clandestine manner in which the highly respected Judge Neubauer was summarily sacked as chief judge, are just three examples,” he says.

Outside group spending in Wisconsin Supreme Court races

2003: Ed Brunner vs. Pat Roggensack $27,200

2007: Linda Clifford vs. Annette Ziegler $3.1 million

2008: Louis Butler vs. Michael Gableman $4.8 million

2009: Shirley Abrahamson vs. Randy Kschnick $577,000

2011 David Prosser vs. JoAnne Kloppenburg $4.5 million

2013 Pat Roggensack vs. Ed Fallone $1.2 million

2015: Ann Walsh Bradley vs. James P. Daley $171,000

2016: Rebecca Bradley vs. Janne Kloppenburg $3.43 million

2018 Rebecca Dallet vs. Michael Screnock $2.8 million

2019: Brian Hagedorn vs. Lisa Neubauer $4.5 million

2020: Jill Karofsky vs. Daniel Kelly $5 million

source: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign

Niess also had a run-in with the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2014 when the Court ordered him to dismiss a challenge to the voter ID law by the League of Women Voters. He refused, instead recusing himself, writing that he believed following the court’s order would violate his oath to uphold the state constitution. He then was threatened with sanction in an unsuccessful complaint before the state Judicial Commission.

“As a judge, I was not at liberty to freely comment on these disturbing trends without the potential for retribution from the Court,” he says.

To Wisconsin attorney Dean Strang, the biggest loss to Wisconsin courts as they become increasingly politicized is not so much ideological as it is a more general decline of integrity.

“The consistent media fallacy in discussing the Wisconsin Supreme Court is that there is a liberal minority on it. There is not,” he says. “There is a conservative, often retrenching, majority. And then there is a moderate, pragmatic minority.”

Conservatives and reactionary populists have shifted the ideological spectrum so far to the right that mere moderation now is mistaken as a leftist threat

– Attorney Dean Strang

After Abrahamson, “the court no longer has any liberal voice at all,” he says.

He sees the media shorthand, citing “liberal” and “conservative” justices, as part of a broader, dispiriting trend. “Conservatives and reactionary populists have shifted the ideological spectrum so far to the right that mere moderation now is mistaken as a leftist threat,” he says.

The proxy partisan warfare in court races has also endangered intellectual honesty and the unbiased assessment of the facts — hallmarks of a good appellate judges, Strang adds.

That’s not to say that he agrees withdoctrine of “originalism” promoted by the Federalist Society, which he describes as “the claim that judging is like archaeology: that judges simply dig carefully through books until they ‘find’ the law, as if it were some buried shard of ancient pottery.”

Instead, a good judge is like an architect, he says, constrained by the text of the law and by precedent the same way an architect is constrained by the laws of physics and engineering, and using the facts of a case“as the site for a construction of law that features the highest ideals that our constitution and legal culture profess.”

Instead, our current judicial system seems to be moving in the opposite direction, digging for money, eyes on the ground.

ggl grab 921

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Gableman says he has started interviews in election review, but conservatives say his efforts are insufficient

21 hours ago

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Michael Gableman, attorney for Assembly Republicans, asks officials to hang onto data about 2020 presidential election

2 days ago

AP News

Wisconsin election investigator demands state preserve data

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Michael Gableman - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Michael_Gableman

Michael J. Gableman (born September 18, 1966) is an American lawyer from Waukesha County, Wisconsin, formerly a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Political party: Republican

Education: Ripon College (?BA?); ?Hamline Univ...?

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omg

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2021/08/23/conservative-think-tank-end-wisconsin-elections-commission/

looks legit

conservative think tank — run by a former staffer for then-Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and connected to former Gov. Scott Walker — has called for abolishing the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) and moving the administration of state elections to the elected secretary of state.

The think tank, the Institute for Reforming Government, called for the change to state election law in a news release Monday morning.

“It is time to abolish WEC and implement good government accountability when it comes to Wisconsin’s elections and work to restore confidence among Wisconsin residents,” Chris Reader, executive vice president of IRG, said in a statement. “When unelected bureaucrats oversee Wisconsin’s elections it can lead to the erosion of faith and confidence in our electoral system. Thirty-three other states have elected officials overseeing the election process, providing a good measure of accountability by empowering people across ideological spectrums to provide a check on who manages elections. This is a good government measure that will benefit all Wisconsinites.”

