Vice President J.D. Vance said Wednesday that he will meet with Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, a Democrat who heavily criticized the Trump administration’s probe into allegations of election fraud during the 2020 election.
Ahead of Mr. Vance’s visit to Milwaukee on Wednesday to discuss the administration’s crackdown on fraud, Mr. Johnson sent the vice president a letter inviting him to meet with city election officials.
FBI officials have sought interviews with a slew of Milwaukee election officials and staff who oversaw the 2020 election. They have also interviewed police officers as part of the federal investigation examining President Trump’s 2020 election loss in battleground states.
Mr. Vance said he is “happy” to meet with Mr. Johnson in Washington, but he is skeptical of the Milwaukee mayor’s vigorous election fraud denials.
“I will say it was a little bit of ‘he doth protest too much,’” Mr. Vance said, borrowing a line from William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” to the effect that a declaration of innocence can be so emphatic as to betray a guilty conscience.
The vice president said he came to Milwaukee to discuss financial fraud and theft of taxpayer-supported programs. He said he was surprised that Mr. Johnson wanted to meet to discuss the 2020 election.
Mr. Vance said it reminded him of a time he came home from a long trip and one of his children abruptly announced that he didn’t steal any cookies while he was away. He said that, of course, he suspected cookies were eaten.
“So when I hear a guy protesting out of nowhere, ‘I did not find any election fraud,’ ‘I did not find any election fraud,’ it makes me wonder, ‘Why is that guy protesting so aggressively?’ It’s a little odd,” Mr. Vance said.
Mr. Johnson wrote in his July 7 letter to Mr. Vance that there was no justification for the probe.
“Evidence of wrongdoing is entirely absent,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Vance should “see our election operation, talk to officials who conduct our elections and scrutinize, firsthand, the extensive security and accuracy in place.”
Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin to President Biden by about 21,000 votes in 2020. The result has been confirmed by repeated audits, recounts and other election reviews.
The Wisconsin probe is one of a series of investigations by federal officials into the 2020 election results in swing states. In January, the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of ballots related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, and the FBI in March issued a grand jury subpoena for voting information in Maricopa County, Arizona.
