A Federal Bureau of Investigation agent interviewed a high-ranking state election official in recent days about the 2020 presidential election, according to sources with knowledge of the conversation.
The agent sat down with Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe earlier this week and discussed with Kehoe how elections are carried out in Wisconsin and various election theories. Kehoe debunked false claims and clarified how elections work, according to the sources.
One of the sources called the conversation “a professional interview by a career FBI agent.”
A spokeswoman for the FBI did not respond to questions. A spokeswoman for the state Elections Commission declined to comment late Thursday but on Friday said the commission “routinely discusses election matters with federal, state, and local officials.”
“The WEC is committed to transparency in matters of public interest; however, there are occasions when we are unable to confirm or discuss certain topics, that includes closed session discussions pertaining to privileged and confidential matters,” she said in a statement.
The interview comes at a time when Wisconsin and Milwaukee election officials are bracing for potential action from federal authorities over their administration of the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump falsely claims he won.
The election officials have been on alert for much of this year after federal investigators in January seized hundreds of boxes related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia and after the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena in March for voting information in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Like Georgia and Arizona, Wisconsin is at the center of Trump’s baseless argument that he won the 2020 election. Trump has claimed without evidence that thousands of fraudulent ballots delivered an election victory for former President Joe Biden in Wisconsin that year.
How nearly 180,000 Milwaukee residents voted in the 2020 presidential election could be at risk of becoming public if the FBI compels election officials to hand over voting data here in its pursuit to relitigate Trump’s election loss in the key battleground states.
The ballots at issue are part of a swath of votes in liberal-leaning Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump sought to throw out during a recount he paid for of Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election, when the COVID-19 pandemic fueled a spike in absentee voting.
Trump lost reelection in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia in 2020 but continues to falsely claim he in fact won, despite court rulings, audits and reviews showing he lost.
If federal authorities expanded their probe to include the pursuit of voting data in Milwaukee, poll books and about 176,000 absentee ballots with an attached ID number could be turned over.
That’s because state law requires absentee ballots counted at a central counting facility to include poll list numbers, which could be matched with poll book information to identify voters.
Normally, ballots from an election held more than five years ago would have been destroyed by now. But these ballots still exist, in part, because of a lawsuit filed against the city by a New London man who has filed dozens of lawsuits against state and local election officials over the 2020 election and other voting matters.
The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Wisconsin officials over their refusal to hand over confidential information of voters that the state election officials argue is protected by Wisconsin law.
The federal lawsuit is one of nearly two dozen the Trump administration has filed across the country seeking voter lists without personal information redacted.
Journal Sentinel reporter Mary Spicuzza contributed.
Molly Beck can be reached at molly.beck@jrn.com.
(This story was updated to add new information.)
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: FBI questions Wisconsin election official about 2020 presidential vote
Reporting by Molly Beck, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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