The think tank’s president is CJ Szafir, who previously worked on Fitzgerald’s staff and served as the executive vice president for the right wing legal outfit, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Walker is named on the think tank’s website as its former national honorary chairman.

According to the think tank’s most recently available :{tax records:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, it paid Walker’s consulting firm, the Walker Group, more than $164,000 in 2019.

The call comes as Republicans continue an effort to delegitimize state election administration in the wake of the 2020 presidential election and former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.

This weekend, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) :{met with Trump:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:to discuss an ongoing investigation into the election led by former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman.Gableman recently traveled to South Dakota for a conspiracy theory-laden convention, run by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, where lies were spread about the 2020 election.

Gableman was joined by a state lawmaker and Robert Spindell, a member of the Elections Commission who has frequently spread conspiracy theories about last year’s election as well.

The conservative group’s call to disband the Wisconsin Elections Commission — made up of six members, three appointed by Democrats and three by Republicans — comes just six years after Republicans themselves created the commission. Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls), who chairs the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Commission, has continued an effort to hold a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election — similar to the widely derided audit held in Arizona.

Fitzgerald, now a member of Congress, and Walker were behind the creation of the WEC in 2015 after they disbanded the Government Accountability Board (GAB) over some similar complaints to the present complaints about the WEC. The GAB was made up of members appointed by a panel of appellate judges and was responsible for administration of the state’s election, ethics and campaign finance laws.

Republicans disbanded the GAB after it began investigating Walker for violations of campaign finance laws through so-called John Doe investigations.

GOP leaders, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, :{directly cited:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: those investigations as the reason for the disbanding of the GAB and the creation of two new commissions to take its place — the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Wisconsin Ethics Commission.

The legislation that created the WEC was introduced by then-Rep. Dean Knudson (R-Hudson). Knudson is now a member of the WEC and its former chair.

The current Wisconsin secretary of state is Democrat Doug La Follette. The office is largely responsible for maintaining government records, as Republicans took nearly all of the other responsibilities — and most of the staff — away from the office they now want to run elections under Walker, moving La Follette to a storage room in the Capitol basement. In 2015, a different right wing think tank, the MacIver Institute, called for :{abolishing the position:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

The Institute for Reforming Government did not respond to a request for comment.

https://ballotpedia.org/Michael_Gableman

gableman graduated from New Berlin West High School in 1984. He received his bachelor's degree in education and history from Ripon College in 1988 and his J.D. from Hamline University School of Law in 1993.[3]

Career

After college, Gableman taught American history at George Washington High School in the Milwaukee Public School System from 1988 to 1989 before pursuing his legal career.[4]

After graduating from law school, Gableman served as a district court law clerk in Douglas County, Minnesota, for two years, and then as a clerk at the circuit court level in Brown County, Wisconsin, for one year. In 1996, he became the half-time assistant district attorney in Langlade County while working part-time at a private law office and also serving as deputy corporation counsel for Forest County. One year later, he became the assistant district attorney for Marathon County. He then served as the district attorney of Ashland County from 1999 to 2002.

In 2002, Gableman was appointed to the Burnett County Circuit Court. He was then elected Circuit Court Judge for Burnett County in 2003, winning 78 percent of the vote.[3] While in Burnett County, Gableman established an inmate community service program, a juvenile community service program, a drug and alcohol court, and arestorative justice program for which he served as chairman of the board for six years. [5] He also taught for three semesters as an adjunct professor of law at Hamline University School of Law, teaching criminal procedure and professional responsibility.[6]

Gableman was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2008.[1][3]

Awards and associations

Member, Fraternal Order of Moose
Past Grand Knight, Ashland Council, Knights of Columbus Masons
Member, Rotary International[3]

Elections

2018

Michael Gableman did not file to run for re-election.

