Free Republic

It was still dark outside when “Jonah” (not his real name) heard the pounding on his front door. As luck would have it, he was awake — or mostly awake. He’d gotten up at 4:00 a.m. on October 3, 2013, to see his parents off to the airport. They were leaving on a quick trip to raise money for the children’s charity his father runs. Jonah was 16 at the time, old enough to stay home alone for a short time, but not old enough to deal with what awaited him on the other side of the door. The pounding...

MADISON, Wis. – Cindy Archer was once made to beg sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents not to shoot her dogs during an early-morning raid on her Madison home. Now the former aide to Gov. Scott Walker who has never been charged with a crime in the Democrat-launched John Doe investigation is fighting back in court. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Tuesday evening, Archer writes that Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and his agents ransacked her house and ruined her career. “After much soul-searching, I am filing a civil-rights lawsuit on Wednesday against Milwaukee County District Attorney...

In April, three victims of Wisconsin’s long-running “John Doe” investigations broke their silence. Former Scott Walker adviser Cindy Archer spoke to National Review on the record while two other women asked for their identities to be concealed. All three, however, told remarkably similar stories — of police raids at dawn, pounding on the door, threats of battering rams, and ransacked homes. They weren’t suspected of drug crimes, violent crimes, or other crimes recognizable to the American public. Rather, they were either close associates of Scott Walker or involved in the broader conservative movement in Wisconsin — and were caught up...

MADISON, Wis. – Kelly Rindfleisch’s roller-coaster ride to justice got rougher Tuesday. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman withdrew the motion he filed late last week asking the court to reconsider its denial of Rindfleisch’s Fourth Amendment appeal. In a brief letter filed in the court Tuesday, Gableman said Rindlfleisch will nevertheless “have the benefit of review by the entire Court” because she has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review her case. Sources close to the case tell Wisconsin Watchdog that Gableman was concerned he would not have the votes to win reconsideration because Justice David Prosser would...

She thought about it — a lot. In the depths of her depression, Kelly Rindfleisch, the former county government official marked by the left with a political scarlet letter, considered killing herself. She just wanted it all to stop — the browbeating prosecutors, the mainstream media feeding frenzy, the crushing legal bills, the shadow of a jail sentence hanging over her. The betrayal. “There were times I felt like I wasn’t going to make it through. They drove me to the absolute depths of depression,” Rindfleisch told Wisconsin Reporter during a recent interview at a diner in downtown Sun Prairie,...