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Top far-right lawyer’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election are catching up with him: report
August 17, 2022
Former RNC Vice Chairman James Bopp, Jr. is one of the top far-right attorneys in America and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election may be catching up with him.
"A judge has declared that attorneys for the now-fired former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who led a yearlong election inquiry can no longer represent the effort," Wisconsin Public Radio reported. "In a scathing opinion Wednesday afternoon, Judge Frank Remington wrote that the out-of-state lawyers representing the Wisconsin Assembly’s Office of Special Counsel "applie(d) phony legal principles to invented facts" in a public records case filed in December 2021."
Bopp was a 2016 Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention.
"In Wednesday's decision, Remington found that Indiana-based Republican attorney James Bopp and his team had failed to meet Wisconsin's legal rules for professional conduct and had filed frivolous motions in the case, including one accusing the judge of bias," Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
The judge wrote, "I revoke [Office of Special Counsel's] out-of-state attorneys' pro hac vice admission because the motion to which they have signed their names applies phony legal principles to invented facts. Near every claim they make is frivolous under Wisconsin law.”
The pro hac vice admission is what allowed the out-of-state lawyers to practice in Wisconsin without being members of the state bar.
'"In November 2020, Bopp filed four lawsuits challenging the election results favoring President Joe Biden in four battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan. But he withdrew the suits without explanation a week after filing them," Law.com reported in April.
Bopp also represented the far-right group True the Vote in multiple failed lawsuits.
"He is perhaps best known in legal circles for his litigation challenging campaign finance limits. He drafted the petition in Citizens United v. FEC, which the Supreme Court granted, but he did not get to argue the case. Citizens United President David Bossie hired former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to argue the case. Bossie later joined the Trump White House," Law.com reported. "Bopp has been an ardent foe of abortion rights on behalf of the National Right to Life Committee, where he has been general counsel, and other anti-abortion groups. He has argued five U.S. Supreme Court cases. Most recently, he represented groups of students and others in challenges to vaccine mandates."
Bopp was the focus of a 2010 New York Times profile reporting "for most of the last 35 years, he has been a lonely Quixote tilting at the very idea of regulating political donations as an affront to free speech. Not anymore. Mr. Bopp won his biggest victory last week when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions and nonprofit groups have the right to spend as much as they want supporting or opposing the election of a candidate."
The profile was titled, "A Quest to End Spending Rules for Campaigns."
Election law professor Richard Hasan told the newspaper the case was Bopp's "brainchild."
“He has manufactured these cases to present certain questions to the Supreme Court in a certain order and achieve a certain result,” Hasen explained. “He is a litigation machine.”
Judge Frank D. Remington ruling / screengrab.
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Judge issues scathing opinion at Wisconsin legislature: 'A pernicious and selfish attempt to repaint the truth'
August 17, 2022
Dane County Circuit Court Judge Frank D. Remington issued a 90-page opinion on Wednesday attacking the Wisconsin state legislature calling them liars.
Michael Gableman, who previously served on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, was hired by Republicans (at taxpayer expense) to help investigate "2020 election fraud." The GOP goal was to prove that Joe Biden somehow "stole" the election from Trump.
The lawsuit is about a records request from American Oversight, a state-level government watchdog group. They are looking into Gableman's investigation and requested documents. Already they've filed several lawsuits trying to get the information about the research that Gableman did and what he did with the taxpayer dollars he was paid. Ultimately, Remington agreed that the documents should be released and Gableman was fined him $2,000 a day until he turned them over.
Gableman submitted an affidavit on June 28 saying that he did a search, which Remington ultimately said he believed the former Supreme Court Justice, but he was still ordered to fork over $24,000 in contempt charges. American Oversight, however, said that they got most of the documents but not all of them.
Gableman's attorney, James Bopp, Jr. who is out of Indiana, swore that the documents didn't exist and he signed a sworn statement to that effect.
“These overbroad statements that ‘everything was produced, we searched everything,’ it’s just almost too broad to be credible given what we know from other sources and given what we know about the Office of Special Counsel’s records procedures,” attorney Christa Westerberg said.
An example revealed last month is that Gableman swore in an affidavit that he searched several electronic devices personally for records. Remington didn't think that he even had the technical capabilities to do such a search.
“Is there a reason he did not enlist the services of individuals with more sophisticated understanding of electronic communications?” Remington asked Gableman, who didn't own a personal computer at the start of the investigation and was using one from the public library.