2008

Gableman won election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2008, defeating incumbent Louis Butler with51.19 percent of the vote, and winning 60 of the 72 counties in the state. [7][8]

...

political donors

The following table includes the five organizations that have donated the most to Gableman's campaign in his 2008 election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court according to publicly available campaign finance records.[12]

Donor	Contribution
Wisconsin Republican Party	$30,390
Wisconsin Builder's Association	$8,500
Wisconsin Club for Growth	$8,500
Concerned Business and Industry	$8,100
Koch Industries	$6,860

Endorsements and scorecards

Gableman was endorsed by a number of Wisconsin Republican officials, including then-Congressman Paul Ryan (R) and Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus. He also earned the endorsement of R.J. Lurquin, president of the Wisconsin Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs Association.[13]

Political ideology

In October 2012, political science professors Adam Bonica and Michael Woodruff of Stanford University attempted to determine the partisan ideology of state supreme court justices. They created a scoring system in which a score above 0 indicated a more conservative-leaning ideology, while scores below 0 were more liberal.

Gableman received a campaign finance score of 1.35, indicating a conservative ideological leaning. This was more conservative than the average score of 0.42 that justices received in Wisconsin.

The study was based on data from campaign contributions by the judges themselves, the partisan leaning of those who contributed to the judges' campaigns, or, in the absence of elections, the ideology of the appointing body (governor or legislature). This study was not a definitive label of a justice, but an academic summary of various relevant factors.[14]

Noteworthy events

Judicial commission complaint (2008)

On October 7, 2008, the Wisconsin Judicial Commission filed a complaint against Justice Gableman over an advertisement used during his 2008 campaign against Justice Louis Butler.[15] On November 19, 2008, Gableman issued a response to the complaint, stating that his First Amendment rights were violated and that campaign advertising should be considered free speech.[16]

Ad in question

The television advertisement in question referred to a case that Butler worked on when he was a public defender. Butler represented Reuben Lee Mitchell from 1985 to 1988 in State v. Reuben Lee Mitchell. That case was Mitchell’s appeal of his conviction in circuit court for molesting an 11-year-old girl.[15]

The abridged audio text of the ad was as follows:

“

...Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street. Like Reuben Lee Mitchell who raped an 11-year-old girl with learning disabilities. Butler found a loophole. Mitchell went on to molest another child.

Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler on the Supreme Court?[15][17]

”

The section of the ad in question was, "Butler found a loophole. Mitchell went on to molest another child."[15] The second molestation was not, as some thought the ad implied, a direct consequence of Butler's loophole. Butler successfully argued before an appellate panel that the trial court improperly admitted certain evidence, such as the age of the girl, which likely prejudiced the jury. The panel ordered a new trial, but the supreme court reversed, holding that the error did not affect the trial's fairness. Mitchell remained in prison until he was released on parole in 1992. Three years later, Mitchell went on to rape another child.[15]

The judicial commission said Gableman's ad "does extreme violence to the public's confidence in the integrity of Wisconsin's judicial system."[15] The filing also mentioned: "The false statement of fact in the advertisement is that Louis Butler was in some way responsible for the release from prison of Reuben Lee Mitchell and for Mitchell's subsequent crime. It is accomplished by the conflation of four sentences into one lie."[18]

On July 8, 2009, attorneys representing Gableman said that the complaint filed against their client was considered a "form of harassment and punishment by the state".[15][18]

The judicial commission requested that Gableman's colleagues on the court discipline him on the claim that the ad intentionally misled voters about Butler.

Judicial panel decision

A judicial conduct panel was designated to hear the case under Wisconsin Statute § 757.87(3). The three-judge panel, comprised of lower court judges, was united in its ruling that the complaint be dismissed. Two judges on the panel agreed that the ad was misleading but did not contain outright lies. The other judge believed the ad contained a lie, but that First Amendment rights protected the speech from regulation.[19] The panel stated:

“

By its own words, the complaint relies on an implicit message which the commission contends was false or, at best, misleading...However, because the individual statements in the advertisement were true, any false or misleading implied message of the advertisement necessarily falls within the reach of the (rule on misleading statements), for which discipline may not be imposed.[19][17]

”

