Posted on 10/08/2015 8:52:42 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
MADISON, Wis. – Gerald Nichol says he has had no problem with the way the state Government Accountability Board has operated over its eight years in existence.
And Nichol, chairman of the troubled political speech regulator, said he’s good with GAB’s involvement in predawn, paramilitary-style raids on the homes and offices of conservative targets in the unconstitutional John Doe investigation.
Those October 2013 raids included armed officers serving a warrant on a 16-year-old boy who was home alone. Though the teen’s father was the target of the political probe, the boy was told he couldn’t call his parents, or even his grandparents who lived just down the road. He certainly couldn’t call a lawyer and if he told his principal, teachers, friends, anyone, why he was late for school that day, he was told he could go to jail.
It’s all good, Nichol said Wednesday.
“I don’t have a problem with the way we played that role,” he said. “It obviously angered one specific party.”
It sure did. But being forced to remain seated on your family room couch while law enforcement officials root through your life (in an investigation where you are never charged with any wrongdoing) is likely to make one a little cranky.
Nichol, one of six retired judges who preside over the campaign finance, election and ethics regulator, still insists that the GAB acted in a supporting role in the sweeping John Doe investigation.
“When you are doing an investigation, and this is part of a John Doe, at that point you have a John Doe prosecutor and it wasn’t the GAB. We were in a supportive role,” he told reporters following a legislative news conference Wednesday to announce a bill aimed at overhauling the agency.
“When you do an arrest on the street and you put together a police report, you bring in a district attorney … and you are still accessing the investigation to see if it will come to fruition one way or another,” he said.
But court documents in a lawsuit alleging the GAB overstepped its authority in the political probe, show the GAB was more than a bit player in this partisan melodrama. Attorneys for the conservative targets who filed the lawsuit say documents currently under seal show in “stunning detail” GAB’s plans for the investigation.
The search warrants used in the raids were executed based on the request of GAB special investigator Dean Nickel, who filed the affidavit for probable cause.
Judge Gregory Peterson in January 2014 found there was no probable cause to support the investigators’ assertion, that 29 conservative groups illegally coordinated with Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign and Republican Senate campaigns during Wisconsin’s historic recalls of 2011 and 2012.
As Wisconsin Watchdog has reported, the raids appear to have been redundant. Investigators already had seized untold electronic communications and other records through sweeping subpoenas of Internet service providers.
David French wrote in a piece published Wednesday in National Review, “The John Doe targets were completely unaware that investigators were obtaining — and reading — their personal e-mail, and while they retained attorneys who tried to block investigators from reviewing the information seized from their homes, neither the targets nor their attorneys knew that investigators were also obtaining their personal e-mails from Internet service providers.”
In an e-mail obtained by National Review, Robert Stelter, a John Doe investigator, wrote to special prosecutor Francis Schmitz and other members of the Doe investigation team:
“Seeing as we are getting hit with lots of high powered attorney’s [sic] that are probably going to be successful at delaying our ability to look at any of the evidence we have seized during the execution of our search warrants last month, it seems that a review of all the email we will get in will be even more critical. . . . The emails should be able to help bolster our arguments on the coordination that it appears we, or should I say Fran will be making to the new Doe judge.
“From the correspondence I’m reading from the various attorney’s they don’t seem to have a clue that we have and will be getting all their clients emails. So . . . we should be able to keep moving forward even without looking at all the evidence seized during the execution of the warrants. [Emphasis added.]”
The state Supreme Court in July ruled that the probe was unconstitutional and ordered it shut down.
In his majority opinion, Justice Michael Gableman wrote:
“The (John Doe) special prosecutor has disregarded the vital principle that in our nation and our state political speech is a fundamental right and is afforded the highest level of protection. The special prosecutor’s theories, rather than “assur[ing] [the] unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people” . . . instead would assure that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished.”
Nichol still believes the GAB and their law enforcement partners conducted themselves appropriately.
“I was a district attorney way back when and we executed search warrants,” the GAB chairman said. “The safest time to execute a search warrant is early in the morning, and from the reports that I heard we did it properly and in accordance with the law.”
Armed searches before sunrise for what amounts to alleged paper crimes, what ultimately turned out to be citizens engaging in legal political speech?
“I can’t go into the allegations because, I wish I could,” Nichol said.
John Doe targets say they were treated like drug dealers, gun runners, murderers over a campaign finance investigation.
“How are you supposed to execute a search warrant?” Nichol shot back. “I wasn’t offended by the way it was executed. I think the police did a very professional job … I think there were various counties and they were all schooled and all well prepared, and it went according to as it should.”
Part 256 of 256 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War
NO PROB: Government Accountability Board Chairman Gerald Nichol on Wednesday said he doesn’t have a problem with the predawn raids on the homes of conservative targets of the political John Doe investigation. The targets have never been charged with any wrongdoing in a probe that has been ruled unconstitutional.
This is exactly why the GAB needs replacing and a few folks belong in jail.
FReep mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
Let’s go roust his ass out of bed at 3 AM at the point of a gun and see what he thinks.
In light of all the serious revelations of misconduct, I sit here wondering why it’s taking the Wisconsin Legislature as long as it has to legislate the GAB out of existence. Do the RATs still have that much power in Wisconsin? Are the GOP folks there not up to the task? It would be just like our country’s walking away from the ME for Wisconsin not to make sure that this mistake is corrected.
That admission alone in a different era would have had him hanging from a rope as an enemy of freedom.
My how far we have come that a person’s privacy can freedoms can be invaded in the name of political partisanship.
What would John Kerry say?
rousting families in the middle of the night and intimidating and torturing them
Wisconsin GAB, you got a ways to go.
like considering moving to Iran
The banal face of authoritarian tyranny.
The SOB belongs in a jail cell. Or worse.
He perpetrated an unconstitutional scheme of intimidation against political speech? Used men with automatic weapons?
This beaming thug should on trial for his life.
Walker wasn’t my first choice but him being President would be a fabulous rebuke to these frozen faced Communists.
We still have 2020 and 2024.
Yes and questionable. I think they were waiting for Walker to come back to lend a little starch to their spines.
Government Accountability Board Chairman Gerald Nichol needs to be prosecuted for violating the bill of rights.
Yeah. That’s the consolation.
Walker is a young man. Time to learn, become a national figure.
At the very minimum he has the issue of the century back home in Wisconsin to rip apart the smug little Bolshevik gang that is dug in there.
Doncha’ just want to slap that silly grin off his face?
Doncha’ just want to slap that silly grin off his face?
Nichol, you POS, I hope you are sued into financial oblivion.
I think that a judge should sentence him to 15 such raids that will be carried out at random over the course of 5 years.
Make him wait a long time between number 14 and 15 so he is waiting for the last shoe to drop.
Then ask him how he likes the way it feels to live in a Soviet-style state.
The SS wasn’t offended when they raided a Jewish household in the middle of the night...
This is the chubby, smiling face of pure evil.
May he die of painful pancreatic cancer.
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." Claire Wolfe
Bastards such as this risk moving the timeline forward.
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