Election Officials Legal Defense Network (EOLDN) – CEIR-Linked Private Funding of Legal Defense for Subpoenaed Election Officials; Providing “Anything of Value” to Procure Non-Compliance With Legislative Oversight (WI)

[Established Fact – As to EOLDN existence and free counsel provision] The Wisconsin Office of the Special Counsel (OSC), led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, documented in its Second Interim Investigative Report that the Election Officials Legal Defense Network (EOLDN) – an organization linked through funding networks to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which itself was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan – offered free legal counsel to municipal election officials in Wisconsin whose activities were under active legislative subpoena and investigative scrutiny. The OSC concluded that this arrangement “effectively armed one side of oversight disputes with privately financed counsel” and that providing anything of financial value – including free legal services worth thousands of dollars per official – to public officials as an incentive or reward for the manner in which they exercised (or declined to exercise) their official duties may constitute a violation of Wisconsin’s election bribery statute, Wis. Stat. § 12.11, which prohibits giving or receiving “anything of value” to cause an election official to perform their duties. The constitutional and statutory framework of Wisconsin election law makes no distinction between cash payments and equivalent financial value in the form of professional legal services when the services are provided specifically because the official exercised election-administration authority in a manner the grantor wished to reward or encourage. The EOLDN’s provision of free legal defense to officials who were simultaneously resisting OSC subpoenas created a financial relationship in which the officials’ cooperation or non-cooperation with oversight became financially consequential to them – cooperation would end the free legal services; non-cooperation, funded by the EOLDN, was economically rational.