Here & Now

Jeff Mandell on an Ethics Complaint Against Michael Gableman

Frederica Freyberg:

Last August, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos fired Michael Gableman, a former Supreme Court justice, from his job as special counsel investigating the administration of the 2020 election. Today the state tab for Gableman’s work has risen to nearly $2.5 million including court costs arising from lawsuits over public records from the probe. And now attorneys at Law Forward have filed a 108-page complaint with the Office of Lawyer Regulations saying Gableman violated Supreme Court rules of professional conduct during his election investigation. Attorney Jeff Mandell filed the complaint. Thanks for being here.

Jeff Mandell:

Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So Michael Gableman was fired, as we just said, and called an embarrassment by Speaker Robin Vos. Isn’t that enough? Why file a complaint against him now?

Jeff Mandell:

Well, the goal here is not to pile on. The goal is not to embarrass Mr. Gableman. But if we have a rule of law, if we have a system where everyone plays by the same rules, those rules need to be enforced. The complaint is as long as it is because Mr. Gableman broke so many rules of ethical conduct. It was quite a task to catalog them all.

Frederica Freyberg:

So you — your complaint, as you say, alleges in detail how Gableman violated professional conduct for an attorney, starting with his competency. He’s certainly held high office as a former justice and DA. Why do you say he was incompetent here?

Jeff Mandell:

Well, for a couple of reasons. First, an attorney can be highly competent at one thing and not competent at some other area of the law, and the ethical rules require attorneys to be mindful and self-conscious of this and to accept those representations that they are prepared to carry out. Mr. Gableman, after accepting his charge as special counsel, publicly stated that he knew almost nothing about election law. So that in itself is a competence issue. Now, an attorney may take on something where they need to learn something new. We’re all capable of learning new things, but Mr. Gableman then did not undertake the kinds of steps you would expect to learn something new. You don’t get to charge the taxpayers or the state or your client for learning these new things and you have to be prepared to do it. Mr. Gableman spent the first several weeks of his job trying to learn these things at a public computer terminal at the New Berlin Public Library. Even as he told the public that his investigation was going to be highly secure and secretive and he needed to make sure that no one knew exactly what he was doing. He was doing this all at a public computer terminal and he was not learning election law in the way you would expect a diligent attorney to do but instead was consulting with conspiracy theorists and fringe actors to bring himself up to date on the latest crazy theories.

Frederica Freyberg:

You also say that he caused malicious injury to those like the mayors that he subpoenaed as part of his investigation. How so?

Jeff Mandell:

Well, he asked a judge in Waukesha County to throw the mayors of Green Bay and Madison in jail and he did so on entirely false pretenses, that he knew were false, and he did so also asking the judge to do it without even hearing from the defendants or letting those mayors know that he was trying to do it. So he misrepresented the facts in the law, tried to hide what he was doing to make sure that they wouldn’t get their day in court to defend themselves. It was entirely malicious, and when we pointed those faults out, at no point did Mr. Gableman or any of the attorneys working with him attempt to fix that or correct the record. They were deliberately lying about these public officials.

Frederica Freyberg:

Have attorneys across the country involved in trying to kind of undo the results of the 2020 election faced professional misconduct discipline in this way?

Jeff Mandell:

Quite a few have. Mayor Giuliani has been sanctioned and a lawyer here in Wisconsin, Erick Kaardal, who was tied into Mr. Gableman’s investigation, though he was not officially working for the state. Mr. Gableman was sharing information and sharing office space with him in ways that are themselves ethically problematic. He has been referred for professional discipline by a federal judge in Washington, DC because a case he filed was so baseless.

Frederica Freyberg:

Why, in your mind, is it important to file these kinds of things?

Jeff Mandell:

Well, you know, we have courts and we use our laws to resolve serious disputes, and that’s an important thing, but when people break the basic rules and they bring cases that are frivolous and that they know are frivolous when they’re seeking to advance a purely political agenda that has no basis in law, we have to uphold the rules and make sure that they can’t do it. Otherwise, we will devolve into chaos.

Frederica Freyberg:

What outcome would you like to see for Michael Gableman here?

Jeff Mandell:

I would like to see the Office of Lawyer Regulation take a really careful and thorough look at this. It is really not for us to say what the ultimate punishment should be. That’s for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin to decide. They’re the ones who patrol the bar at the end of the day. They’re the cops on the beat for this. But my hope is that the Office of Lawyer Regulation will thoroughly investigate this and get to the bottom of this and treat Mr. Gableman the same way they would treat any other lawyer in the state of Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

And so it doesn’t constitute any kind of conflict of interest given that he was a former Supreme Court justice that it is an arm of the Supreme Court?

Jeff Mandell:

It doesn’t. In fact, there was a complaint against Mr. Gableman while he was a Supreme Court justice that the rest of the Supreme Court did deal with. It’s complicated and maybe a little bit uncomfortable, but it’s part of their job.

Frederica Freyberg:

Jeffrey Mandell, thanks very much.

Jeff Mandell:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

Michael Gableman is now senior counsel in the election integrity unit at the Thomas Moore Society, a conservative public interest law firm based in Chicago.

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