Wisconsin’s state-funded, 14-month investigation into the 2020 election ended on Friday when Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly,
Wisconsin’s state-funded, 14-month investigation into the 2020 election ended on Friday when Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, fired Michael J. Gableman, the conservative former State Supreme Court justice leading the inquiry.
Under pressure from former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Vos had hired Mr. Gableman last year to scrutinize the results, but the former justice eventually turned on him when Mr. Vos refused to entertain decertifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state.
The firing was first reported by The Associated Press.
Mr. Gableman has become a key driver of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin and a ringleader of far-right Republicans’ effort to overturn the state’s presidential results — which cannot legally be done. His investigation found no evidence of widespread fraud in Wisconsin’s election.
Up until now, Mr. Vos had remained publicly supportive of the investigation, which cost Wisconsin taxpayers $1.1 million, even as Mr. Gableman amplified increasingly outlandish theories about the 2020 election. In March, the former justice presented state legislators with a report that said they should consider decertifying the election — a proposal that has no basis in state or federal law but that has nonetheless been adopted by Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters in the state.
As Mr. Vos resisted the decertification push, Mr. Gableman continued to promote false claims about the election. Last week, he endorsed Mr. Vos’s Trump-backed primary opponent, a far-right political neophyte named Adam Steen who came within a few hundred votes of toppling Mr. Vos.
After his narrow victory on Tuesday, Mr. Vos said at his election-night party that Mr. Gableman was “an embarrassment to the state.”
In the following days, Mr. Vos defended his decision to start the Gableman investigation but signaled that he would soon end it.
“There were problems with the 2020 election that we need to fix — all of those things are real,” he said Wednesday on a conservative talk radio show in Milwaukee. “But somehow, Justice Gableman, as the investigation began to come to an end, decided it was more important to play to Donald Trump and to play to the very extreme of our party who thought we could unconstitutionally overturn the election than it was to be responsive to his client, which was the Legislature.”
Mr. Vos said in that interview that he had given Mr. Gableman “some very clear direction: ‘You can’t be involved in politics, you can’t go to rallies. We want you to be an independent voice.’ And he broke that.”
Yet when Mr. Vos announced the hire in June 2021, he did so at the Wisconsin Republican Party’s annual convention, and he did not publicly discipline Mr. Gableman when the former justice attended a political event with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has funded many attempts to overturn the election, or when he appeared at campaign events with local Republican Party chapters in Wisconsin.
Mr. Vos and his spokeswoman did not respond to messages on Friday. Mr. Gableman’s spokesman, Zak Niemierowicz, said he had resigned from Mr. Gableman’s investigation last month. Mr. Gableman did not respond to messages.
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