MADISON, Wisconsin. First, the Wisconsin Republicans. ordered an audit of the 2020 elections. Then they passed a number of new restrictions on the vote. And in June they authorized the only special investigation in the country in 2020.

Now, more than 15 months after former President Donald Trump lost the state by 20,682 votesAn increasingly active part of the Republican Party is backing a new scheme: reversing the confirmation of the 2020 presidential election results in the hope of restoring Trump to the White House.

Wisconsin is closer to the next federal election than it was to the last, but Republican efforts to reverse the election here are gaining momentum, not fading—and spiraling further from reality. The latest twist, fueled by Mr. Trump, bogus legal theories and a new gubernatorial candidate, is creating havoc in the Republican Party and threatening to undermine its drive to win this year’s gubernatorial and Senate elections.

The situation in Wisconsin may be the clearest example of Republican leaders struggling to rally their party, with many of its most vocal voters simply unable to come to terms with the reality of losing Mr. Trump.

In Wisconsin, Robin Vos, the Speaker of the Assembly, who allowed vague theories about fraud to circulate unhindered, now struggles to curb them. Even Mr. Vos’s cautious attempts have sharply turned opponents of the election against him.

“It’s a real problem,” said Timothy Ramtun, the Republican state representative who has turned his bid to cancel the election into a nascent campaign for governor. Mr. Ramthun argued that if the Wisconsin Legislature revokes the approval of the results and annuls 10 state electoral votes — an action that has no basis in state or federal law — it could spark a movement that would remove President Biden from office.

“We don’t wear tinfoil hats,” he said. “We are not marginalized.”

While support for the decertification campaign is hard to measure, it won’t take long to make an impact in a state where elections are routinely narrowly decided. Mr. Ramtun is drawing crowds, and his campaign has already sparked controversy among Republicans over false allegations of fraud in 2020. October Marquette University School of Law Poll in Milwaukee.

“That’s just not what the Republican Party needs right now,” Rob Swearingen said. Republican state representative from conservative Northwood. “We shouldn’t quarrel among ourselves over what happened, you know, a year and a half ago.”

Wisconsin has the most active dessertification effort in the country. In Arizona Republican state legislator running for Secretary of Statealong with congressional candidates called for the state’s electoral votes to be withdrawn. In September, Mr Trump wrote a letter to the Georgian authorities asking them to cancel Mr. Biden’s victory there, but there was no organized effort.

In Wisconsin, the move to decertify has turned Republican politics on its head. After more than a decade of Republican leaders keeping pace with their base, the party is plagued by infighting and it is the Democrats who are backing Gov. Tony Evers, who is running for a second term in November.

“Now the Republicans are arguing about whether we want democracy or not,” Mr. Evers said in an interview Friday.

Mr. Ramthun, a 64-year-old MP who lives in a village of 2,000 an hour northwest of Milwaukee, has suddenly become a folk hero in Trump’s wing in his drive to renounce certification. Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, invited Mr. Ramtan to his podcast. At parties he flaunts 72 page presentation in which he falsely claims that legislators have the power to declare Wisconsin’s election results invalid and withdraw the state’s electoral votes.

Mr. Ramtun received more applause at local Republican caucus than leading gubernatorial candidates, and last weekend he joined the race himselfannouncing his candidacy at the start of the campaign, where he was introduced by Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow, which funded numerous attempts to undermine and overthrow elections 2020.

Mr. Trump delivered public words of support.

“Who in Wisconsin is leading the fight to decertify these fraudulent elections?” the former president said in a statement.

Soon, the state’s leading Republicans reacted to Mr. Ramtun’s campaign plots. A few days later, both of his Republican rivals for governor unveiled new plans to strengthen guerrilla control elections in Wisconsin.

During a radio appearance Thursday, former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Clifish, party establishment preferred candidate, refused to acknowledge that Mr. Biden won the 2020 election – what she had already conceded last September. Ms. Klefish declined to be interviewed.

However, Mr. Ramthun maintains that the energy of the grassroots is on his side. On Tuesday, he gathered about 250 people for a two-hour rally in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

Terry Brand, chairman of the Republican Party in rural Langlade County, chartered a bus for two dozen people for a three-hour trip. Mr. Brand oversaw the county’s first GOP conviction of Mr. Vos in January, calling for the leader’s resignation for blocking an effort to revoke the certificate. At the rally, Mr. Brand stood with a sign “Quit Vos.”

“People foaming at the mouth over this issue,” he said, listening intently as the speakers offered both conspiracy theories and assurances from the audience that they were of sound mind.

