Saying that the investigation run by the Republican-led legislature’s Office of Special Council “accomplished nothing,” a Wisconsin state judge issued a scathing 90-page ruling that effectively dismantles and neuters the team of lawyers Republicans assembled to find fraud in the 2020 election.
Just days after Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos fired former state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman, Circuit Court Judge Frank Remington on Wednesday stated that the effort Gableman led was amateurish, incomplete and unproductive.
“If my prior estimation that OSC’s brief ‘contains inaccuracies’ was improvident, it was only in the suggestion that OSC’s brief also contains accuracies,” Remington wrote. “But to read the brief casually is to witness fiction distilled from the disappointment of a losing party; a fever dream version of the facts of this case.”
Remington took Vos’s firing of Gableman further, revoking the temporarily-granted ability of five attorneys recruited from out-of-state to sit on the Republican-formed commission from practicing in Wisconsin. Remington also took down a motion by the attorneys that he should recuse himself from the case, pointing out that the commission produced literally nothing.
From August 30 through December 4, 2021, the evidence speaks for itself. OSC accomplished nothing. It kept none of the weekly progress reports the Wisconsin State Assembly required it to keep. It recorded no interviews with witnesses. It gathered no measurable data. It organized no existing data into any analytical format. It generated no reports based on any special expertise. It did commence lawsuits against other parts of our state and local government, although at time of this writing, OSC has received no relief. … It printed copies of reports that better investigators had already written, although there is no evidence any person connected with OSC ever read these reports, let alone critically analyzed their factual and legal bases to draw his or her own principled conclusions. It does not matter how often OSC repeats its baseless arguments. The time has come and gone for OSC to show its substance. There simply is nothing there. OSC’s conduct violated Wis. Stat. § 19.35(1)(a). Its lawyers’ arguments are wholly without merit and, together, their disobedience for the rule of law is contemptuous.
Remington summarized the entirety of the committee’s “findings” as nonsense. As an example of the commission’s incompetence, he noted one piece of information the commission wished to keep from the public was a page that contained only a 2 square by 4 square data grid that supposedly included vote totals for Joe Biden and Donald Trump, showing that Trump won by more than 250,000 votes. The problem with the graphic? Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by more than 20,000 votes. The chart contains no reference to what data it was representing, nor does it list the source for the alleged vote counts. It also doesn’t reference any process for calculating the numbers in the grid.