Public misdirection runs rampant in the matter of the John Doe investigation reportedly looking into Republican campaigning practices involving Scott Walker and at least one GOP legislator in the 2011-'12 state recall elections.
Lawyers apparently hired by anonymous conservatives have tried and failed in court to shut down the investigation on the supposed basis that it's being conducted improperly or even in a partisan manner. Meanwhile, conservative bloggers and some media pundits wonder aloud: Why does the secret probe only seem to be targeting Republicans for inquiry and not Democrats?
Well, if you apply known facts and think that question through a bit, there are two obvious answers:
1. The John Doe leaks are all being published by right-wing web sites, along with the conservative Wall Street Journal, which ran an interview with a self-named source, a conservative think-tank boss who himself was served a subpoena in the matter (see more about this in one of the web pages linked below). No leaks are being published by left-wingers. So, the least you could say about this is that those on the political left are more careful abiding the law in the case of these types of investigations. The worst you could say is that right-wing interests are quite willing to blab about the investigation if they think it'll benefit their side.
2. That the conservative leakers never fail to spin the information they leak seems quite the "tell." After all, since they have access to secret information about the case, it'd be hard to believe they wouldn't know of any inquiry into Democratic campaigns. So, lack of any leaks in that regard suggests there indeed isn't any such inquiry about the Democratic campaigns, or at least no inquiry that led anywhere in the months-long investigation.
Which returns us to the renewed conservative charge (easily dismissed by the historic record, which we'll get back to in a moment), that this latest John Doe is a partisan witch hunt, because only conservatives seem to be targets. Unless you believe that law enforcement agencies and courts are completely compromised by the political left (a long-running Republican meme, to be sure), this charge seems silly. After all, in the John Doe probe of state legislative caucuses more than a decade ago, conservatives also leaked supposedly secret information, and made it clear Democratic lawmakers were being targeted along with conservatives.
How could a supposedly liberal, biased justice system investigate and indict Democrats along with Republicans then, but not now? The caucus case was, in fact, handled by the Dane County district attorney, an office that Republicans routinely love to point to as the epitome of liberal legal bias.
Moreover, the current probe is being led by Francis Schmitz, a highly regarded career prosecutor whom President George W. Bush once seriously considered for a US Attorney's post. But to read those conservative blogs and listen to those conservative pundits, you might think this probe is practically being run from the offices of the state Democratic Party.
Actually, it's the other party that's running an operation from their own offices. On the face of it, the recent spate of conservative attacks aimed at the current Doe probe look quite coordinated. And that's ironic, since an apparent issue in this John Doe involves whether the Walker and other Republican campaigns illegally coordinated their activity with supposedly independent third-party issue organizations that promoted their candidacies.
The bottom line is that, as with most things, where's there's smoke there's usually fire. This Doe probe grow out of an earlier one that focused on Scott Walker's campaign organization and improper behavior involving his appointed government staff when he was Milwaukee County executive. That investigation led to the criminal convictions of six individuals, including three former Walker aides, an appointee and a major campaign contributor.
In his otherwise solid columns on this case, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Dan Bice once again today providing helpful coverage, up to a point. But, as you might otherwise infer from his reporting, it's not exactly true that conservatives are only just now becoming activist in trying to influence public opinion about John Doe probes. Bice noted that in the previous John Doe probe of the Walker campaign, conservatives were tight-lipped. What he didn't note was that in the John Doe probe of the legislative caucus scandals a decade ago, conservative bloggers were -- as they are now -- busy web-publishing supposedly secret information, only worse, because among revealed documents were transcripts of closed testimony in the case. Those confidential, unreleased transcripts could only have been obtained through illegal means. Moreover, back then, conservative bloggers edited secret testimony so that excerpts cast aspersions only on Democrats. Just as with the current probe, left-of-center interests released no such secret information.
ADDENDUM: Our fellow Wisconsin blogger over at Cognitive Dissonance put up his own post on this subject noting that it's not even true, as Bice wrote, that Republicans didn't make a public fuss over the first Walker-based John Doe probe. See: http://cognidissidence.blogspot.com/2013/11/walkergate-2-john-does-ches…
It's only slightly hyperbolic to compare all these conservative-originated leaks of supposedly secret Wisconsin criminal investigations to the Bush administration's leak of secret information in the CIA-Valerie Plame case during the Iraq war. In both cases, the leaks clearly were meant to score political points through underhanded means. In both cases, Republicans and/or their supporters were trying to skew public perceptions and obscure the most salient facts by casting asperions on the individuals revealing those facts.
In the Wisconsin legislative caucus scandal, there was never a probe into who illegally leaked the secret information that showed up on conservative web sites. Almost certainly the source had to be one or more court officials, law enforcement agents or lawyers who had access to the testimony precisely because they were parties to the case. We've never had a Watergate-style investigation into those illegal leaks, which arguably were almost as bad as the crimes themselves. Privileged information was misused -- and continues to be misused -- to unfairly besmirch innocent parties and Wisconsin's justice system itself. Where's there's smoke, indeed.
