‘HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?” GAB director Kevin Kennedy asked that historically charged question of a Republican lawmaker at Tuesday’s hearing on a GAB overhaul bill.
RELATED: GAB chairman: I wasn’t ‘offended’ by John Doe raids
Posted on 10/13/2015 3:59:19 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Part 261 of 259 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War
By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Watchdog
MADISON, Wis. – It was only a matter of time before someone invoked the ghost of Joe McCarthy.
This is politically hyperbolic Wisconsin after all, the home of the U.S. senator disgraced by his crusade against communists in federal government and wherever else he believed them to be.
On Tuesday, it was Government Accountability Board director and chief legal counsel Kevin Kennedy resurrecting the long-dead senator.
It was an interesting invocation for a guy who is accused by conservatives of helping to push a lengthy and unconstitutional John Doe investigation against right-of-center groups in Wisconsin.
“Seriously? Have you no decency?” Kennedy sharply responded to state Sen. Chris Kapenga’s question about Kennedy’s relationship with Lois Lerner, former director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations Unit, and the central figure in the 2013 IRS targeting controversy.
“That’s a question right out of Joseph McCarthy,” Kennedy said, his voice rising and cracking with anger.
Apparently Kennedy saw himself as Joseph Welch, the Boston attorney who represented the U.S. Army in McCarthy’s disastrous Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.
Kennedy had spent the past hour the subject of withering questions by Republicans on the Legislature’s Campaigns and Elections committee during Tuesday’s marathon public hearing. The session elicited testimony and public comment on bills that would overhaul the GAB and bring the state’s mangled campaign finance law up to date.
Kapenga kept his cool. The Delafield Republican wasn’t about to be portrayed as the McCarthy in a contest with the director of an agency that has been accused of operating a politically driven investigation that has chilled conservative speech.
He repeated his question. Kennedy resisted, and Kapenga told him he didn’t have to answer.
“I have explained my relationship with Ms. Lerner,” Kennedy said.
He has, to a degree, to the Wall Street Journal. In July the Journal’s editorial board reported on emails it had viewed showing Kennedy and Lerner in “contact on multiple occasions” between 2011 and 2013, “sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsin’s recall elections.”
“The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met for dinner and kept in professional touch,” the Journal reported.
Kennedy told the newspaper via email that “Ms. Lerner is a professional friend who I have known for more than 20 years” but declined further comment.
In his comments before the committee Tuesday, Kennedy first dismissed Kapenga’s question, asserting that his personal relationships weren’t the senator’s business.
“You have the temerity to ask me about my personal relationships,” Kennedy said.
He quickly conceded that he has had, as he told the Wall Street Journal, a “professional relationship” with Lerner since long before Lerner became the head of an IRS division that targeted conservative groups applying for nonprofit status.
It was clear that Kennedy, the long-time bureaucrat who has been in charge of Wisconsin’s elections agency in one form or fashion for the past 32 years, was fixing for a fight.
Kennedy’s job is on the line.
The bill in question would effectively dismantle the state campaign finance, elections and lobbying regulator, which the Legislature created in its current form eight years ago.
Instead of the centralized GAB, state elections and campaign finance would be split into two divisions, and the elections commission would be run by an equal number of appointed partisans – much like the Federal Election Commission. The commission would then appoint a director, subject to four-year terms and reappointment.
Kennedy defended his job, his staff members and the retired judges who preside over the board, insisting the GAB has been a national model of political speech regulation.
“I’m sure it’s a legend in your own mind, but we have a disaster of an agency here,” said state Rep. Joe Sanfelippo, R-New Berlin, a member of the committee. Sanfelippo pointed to a legislative audit that has found the GAB has failed to perform some of its most important duties, including promulgating rules.
“Eight years later the GAB has proven to be a failure,” said Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa. “We need to correct the failure.”
Committee Democrats called on committee chair Rep. Kathy Bernier, R-Chippewa Falls, to postpone the hearings on the bills. They argued they and Wisconsin citizens need more time to digest the proposals.
Interestingly, committee member Rep. Fred Kessler, D-Milwaukee, decried the three-minute limit on hearing comments, calling the timeline a “gag rule.”
Targets and witnesses of the political John Doe probe that Kessler appears to support have been bound by a “gag” order for several years. Talking about the investigation to anyone could have landed them in jail and subject to expensive fines.
The call for overhauling the GAB comes after Wisconsin Watchdog’s investigative series, “Wisconsin’s Secret War,” and national publications like the Wall Street Journal shed light on the secret investigation and its partisan players. In recent months, multiple emails from GAB staff have been published raising questions about the probe’s motives.
“I want them to be frank and know that they’re not going to be punished for that,” Kennedy said of his staff members, in dismissing accusations of partisanship.
Information released in a lawsuit against the GAB found staff members used Gmail accounts to communicate about the probe with their prosecutor partners at the Democrat-led Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office.
State Rep. Dave Craig, R-Town of Vernon, grilled Kennedy on the email accounts.
Craig asked, why keep the accounts separate from the state system, a system that integrated technology experts said is far more secure than a Gmail account?
“I find it very concerning that the GAB, which is charged with ethics and things related to open records, used a GMAIL account” for this investigation, Craig said, adding that hundreds of thousands of documents containing private information of targets, subjects and witnesses of the probe could be compromised.
The hearing featured enough parsing of words to make a lawyer stutter.
GAB chairman Gerald Nichol, an old attorney, either forgot the facts or inverted the truth in his comments to the committee.
Nichol asked, “Why is the other side fighting so hard” to keep John Doe-related records out of the public eye.
It is the other way around.
“The other side,” or the conservatives suing the GAB in state court, have asked the Waukesha County judge presiding over the case to lift his protective order that has sealed information obtained from the GAB through discovery. Attorneys for the conservatives have asked the judge to allow them to release the records.
Attorneys for the GAB have argued against public disclosure, saying state law does not allow the agency to release information from their secret investigations. True, but there is no law against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit from releasing the records, the conservatives argue.
‘HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?” GAB director Kevin Kennedy asked that historically charged question of a Republican lawmaker at Tuesday’s hearing on a GAB overhaul bill.
RELATED: GAB chairman: I wasn’t ‘offended’ by John Doe raids
This is positively delicious. Kennedy gets all hot under the collar over questions about his long term relationship with Lois Lerner of the IRS as he fights for his job.
My question: After they fire him, can they confiscate his state pension? s/off
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
Turns out McCarthy was right. Watcha gonna say now, “watchdog”?
Watchdog didn’t say McCarthy was wrong. Did you read the article?
Kevin Kennedy - Lois Lerner’s butt boy
Tailgunner Joe was RIGHT!
It’s that worm, Kennedy, who was maligning McCarthy in an attempt to defend himself.
As we now know, after Russia, back in the 1990’s released, old, declassified cold war documents from the USSR, McCarthy was correct.
Kevin Kennedy has established that HE has no decency.
“Disgraced” my ass!!
CONFIRMED in all counts by the released Soviet documents—way back in the 1990’s fer God’s sake!!
If anything, McCarthy TOTALLY UNDERESTIMATED the problem. (It is STILL a huge problem TODAY, BTW.)
OK, even though is a Commie, he supports and drives NAZI SWAT Team home invasions of political “enemies”.
OK, even though Kennedy is a Commie, he supports and drives NAZI SWAT Team home invasions of political “enemies”.
He should’ve been hustled out of there in handcuffs.
“Tailgunner Joe was RIGHT!”
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bkmk
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