Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke thinks the top Republican in the Wisconsin state assembly is feeding voters a “crap sandwich.”
“And now he’s running around trying to tell you it tastes good,” Clarke told the crowd at a rally he hosted on the steps of Wisconsin’s capitol. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was on hand to witness the festivities.
Clarke, like lots of wannabe right-wing influencers, is upset about election audits; more specifically, he thinks the multiple audits ongoing in Wisconsin aren’t enough.
Robin Vos (R), the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, signed contracts a couple months ago with two retired police detectives to investigate the 2020 election, and he named retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman the “special counsel” handling the investigation.
Even though there was nothing amiss with Wisconsin’s 2020 elections, Vos recently even said he was expanding the probe — after the two retired detectives quit — allowing Gableman to hire whoever he wanted. And all of this is on top of yet another ongoing review by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau.
For Clarke and the top Big Lie promoter in the state, State Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R), the head of assembly’s elections committee, that’s simply not enough.
Clarke says Gableman might be a nice guy but that isn’t enough.
“My thought on that is maybe Mike Gableman is the wrong guy for that position.”
Vos hired Gableman for the job this summer.
— Patrick Marley (@patrickdmarley) August 6, 2021
“Maybe Mike Gableman is the wrong guy for that position,” he declared Friday, according to Journal-Sentinel reporter Patrick Marley. A flyer for the event called itself an “ACTIVATION NOTICE!” and demanded a “FULL Forensic Audit.”
“There’s a groundswell of support for a full, cyber, forensic audit, Maricopa-county-style, here in Wisconsin,” Clarke told One America News Network on Wednesday.
Brandtjen, for her part, delivered a crowd pleaser on Friday, announcing to the rally that she’d just issued subpoenas for election materials from Milwaukee and Brown counties.
She didn’t let herself get too bogged down in the details: Vos didn’t sign the subpoenas, the Journal Sentinel noted, so it’s not clear they have any legal weight at all.
“I am issuing these subpoenas as the first step towards a full, cyber-forensic audit of tabulators and inspection of the physical ballots from the November 2020 fall election,” Brandtjen said in a statement. (Like other flashy terms in the era of audit-mania, “cyber-forensic audit” has no agreed-upon definition.)
As the Journal Sentinel and at least one eagle-eyed Twitter user noted, Brandtjen’s subpoenas were eerily reminiscent of a similar request for documents sent to three counties by Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) — typos and all.
Brandtjen’s audit credentials are impeccable.
In December, she wrote that “there is no doubt that after the filed affidavits and lawsuit, Donald Trump won this election in Wisconsin and several methods of fraud were used to change the outcome.” (Wrong.) Then, the day before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Brandtjen and 14 other Republican legislators wrote to then-Vice President Mike Pence urging him not to certify Joe Biden’s victory.
In June, she took a tour of the GOP-controlled Arizona Senate’s sham “audit” of Maricopa County. The trip, it so happens, was paid for by a fundraising group led by right-wing One America News anchor Christina Bobb.
Last month, Brandtjen said she’d decided to “initiate a more intensive investigation” of the last election.
This post has been updated.
