A Dane County judge last week ordered Robin Vos, speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, to turn over records related to Republicans’ investigation into the 2020 presidential election, the Wisconsin State Journal reports.
The ruling was issued hours after a lawsuit was filed by American Oversight, a liberal government watchdog group. The lawsuit said Vos had not responded to the group’s open records requests. Similar records requests filed by the State Journal and other news outlets also had not been fulfilled.
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Vos was ordered by the judge to release the records or appear in court on Nov. 5 to explain why he was unable to do so. The judge said that Vos and Assembly Chief Clerk Ted Blazel, who also was named in the suit, “unjustifiably withheld” the records.
The ruling was made as controversy continues to surround the investigation led by Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. Calls for Gableman’s firing or resignation came Friday after he compared reporting on the investigation to Nazi propaganda. The involvement of Andrew Kloster, a Republican attorney and former member of the Trump administration, also has raised questions about the credibility of the elections probe.
