MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin judge said Thursday that a Republican-ordered, taxpayer-funded investigation into the 2020 election found “absolutely no evidence of voter fraud,” but found a disregard for the law. on the open archives of the State by the President of the Assembly. Robin Vos and a former state Supreme Court justice he hired.
Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn awarded about $98,000 in attorneys’ fees to the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, ending one of four lawsuits filed by the circuit court in the circuit court. band. Vos’s attorney, Ron Stadler, said he recommends Vos appeal the decision.
The costs will be paid by the taxpayers, which is why the judge said she was also not awarding additional punitive damages to Vos. The investigation’s cost to taxpayers, including ongoing legal fees, exceeded $1 million.
“I think the people of the state of Wisconsin have been punished enough for this case,” Bailey-Rihn said. “I don’t think it does anyone any good to impose punitive damages on the innocent people of this state.”
All of American Oversight’s lawsuits stem from requests for records it made of Vos and Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice hired by Vos in June 2021 to investigate the 2020 presidential election won by President Joe Biden. Vos ordered the investigation under pressure from election loser Donald Trump, who continues to falsely claim that there was widespread fraud in Wisconsin and that Biden’s victory should be decertified, which is impossible and which Vos has repeatedly refused to support.
Even Gableman’s attorney said the decertification was “unnecessary.”
Biden’s victory by nearly 21,000 votes withstood recounts, several state and federal lawsuits, an audit by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Office and a review by a conservative activist law firm, the Wisconsin Institute. for Law & Liberty. An Associated Press review of Wisconsin and other battleground states also found far too little fraud to have swayed Trump’s election.
Vos and Gableman suffered a series of circuit court defeats in US surveillance lawsuits. Along the way, the two were found in contempt for refusing to comply with court orders to turn over the records. Bailey-Rihn, presiding over her last hearing before retiring, expressed her frustration on Thursday.
“It’s been a long and tortuous process to get to this point,” she said. “The reality is, whatever the records were, they were either destroyed or they weren’t preserved. The problem for this court is that no one knows when those records were destroyed.”
State law requires lawmakers like Vos to retain records after an open records request is filed about them. They can and should delete registrations if there is no pending open registration request.
Gableman testified in another case that he regularly deleted recordings he thought were not part of the investigation. This led American Oversight to file a fourth lawsuit alleging that these deletions were against the law. This case, along with two others, is still pending.
Next month, a judge was due to consider whether Gableman had met the conditions to overturn an earlier contempt order for failing to turn over records. And in another case, Vos faced an August 4 deadline to turn over additional records requested by American Oversight.
“This whole thing was about trying to shed some light on the government,” Bailey-Rihn said. What she revealed, she said, was that at the start of Gableman’s investigation, he was being paid $11,000 a month by taxpayers “to sit in the library in New Berlin to learn about electoral law because he knows nothing about electoral law.
“We are all citizens of this state and this country, and we want our elections to be fair and free from any form of voter fraud,” the judge said. “We absolutely discovered in this case that there was absolutely no evidence of voter fraud.
She said that Vos and others have shown that they believe they have no obligation to comply with the State Open Archives Act, that they do not understand it, that they do not not following the advice of the Attorney General and leaving it to people who are not trained in the law to deal with it.
“It’s something the citizens of this state have learned to their detriment,” Bailey-Rihn said.
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