PROSECUTOR TURNED DEFENDANT: Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, again, will be on the other side of the complaint in a civil rights lawsuit brought against him and his alleged abusive tactics in the political John Doe investigation.
Posted on 07/01/2015 8:56:37 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
MADISON, Wis. – Cindy Archer was once made to beg sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents not to shoot her dogs during an early-morning raid on her Madison home.
Now the former aide to Gov. Scott Walker who has never been charged with a crime in the Democrat-launched John Doe investigation is fighting back in court.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Tuesday evening, Archer writes that Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and his agents ransacked her house and ruined her career.
“After much soul-searching, I am filing a civil-rights lawsuit on Wednesday against Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm,” Archer writes in the column headlined “Why I’m Filing a Civil Rights Lawsuit.”
“I fear his retaliation, given what I know of his methods, but the Chisholm campaign against me that began at dawn on Sept. 14, 2011, requires a legal response to discourage the prosecutor’s continued abuse of his office.”
Archer, a close adviser to Walker when Walker was Milwaukee County executive and for a time at the start of the Republican’s first term as governor, goes into stark details of a stunning assault on her liberty and her reputation – an investigation and its violent raid all done in the name of politics.
“Nothing could have prepared me for waking up to the shouts of men with battering rams announcing that they were about to break down my door on that morning in 2011. It was so unexpected and frightening that I ran down from my bedroom without clothes on,” she writes.
Archer first told her story to the National Review in April. In that vivid account, the former Walker aide recalled that she “begged and begged investigators, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.”
In her column Tuesday, Archer recounts agents with weapons drawn swarming her house and barging into the bathroom where her partner was showering.
“I was told to shut up and sit down. The officers rummaged through drawers, cabinets and closets. Their aggressive assault on my home seemed more appropriate for a dangerous criminal, not a longtime public servant with no criminal history,” she writes.
When the agents finally left, Archer said she took inventory of the damage. She found drawers and closets ransacked, her “deceased mother’s belongings were strewn across the floor.” Like so many other targets of the secret John Doe investigation into Wisconsin conservatives, Archer was forced to watch her neighbors watch her – the star of a very public search-and-seizure operation.
And like her fellow targets, she was told she couldn’t contact her attorney and she could say nothing publicly about being a target of Chisholm’s probe.
Archer in her Wall Street Journal column asks, what prompted the raid?
She speculates it had much to do with her key role in drafting Walker’s Act 10, the public employee collective-bargaining reforms that big labor and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin despised so much that they pushed a recall movement against Walker and several Republican state senators.
Chisholm, a Democrat, grew incensed with Walker and Act 10, according to Michael Lutz, a highly decorated former Milwaukee police officer who worked as a special prosecutor in Chisholm’s office in 2011.
Lutz told the American Media Institute that Chisholm felt he had to protect his wife, Colleen Chisholm, a union shop steward at an area school, from Walker’s law. She “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”
Her husband did, too.
“He felt it was his personal duty to stop people from being treated like this, to stop Walker from treating people like this,” Lutz told Wisconsin Watchdog last year.
Chisholm and his assistants have not returned dozens of calls from Wisconsin Watchdog seeking comment.
Archer writes that her ties to Walker an Act 10 made her a “prime target for Mr. Chisholm’s campaign to intimidate anyone close to the governor.”
“In other words, I was targeted because of my politics—in plain violation of the First Amendment and federal civil-rights statutes,” she writes in the WSJ column.
Archer says she was interrogated by Chisholm’s assistants numerous times in the months following the raid, but never charged with any wrongdoing.
“I faced seven grueling confrontations that seemed designed simply to intimidate and harass me into providing damaging information about Gov. Walker—though I had none,” Archer writes.
Kelly Rindfleisch, another former aide to Walker in the county executive’s office who was ensnared in a sweeping raid of all of her digital communications, has also said that prosecutors leaned on her to get information on Walker.
And Archer, like Rindfleisch has, expressed her disappointment in Walker’s team for leaving her for dead on the brutal political battlefield.
“Worst of all, I have discovered that my demotion as Gov. Walker’s deputy director of administration, which came four weeks before the raid on my house, appears to have been engineered by the governor’s team after word reached them that I had been targeted by the district attorney. Subsequently, I have not been given any role in the administration that may bring public attention,” Archer writes.
Sources say Archer will file her civil rights complaint in state court. That’s important, because a civil rights lawsuit against John Doe prosecutors filed by other conservatives ultimately failed at the federal level after an appeals court ruled that the legal controversies involved are matters for state courts.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on several questions related to the John Doe, particularly whether the stalled investigation has to be permanently shut down.
Chisholm’s probe, launched more than five years ago, has spread into a multi-county investigation into Walker’s campaign and 29 conservative organizations. As Wisconsin Watchdog reported this week, court records show the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office was engaged in an ongoing spy operation on conservatives for years, tapping into their digital records. Some of the targets of the probe may have no idea that they were under surveillance, documents suggest.
“There should be no place in America where powerful law-enforcement officials are allowed to misuse their offices for political purposes,” Archer concludes in the Wall Street Journal piece.
PROSECUTOR TURNED DEFENDANT: Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, again, will be on the other side of the complaint in a civil rights lawsuit brought against him and his alleged abusive tactics in the political John Doe investigation.
It’s disturbing to read here that Walker’s team hung her out to dry 4 weeks before the raid on her home. They had advance notice, but did not notify her. Bad form.
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
This is a must read for those who have been asking if anyone is suing John Chisholm. Here it is.
he LOOKS like a royal piece of $hit
Chisholm even LOOKS evil.
May justice rain down on Chisholm as fire and brimstone.
Are there any experienced lawyers out there who can comment on the suit’s legal merits and chance of success?
Indeed!
She’s not a human being. She’s a “Walker aide.”
Perhaps the worst part of this is that Walker and his staff turned their backs on Archer, demoted her, and then treated her like a leper. They’re just as culpable as this corrupt D.A. in refusing to fight back.
I’m surprised it took any soul-searching.
Sovereign immunity isn’t in the Constitution, our contract with government. It’s wholly judge made law. We need to unmake it, instanter.
Yes, I was shocked by that relevation, but I have found Kittle to be accurate to a fault in is reporting. So, I believe him.
I have an old political friend who holds a post in the Walker Admin. I know that she is extremely careful about what she does — so much so that ordinary communications with her are no longer possible. IOW, she is constrained about what she can say at every level, just in case that it might be construed as mixing partisan politics with her job.
Following the law, I guess. That's what's most important.
What you describe exists in many places. The feds have statutes that give a cause of action, depending on the government over-reach. Absent a statute, the courts make up a remedy (like for homo marriage), or turn the plaintiff away, depending on what the judge had for breakfast.
Hope they take everything he has.
The chances depend entirely on which judge she gets. This is going to be a political case. Judges are reluctant to step on prosecutors’ toes, prosecutors are the rain makers. My guess is she has maybe a 20% chance.
“Are there any experienced lawyers out there who can comment on the suit’s legal merits and chance of success?”
Prosecutors and judges have almost unlimited discretion in doing their job. Hence, lawsuits against them for something that they do in the course of their work almost always fail. Hopefully, this will be the rare exception.
So........WHERE THE HELL WAS WALKER?????
Wanna vote for him now?
Wow. Walker fails the loyalty test.
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