State Supreme Court Candidate Paid by State and National Republicans

Monday, February 20th, 2023 -- 10:01 AM

(AP) One of the two conservative candidates for an open Wisconsin Supreme Court seat was paid by state and national Republicans to advise on election issues, including the plan to have fake GOP electors cast ballots for Donald Trump even though he lost the state.

Dan Kelly is a former state Supreme Court Justice who is one of four candidates in Tuesday’s primary. The top two vote-getters will advance to the April 4 general election, with the winner determining whether the court remains 4-3 majority conservative or flips to liberal control.

Kelly was a justice on the court from 2016 to 2020. He was endorsed by Trump during his unsuccessful run for the court in 2020. After Kelly left the court in August 2020, he went on to be paid nearly $120,000 by the Wisconsin Republican Party and the Republican National Committee to work on election issues, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first reported Friday.

Kelly’s work for the state GOP was revealed in testimony that former party Chairman Andrew Hitt gave the U.S. House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol.

Hitt, according to his testimony that was released by the committee last month, said that Kelly was working as a “special counsel” and had “pretty extensive conservations” about the fake Republican electors. Hitt testified that he brought in Kelly to “kind of advise on election law matters.”

The Republican fake electors met in the Wisconsin Capitol building on the same day that Democrats cast the state’s 10 electoral votes for Biden. Hitt and others who cast ballots for Trump said they were doing so in case courts overturned Biden’s win and gave the state to Trump.

Biden won the state by nearly 21,000 votes, and every attempt by Trump and his allies to overturn the results failed.

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