First, Arizona. Now, Republicans in another battleground state, Wisconsin, are at war with each other over the crank "election review" being conducted by Trumpist hack and legal kleagle Michael Gableman:
The Republican-led review of Wisconsin’s 2020 election abruptly ended Friday when the GOP Assembly speaker who launched the inquiry last summer fired the former state Supreme Court justice he had hired to lead it.
The firing came a week after Michael Gableman, who had led the investigation, joined former president Donald Trump in turning against Speaker Robin Vos amid the veteran Wisconsin politician’s effort to fend off a primary challenge from the right.
The haphazard, year-old inquiry was marked by meetings with conspiracy theorists, violations of the state’s public records laws and a call by Gableman to explore the legally impossible task of decertifying the election results. It did not uncover evidence of widespread fraud, though Trump and Gableman tried to suggest otherwise.
Of course, this being an intra-GQP fight, no principles were involved, beyond fealty to the Malignant Loser:
Vos has had a tenuous relationship with Trump, who supported the Wisconsin review but repeatedly pressed Vos to go further with it. Last week, Trump and Gableman endorsed the longtime speaker’s Republican primary opponent, with the former president holding a rally urging voters to throw out Vos.
Vos won Tuesday’s primary against Adam Steen, but just barely, claiming 51 percent of the vote. Steen had called for decertifying the election and labeled Vos, one of the most powerful Republicans in Wisconsin, a traitor.
The firing marked the end of a saga that began in June 2021 when Vos, acting under pressure from Trump, announced at the state Republican Party’s annual convention that he had hired Gableman. The retired judge had earlier claimed without evidence that the election had been stolen.
It was a rational, rigorous and unbiased investigation, by GQP standards:
Gableman took months to set up his office and spent the early stage of his review performing online research from a public library in suburban Milwaukee. He toured the site of a frequently criticized GOP-led ballot review in Arizona and attended a seminar in South Dakota hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has spouted false claims about the 2020 election.
As he pursued his review, Gableman claimed to be acting in a nonpartisan manner while attending Republican Party events and calling for the resignation of a Republican state senator who had lambasted his review as a charade. Gableman criticized the way the nonpartisan director of the state’s elections commission dresses and monitored the social media posts of others. He or one of his aides drafted a memo speculating that a city employee in Milwaukee was a Democrat because she had a nose ring, liked snakes and lived with her boyfriend.
Gableman in March issued a report calling on lawmakers to consider revoking the state’s 10 electoral votes for Joe Biden, who beat Trump in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes. Vos had long opposed that idea because election experts — including Gableman’s own attorney, James Bopp Jr. — have found there is no way to legally perform that task. [snip]
With his probe, Gableman turned up little information that was new. The reports he wrote mostly reiterated the findings of conservative groups that criticized how the election was run during the coronavirus pandemic.
There's more chewy nuttiness at the link, but we do have to give Vos credit for this assessment of his fellow Republican:
“He’s an embarrassment to the state.”He's not the only one, Mr. Vos.
(Photo: step away from the smorgasbord, Mr. Gableman/ NBC News)
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