Outcome

Though the three-judge panel recommended the case be dropped, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard a case against their colleague regarding the negative ad. The justices were deadlocked with three justices on each side of the issue. Justices Shirley Abrahamson, N. Patrick Crooks and Ann Walsh Bradley concluded that Gableman lied about Butler. The other three justices, David T. Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler agreed with the Judicial Conduct Panel that the case be dismissed.[20] Because the burden of proof fell on the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, no action was taken against Gableman.[21][22]

Notable Cases

Some notable cases authored by Justice Gableman include:

Madison Teachers, Inc. v. Scott Walker [23]
Board of Regents - UW System v. Jeffrey S. Decker [24]
State v.Abbott Labs [25]
McConkey v. Van Hollen [26]
Coulee Catholic Schools v. LIRC [27]
Horst v. John Deere& Company [28]
Star Direct v. Dal Pra [29]

Horst v. John Deere & Company

The main question before the Court was whether Wisconsin had adopted, or should have adopted, a bystander contemplation test. An infant, by his guardian ad litem, brought a products liability action against a manufacturer of a riding lawnmower after the infant's feet were severed when the lawnmower was operated in reverse by the infant's father.[30]

The Court held that the consumer contemplation test, and not a bystander contemplation test, governed all strict products liability claims in Wisconsin, including cases where a bystander was injured. While bystanders were permitted to recover damages when injured by an unreasonably dangerous product, the determination of whether the product was unreasonably dangerous was based on the expectations of the ordinary consumer. This opinion re-stated the axiom that "sometimes accidents happen."[30]

Justice Gableman also wrote a concurring opinion in this case to emphasize the deficiencies in utilizing the consumer contemplation test. In design defects cases, Justice Gableman stated he would adopt the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability, because it is a "more appropriate framework for meeting the needs of Wisconsin consumers, businesses, and those whose lives are affected by commerce in the state."[30]

John Doe investigations

Two John Doe investigations, beginning in 2010 and ending in 2015, were launched by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm (D) into the activities of staff and associates of Gov. Scott Walker (R).[31] The Wisconsin Supreme Court officially put an end to the investigations in a 4-2 ruling on July 16, 2015, noting that "a state law outlawing such coordination was 'unconstitutionally overbroad and vague under the First Amendment'" and that "the special prosecutor's legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law."[32][33] Gableman wrote the majority opinion, stating:[34]

“

It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing,” Gableman wrote in the majority opinion. “To be clear, this conclusion ends the John Doe investigation because the special prosecutor’s legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law. [17]

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/**2017/**03/02/secret-scott-walker-john-doe-leak-inquiry-underway/

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According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ) investigators are reviewing documents from state court and government offices for information about the Guardian story on the now-closed Wisconsin John Doe investigation into whether or not Scott Walker’s campaign committee illegally coordinated his recall campaign efforts with outside groups. Outside groups raised and spent an estimated $20 million in Walker’s June 2012 recall election.

Until Justice Michael Gableman and the “conservative” majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court rewrote whole swaths of the state’s campaign finance law in their July 2015 4-2 decision ending the Walker John Doe investigation, outside groups were required to work independently of candidates on elections.Two justices, including Gableman, were asked to recuse themselves from the case, because they were elected after major expenditures by some of the groups under investigation raising serious conflict of interest issues, but the justices refused.

The Supreme Court took up three challenges to the investigation even though lower courts did not have time to develop a fact-record on the issues. The Court prepared to hear oral arguments behind closed doors and sealed many of the court filings. In its 2015 ruling, the Wisconsin Supreme Court terminated the John Doe II, writing: “To be clear, this conclusion ends the John Doe investigation…” and “the investigation is closed.”

TheCourt legalized coordination between candidates and outside groups running what the Court called “issue ads,” fired the Republican special prosecutor, told thebi-partisan group of district attorneys who initiated the probe to stand down, andordered the special prosecutor to “permanently destroy all copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation.” After blowback, they modified that order directing the special prosecutor to collect up and return all documents and evidence to the Court.

But the Guardianpublished some of the secret documents in September 2016.

Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel first asked the Supreme Court to appoint a “special master” to investigate the leak, but the Court brusquely declined.A special master is an administrative role usually reserved for complex civil litigation cases. Next, he recommended a grand jury. But costly grand juries are extremely rare in the state, usually reserved for serious felony crimes such as the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus or homicides.

