Free Republic

Part 267 of 265 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War MADISON, Wis. — Get ready for more fireworks Wednesday as the Assembly takes up two bills aimed at reforming Wisconsin’s troubled campaign finance law and overhauling its even more troubled political speech regulator. Under a Republican proposal, the state Government Accountability Board would be split into two commissions, an elections entity and an ethics operation. The six election commission members would be partisan, evenly appointed by both parties and the governor, and the directors of the commissions would be appointed to four-year terms, subject to reappointment. Created in 2007 with...

Part 263 of 262 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War MADISON, Wisconsin — The public will have to wait for trial to see the brunt of “hot documents” attorneys have said will be “very embarrassing” to the state Government Accountability Board. On Thursday, Waukesha County Judge Lee Dreyfus Jr. opted against lifting the protective order on 181 pages of records from a lawsuit alleging the GAB overstepped its authority at taxpayer expense in driving a politically charged John Doe investigation into dozens of conservative groups and the campaign of Gov. Scott Walker. Dreyfus said the documents would probably come out...

Part 262 of 260 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War MADISON, Wisconsin — Lost in the heated rhetoric of this week’s legislative hearing on a bill to overhaul the state Government Accountability Board (See: Joseph Welch impersonations), was an important question the GAB’s director has yet to adequately answer. State Sen. Dave Craig, R-Town of Vernon, still wants to know why the state’s election, campaign finance and lobbying law regulator used Gmail accounts to communicate about the secret John Doe investigation. “I find it very concerning that the GAB, which is charged with ethics and things related to open records,...

Part 261 of 259 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Watchdog MADISON, Wis. – It was only a matter of time before someone invoked the ghost of Joe McCarthy. This is politically hyperbolic Wisconsin after all, the home of the U.S. senator disgraced by his crusade against communists in federal government and wherever else he believed them to be. On Tuesday, it was Government Accountability Board director and chief legal counsel Kevin Kennedy resurrecting the long-dead senator. It was an interesting invocation for a guy who is accused by conservatives of helping to push a...

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...

MADISON, Wisconsin — Despite word that some members were getting weak-kneed about sweeping reform, GOP Assembly leadership is rolling out an overhaul of the state Government Accountability Board — a bill aimed at decentralizing a rogue agency its critics charge is run by left-leaning bureaucrats. Sources tell Wisconsin Watchdog the proposed bill, to be laid out Wednesday afternoon, will replace the existing accountability board with two separate and distinct commissions — ethics and elections. The GAB’s six presiding retired judges will be replaced. Under the proposal, the Legislature would appoint four citizen members of the Elections commission, two from each...

Part 254 of 252 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War MADISON, Wisconsin — A Waukesha County judge has ordered the state Government Accountability Board to turn over communications it had with liberal political groups. The GAB last month had argued against the release to the conservative targets of the unconstitutional John Doe investigation. But Waukesha County Judge Lee Dreyfus Jr. on Friday declared the GAB’s communications to and from the left-leaning groups, although shielded from public consumption at this point, must be turned over to the conservative plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the agency. Long-time political activist Eric O’Keefe and...

MADISON, Wis. — The state Government Accountability Board has launched a desperate public relations campaign to save the rogue agency. And the left — including Wisconsin’s mainstream media — has been more than willing to provide backup for the state’s campaign finance, election and ethics regulator. What you will find in the GAB’s PR campaign is a plea for more delay in reforming a “nonpartisan” agency found to have been extremely partisan in pushing a political probe into dozens of conservative groups and the campaign of Gov. Scott Walker. Delay has been the modus operandi of the GAB in defending...

MADISON, Wisconsin — Conservative targets of Wisconsin’s political John Doe investigation were still waiting Wednesday for a judge’s decision on whether the state Government Accountability Board must turn over communications it had with liberal political groups. Waukesha County Judge Lee Dreyfus Jr. was expected to rule two weeks ago, but the court doesn’t have Microsoft Outlook software, and the judge was unable to view the correspondence in question. Attorneys for the GAB have since sent the documents in PDF. Eddie Greim, attorney for conservative activist Eric O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth, both plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging the...

Madison— The head of the state's elections board has urged legislative leaders to slow down their plans to overhaul the agency, but top GOP lawmakers say they will unveil their restructuring plans next week. Gerald Nichol, chairman of the Government Accountability Board, in a letter to lawmakers raised concerns about restructuring the board 13 months before the high-turnout presidential election. His request to slow down fell on deaf ears. On Wednesday, aides to Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said they reached a deal on the matter. They declined to provide details, saying they...

MADISON, Wis. — The state Government Accountability Board has long attempted to downplay its role in the political John Doe investigation. Documents obtained by Wisconsin Watchdog, however, show just how involved the rogue agency was in assisting John Doe special prosecutor Francis Schmitz and other partners in defending the unconstitutional campaign finance probe into Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign and dozens of conservative organizations. “It’s clear that the GAB continued to defend the bogus legal theories in the John Doe long after the board voted to shut it down … and after a federal judge enjoined the agency from continuing to...

