Posted on 07/16/2015 6:32:06 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday ended a secret investigation into whether Republican Gov. Scott Walker's campaign illegally coordinated with conservative groups in winning his 2012 recall election.
The court's action is a major victory for Walker as he pursues the presidency, though one expert said prosecutors could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. No one has been charged in the so-called John Doe probe, Wisconsin's version of a grand jury investigation where information is tightly controlled, but questions about the investigation have dogged Walker for months.
The case centers on political activity conducted by Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservative organizations during the 2012 recall, which was spurred by Democrats' anger over a Walker-authored law that effectively ending collective bargaining for most public workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
This is the real Obama Legacy."
Submitted by Brendan Fischer on February 13, 2015 -
3:03pm The prosecutor leading the probe into possible coordination between Governor Scott Walker's campaign and outside groups has asked some Wisconsin Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from hearing a challenge to the investigation.
A notation in court records titled "Motion for Recusal and Notice of Ethical Concerns" indicates that on February 12, Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz filed a sealed motion for one or more of the Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from the case.
(Read the redacted motion here). Schmitz was previously on George W. Bush's shortlist for U.S. Attorney and said that he voted for Walker.
A bipartisan group of prosecutors allege that the Walker campaign illegally coordinated fundraising and expenditures with Wisconsin Club for Growth (WiCFG) and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC) and perhaps other groups) during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections.
WiCFG director R.J. Johnson was also Walker's campaign manager when the state faced a series of nine recall races after the passage of the union-busting Act 10 legislation. Representatives of the campaign or the dark money groups could face civil or criminal liability if prosecutors find that they conspired to evade campaign finance disclosure requirements and contribution limits.
(U.S. Department of Justice recently settled a criminal campaign coordination case in Virginia.) The Walker probe has been subject to a barrage of state and federal lawsuits, and in December the Wisconsin Supreme Court consolidated four different challenges to the investigation.
The Center for Media and Democracy first identified the conflicts-of-interest facing some Wisconsin Supreme Court justices in April of 2014. The groups bringing the challenge to the probe, WiCFG and WMC, have been the dominant spenders in Wisconsin Supreme Court elections in recent years, spending over $10 million since 2007 to elect the Court's Republican majority.
In most cases, the groups spent more than the candidates themselves. In two instances, the judges were elected by very narrow margins.
In Wisconsin, the decision to recuse rests solely with the justices themselves, and in 2010 the Court adopted rules drafted by the WMC declaring that the fact of a campaign contribution alone won't require recusal. Yet the level of spending by the groups in this case -- and their direct stake in the outcome -- could demand recusal under the U.S. Constitution, following the 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Caperton v. Massey. A majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declared that where a donor "had a significant and disproportionate influence on the outcome" of a judge's election, and where an election was decided by a small number of votes, the risk of bias is significant enough to demand recusal.
The court record does not indicate which justices prosecutors are asking to step aside in the case. According to CMD's analysis, WiCFG, WMC, and their offshoots spent $3,685,000 supporting Justice David Prosser in his 2011 race, five times as much as the Prosser campaign, in an election decided by just 7,000 votes.
WMC spent five-and-a-half times as much supporting Justice Michael Gableman as Gableman's own campaign in 2008, in a race he won by 20,000 votes, and WiCFG also surpassed Gableman's campaign spending.
WMC and WiCFG together spent twice as much as Justice Annette Ziegler's campaign in her 2007 race, and WMC and WiCFG together outspent Justice Patience Roggensack in her reelection campaign last year, but those races were not as close. Plus, if the justices hear the case and strike down the coordination rules, their campaigns could take advantage of the newly-lawless electoral landscape.
In future elections, the same justices who will be deciding whether Wisconsin’s coordination rules are constitutional could work hand-in-glove with the same groups that are bringing the challenge to those rules.
When Justice Annette Ziegler is up for reelection in 2017, her campaign could coordinate with WMC, which spent $2.5 million on her last race. When Justice Michael Gableman runs again in 2018, his campaign could coordinate with Wisconsin Club for Growth, which spent at least a half-million when -
See more at: Link to P.R.Watch
See post 22 for an article on the recusal issue.
Nope, SCOTUS would have taken it up for O'Keefe, not the partian hack Chisholm. They denied O'Keefe's petition for writ of certioari, so it is over. Chisholm has no SCOTUS options.
