Wisconsin Republicans originally envisioned a relatively brief — and wildly unnecessary — investigation into the state’s 2020 presidential election.
GOP legislators agreed to invest nearly $680,000 in taxpayer money into their scheme; they hired a partisan conspiracy theorist to tell the party what it wanted to hear; and they expected to have a sham report that would make Donald Trump and his followers feel better about their defeat.
Months later, the process isn’t just a fiasco, it’s also taking a ridiculously long time. The Associated Press reported:
Wisconsin’s Republican Assembly speaker signed a new contract Tuesday with Michael Gableman, the former state Supreme Court justice he hired to investigate the 2020 election, extending his review through the end of April. The extension comes after the original contract expired on Dec. 31 and a week after Gableman delivered a widely panned report that called for the Legislature to take a serious look at decertifying President Joe Biden’s win in the battleground state.
The timing could’ve been better. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that shortly before Wisconsin Republicans agreed to extend the duration of the sham “audit,” a state judge released records showing the investigation has barely done any real work.
As he made public 761 pages of records, Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington said, “I believe that it’s for every man now … to examine these documents. And I believe when done so (he) will come to the conclusion that this has been much to-do about nothing, that these documents do not support the argument that there has been an investigation, much less the conclusions that have been made by the Office of Special Counsel.”
This comes a week after Gableman pushed a series of strange and discredited ideas, while claiming the state legislature should decertify the results of the election from 16 months ago.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump, who highlighted several of Gableman’s absurdities, concluded, “This Wisconsin ‘fraud’ report is so mind-bogglingly stupid that I’m honestly amazed the man responsible for it sat on the state Supreme Court.”
In case anyone needs a refresher, let’s take stock of how we arrived at this head-shaking moment.
Wisconsin Republicans, unsatisfied with the actual election results, launched a bizarre “investigation” last year. To lead the effort, GOP officials tapped Gableman — a “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theorist and former Trump appointee.
Who better to investigate anti-election ideas — in a fair and impartial fashion, of course — than a partisan conspiracy theorist from Trump’s own team?
Gableman soon acknowledged that he doesn’t have “any understanding of how elections work.” He also issued strange subpoenas, demanded materials that were already publicly available, and sent error-filled requests to the wrong local officials. Making matters quite a bit worse, Gableman appeared on a conservative radio show to compare The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to Nazi propaganda, complete with multiple Joseph Goebbels references. Gableman also showed up at a city council meeting in Green Bay, where he suggested an election investigation is justified because of some unidentified stuff he saw online. More recently, the former Republican judge has called for the incarceration of Wisconsin officials who don’t assist him with his outlandish crusade. Last week, while promoting plainly nonsensical ideas, he also dismissed the significance of the Jan. 6 attack, calling it “one discrete incident.” The truth is readily available: A count, recount, and an audit proved that Biden defeated Trump in the state of Wisconsin in 2020. Republicans can keep their circus going indefinitely, but it won’t change these results.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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