The “special counsel” of an investigation into Wisconsin’s election system attended pillow magnate Mike Lindell’s flop “Cyber Symposium” this week.
“I’m here out of an honest effort to find out if anyone has any information that will be helpful in carrying out my duties as special counsel,” former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman told the Associated Press.
The MyPillow CEO’s conference closed on Thursday after promising, and then failing, to deliver data that Lindell said would show Chinese hackers stole Donald Trump’s second term from him.
Just a few days after the 2020 elections, at a Nov. 7 pro-Trump rally, Gableman — who served as a reliably conservative member of the state Supreme Court from 2008 to 2018 — said, “I don’t think anyone here can think of anything more systematically unjust than a stolen election.”
Gableman also told the AP Friday that he’d learned a lot from a recent trip to visit the “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 results, though that has been a mess as well.
“I learned a lot there that will be helpful to my investigation,” Gableman said.
The former state Supreme Court justice is being paid with taxpayer funds, and he told the AP that both trips — to Wisconsin and Arizona — were paid out of his $11,000 monthly salary for the Wisconsin investigation.
Gableman originally had two retired police detectives working on his investigation, which was authorized by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R). But those investigators quit early last month. Vos then granted Gableman his own hiring authority.
“If he thinks he needs one person, great,” Vos told the AP at the time. “If he thinks he needs half a dozen, great.”
Vos and Gableman’s probe is just one of the 2020 election reviews ongoing in Wisconsin.
The nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau is conducting its own investigation.
And State Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R), the chairwoman of the Assembly Elections Committee, announced last week that she was sending “subpoenas” to two counties for their election records.
It’s not clear that Brandtjen’s supposed subpoenas have any legal weight, though — they weren’t signed by Vos.
And the subpoenas themselves seemed to have been ripped off — typos and all — from similar documents used in Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano’s (R) attempt to kickstart an audit of three counties in his state.
