How Innocent Scott Walker Supporters Were Persecuted in Wisconsin

RUSH: Some truly outrageous things that have gone on in the state of Wisconsin that have happened at the same time as -- and as part of -- the effort to destroy Scott Walker. A similar effort, almost identical effort was made to destroy anybody and everybody who supported him and vote for him or donated money to him.

Think of it this way: What do you think the greatest fear of the innocent is if law enforcement comes calling? Have you ever thought about this? Maybe some of you have experienced it. You are totally innocent. Nevertheless, you are being pursued. What is your greatest fear?

Your greatest fear is the system is gonna totally fail you and that there is nobody to stop an out-of-control cop, nobody to stop an out-of-control prosecutor, nobody to stop a corrupt judge, and that you're gonna be had no matter the fact that you are terribly innocent.

That is a fear a lot of people have, and it was routinely occurring in the state of Wisconsin during the recall efforts of Scott Walker and during the general elections and campaigns of Scott Walker. Now, everybody knows what he went through. Everybody knows what his family went through. What nobody outside the state of Wisconsin knows -- until now, because National Review has uncovered it in great detail with a story by David French.

Nobody knew what just average, ordinary nameless, faceless people who happened to just donate to him or vote for him went through as well. Midnight raids on their homes. Police with battering rams breaking down their front doors at midnight, at one or two in the morning. It was never explained why law enforcement was after them. They were forbidden to tell anybody who was going on. The neighborhood saw it all happen.

The neighborhood, people in the neighborhood wondered, "What in the world did that family do? My God, we got scared to death!" The cops didn't have to explain anything, whatever the prosecutor wanted -- and his name is one I hope you will never forget, as well as the judge involved in this. I hope neither of these names do you ever forget, because they are the essence of liberal Democrat corruption run amok with no limits and no stops whatsoever.

It is frighteningly outrageous. It's the kind of stuff that Hollywood makes movies about that, when you watch, you might fear it, but you would never, ever dream of it really happening. That's why it's in a movie. So I want to try to explain in a little bit more detail what this story is about. But ultimately you're gonna have to read it at National Review.

RUSH: I've been sitting on the Wisconsin Scott Walker story. I got it Sunday night. They sent me a prepublication copy of it, a PDF file. I started reading it, and I said, "There is no way that I'm gonna be ready to do this justice by Monday," which was yesterday. So I spent a little bit more time on it. So hopefully I'll get to it today with just enough of a summary to intrigue you enough to make you go read it. You've gotta read this. You have to. It's a National Review, and it's by David French.

Let me give you the actual title of the story. "John Doe's Tyranny -- Wisconsin conservatives have been subjected to secretive, baseless investigations." But that subhead doesn't even come close to telling it is reader what he's about to discover. It's about the John Doe laws in Wisconsin, which we have discussed on occasion on this program. John Doe means the state can literally investigate anybody without telling them why, and they can deny them lawyers.

I mean, it's incredible. They could literally set out to destroy you, and the only thing standing in the way of it is the honor system. If you have a corrupt prosecutor (which this story has), and if you have a corrupt judge, (which this story has), and if you have a police department that is also corrupt (this happened in Milwaukee, mostly), then you can pull this off.

There's even a quote from a couple police officers who were forced to participate these midnight raids on innocent people who had not done a thing other than support Scott Walker. That's all they had done, and cop car after cop car, cop after cop, SWAT teams, you name it, show up with battering rams to break into these people's homes! They're kicked out of their homes at midnight, at one o'clock in the morning. They're not allowed to take anything; they're not told why.

They're not allowed to explain to anybody that this has happened besides the neighborhood which can see it. Years after the fact, mothers are reporting their young kids that were at home when this happened are still traumatized. People are reporting today that they get scared and traumatized and panicked when they see a uniformed police officer just walking a beat. They hightail it away.

It is the fear that I think a lot of innocent people experience when law enforcement is pursuing them. I know. I've been there. I know a number of things. Law enforcement's never doubted, other than the civil rights community. The media doesn't doubt them. Law enforcement can leak anything they want about anybody, and the media writes it, and it becomes fact. Even average, ordinary Americans say, "Why would the cops lie? Why?" I mean, they take it on faith.

"Why would a prosecutor lie? Why would a prosecutor say somebody's guilty if they're not? They don't have time to waste on this. There are too many guilty people to go get to waste time on the innocent." The innocent in Wisconsin were guilty because they were conservative. The left in Wisconsin was losing everything. They were losing their union domination and control. Scott Walker was decimating all the systems they had put in place.

They literally lashed out in panic, anger, and you name it to punish people who had voted for Walker, who had raised money for him, who they thought had voted for him. It was the kind of thing that Vladimir Putin does and we all laugh about because that's what we expect in a tyrannical dictatorship like the Soviet Union or Russia. We find out that it can happen here and has happened here, and there was no mechanism to stop it. The prosecutor's name is Chisholm, John Chisholm, and I hope his name is never forgotten.