“Quite plausibly, Mr. Gableman has demonstrated he’s not capable of conducting a professional and thorough investigation, that he deleted records, public records, and what you’re trying to do is superimpose a level of professionalism on an entity and an individual that just doesn’t exist,” Remington said last month in court, according to KPVI. “All the questions that you asked, even if I sent it back to them for supplemental response again and again and again, we’ll never get to the end of the question because you’re expecting more than what this organization and individual was prepared and able to deliver. Does that mean then you made your point and the answers will be left to the history books to wonder?”
The judge then ordered the Wisconsin Assembly to pay $160,000 in attorneys fees after holding Gableman in contempt. The Assembly had only allocated $676,000 for the investigation into the 2020 election, but Gableman has spent closer to $1 million at this point, said WISPolitics.com. At one point in the trial, Gableman was even caught on a hot mic mocking the judge and sarcastically pretending to invite the American Oversight attorney "come back into my chamber" so she could dictate what she wanted.
Meanwhile, the cases have continued and "Remington berated Bopp and his team for arguing that records had to be withheld because they were 'strategic' to the investigation," reported the AP. "The records Gableman eventually turned over included mostly blank pages, dozens of pages of duplicates and a complaint against film and television actors for criticizing the government, the judge wrote, demonstrating that the investigation accomplished nothing."
The GOP Assembly fired Gableman from the probe, with the Assembly speaker citing unprofessional behavior. But Judge Remington had a few more words for Bopp and the legal team in an order revoking five attorneys from being able to represent the Assembly Office of Special Counsel. Gableman made a number of false claims that sent Remington to issue the 90-page response.
Judge Remington said the lawyers' effort was "a pernicious and selfish attempt to repaint the truth. In doing so, [the Assembly counsel] denigrates our entire unified court system. Wis. Const. art. VII, § 2. OSC accuses me of threatening a witness, a felony under Wis. Stat. § 940.201. It does these things carelessly, with no regard for the law of the State of Wisconsin or for the facts of this case, and perhaps most perplexingly, OSC never even bothers to invent an explanation for why I am supposedly biased."
To make matters worse, the lawyer, Bopp, who works out of state in Indiana, tried to say that the judge's comments and his order to remove the lawyers was "pointless and meaningless" because the case is going to the trial court."
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On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is privately flustered and worried about the effectiveness of Democratic attacks on him as a wealthy elitist who uses his political office to enrich himself.
This comes as Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes mounts a campaign to unseat him in the midterms — and as the most recent poll from Marquette University shows Barnes leading by 7 points with likely voters.
"Johnson’s ability to reintroduce himself in a more positive light — his favorability has been on a steady decline since 2019 among voters here — is key to Republicans’ strategy to retain a Senate seat that could ultimately determine control of the chamber, where Vice President Kamala Harris is now the tie-breaking vote," reported Natasha Korecki. "Several Johnson aides and allies said the senator has privately fumed over Democrats’ depiction of him as a Washington insider who’s profited off of his position and lost touch with the average Wisconsinite — a message that Barnes is now helping to steer."
According to the report, strategists helping Johnson are eager to paint Barnes as an extremist — but are wary the messaging could backfire, as they did against another Black Democratic candidate, now-Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia.
"Despite the early zeal to compete against Barnes, Republicans are also approaching their Wisconsin strategy with some caution, with some privately acknowledging they’ve learned lessons from Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s January 2021 win in Georgia," said the report. "In that campaign, Republicans depicted Warnock as a radical and liberal — the same attack the GOP has already launched against Barnes."
"Johnson’s persona, meanwhile, has been increasingly defined by the controversial headlines he routinely captures over his statements on issues like abortion, his perpetuation of dubious and unproven Covid treatments, and even the recent FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida," said the report.
"A campaign aide said Johnson is most unnerved by Democrats’ depiction of him as a “billionaire bogeyman in it for himself” and at shots at his integrity, including two ethics complaints that were lodged against him. One, questioning his flights to Florida from Wisconsin, was dismissed. Still pending is a complaint over a $280,000 gift to a chief of staff — payments, according to his campaign, that were meant to cover the longtime employee’s cancer treatments. "
Johnson came under further scrutiny this week with his remarks opposing the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act provision allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs as "punishing the pharmaceutical industry."
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