Senator Ron Johnson’s staffer was part of Wisconsin fake elector scheme

Wisconsin senator has distanced himself from scheme

A woman who was part of an effort to subvert the will of voters in the 2020 election and cast her state’s Electoral College votes for Donald Trump works for the state’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson.

The new revelation was first reported by NBC News on Wednesday. According to the news outlet and a spokesperson for Mr Johnson, the woman in question, Pam Travis, is a longtime state Republican Party operative who works, according to Mr Johnson’s office, “answering phones” in the senator’s regional headquarters.

Ms Travis was one of 10 people who sought to have the state’s legislature endorse their bid to pass a resolution “decertifying” the results of Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election and supporting their efforts to go to Washington and cast the state’s ballots for Mr Trump instead of Joe Biden. The scheme was unconstitutional for a number of reasons: There’s no legal means, according to experts in Wisconsin law, to throw out the state’s election results with a simple legislative fiat. And no credible authority ever proved any kind of widespread fraud in Wisconsin during the 2020 election.

But nonetheless, the scheme continued for months to the point where the top deputy for Mr Johnson was in contact with a lawyer for the Trump campaign on the morning of January 6 and was pressured (unsuccessfully) to ask his boss to hand-deliver the slate of Wisconsin’s false electors to Mike Pence on the day when those electors would have been counted.

That contact has led to questions about just how involved Mr Johnson and his team were in the efforts around the country by the Trump campaign and the president’s allies to reverse his defeat in key swing states including Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. The senator has denied any significant involvement for months.

A spokesperson for his office slammed the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Mandela Barnes, in a statement when asked for comment on the continued employment of Ms Travis by The Independent, and called her a valued colleague.

“Pam Travis is a dedicated volunteer who has been active in the Republican Party grassroots for years and we are proud to have her on the team. It is really sad that Mandela Barnes supporters are going as low as to levy a baseless attack against a private citizen while Barnes himself dodges media scrutiny on a near-daily basis,” said Alexa Henning.

Numerous Republicans in the House of Representatives are known to have sought pardons for their own roles in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as did members of Mr Trump’s inner circle including Rudy Giuliani.

Those discussions as well as the very public efforts of Republicans to back away from their unsuccessful efforts raises the question about how involved they were, and whether they knew from the beginning that their efforts were likely afoul of legal procedures for contesting election results.