Now it appears Schimel is taking another route, pursuing an investigation with the assistance of the John Doe II judge, David Wambach. Based on news accounts, it appears that Wambach is ordering courthouse clerks and other government agencies to turn over documents in their possession, but what information they are seeking is not known as the unusual orders are under seal.

The move has many legal observers scratching their heads.

LEGAL QUESTIONS RAISED

The attorney general’s conduct in the leak investigation has already been questioned by Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson, who considered a recent letter and court order the Department of Justice sent to the Supreme Court requesting documents from the court to be an improper “ex parte” communication.

She wrote a letter to a list of prosecutors and attorneys representing parties in the John Doe II as well as a long list of other courthouse personnel across the state to inform them of her views on the matter.

Her letter was then given to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but not by Abrahamson, said the reporters. Abrahamson also questioned how Schimel can investigate on behalf of the John Doe judge when he also represented him in court. Abrahamson’s letter suggests that she believes the attorney general is operating under the auspices of the John Doe II, as she copied participants in that investigation. Abrahamson has also consistently argued that the Court’s slipshod application of secrecy in the John Doe II “raised significant First Amendment, state constitutional, statutory and common law issues.”

CMD spoke to half a dozen attorneys who raised numerous questions about the probe.

Was Schimel formally asked to investigate the issue by Governor Walker or the state legislature?

Can Schimel use a closed John Doe operating without a district attorney for a new investigation? Statutorily, a John Doe proceeding is to be initiated by a district attorney, not by the Department of Justice.

Has the attorney general opened up a new John Doe? The new John Doe statute exempts public officials from prosecution under a Doe and limits new investigations to serious crimes like homicide.

Are investigators authorized to inspect documents under Supreme Court seal?

SELECTIVE PROSECUTION QUESTIONS RAISED

Schimel is apparently on the hunt for theGuardian leaker even though he has publicly saidhe will not investigate the fact that Eric O’Keefe, a director for Wisconsin Club for Growth — the dark money group at the center of the John Doe II, admitted leaking information to the media.

O’Keefe boasted about defying the John Doe secrecy order in multiple interviews with supportive press.

FOX’s Megyn Kelly quizzed O’Keefe: “Eric do you, are you under a secrecy order right now? Because everybody’s been told not to speak.” O’Keefe: “Yes, an unconstitutional secrecy order and I’m defying the secrecy order.” Kelly: “Right now?” O’Keefe: “Yes.” He told WISN’s Vicki McKenna “I have persistently ignored (the gag order) because I can read the Constitution and it’s an outrageous clamp down on my speech.”

Editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal described “copies of two subpoenas we have seen” publicly providing for the first time a list of some of the groups under investigation. They cited O’Keefe in the one-sided article and spun the campaign finance investigation, which was under the control of a Republican special prosecutor, as a “political speech raid.”

O’Keefe told the Wall Street Journal‘s Kim Strassel for her book “Intimidation Game” that he violated the secrecy order “in some form every day.” He also told her that Walker’s top campaign advisor, R.J. Johnson, had also violated the Court’s secrecy order.

Republican special prosecutor Francis Schmitz attempted to sanction O’Keefe for violating the secrecy order, but in 2015, the GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature terminated all prior John Doe secrecy orders, except for a narrow list of prosecutors and judges, as part of their self-serving revamp of the statute.The statute also exempted corrupt politicians from prosecution under a John Doe.

According to documents later unsealed by a few of the judges on the state Supreme Court, O’Keefe’s lawyers argued to the Court that by the terms of the statute the new law was intended to be retroactive and therefore was effectively a “get-out-of-jail-free” card for O’Keefe for leaking John Doe II documents. The Court seemed to have bought this argument as O’Keefe apparently was not subjected to sanctions for repeatedly violating the secrecy rules that applied to him.

This has implications for any leak prosecution.

“While I feel that the investigation of the various Court clerks is misguided and an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, any prosecution instituted as a result of the investigation would be subject to challenge as selective prosecution and a violation of the due process clause. One only need ask — why does Mr. O’Keefe have a First Amendment right to disclose, but no one else?” said Stephen J. Meyer, a Wisconsin criminal defense attorney who has represented clients in John Doe proceedings.