Your “SOURCE” : )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Democracy
“..CMD was founded in 1993 by progressive writer John Stauber in Madison, Wisconsin. Lisa Graves is president of CMD......
“CMD states that it accepts donations from “individuals and philanthropic foundations through gifts and grants”, but “no funding from for-profit corporations or grants from government agencies.” It maintains a partial list of supporters on its website.
In a column for Fox News, Dan Gainor wrote that BanksterUSA received $200,000 from the Open Society Institute (OSI), a grantmaking network founded by George Soros, aimed to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. CMD stated that it received a grant from OSI “to continue work on national security issues”.
Fox News reported that in 2011 CMD received $864,740 in donations. $520,000, or 60% of 2011’s total revenue, was received from the Schwab Charitable Fund, a donor advised fund which preserves the anonymity of donors by not disclosing individual donor names.
According to the conservative news website Watchdog.org, the Tides Foundation, a foundation known to donate primarily to liberal organizations, reported giving CMD $160,000 in 2011, but that money did not appear on CMD’s tax return. When asked why CMD heavily criticizes conservative organizations for not revealing their donors while refusing to name all of CMD’s funders, CMD’s presdient Lisa Graves said, “The question of conservative funders versus liberal funders, I think, is a matter of false equivalency.”
In June 2014, Politico reported that the Center for Media and Democracy was a recipient of funding through the Democracy Alliance, a network of progressive donors.”.....
Yes I especially loved the video on the left about the Kochs anti civil rights roots and their stated fight against ALEC in their tool bar. Amazingly enough the whole site is anti Scott walker. Your source is laughable and if you are a conservative you should be tremendously embarrassed for even linking to that site.
Somehow, someway your unbiased website for articles fails to mention that John Doe Judge Gregory Peterson who took over after the original Judge Barabara Kluka recused herself (she was the original one that rubber stamped all of the warrants) already in January 2014 had stated that there were major problems with how Chisholm obtained warrants.
It also doesn’t mention that Federal Judge Rudolph Randa put a stop on the John Doe investigation also due to concerns over John Doe tactics.
Now I fed the troll for the day and now I’m done.
Pimping leftist talking points over and over since May, 2015.
Proudly.
It’s never over til the left wins. Ever. Just give them time.
Where John Roberts is waiting to save him. < /s>
That expert is no expert...there is no standing for Chisholm to take this to the SC.
With this “Supreme Court”, I count nothing out.
Walker fought valiantly and won against the left In Wisky; but he now has to face his toughest test yet - zombie cult members of the First High Church of Ted.
I can see them now, stumbling through the streets of Wauwatosa: “CRUZ...CRUUUZZZZ...” I get shivers just to think of it.
Correct. O’Keefe is the only party who had potential standing and his petition was denied.
Thank you.
I needed that.
: )
: )
Can you refute the substance of the article, or is this just the usual tactic of attacking the messenger? What the article says is either true or false. If it is false, where is the information refuting it?
The fact is that the Republican Prosecutor asked for these judges to recuse themselves because the evidence pointed to their involvement in the case on campaign finance issues. The judges did not recuse themselves, just as the SCOTUS Justices don’t when there is a conflict of interest.
Can’t wait to see Chisholm panhandling.
Take everything from him Walker, and all the Americans that were harassed, intimidated and terrorized by the instruction of this man.
The court record does not indicate which justices prosecutors are asking to step aside in the case. According to CMD's analysis . . . and then they go off speculating against their boogiemen.
There is no there there.
Any law against “campaign funding collusion” is a law against freedom of the press. Freedom of the press is a right of the people to spend our own money to publicize our own views. To propose that that right pertains only to members of the Associated Press is to propose that said organizations are an established priestly class.The Ninth Amendment says that the rights of the people are to be read broadly, and the First Amendment doesn’t say that “the press” applies only to 1790 printing technology, while Section 8 of Article I makes explicit that the Framers of the Constitution contemplated "the progress of science and useful arts” as an objective Congress was specifically authorized “to promote."
I’m going to post to you merely to point out to the thread your complicity with moving George Soros’ funded propaganda onto FR.
If there had been a legitimate reason to remove these judges, they would have been removed or have recused themselves.
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