Wisconsin Assembly, Speaker found in contempt over election review records

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) was found in contempt of court Wednesday for failing to produce documents pertinent to an earlier request to investigate the 2020 election results.

Dane County Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn ordered Vos and the rest of the Assembly held in contempt after they chose not to hand over election documents to American Oversight, a left-leaning group that asked for them under Wisconsin’s open records law.

Bailey-Rihn said in her decision that Vos and the rest of the Assembly “revealed a collective and abject disregard for the court’s order.”

“Robin Vos had deleted the search for contractors’ records to an employee who did nothing more than send one vague email to one contractor,” she wrote. “Putting aside for the moment the impropriety of making a contractor responsible for a records request … Robin Vos did not tell that contractor which records to produce, did not ask any of the other contractors to produce records, and did not even review the records ultimately received. Still worse, the Assembly did nothing at all.”

The Assembly was ordered to turn over the documents, which still have not materialized, in November.

Vos, joined by the rest of the Assembly members, now has two weeks to find and share the documents, after which each member will receive a fine of $1,000 per day that they are not shared.

If records are not found, the Assembly is required to show the court sworn affidavits explaining why this is impossible.

“Purge conditions shall be simple: they must prove that they have complied with their duties under the public records law to search for responsive records created by their contractors,” Bailey-Rihn clarified.

Vos and the Assembly are also required to pay American Oversight’s court fees for the months it has engaged with the case. Vos has previously allied himself with former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s argument that state legislatures should be able to decertify election results even after the conclusion of the race.

Wisconsin is one of multiple states that President Trump and other Republicans have baselessly claimed went to Biden in the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.