Our liberal friends in Wisconsin are unhappy. They think someone is leaking emails that make the state’s partisan campaign regulators look bad. We’ll plead guilty to having sources, but the emails are news and they sure are revealing. Today’s installment from court documents concerns how a special prosecutor and regulators at the Government Accountability Board (GAB) targeted the state’s conservative Supreme Court justices. The partisan goal was to force some justices to recuse themselves from hearing a constitutional challenge to their probe of Governor Scott Walker and his political allies. In a Feb. 11, 2013 email, then-GAB staff counsel Shane...

The Wall Street Journal and Wisconsin Watchdog disclosed that the staff of the Government Accountability Board was engaged in partisan calculations during an investigation into the activities of the Wisconsin Club for Growth and various citizens. Kevin Kennedy responded to the disclosure with a statement that GAB staff members “feel passionately about ensuring that all parties comply with campaign finance laws.” “Passionate” is a strong word; here is the dictionary.com definition: Passionate: having, compelled by, or ruled by intense emotion or strong feeling; fervid. And this is the dictionary.com definition of its opposite: Dispassionate: free from or unaffected by passion;...

The Wall Street Journal somehow got its hands on internal GAB e-mails regarding the John Doe. The Journal Sentinel reported on the revelation but decided to make the thrust of its story the belief of one GAB staff attorney, Shane Falk, that Scott Walker really was a target of the investigation. This contradicted a public statement by Special Prosecutor Fran Schmitz that he was not. There was, apparently, bickering among the prosecutors. I think the paper missed the story. Completely. The more significant revelation - completely unreported by the Journal Sentinel - was that Falk was concerned about the impact...

The John Doe investigation of Wisconsin conservatives collapsed last week with a powerful decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court that called state prosecutors’ theory of campaign-finance law “unconstitutional” and “unsupported in either reason or law.” But the legal exoneration shouldn’t pass without noting the hardship the secret probe imposed on its targets and on political debate in Wisconsin. For the past few days, I’ve been talking to the targets of the task force of Milwaukee Democratic prosecutors, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board and Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz. Their experiences, on the record here for the first time, reveal the nasty...

In an attempt to limit the damage to its viability, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) has issued two press releases since the state Supreme Court ruled last Thursday to terminate the agency’s secret investigation of conservatives. The releases contain a single truthful sentence: “The Legislature expected and intended the Government Accountability Board to operate in a professional, unbiased, and nonpartisan manner.” The rest is myth-making. Myth 1: GAB was a bystander in the John Doe investigation and ensuing litigation, and merely filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court.The truth is GAB Director Kevin Kennedy and the GAB began...

The official behind the IRS' conservative nonprofit targeting scandal, Lois Lerner, was friends with the Wisconsin regulator who targeted Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's conservative aides and allies. Lerner and Kevin Kennedy, director of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, were friends for 20 years and traded emails on campaign finance, politics, and personal matters between 2011 and 2013, emails obtained by the Wall Street Journal reveal. That was the same time frame the IRS increased its harassment of conservative groups and Wisconsin prosecutors conducted a secret John Doe probe of Walker's allies, raising the troubling question of whether they coordinated their...

MADISON, Wis. – The reaction from Republican lawmakers was outrage and the response was swift Friday following the Wall Street Journal’s bombshell revelations that the director of the state’s political speech regulator and the head of the IRS division accused of targeting conservative groups may have shared information about Wisconsin’s political John Doe investigation. Republican leadership called on the Legislature to “double down” on finalizing reforms to the state’s Government Accountability Board, the agency that oversees, election, campaign finance and ethics laws. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Rep. Dean Knudson, R-Hudson, called for a reform bill to be ready...

It turns out that the vast left-wing conspiracy isn’t all that vast. From the Wall Street Journal: Wisconsin’s campaign to investigate conservative tax-exempt groups has always seemed like an echo of the IRS’s scrutiny of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. It turns out that may be more than a coincidence. Former IRS tax-exempt director Lois Lerner ran the agency’s policy on conservative groups. Kevin Kennedy runs the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) that helped prosecutors with their secret John Doe investigation of conservative groups after the 2011 and 2012 recall elections of Governor Scott Walker and state senators. Emails...

Madison— Key Assembly Republicans renewed their call Friday for overhauling the state's elections and ethics board after The Wall Street Journal reported the agency had been in touch with the Internal Revenue Service as it investigated conservative groups. "Nothing should be more important than free speech and it's outrageous that there's a coordinated effort to undermine this basic constitutional right," said a joint statement issued by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Rep. Dean Knudson (R-Hudson). "Now that the state budget is complete, it's time to double down on finalizing the necessary reforms for the (Government Accountability Board) so the...