Vos to Trump-backed Gableman: 'You're fired'

MADISON (WKOW) -- The Wisconsin GOP review of the 2020 election ended Friday when Assembly Speaker Robin Vos fired the man he picked to lead the investigation.

Vos sent a termination letter to Michael Gableman, a former state supreme court justice, whose 14-month investigation cost taxpayers more than $1 million and produced no evidence of widespread fraud.

Gableman and Vos had been at odds over the past couple weeks. Gableman campaigned for Adam Steen, who challenged Vos in this week's GOP primary.

Vos barely survived the primary challenge, prevailing by fewer than 300 votes.

Former President Donald Trump praised Gableman and Steen at his rally in Waukesha last Friday. He also slammed Vos over the speaker's refusal to undertake the legally impossible step of decertifying Wisconsin's 2020 election results.

The former president maintained that hundreds of thousands of votes should be discounted after the state supreme court ruled in June drop boxes are illegal. The court made no such ruling on the validity of 2020 drop box votes in its June decision.

Vos confirmed the firing in a press release Friday afternoon.

“After having many members of our caucus reach out to me over the past several days, it is beyond clear to me that we only have one choice in this matter," Vos said in the statement. "And that's to close the Office of Special Counsel."

Gableman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Republican State Sen. Kathy Bernier (R-Chippewa Falls) chairs the Senate election committee and had been a frequent critic of Gableman's work.

"He has provided nothing of value for this whole research, other than hyper-political behavior," Bernier said Friday in an interview. "And that's a sad state of affairs."

Democrats have long decried the investigation as a politically-motivated attempt to justify a slate of bills introducing new restrictions for absentee voting.

Rep. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) said while it was a "good day for Wisconsin," he was troubled Vos only removed Gableman once the speaker was on the wrong end of Gableman's criticisms.

"Speaker Vos never should've hired Michael Gableman in the first place," Spreitzer said. "It's a shame that it took Mike Gableman endorsing against him in a Republican primary to get him to see what we've seen all along -- that Gableman was an embarrassment."

Vos' office provided a copy of the termination letter Friday evening. It notified Gableman he was to turn over all records related to his investigation. 

The letter also said Gableman would learn more in the next week about when the state would come to clean out the office he'd been renting in Brookfield.

Vos agreed to pay Gableman $11,000 per month before cutting his salary to $5,500 as the investigation was paused amid a quartet of lawsuits challenging whether Gableman followed the state's open records laws, and another suit brought by the Wisconsin Department of Justice challenging Gableman's authority to depose mayors and election officials in private.

Gableman had been found in contempt by one Dane County judge, while another ruled Vos failed to comply with record keeping laws.

In both cases, the judges ordered Gableman to cover the legal costs of American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group that brought the suits. Those fees amounted to more than $162,000.

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