Posted on 09/10/2014 12:49:31 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
A Democratic district attorney who has pursued Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker over alleged campaign finance violations told a fellow prosecutor that his crying wife, a union official, drove him to hunt the governor and his conservative allies because of his anti-union laws feared by organized labor.
The explosive revelation came Tuesday as lawyers for Milwaukee DA John Chisholm began two days of oral arguments in a Chicago courtroom over earlier rulings that effectively ended his wide-ranging investigation.
The investigation aimed to show that conservative groups were illegally working hand-in-hand with Walker's office when they ran 'issue ads' pressing the case that public employee unions should face reforms. Such arrangements, attorneys say, are common on both sides of the political aisle – including President Barack Obama's longstanding coordination with Priorities USA Action and other 'super PACs.'
Leaders of virtually every conservative political nonprofit in the Badger State, 29 in all, have found themselves swept up in Chisholm's criminal probe as they were hit with pre-dawn raids that seized their computers, cell phones, email records – and even a child's iPad.
Armed police kept many of them from contacting their lawyers or corralling their children in some cases while they executed searches initiated by Chisholm over a period of a year and a half.
Republicans have accused Chisholm of using heavy-handed tactics, furthered by police using floodlights to illuminate suburban homes as flashing squad cars jammed driveways and cul-de-sacs.
None of the targets of the searches were ever convicted of any crime, and few were charged.....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
It was an effort to criminalize conservative political activism.... it was a raw abuse of prosecutorial power.
This was a political fishing expedition. John Chisholm has been shut down by the courts but it hasn’t deterred him from going after conservatives.
Milwaukee DA John Chisholm belongs in prison.
Course with a POS head of Justice dept. Holder that will never happen.
This is relevant because the Democrats want to eviscerate freedom of speech in the name of political equality.
And who decides what political speech meets that test? US Attorneys and District Attorneys across the country will decide if you need to be muzzled.
That’s what they’re debating now in the Senate. Campaign finance laws on steroids.
Same Dem M.O. (less “weeping tears”) in Texas - with DA witch hunt of Tom DeLay, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Rick Perry.
Disbar the guy and send him and his wife to prison.
!
Yup.
Republican lawmakers have suggested that the IRS collaborated with the Treasury Department and the executive’s office to control damage from the IRS targeting scandal. The White House learned about the missing e-mails in April, two months before the IRS informed the congressional committees that had requested the records for investigations..........."
In a blockbuster revelation, Stuart Taylor at Legal Newsline reports that Chisholm’s wife, who is a union operative, may be the motivating force, District attorney’s wife drove case against Wis. Gov. Walker, insider says:
…. Walker became a national figure in 2011, when his “Budget Repair” bill cut state spending and sharply curbed public employee unions — perhaps the biggest reversal of public union power in U.S. history. Conservatives were delighted and liberals alarmed.
Now a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis high school, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”
Citing fear of retaliation, the former prosecutor declined to be identified and has not previously talked to reporters.
Chisholm added, according to that prosecutor, that “he felt that it was his personal duty to stop Walker from treating people like this.”
Chisholm was referring to Gov. Walker’s proposal – passed by the legislature in March 2011 – to require public employee unions to contribute to their retirement and health-care plans for the first time and to limit unions’ ability to bargain for non-wage benefits.
Chisholm said his wife had joined teachers union demonstrations against Walker, said the former prosecutor. The 2011 political storm over public unions was unlike any previously seen in Wisconsin. Protestors crowded the State Capitol grounds and roared in the Rotunda. Picketers appeared outside of Walker’s private home. There were threats of boycotts and even death to Walker’s supporters. Two members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court almost came to blows. Political ad spending set new records. Wisconsin was bitterly divided.
Still, Chisholm’s private displays of partisan animus stunned the former prosecutor. “I admired him [Chisholm] greatly up until this whole thing started,” the former prosecutor said. “But once this whole matter came up, it was surprising how almost hyper-partisan he became … It was amazing … to see this complete change.”
The culture in the Milwaukee district attorney’s office was stoutly Democratic, the former prosecutor said, and become more so during Gov. Walker’s battle with the unions. Chisholm “had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.”
Liberals are mentally ill.... And dangerously so.
Must have broken some state statutes . Where’s the Wisconsin Attorney General?
Time to play some hardball.
July 2011: Democrats Unveil the Weapon of the Future
".......[SNIP - the list of attacks]
....This is an extraordinary series of events, of a type that we haven't witnessed before. Even more singular is the legacy media's insistence on covering the story (with the exception of the siege of Madison, which got the standard "unions unbound" treatment) as if it were commonplace to the point of boredom. It is no such thing; it is an ideological campaign of a magnitude and breadth that we have not seen in quite some time, if ever.
What all this amounts to is the baptism of fire of what I have taken to calling the "liberal superstructure." This superstructure is the vast constellation of advocacy groups, think tanks, single-issue outfits, unions, and various other flotsam constructed by the left over the past half-century or so. There are literally thousands of these groups, ranging from the ACLU and the Sierra Club with their hundreds of thousands of members to the local "Friends of the People's Venezuela" outfit which amounts to a retired feminism professor and her six cats. These organizations are ubiquitous, universal, and networked to a fare-thee- well. They are also liberalism's last great hope of controlling politics in the United States.
It's scarcely arguable that, in the political sense, liberalism is on the ropes. Obama spent their last nickel. They have lost the House and will lose the Senate, with little chance of regaining them in the near future. The same is true of the White House once the messiah gets the bum's rush come 2012. Liberalism is on the skids, its programs uniform failures, its ideology barren, its slogans worn out, its long hold on the independents being relentlessly pared down by the Tea Parties.
So what is a political movement to do, particularly one as fanatic and apocalyptic as this one? Well, if you have an alternate system made up of outside organizations not subject to governmental oversight, a system populated with self-selected fanatics and true believers, a system poised and ready to march, you can do what was done in Wisconsin. You can turn the superstructure loose to threaten the public peace, smash things up, abuse the electoral process, create a media spectacle, and pressure the state to do things your way. You can use nonpolitical organizations (in the electoral sense) to get a political result.
All the groups involved in the Wisconsin campaign were superstructure groups. The unions, the very core organizations of the superstructure, without which it's no more than a pack of vegetarians and aging hippies. The media, which serves as its propaganda arm. And the judiciary, which is broadly infiltrated by leftist partisans whose allegiance has been awarded to something other than the law. ......................."
................”Since Chisholm prosecuted an unrelated 2009 embezzlement case that Walker’s office urged him to take up when he was a county executive, conservatives have wondered why the DA expanded the probe into what Wisconsin insiders call a ‘John Doe’ investigation – ensnaring dozens of Walker’s aides and allies once he became governor in 2010.
The John Doe proceeding, peculiar to Wisconsin, allowed Chisholm to enforce a gag order demanding complete secrecy from his targets and potential witnesses, prohibiting them from discussing the case, defending themselves in public or firing back when damaging documents were leaked to the press.
Chisholm has persisted despite defeats in every court that has weighed in.”..............
Send him with Mike Nifong in Durham North Carolina
So this is illegal: “...show that conservative groups were illegally working hand-in-hand with...”
But this is not: “show that liberal/progressive groups were illegally working hand-in-hand with X..”
The Democratic Party needs to be outlawed!
So Chisholm sees himself as a righteous avenging angel who’s entitled to use any means necessary to defeat the forces of evil. In other words he’s a typical liberal. Obama has the same mindset. They all do to some degree. Liberalism is moral zeal unrestrained by patience or humility or respect for the rule law.
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