“You’re not crazy,” Yanel Brandtjen, chairman of the Assembly’s electoral committee, told the crowd.

One speaker connected Mr. Vos through college roommate and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to false claims circulating in right-wing media that the Hillary Clinton campaign was spying on Mr. Trump. The other was introduced under a pseudonym and then immediately declared herself candidate for lieutenant governor.

The rally ended with the words of Harry Waite, organizer of a conservative group in Racine County called HOT governmentan abbreviation for honest, open and transparent.

“I want to remind everyone,” said Mr. Waite, “that yesterday’s conspiracies can be today’s reality.”

Mr. Ramtun says he has questioned the outcome of every presidential election in Wisconsin. since 1996. (He makes no exception for the only Republican victory in that period: Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016.) He promised to consider ending the use of voting machines and “independent full forensic physical cyber-auditthe 2020 elections as well as the 2022 elections, no matter how they turn out.

Mr. Ramthun adopted the biblical slogan “Let there be light,” a reference to his claim that Mr. Vos is hiding the truth from voters. If Wisconsin withdraws its electoral votes, Mr. Ramthun said, other states may follow suit.

(American presidents can only be removed from office by impeachment or cabinet vote.)

It has all become too much for Mr. Vos, who until the Trump era was a die-hard Republican grunt focused on taxes, spending and labor laws.

Mr. Vos often appeased his party’s campaign conspirators, expressing their own doubts about who really won in Wisconsin calling for felony indictment against Wisconsin’s top election organizers and the authorization of the 2020 election investigation, which is still ongoing.

Now, even as he draws the line for refusing certification, Mr. Vos tries to calm his base and beg for patience. This week, he announced that the Assembly plans to vote on a new package of bills. (Mr Evers said in an interview Friday that he would veto any new restrictions.)

“It’s just a matter of misdirected anger,” he said of the criticism he faced. “They have already assumed that the Democrats are hopeless, and now they are focused on those of us who are trying to get to the bottom of the truth, hoping that we will do more.”

Other Republicans in the state are also walking the political tightrope – refusing to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory while avoiding taking a stand on Mr. Ramtun’s efforts to revoke the certificate.

“There may be evidence, other people are working on it,” said Ron Tasler, a member of the Assembly’s selection committee. “It’s too early to be sure, but maybe we’ll try it later.”

State Senator Kathy Bernier is the only one of Wisconsin’s 82 Republican lawmakers to release a statement that Mr. Trump lost the state fairly, without widespread fraud.

Ms. Bernier, chair of the State Senate Elections Committee, asked lawyers in the Wisconsin Legislature in November to weigh the legality of the cancellation of the election results, which they said was impossible. In December, she called for the end to the Assembly Inquiry in 2020. Three weeks later she announced she will not seek re-election this year.

“I have no explanation why lawmakers want to develop voter fraud conspiracy theories that have not been proven,” Ms Bernier said in an interview. “They shouldn’t be doing this. This is dangerous for our democratic republic. They need to take a step back and only talk about what they know, understand and can do. And besides that, they have to zip it up.”

Kitty Bennett contributed to the study.

Peter Ernest, who led undercover CIA agents during the Cold War for decades and then used that experience as the first executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, died on February 13 at a hospital in Arlington, Virginia. 88.

His wife Karen Rice said congestive heart failure was the cause.

Unlike many former intelligence officers who tend to remain silent, Mr. Ernest spoke skillfully and willingly about his career in the CIA, including years spent in Europe and the Middle East, where he recruited and directed espionage agents. Soviet Union and its satellites. This experience – and his attitude – made him an excellent candidate to run a museum dedicated to international espionage.

One of his favorite stories involves a 1978 assignment to protect and interrogate Soviet defector Arkady N. Shevchenko by moving him undercover from his New York City apartment to a Virginia suburb. Mr. Shevchenko, the UN’s appointed deputy secretary general, had already been spying for the CIA, and the Americans were worried he was about to be caught by the KGB.

For several weeks, Mr. Ernest’s team interrogated Mr. Shevchenko — among his interrogators was Aldrich Ames, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy himself — and dealt with his endless demands for clothes, girlfriends, and even vacations in the Caribbean. Mr. Ernest paid for all this by handing over the cash to the FBI handlers of the Russian defector.

FBI agents accustomed to strict spending protocols were amazed, he recalled in Business Confidentiality: Lessons in Corporate Success from Inside the CIA (2010), which he coauthored with Marianne Karinch. “They said, ‘No one can distribute that kind of money but God.’

