THE PARTY OF FRAUD.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: COMMENT - Republican Party

On November 16, 2020, Andrew Kloster, then a lawyer for the Trump Administration, filed an affidavit calling into question the integrity of Wisconsin's presidential election results. It recounted a series of tense encounters he managed to get into while serving as a Republican election observer in Brown County, Wisconsin. This included spats with a mayoral staffer named Amaad Rivera-Wagner, who in his own account said Kloster verbally accosted him, screamed at election workers, and yelled at police.

Kloster's affidavit claims he saw Rivera-Wagner hand a single ballot envelope to an election official "in a surreptitious manner," among other similarly threadbare accusations, none of which prove that any fraud occurred, much less on a scale that would have overturned the results of the election. Trump lost Wisconsin by nearly 21,000 votes, an outcome affirmed by a recount of ballots in two counties. It was roughly the same margin Trump won by in 2016.

A few months later, Kloster declared in an online post that "the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square. No use complaining." He then proceeded to do a lot of complaining, leading up to this twisted call to action: "We need our own irate hooligans (incidentally, this is why the left and our national security apparatus hates the Proud Boys) and our own captured DA offices to let our boys off the hook."

Such rantings probably merit FBI surveillance. Yet Kloster achieved something completely different--he was tapped to play a role in a massive review of Wisconsin's election headed by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and financed to the tune of $676,000 in taxpayer dollars, and possibly more.

The probe is similar to the ones underway in Pennsylvania and Texas. And, so far, it has been marked by the same wholesale incompetence as the "forensic audit" undertaken in Arizona, which dragged on for five months, cost $6 million, and ended up concluding that Joe Biden actually beat Trump by slightly more votes than originally reported. (Trump, impervious to shame, proclaimed that he prevailed, telling his followers: "It is clear in Arizona that they must decertify the election. You heard the numbers. And those responsible for wrongdoing must be held accountable. It was a corrupt election.")

In September, Kloster was identified as the author of an email signed by Gableman and sent to election clerks across the state, asking them to retain election data, as they are...