Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Ralph Ramirez issued the order during a scheduling hearing Friday, one day after a lawyer for Gableman demanded Jeffrey Mandell, an outside attorney for Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich, withdraw a letter he sent earlier this month criticizing Gableman’s initial request.

Gableman, who was hired by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, earlier this year to conduct the probe into how the election was conducted, had initially requested interviews with mayors and city clerks in five cities — a demand he later rescinded. But in a legal filing last week in Waukesha County, Gableman asked for an order compelling the mayors to comply with an Oct. 22 legislative subpoena.

Mandell filed a letter with the court on Dec. 2 criticizing Gableman’s request, which Mandell said was “not only lacking in legal merit and built upon a gross distortion of the relevant facts, but it departs so greatly from legal standards that Mayor Genrich intends to serve the Special Counsel with a motion for sanctions.”

In the letter, Mandell said Genrich requests that the court dismiss Gableman’s petition or order a scheduling hearing to allow both parties to fully address issues raised in the petition. Ramirez ordered the latter, which was held Friday.

Madison City Attorney Mike Haas on Thursday sent a letter to Ramirez on behalf of Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway seeking to join Genrich’s request for dismissal. Haas said nobody with the city had received Gableman’s initial filing and Rhodes-Conway has said repeatedly she is willing to testify before Gableman in a public setting.

Gableman’s attorney Kevin Scott on Thursday sent a letter to Mandell demanding that he withdraw the Dec. 2 letter, which Scott said appeared to have been filed “for the improper purpose of creating undue delay and expense” to Gableman’s investigation.

In a separate letter sent Thursday to Ramirez, Scott said Mandell’s letter was “without reasonable basis in fact or law.”

Ramirez will take up the matter on Jan. 21, about one month after a separate case filed in Dane County Circuit Court. In that case, Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, who is representing the Wisconsin Elections Commission and its administrator, Meagan Wolfe, has sought a restraining order barring Gableman from seeking interviews outside of a public legislative meeting. A hearing on Kaul’s lawsuit is scheduled for Dec. 23.

Grants to cities

Gableman’s investigation has largely focused on private election grants received by Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine from the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which is funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The state’s bipartisan Elections Commission on Wednesday threw out challenges against the grant funding, which was used to help administer last year’s election during the COVID-19 pandemic. The complaints were filed earlier this year by Erick Kaardal, a Republican attorney for the conservative Thomas More Society and former secretary and treasurer for the Republican Party of Minnesota.

Kaardal has lost two lawsuits, one filed in state court and another in federal court, on behalf of the conservative Wisconsin Voters Alliance alleging the grants amounted to bribery to increase voter turnout in Democratic strongholds.

Lawyers with Madison’s DeWitt law firm, who were retained as special counsel to the commission, dismissed the complaints against the five cities, saying they don’t “raise probable cause to believe that a violation of law or abuse of discretion has occurred,” according to documents provided Thursday.

Pair reconsider

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Thursday that, despite no objections from the commission’s six members leading up to Wednesday’s decision, two of the agency’s Republican appointees — Bob Spindell and Dean Knudson — later said they disagreed with the decision to throw out the complaints. Spindell told the paper he had not seen emails from commission chairperson Ann Jacobs regarding the decision, while Knudson said he thought the email was spam.

The complainants have 30 days to appeal the commission’s decision to the circuit court. On Friday, Jacobs said it’s her understanding that the clock has already started to run on the appeals timeline, and it’s unclear if the commission could hold a hearing on the matter now.

“As far as I can tell, the timeframe that (the complainants) have to respond is now running, so I don’t know how to undo that,” Jacobs said.

Even if a hearing were to be held, it would take at least four votes to overturn the commission’s decision.

Court rulings have found nothing illegal about the more than $10 million in grants CTCL distributed to about 214 municipalities in 39 of Wisconsin’s 70 counties, including many in areas solidly won by former President Donald Trump. Nor did CTCL turn down grant requests from any of the Wisconsin municipalities that made them.

However, Republicans contend CTCL showered money on Wisconsin’s largest and most liberal areas in an effort to boost turnout for President Joe Biden in a battleground state Trump narrowly won in 2016 and that Biden ended up winning by less than a percentage point last year.