Mr. Ernest’s last position in the agency was that of its chief representative. He demonstrated media dexterity as the CIA weathered the Iran-Contra scandal, the fall of the Soviet Union, and congressional pressure to declassify Cold War material. By many accounts, he was successful, in part because he was trusted by the rank and file of the CIA.

“It’s hard to be a publicist for a company that doesn’t want publicity,” Burton Gerber, who has worked at the agency for 39 years, said in a telephone interview. “We liked Peter because he was one of us.”

And part of the job, according to Mr. Ernest, was fun: for example, he met Harrison Ford after he helped arrange for a film crew to come to the agency’s headquarters to film Patriot Games (1992), the first film made. allowed to film inside the building.

Such experience made Mr. Ernest a natural choice to run the International Spy Museum, a $34 million venture that opened in downtown Washington in 2002. As executive director, he has been involved in everything from exhibitions and lectures to public relations; he spoke to reporters almost as often as he did at the CIA

“Someone once said that if you can convince another person to spy for your country, you can probably sell anything,” said H. Keith Melton, a historian and collector who donated many of the spy artifacts that made up the original funds of the museum. “Peter had such a skill set.”

Mr. Melton, one of the museum’s early board members, was instrumental in hiring Mr. Ernest, and Mr. Ernest later helped convince Mr. Melton donate most of your remaining collectionabout 7,000 items, including the ice pick that killed the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Mr. Ernest also understood the importance of making the museum more than just a tourist attraction. He organized advisory boards that included retired intelligence officials and historians and built both permanent and temporary exhibits on mysteries like spy camera technology and current events like the war on terror.

And he added personality to the museum: among his collection was a coat with a camera in the buttonhole, which he wore while working undercover in Greece and Cyprus.

His efforts paid off. About nine million people visited the museum between 2002 and its retirement in 2017, far exceeding the founders’ initial expectations, despite people having to pay to enter in a city where many museums are free. (Adult tickets are currently $26.95.)

“He was a true spy who believed deeply and passionately not only in transparency, but in helping the public understand what espionage is,” Tamara Christian, the museum’s president and CEO, said in a telephone interview. She added, “He wanted people to stop thinking of espionage as a James Bond movie.”

With a quick wit and dapper sense of style, he has also been a popular guest on television programs such as “Colbert Reportand radio programs such as the NPR quiz show “ask me more”, whose host, Ophira Eisenberg, wondered if spies really like to shake, not stir drinks.

— How do you drink? she asked.

Without wasting a second, he replied, “One after the other.”

Edwin Peter Ernest was born on January 1, 1934 in Edinburgh, where his father, Edwin Burchett Ernest, served as a diplomat at the US Consulate. His mother, Emily (Keating) Ernest, was born in England and was a housewife.

The family returned to the United States in 1939 and settled in Bethesda, Maryland. Peter’s father died of a brain tumor in 1946; then his mother became a US citizen and went to work for the State Department.

Mr. Ernest graduated from Georgetown University in 1955 with a degree in history and political science and immediately joined the Marine Corps, where he was posted to Japan. When he returned, his fiancée Janet Chesney, who was already working in the CIA field office in Washington, convinced his superiors to recruit him.

His marriage to Miss Chesney ended in divorce. He married Ms. Rice, who also worked for the CIA, in 1988. With her, he was survived by four daughters, Nancy Cintorino, Carol Earnest, Patricia Earnest, and Sheila Gorman, all from his first marriage; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Mr. Ernest worked in the agency’s secret service for 25 years, after which he worked in the agency’s inspector general’s office and Senate liaison. He arrived in the late 1970s to mend relations with Congress after the so-called Church Committee exposed years of CIA involvement in coups and assassinations.

Although Mr. Ernest tried not to embellish intelligence work, he also seemed to like to lift the veil over the life of a spy from time to time.

IN interview for the International Spy Museum, he said that he was assigned to plant a bug in the house of a man whom his superiors suspected of being a double agent. One night, the suspect invited Mr. Ernest and his wife to a small party at his home.

When the owner wasn’t looking, Mr. Ernest, dressed in a tuxedo, slipped downstairs into the man’s office, where he slipped under his desk, drilled a hole, and installed a listening device, placing a handkerchief across his chest to catch sawdust. . He returned to the party unnoticed.

It was his “connection moment,” he said, and it worked: the bug recorded a conversation between the suspect and his handler on the other side.

“But for a moment,” he said, “lying under that desk, I should have thought what my reaction would be if he walked into that office.”