SELECTIVE PROSECUTION II

Schimel and the John Doe judge appear to be ignoring a number of other legal issues as well.

The Guardian documents revealed for the first time a new set of potential legal violations that were not addressed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision that summarily ended the John Doe II investigation. These include:

Governor Scott Walker’s solicitation of corporate checks to fund the campaign being run by his top advisor, R.J. Johnson acting on behalf of Wisconsin Club for Growth. As Democratic lawmakers explained, Wisconsin statute 11.38 (1)(a)(1) has banned corporations from making contributions to candidates “directly or indirectly” from their corporate treasuries since 1905. There are stiff penalties on both sides of the transaction, including huge fines for firms and forfeiture of office for politicians. The documents indicate that Walker secretly solicited large corporate checks for Wisconsin Club for Growth, including two $1 million checks from Menards Inc. “I got a million dollars from John Menard today,” boasted Walker in one 2011 email. Menard sent another corporate check in 2012 when the Walker recall loomed.
Evidence that Keith Gilkes, Scott Walker’s campaign manager, held weekly meetings with the Republican Governor’s Association, registered in the state as “independent expenditure” group, which had sworn an oath not to coordinate with Walker. On October 14, 2011 an RGA staffer wrote to Gilkes “Josh mentioned he would like to make this a recurring call on Fridays at 2:30 pm (EST). Does that work for you?” Gilkes replies: “This works on my end for a weekly call… Shoot me the phone number and dial-in when you have it.” Josh is likely Josh Robinson, RGA’s political director who later boasted of “overseeing the largest IE [Independent Expenditure] campaign defending Scott Walker during the 2012 recalls” in his bio. RGA spent $9.5 million in the recall election pounding Walker’s opponent and lauding Walker. Many contend these ads were not “issue ads” but were the functional equivalent of express advocacy and prohibited even under the 2015 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling shutting down the John Doe. (Moreover,Marquette Law Professor Ed Fallone points out that U.S. Supreme Court decision this week upholding a lower court ruling also makes clear that the Wisconsin Supreme Court plainly got it wrong when it ruled that so-called “issue ads” are exempt from regulation.)
Potential pay-to-play criminal and ethics violations related to Texas billionaire Harold Simmons’ $750,000 contribution in personal and corporate checks (from his holding company CONTRAN Corporation) to Wisconsin Club for Growth and the coordinated campaign. These checks were followed by specific changes to Wisconsin law proposed by Simmons’ lobbyist, Eric Peterson,that were intended to retroactively nullify lawsuits brought by Wisconsin children poisoned by lead who were suing Simmons’ lead company called NL Industries, (formerly National Lead). Peterson’s verbatim language nullifying the lawsuits was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Walker. The new law was quickly struck down as plainly unconstitutional by both state and federal courts.
Evidence that money Walker raised for Wisconsin Club for Growth was funneled to Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and used for ads praising Walker and attacking his opponent during his 2012 recall race. TheGuardian documents reveal prosecutor allegations that WMC paid its media firm Ten Capitol some $3.7 million and “coinciding with the wire transfers to Ten Capitol, WMC-IMC received payments from WCFG.” These ads were also the functional equivalent of express advocacy prohibited even under the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision. Prosecutors alleged that Walker’s top campaign advisor on the recall, R.J. Johnson, may have been paid for orchestrating the WMC ads. “Consistent with a commission for ad placement, R.J. Johnson and Associates received $50,000 from Ten Capitol on June 22, 2012,” wrote prosecutors.

In an email to Karl Rove, Scott Walker credited R.J. Johnson with winning Justice Gableman’s 2008 race against Louis Butler.Now, Gableman and Wisconsin Club for Growth’s Eric O’Keefe will be appearing together at a Republican fundraiser as Gableman gets ready to run again in 2018.

“What happened was unprecedented in Wisconsin — wholesale violations of the laws that had governed campaigns for decades,” said Bill Christofferson, a veteran Wisconsin campaign consultant. Christofferson has run many state-wide campaigns including for former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl.