MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) — After a shorter-than-expected victory over a Trump-endorsed candidate in Tuesday’s primary, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos called the former Supreme Court Justice the State, Michael Gableman, ‘of embarrassment to this State’.
In an interview with CBS 58’s Bill Walsh on Wednesday, Vos softened his comments about the man he hired to investigate the 2020 election, and the man who later endorsed his main challenger, Adam Steen.
“It’s really about his actions, that’s what I was describing,” Vos said. “All we’ve asked for is to make sure he keeps us informed, that he doesn’t engage in partisan politics and that he tries to downplay his political involvement to show he’s not s is not a partisan event.”
But critics say the Gableman inquiry into the 2020 election was partisan from the start. A twitter feed Assembly Wednesday Minority Leader Greta Neubauer details several partisan events Gableman attended using taxpayer dollars.
Today, Democrats on the Joint Legislative Audit Committee called for a full audit from the Office of the Special Counsel led by Michael Gableman, calling the spending of more than $1 million “one of the most flagrant embezzlements of taxpayers’ money in our state’s history.”
Vos dismissed the Democrats’ letter as a headline, “because they know every bill we’ve paid is already a public document.”
Although Vos acknowledges that some of the money on the Gableman investigation was not well spent, it was for quite different reasons.
“Most of the money that was spent wasn’t spent on the investigation, it was spent on these liberal special interest groups who wouldn’t even discuss the fact that there were issues with the 2020 elections,” he said.
As for the future of the Gableman investigation, Vos suggests that its days are numbered.
“We need to start wrapping up, we already know what happened in 2020, and we need to consider moving forward,” he said.
An investigation by the conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty into the 2020 election found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