He has tarnished the reputation of prosecutors all over this country. He belongs right up there with Mike Nifong. Mike Nifong is a piker compared to what happened in this case. Nifong is an amateur compared to what happened here in Wisconsin. There's one puzzling thing about this, to me. There's one puzzling thing about it, and that is Scott Walker doesn't talk about it. Now, until I read the National Review piece...

You know, I knew the John Doe laws and I knew they'd been abused and I'd heard this or that. But I did not know until Sunday night just how outrageous the application of the John Doe laws has been. There's a term that has been developed to describe what happens here. It's "lawfare" as in warfare, except this warfare conducted by law enforcement. "Lawfare." Walker hasn't talked about it. I mean, everybody knows what he went through. Everybody knows the attacks on him.

What nobody outside Wisconsin knows, or very few (they will now) is the same stuff was done to hundreds of people that supported him.

RUSH: Another piece of information about these Wisconsin raids. And, by the way, they were all innocent. Nobody was guilty of anything. They hadn't done anything. The John Doe law allowed for anonymous prosecution. Law enforcement was simply allowed to target anybody they thought might be guilty of a crime under the terms of this law, and they had to tell nobody, including the accused. This violated the US Constitution in so many ways.

Just think of a battering ram breaking down your house. You live in suburbia, a battering ram breaking down your house at one a.m., and cops, jackbooted or otherwise, come in, steal every telephone and every computer, and you never get them back. And they don't tell you why. You're left to assume it. I mean, that's just one of the things that happened.

It was all done by a bunch of aggrieved, loser at the ballot box liberal Democrats, who thought the state was forever their personal fiefdom. And then Walker had to go and beat them three times, and they just lost it, and in the process became exactly who they are. The one plus in this, if there is a plus, is that the left, in these incidents in Wisconsin, they threw down all the camouflage. They got rid of every mask. They hid behind nothing. Exactly who they are if left unchecked and unopposed, was made obvious.

That’s the “John Doe” gag function and why this has gone to the WI Supreme Ct and the U.S. Supreme Ct. This practically destroyed Wisconsin Club for Growth and has hurt many individuals and families.

“......The investigation not only damaged families, it also shut down their free speech. In many cases, the investigations halted conservative groups in their tracks. O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth described the effect in court filings:

>>>O’Keefe’s associates began cancelling meetings with him and declining to take his calls, reasonably fearful that merely associating with him could make them targets of the investigation. O’Keefe was forced to abandon fundraising for the Club because he could no longer guarantee to donors that their identities would remain confidential, could not (due to the Secrecy Order) explain to potential donors the nature of the investigation, could not assuage donors’ fears that they might become targets themselves, and could not assure donors that their money would go to fund advocacy rather than legal expenses. The Club was also paralyzed. Its officials could not associate with its key supporters, and its funds were depleted. It could not engage in issue advocacy for fear of criminal sanction.<<<

These raids and subpoenas were often based not on traditional notions of probable cause but on mere suspicion, untethered to the law or evidence, and potentially violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The very existence of First Amendment–protected expression was deemed to be evidence of illegality. The prosecution simply assumed that the conservatives were incapable of operating within the bounds of the law.

Even worse, many of the investigators’ legal theories, even if proven by the evidence, would not have supported criminal prosecutions. In other words, they were investigating “crimes” that weren’t crimes at all.

If the prosecutors had applied the same legal standards to the Democrats in their own offices, they would have been forced to turn the raids on themselves. If the prosecutors and investigators had been raided, how many of their computers and smartphones would have contained incriminating information indicating use of government resources for partisan purposes?

With the investigations now bursting out into the open, some conservatives began to fight back. O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth moved to quash the John Doe subpoenas aimed at them. In a surprise move, Judge Kluka, who had presided over the Doe investigations for more than a year, recused herself from the case. (A political journal, the Wisconsin Reporter, attempted to speak to Judge Kluka about her recusal, but she refused to offer comment.)

The new judge in the case, Gregory Peterson, promptly sided with O’Keefe and blocked multiple subpoenas, holding (in a sealed opinion obtained by the Wall Street Journal, which has done invaluable work covering the John Doe investigations) that they “do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws.” The judge noted that “the State is not claiming that any of the independent organizations expressly advocated” Walker’s election.

O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth followed up Judge Peterson’s ruling by filing a federal lawsuit against Chisholm and a number of additional defendants, alleging multiple constitutional violations, including a claim that the investigation constituted unlawful retaliation against the plaintiffs for the exercise of their First Amendment rights. United States District Court judge Rudolph Randa promptly granted the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, declaring that “the Defendants must cease all activities related to the investigation, return all property seized in the investigation from any individual or organization, and permanently destroy all copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation.”

From that point forward, the case proceeded on parallel state and federal tracks. At the federal level, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Randa’s order. Declining to consider the case on the merits, the appeals court found the lawsuit barred by the federal Anti-Injunction Act, which prohibits federal courts from issuing injunctions against some state-court proceedings. O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth have petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari and expect a ruling in a matter of weeks.

At the same time, the John Doe prosecutors took their case to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals to attempt to restart the Doe proceedings. The case was ultimately consolidated before the state supreme court, with a ruling also expected in a matter of weeks. “.... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3281035/posts

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